Is it just me, or do the years seem to go faster the older one gets?

2017 was full of surprises for me, with changes coming in fast and furious. At work, my team looks very different from the beginning of 2016, and my role has unexpectedly changed as well into something more exciting than I could have hoped for. On the personal front, I traveled to Bali, India and San Francisco for the first time (the latter two for work, but I had some time to explore), and all of them were not planned for at the beginning of the year. I restarted this blog, and exercised some (fiction) writing muscles that I have not used in years.

 

I did not meet most of the goals I set out to achieve.

I wanted to deepen my technical skills this year, with an eye on finishing a R-focused analytical track in DataCamp. Instead, I got to learn Tableau and how to scale an analysis company-wide. Instead of R, I started learning Python and actually got to deploy some unsupervised machine learning in a project – without actually knowing that what I was doing was considered a form of machine learning (I sought out k-means clustering).

I wanted to join events and meet new people. I joined only a couple of events across the whole year, but I got to know a lot more people than expected at work, be it from different teams or from different parts of the world. It was unexpected but fun, and certainly more than enough for an introvert.

I wanted to develop a ‘creative habit’, thinking mostly in terms of paintings and art. I did sketch and paint a lot more this year, even hosting a small watercolour workshop at work. But what surprised me was the rediscovery of my love for writing. It happened after my one week of doing nothing, and now I can’t imagine going back to a life of not trying to tell stories of my own.

I wanted to develop a healthy and active lifestyle. I struggled a lot with this despite having access to great facilities and a flexible work culture. There were weeks where I could keep up with regular work-outs, but months in between where I felt like there was no time. All the traveling did not help, as work tends to bunch up in the week before and after the trips, and there was always the excuse of waiting until ‘things settle down’ before I start again. I know I need more motivation and more exciting stuff to look forward to, so I signed up at a boxing club a few months ago. Haven’t been too regular a student yet, but I definitely want to step this up in the coming year.

But back to these 2017 goals that I did not meet. I guess in some roundabout ways, I did meet most of them in spirit if not to the letter. I wouldn’t ask for it to go differently, either. I’m quite happy with how the year has turned out.

Which brings me to the question, am I just bad at setting goals? Or is there a point in doing this at all, if we can’t anticipate the external changes that are coming? Should I bother with 2018 goals?

If I had learned anything at all this year, it would be this – changes come faster than you can plan for. We need to be ready; ready to adapt, to climb a steep learning curve, to say yes.

Setting goals helps us become ready – even if we don’t meet them in the end, the effort that we put in, and the thoughts and mindshare we invested, will help us become more ready to adapt. If I had not been thinking about deepening my technical skills this year, when the projects that require skills I did not have or did not plan to learn come up, I may have taken a pass. Instead, I was primed for learning and ready to say, why not?

So yes, I will still set goals for next year.

But I will be more wary of the goals I set. Maybe this is just me, but goals have this allure of having this formal structure, one that you can build a nice little plan around. But life is often messy, and plans get thwarted before you know it. For me, I’m more attracted to doing things in nicely organised chunks and setting routines, and this was my problem with fitness goals this year. Whenever there were due dates or travels, I would tell myself that plans do not apply, and I should wait for things to settle down before I get back on track. But things rarely settle down for long, and before I know it, it was year-end and I have fallen way, way off track.

Focus on small wins. That’s what I will tell myself in the coming year. Forget about neat plans or a well-timed start or a perfect season of meeting all the milestones on time. I know now that getting too hung up on those will make it seem like the goal is unachievable when I inevitably miss a few milestones, and it’s that much more tempting to give up entirely.

So yes, set lofty goals if you must, but focus on small wins.

*

2017 has been a good year, and I will cherish the memories I made and the many hard-won lessons. If I don’t sound too chirpy about it, it’s partly because it has been a long year too, and I am tired.

I’m glad that it’s the holidays. I look forward to mid-day naps, getting lost in books, and daydreaming.

Happy Holidays, all.

Now that I have a few hours to think about it after watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi, I have decided that I’m a fan of Star Wars – the new arc, at least.

Was I not, before this? Well, I like the old movies in the franchise. I watched them multiple times, and wished that lightsabers and Jedis were real. But I don’t feel as strongly about the characters as, say, the characters in the Avengers. Heck, I love the characters in Legends of Tomorrow way more.

