NUYORICAN

I spent the last ten minutes reading about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I believe I might have found my new favorite New Yorker/Puerto Rican, unseating Lin-Manuel Miranda only by a little, because of course she is female and by default she has had to work harder to get where she is. I love that according to most media coverage, her win was pretty much the biggest recent political upset because she was obviously the underdog, having spent a ratio of 1:18 to Joe Crowley's campaigns. Her political stances give me hope that there is a point to rocking the boat, and that the tides are turning. We'll see, but till then, imma still look to Lin's daily good morning and good night Tweets to lift my spirits. I had a brilliant, brilliant day today, the people I work with truly bring light, love and laughter into my life, even if the retail work itself does not inspire me on a minute or even hourly basis. I hope Demi Lovato is strong enough to get through what she is going through. Today I thought about the Central Provident Fund. This is the mandatory "savings" fund in Singapore, that takes away 20% of your monthly income. This money cannot be removed as cash or used for anything apart from HDB flats/housing, a housing board which belongs to the government, and the average prices of HDB apartments are around Singapore Dollar $330,000 for a 120 sq-metre apartment, and of course private housing is even more expensive. To illustrate the worth of this, sit down cross-legged on the floor and draw a square around you, that is about a square meter. To purchase a HDB apartment, you are paying $2800 (2100 USD) for that square of space and you own about 120 squares, usually. Also, you aren't allowed to purchase an apartment by yourself until you are 35, because the government believes in traditional "family values", so most people have to get married if they want to live in their own flat. This is why there is a trend of proposals happening whenever talk of purchasing a flat occurs. If you somehow happen to still have a value in your CPF account, you still aren't allowed to retire and take out the amount in whole, the government will ration it and give you like 300 bucks a month from, I dunno, age 65, till you die. This means that this money will never truly belong to you. I work in retail in a country that does not believe in or have a minimum wage in place, how much do you think I earn? I clearly don't earn enough. Whatever your wage is per month, divide it by four and that's my monthly income. Then take away a fifth of it, for my supposed "housing" funds, which means now I have four-fifths of my meagre monthly wage, which I have to spend on food, transport, bills, etc. What do I even have left to save? The only way I can retrieve the 20% of my cumulative wages I have earned so far in my decade of working life (it has chalked up to a couple tens of thousands), as my pure hard-earned cash, is if I renounce my Singaporean citizenship and have lived as a citizen of another country for a minimum of five years. Listen, whatever Singapore is portraying to the world, it isn't even the half of it. It likes to suck up to the powers that be, because we are tiny and have no power of our own. Singaporeans aren't happy, and even foreigners wouldn't be happy if they had to live here like Singaporeans do. I hate it here, and I'm out the first chance I get. I will not contribute to this atrocious North Korean dictatorship pretending to be a democracy when it's not. Again, though, I had a good day. If you'd like to find out more, you are welcome to read the Wikipedia page of the Singaporean CPF, although I'm pretty sure the Singapore government keeps tabs on it so that the controversy tab is kept to a minimum. If you Googled it, you are highly likely to find many more dissidents and much more dissatisfaction than is listed on the Wiki page.