A Day In The Life

Here’s what my school schedule looks like:

• Monday: Labour in Capitalist Societies (10:30-12) and Global India (2:30-5)

• Tuesday: Key Debates in Urban Planning and Policy (10:30-12) and Empire’s Outlaws (1-4)

• Wednesday: None

• Thursday: Labour in Capitalist Societies (10:30-12)

• Friday: Key Debates in Urban Planning and Policy (10:30-12)

While I am absolutely slammed on Sundays and Mondays in terms of reading, if I can make it to Tuesday night, I have like a mini-weekend. And this Wednesday, I decided to enjoy some nature – or, as we youths say, “touch grass.” So I headed to Southern Ridges, a park not too far away with walkways in the tree canopies.

There were some cool old colonial houses along the park, and I kinda wish I lived there. The soundtrack to my walk was Dick’s Picks Vol. 10: Winterland Arena, San Francisco 12/29/77. Highly recommend. I’m new to all of this, but is ’77 just the best year for the Dead? Embrace the debate in the comments below.

Although I also had to hear Bill Simmons’s take on the Aaron Rodgers incident. Though I’m halfway around the world, the night games (Sunday, Monday, and Thursday Night Football) kick off at about 8:15 a.m. the next day here, and I tune in while I’m eating breakfast. Somehow I’m still the commissioner of my fantasy league even though I can’t watch 90% of the games (very optimistic about my fantasy team this year after the Damar Hamlin incident robbed me of a championship last season). So I got to watch Aaron Rodgers’s Achilles explode as I was sipping my morning coffee. And since the broadcast played it incessantly in slow motion and you could literally see it pop, it reminded me very strongly of seeing the same thing happen to Kevin Durant in the 2019 NBA Finals.

Part of Southern Ridges was closed, so I decided to follow the signs for Kent Ridge Park’s Canopy Walk because that sounded like it should be similar and I knew Kent Ridge was in the general direction of campus. I decided to hit a 7-Eleven on the way to grab a cold drink and a snack since I was running on nothing but iced coffee, water, and jasmine tea (in that order). Long-time readers will recall my fondness for Japanese 7-Eleven, and I wanted to see how Singaporean 7-Eleven stacked up in comparison. My search for 7-Eleven brought me to a sprawling corporate office park that contained, among other companies, Google.

And of course, because it’s Singapore, this massive tech office park was full of nature and had a basketball court. I also noticed that it was full of restaurants, and before I knew it, my feet found a food court.

I’m sure I blended in well with all of the office workers, as I was dripping with sweat and wearing a knockoff Kawhi Leonard jersey and my trusty TeVas. Nonetheless, I was hungry.

This humble plate of duck rice was just S$5.50, or $4.04 US dollars. The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal are chock-full of op-eds from corporate fat cats complaining about how nobody wants to return from work-at-home. Well if they want to get people back in the office, maybe they should put in a huge food court full of stalls to get Chinese food, Malay food, Indian food, drinks, and dessert. Just my two cents.

I continued on with my journey, and try as I might, I could not find that goddamn 7-Eleven. I decided to bag it and proceed to Kent Ridge Park.

Kent Ridge Park is beautiful and full of history. One of the last battles in the Japanese Imperial Army’s conquest of Singapore took place there in 1942. Also, check out that cool bird! There were like six of them all hanging out together, with a black stripe around their eyes and a white mohawk. No clue what it was.

Here’s some other cool stuff I saw on my long and very hot walk.

I’m going to try and do more short blogs like this, as I think more frequent shorter blogs are better than more infrequent long ones. So stay tuned. Also, I’m going to plug my Venmo (@Zev-Green) and CashApp ($ZevGreen) again, because that was very successful last time. So if you didn’t give last time, take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself: why wouldn’t you want to support this bright young man’s adventures? Are you some kind of cold-hearted monster?

And speaking of adventures: I’m going to Ho Chi Minh City! We have the last week of September off, so I’m headed back to the city that I visited in December 2019 and loved so much. Be on the lookout for a blog chock-full of pho, banh mi, banh xeo (a new favorite), and so much more.