I just really, really like space adventures. I love Star Trek in the same way, and there is a reason that my favourite season of Power Rangers when I was young was Power Rangers In Space.

But was I fan of Star Wars in particular? At a recent Star Wars Day celebration in the office (yes, my office is cool that way), there was a Star Wars trivia and I realised I couldn’t answer even one of those, and I didn’t quite care enough to find out who won this battle on that planet. Whatever.

The Last Jedi though, it blew me away, and I certainly wasn’t expecting to love it so much.

I love the tight, edge-of-your-seat plot; I am pleasantly surprised that despite the full cast, none of the major characters were flat, they were all nuanced and fleshed out and flawed (they even made mistakes that almost brought their own downfall! How refreshing); I was caught off-guard by the funny moments, of which there is a surprising number; and wow, was the climax epic and completely unexpected. It is quite hard to be surprising in a movie universe that has 7 instalments before this, and each with their own epic battles using lightsabers and ships. But I did not see the epic twist coming.

And all the juicy themes – letting go of the past, keeping hope, choice and circumstance, etc. I can’t analyse all these well enough, so I will direct you to this review that basically sums up how I feel (spoiler alert!): Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a near-perfect reinvention of the franchise.

What made me a fan, though, is the characters. I love that there was no prophesied chosen one, and that the characters become heroes because they are trying to do the right thing. I love that Rey makes her own choices and fights hard. I love that Poe thinks outside the box and yet was also human enough to make a (huge) misjudgement. I love that Admiral Holdo was not at all what she seems but was heroic all the same.

I love, love, love Rose Tico. As I wasn’t following every news release, I didn’t know that there was going to be an Asian female character being so central to the plot. She wasn’t at all what you’d expect, but she is smart, kind of silly, but heroic and wise.

(Rose and Finn. Btw, Rose works in maintenance)

The fact that the cast is diverse has apparently gotten some backlash among some circles though. I love the fact that the leading character is Rey, a female, but I wasn’t as sensitive to it because it seems like a sign of the times. Recent – and this is talking about recent 5+ years – movies and shows have had strong female characters and casts that were not majority white dudes. There were the Hunger Games franchise, Wonder Woman, Jessica Jones in Defenders, and certainly Sarah Lance in Legends of Tomorrow, among others. (You can probably tell that I’m a superhero shows junkie; these are the examples I know, but I’ve read about similar trends outside of this genre.) I was perhaps unconsciously expecting a diverse cast already. But knowing that it can incite such a strong reaction makes me all the more appreciative that the cast is what it is in The Last Jedi.

But no matter what kind of characters they are, I love the journey they go through in the movie. To squeeze all those character stories, and for a large number of characters, into a tight plot that basically spans out within hours or days is amazing. I know I will rewatch this, and when I write my own stories this will be one of the examples I look to.

To me, Star Wars was about heroes and idols; ‘chosen ones’ in galaxies far, far away that were easy to fantasise about but hard to relate to. But with Rey and Finn and Rose and Poe, I see stories about normal people dragged into things bigger than themselves and trying their best to do the right thing.

This, I can relate to. I’m a fan now. And I will happily trade my Darth Vader stuffed toy for a Rose Tico figurine if any one of you have it, just saying.

I will leave you with my favourite quote from the movie, by Rose:

“This is how you win, silly. Not by destroying what you hate, but by saving what you love.”

 

 

 

I was staring at a tram passing by Market Street that evening, waiting to cross the road, when the passing tram revealed this woman in the middle of the street, dancing.

Her eyes were closed as she danced to some silent disco, no headphones in sight. She was at the divider in the middle of the street, with cars and trams passing by in opposite directions around her. She pumped her hands into the air as she bobbed along. She was black, her long wild hair barely constrained in a fluffy ponytail.

The few people who were waiting beside me were also tourists, and they muttered something about the homeless people, people who were not right in the head.

The pedestrian lights turned white – not green – and I hurried across the road, trying not to stare at her. But still, the image of her, dancing so freely in the middle of the street, replayed itself over and over in my head.

*

I’m very much a city girl. I love exploring cities, I love how predictable cities can be in their functional design – no matter where in the world you are, you know the big blocks that make up a city; the city centre and its activity, the main transport nodes and lines, the availability of Google maps and reliable data connections. To me, it provides a solid counterbalance to the cultural shocks and the uncertainty of being in an alien country.

