IN YOUR AREA

Yesterday, I posted on Instagram that I wanted to try eating only vegetarian meals for a week, to do my part for the environment. Today, I am in the Dhoby Ghaut area where the first Five Guys branch just opened in Singapore, and already I have eaten a hamburger for lunch. The burger was not even that nice, I mean I know it's just fast food and I didn't expect a Michelin-worthy meal but I stand by my opinion that Shake Shack has better burgers than the average. Tomorrow I have a hot yoga session, which is free thanks to Lululemon, so I'm feeling pretty stoked. If there is anything I have learned in a capitalist world, it is that you should never pay when you can have something for "free". Lululemon is part of fast fashion, which definitely contributes to climate change, but then its employee welfare is also fucking awesome, so there's that. I think a lot of society is too lethargic to be active in their... activism, and it's easy to be like this, because there's such a big disconnect between our actions and the consequences of those actions. For example, while I work in Lululemon, I get free sweat sessions, so all I see are my strengthening muscles and toned body. I do not see the fact that somewhere across the world (although tbh they could be closer to me than to you, because I am in Asia where all the sweatshops are) somebody is living below the poverty line to make the clothes I sell. I wonder how many people in this very Starbucks that I'm at, are affected by compassion fatigue. Some days I want to just say fuck it, quit my job, and lay down in front of Raffles Place MRT, disrupt all the corporate office workers, and start a protest. I want to gather all the people my age and ask them, do you also think like me, that you don't need another eyeshadow palette, another pair of tights for spin class, another bespoke bracelet, another reformulated body lotion. I fantasize about all the millennials in Singapore protesting like Hong Kong did and are still doing. I daydream that one day, we're going to wake up and realize that we never see any of the money we're working for, and we need to stop producing and consuming, and give this goddamn planet a break so it can cool down. The rat race has gone too far you can even feel it in the weather, and still we're going around like the robots we've been programmed to be. And then I think, I had one choice to make today, and I still chose a hamburger because it was convenient to me and I had a fear of missing out, so. Also, if I start a protest in the middle of the CBD (in which I mean central business district and not cannabidiol), I will be arrested for fucking real, I can bet you $100,000 on that. On two unrelated notes, last week during dinner with his mother, I found out Lucas thinks that an apartment in Singapore costs $50,000. I don't know why he had such an impression, he's been working here for close to two years, he works in IT and has some semblance of common sense, Singapore is one of the most expensive cities to live in, in the world, and still, he thought an apartment costs fifty thousand bucks. I obviously told him a halfway-decent apartment starts at $300k, and if it were fifty grand, I wouldn't be such a gripey bitch about my government and would start saving towards an apartment. Lucas thought I was just bitching because the government won't let you buy an apartment if you're single unless you reach 35 years old???? I don't understand! If apartments in Singapore were 50Ks they would be sold out in like, ten minutes, because they'd be bought out by property developers and Chinese investors or whatever. Chinese buyers buy out apartments everywhere in the world!!!!!!! Sometimes the way Lucas does his computing.... does not compute to me. On the second note, yesterday my sixteen-year-old sister Aqilah went back to her secondary school to collect her 'O'-level results, and the school didn't allow her in because she'd recently dyed her hair red, even though she'd sprayed it back to black for yesterday. Our other sister Lyssa then griped: "honestly singapore is a shitty country / or schools and uniforms in general just / I HATE THIS!!!!! ITS MY BODY!!!" and it is testament to how jaded I've become, because honestly, Singapore recognizes no such thing as civil rights and this hair-dyeing incident is not a surprise. My sister has already graduated from the school, for fuck's sake. She just needed to step in to collect her results. In any case, in true rebellious familial fashion, she was top of her cohort for the English exam, so that's a fuck-you to governmental bureaucracy.