Scribble scrabble.
#2035 | A Private Bubble, A World
When I first knew I was moving to New York Roz turned to me and said your earphones will be your best friends.
I don’t actually listen to music that much, I said, and she shook her head.
Trust me, she said, you will.
I place more stock in Roz’s opinions than I do the usual person not only because she is wise and smart and funny but also because it was at twenty seven that she, too, moved across seas to chase her dream. Ten years separate us but when we are together we do not feel it except to benefit from the endless comparing of notes from days past and present. Ten years ago Roz packed up and got on a flight to Taiwan where her career as an actress developed; ten years later I rolled my life into a suitcase and stepped on the plane to New York with big dreams and a pen in every bag. Ever since she and I have obsessively texted and skyped and continued exchanging stories in every medium possible. I press my earphones in and listen to her voice messages on my walk to school. I think to myself: she was right – my earphones did become my best friends – but not in the way she had expected. Everytime I slide my earphones on, the voices of my loved ones back home chatter in my ear. So much of my days here, now, are spent with a foot in each country: america, singapore. Just a week ago I watched a friend walk down the aisle and heard the sniffles in my ear while feeling the chilly autumn breeze raise goosebumps up and down my back. I have a body that exists in two states.
As someone who identifies as technologically curious, I made the transition to wireless headphones years ago, and as headphones evolved in more compact and amazing ways I followed suit and have used exclusively true wireless earbuds for the past couple of years. How incredible they are, automatically waking and pairing once you snap the case open, pausing your track if you take them out, giving you the option to take calls or change tracks with a casual tap on your ear. And buds are so subtle. The fact that I affect a slight Luna Lovegood air when muttering observations about new york to whoever is invisibly on the line can only be a plus.
With the bud-sized world I now carry around of course my appetite for music has increased. After countless earpieces snapped, frayed, and tangled, I was slowly weaned off a perpetual background track years ago… something that slowly started coming back in the last few years after investing in home speakers and wireless earpieces. But True Wireless Earbuds as a category is honestly unparalleled in terms of convenience. After the first pairing, it’s automatic and quick, the minute you take the earbuds out of their case they link up to your phone and are ready to rumba. And not all earbuds are created equal. It surprises literally nobody that my current babies, Sennheiser’s MOMENTUM True Wireless earbuds, are an audiophile’s dream, delivering excellent sound, as per all of Sennheiser’s offerings. Bluetooth technology has been a major debate for audiophiles for a long time, always seen as a trade up between sound fidelity and the hassle of wires, but Sennheiser has handed the reigns of control back to the user – through the companion app you can tweak the bass, the treble, the highs and the lows to your personal preference. And as someone who is absolutely addicted now to orchestral game music (I wrote a whole piece to the soundtrack of Pokemon Red’s Pallet Town theme), I can assure you, simply walking down the street takes on an epic quality.
Because I have no issues talking out loud to the apparently empty air I get a major kick out of telling the linked Google Assistant to change the track or adjust the volume: this is new york, talking to the sky is the least shocking thing you can see a stranger do. If one so wishes, the buds can even feed in some ambient noise from the outside world (the transparent hearing option toggled in the app) the result being that I never miss MTA announcements while waiting for the train.
And there is no talking about the MOMENTUMs without at least a brief mention of the case, which is a tactile luxury, solidly built and encased in grey fabric. Perhaps bite sized luxury is the best way to think about the MOMENTUMs, which are small and excellent, compact and comforting, which have followed me across the seas to my new life here where they will stay for the foreseeable future.
X
Jem
This post is brought to you in collaboration with SITEX Singapore. All views expressed are my own. Visit SITEX for more details of the Travel Tech Experiential Zone, and click here to read more about the Sennheiser MOMENTUMs – straight from the horse’s mouth, as they say.
#2034 | Six years!
New York, Singapore
When people ask me what the MFA program is like I tend to compare it to having a nutritionist or physiotherapist – you identify the areas where you want your body (of work) to be strengthened, enriched, fixed, and a specialist works with you through small, cumulative repetitions to the end of extending, widening your range of movements. In that light it feels telling that I am taking not one, but two classes that have to do specifically with time, and on top of that, a lecture by a writer who is also preoccupied with dismantling the presence of a clock in every work of fiction. In my masterclass, (mis)adventures in time, ayana mathis asked during our first meeting what the significance of time was… how it functions, specifically, in each of our lives.. automatically I replied it seems to exist purely to frustrate me. And it is true, I sometimes feel like time is something I dip in and out of, but of course what I am starting to see is that, inevitably, it is something one is bound to, happily or unhappily it progresses and with it we must go or rage.
In The Time Traveller’s Wife, which was a favorite book of ours (shane and i, when we were twenty one), audrey niffeneger explains time travel as traced back to a gene that causes one to be chronologically displaced, involuntarily dropping in and out of time, and it was an idea that immediately echoed in me… so much of my life I have tried to organize in boxes and discipline into schedules, I like timetables, the rigidity, the solidity of something that I can rely on when otherwise things dance around in my brain with no fidelity to order. But when you live in a body that lacks chronological rigor things old and past can seem fresh and new, sometimes intrusively, sometimes pleasantly. Was it seven years ago that we took the train together from the west to the east and found each other familiar or six and a half that shane bought me a plate of NTUC sashimi to cheer me up after a long day of wrangling with an essay on modernism? Or just yesterday that he read me a poem on the ADM roof and asked me to be his girlfriend – was it this morning that I replied oh, finally or two months ago that i read the play he wrote, the play with which he asked me to marry him, or just a year before that I said, as a writer i will be broke forever, are you sure … round and round my memories go, mixed in an undiscerning swirl.