I loved San Francisco’s grid-like streets. It didn’t matter if I got lost, because I knew I just need to find the next turn and get back to the right grid line. And exploring them in 15 degrees Celcius weather was very enjoyable.

Except for the homeless people on the streets.

People warned me about them, of course. They told me to prepare myself, especially since I live in Singapore and was obviously not used to homeless folks. But I was still caught off-guard by how ubiquitous they are, even at the city centre where my hotel and office were. And there were all kinds of folks: a plump, stoic-looking bearded guy sitting cross-legged at a corner among his belongings; a young looking long-haired punk who radiated pride and resentment; folks who walk with a limp, or a slouch; middle-aged men who yelled and argued with invisible enemies as they walk past; people who held out Big-Gulp cups for change. They were black and white, young and old, male and female.

It is not that I’m not used to seeing homeless people – there are many cities in Asia where you still see them – it just struck me as so weird that they were everywhere in San Francisco, one of the richest cities there is and home to many tech companies. This is a city that so many people across the world aspire to go to and work in, and somehow the mass of homeless people was just incongruent with the image of such a place.

I know about the high property prices and the inflation, of course. I majored in economics, I understand the mechanics of why these happen. But every time I averted eye contact, every time I sped up my pace or dodged sideways, I wondered how they got there. I wonder what their stories were, and whether they got here because they chased their dreams here.

This is the flip side of freedom, I tell myself. You are free to build a start-up and become a millionaire, but you are also free to fail, and free to grab a corner on the street when you do. And when you got there, who says you can’t dance in the middle of the street to the memory of your favourite song?

I am making sweeping generalisations and assumptions here, of course. But in SF I feel like I tasted freedom in its rawest form. Life is what you make of it. You do what you can to thrive, to survive.

It makes a lot of sense, but it still left me cold.

*

I was in SF for a week for work, and I barely had time to really explore. But in the evenings my teammates there brought me and other out-of-town folks out, and I still found it ironic that they brought me to Mexican places and a Chinese dumpling restaurant, and not somewhere more ‘local’. These are the best food in SF, they said.

I was reminded then of how America is a nation of migrants, just like Singapore, Malaysia, and probably hundreds of other countries. And it is always in the biggest cities, the most dynamic commerce centers, that you find a melting pot of cultures. Here, you take the best of each culture and create something better. You stay open-minded because you know how silly it is to insist on staying the same.

And here, both success and failure are exaggerated. You can bump into a millionaire on the street or another homeless person. And between the two extremes, you have a large sea of people who are trying hard to come up top.

One sign of how hard they try is the insane commutes. Many of them have to live in adjacent cities to keep living costs down, and endure two-hour commutes one-way each day to get to work. This is not new to me at all; I have, after all, sworn to never do daily commutes from JB – my hometown and a city next to Singapore – after seeing the toll it took on my parents. Knowing that people do that in SF just made me appreciate how lucky I am to be able to afford this choice.

For those who work in the HQ of the big tech companies, it could be worse. The giant campuses of these companies are not in SF at all but at neighbouring towns or cities. There is, I found out, a complex network of shuttle buses and train options to get from SF to those campuses. The companies also provide varying transport subsidies or programs.

My company conducts a very comprehensive survey about employee commutes every year. For someone who works in Singapore, with its efficient transport system, I never understood why they asked so many questions about commute and feedback. Now I could finally appreciate how they use the results.

On one of the mornings, my team had to get to Sunnyvale for a series of morning meetings. We had to meet at a random street corner at 6.30am to catch the company bus. We almost got on the bus to the wrong tech company HQ because there are just so many of these buses ferrying employees around, and all of them low-profile with no company logos on the bus itself. When we got on, the teammate who was local got us the wifi passwords for the bus’ network, and I noticed that quite a number of the people on the bus were working on their laptops. I was too drowsy to be shocked then, and just slept for most of the hour-long journey.

(From the bus ride to Sunnyvale, probably around 7am. Sprawling houses everywhere)

*

Two weeks on, I still think about that woman dancing in the street, and I still think about what it means to be free. Whatever her circumstances, she seemed to be enjoying herself at that moment in time. She seemed free.

As for myself and the other tourists who judged her – how free were we, chasing our dreams to San Francisco, drawn here by stories of others?