Perhaps ten years from now I will be confused as to whether we had gotten the dog or married first, or if the fights preceded the apologies or vice versa. Perhaps my need to record has always traced back to a need to explain to myself the order of things, this happened, and then this, and then we got older, and time compressed here, here, and lingered here. Perhaps. But for now it is enough to say that it feels new and fresh and amazing and wonderful and fun and incredible and all the things that! I woke up one day and! We were six.
x
Jem
#2033| No Ticket No Taco!
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Jem
#2032| Reading update 3
July
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (Screenplay)
Frankisstein by Jeanette Winterson
Severance by Ling Ma
The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy
The 80 Minute MBA by Richard Reeves and John Knell
Exhalation by Ted ChiangBook of the month: Exhalation by Ted Chiang
August
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
How to Pray by CS Lewis
We are the Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Water Dancer by Ta-nehisi Coates
Veronica by Nicholas Christopher
Still Here by Lara Vapnyar
Everything I know about Love by Dolly AldertonBook of the month: Everything I know about Love by Dolly Alderton
September
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolenteni
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirschenbaum
Monsieur Teste by Paul Valery (hated)
The Face: Strangers on a Pier by Tash Aw (Re-read)
Miss lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West
Day of the locust by Nathaniel West
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
Glory by Vladimir Nabokov
Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia WoolfBook of the month: Mrs Bridge by Evan S.Connell
When you have to read two novels a week for school you realise things move very, very fast indeed.
Last quarter of 2019, here we go.
x
Jem
#2031 | The measure of a month
It feels like both a lifetime and barely the first axis of an inhale but the truth is it has only been a month (already been a month) since I moved to New York, where in no order of priority I have:
1. Started school
2. Created the hole of silence wherein my first two weeks reside – which I will one day have to unpick, I know
3. Went into the wine shop only one time and declared loudly (dramatically!) “I have had a long day, and i want something cheap and good.”
4. Replied to the man who tried to sway me in favor of the forty dollar bottle (then you should treat yourself, girl!) definitively, confrontationally, firmly – “I am a broke student and your country is making me hemorrhage money, show me the cheapest bottle that you would still actually drink!”
5. (Please.) Always affixing the concession after, after the act.
6. Went through eight housemates (some of whom overlap) and two houses.
7. Assassinated eleven goldfish but only in my mind’s invention.
8. Took the uber of a famous-ass youtuber and told him i disapproved of his pranks, then realised how old i sounded, had a minor crisis, shut up, all in the backseat of the uber. Stared out at the skyline in silence. Thought to myself: well, that’s that on that.
9. Turned twenty seven!!!!!!
10. Over the legendary momofuku noodles which I must admit do live up to the ~hype~, interviewed Tash which I am happy about, shot his portrait which I am also happy about. Good lighting and good conversation and good noodles! Interview is up on the Columbia Journal.
11. Bought one zillion second hand things to construct the semblance of a living space
12. Made myself responsible for four houseplants, was given another two. We will see.
13. Read eleven books and wrote none.
14. Sigh.
15. Did I procrastinate?
16. Went 48 hours without talking at one point, which is a minor miracle for me. After that I started talking to myself (not unusual).
17. Felt very attacked when in a lecture, Joshua Cohen when debating the first vs third person said: “If a character talks to themselves all the time, they’d be like, totally crazy!”
18. All of you talk to yourselves too.
19. Tried and failed to get some logistical matters in Singapore settled. Honestly the biggest pain of moving is probably the minor administrative details that slide like grains of dirt under the raw skin of relocation, only to resurface in itches; irritations under scabs, pressing upwards demanding attention, threatening inflammation.
20. Still, I chose this.
x
Jem
#2030 | Some observations about New York so far
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1. The back of most toilet doors dont have bag hooks 🙁
2. So many dogs
3. It is possible to be attacked by spiderman in Central Park with a PMD and have your arm broken as a result, which is exactly what happened to my housemate last week.
4. People don’t like, but still use, Amazon here
5. So many gyms. So many pasta shops.
6. Today I asked someone what Adderall was after getting caught up with the Caroline Calloway drama, and she was so shocked she said: “oh my god, I cannot believe I just heard someone say that sentence what is Adderall”
7. Suddenly I understand why everyone keeps asking me – are you using any substances – and I understand that it is not personal, and that I, for the most part, pass as painstakingly regular.
8. Where are all the cats, I asked, and someone told me, this is a city, if a cat went on the streets it would die immediately. I heard this and in my minds eye I saw the four cats that live in my void deck back home and the seventeen that live on my street and I knew that it is not the abstract city that kills cats, it is New York City, which consumes the independent street felines, for it is only the ones on a leash, or reared to venture only as far as the fire escape, that make it out alive.
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Jem
Camera Info
I shoot on a Nikon D750 with a 35f/1.8 lens, a Fujifilm x100v, or my Samsung Note 20 Ultra. Pictures are edited in Lightroom Mobile or VSCO