Saturday, October 16, 2004
Waterwords
It's so easy to look in on other people's worlds; so easy to see the things they should be doing or the consequences their courses will wreak.
It's a different story when you're the sailboat cast adrift in the storm, when you're the storm-battered, disorientated master of that boat trying to weather out the waves, just trying to stay afloat. To stay alive.
Some of us can't see any better, some of us can't step out beyond the shell and look in upon ourselves - sometimes I envy people like that. Perhaps it's easier that way, all it would take would be to fasten onto some well-wisher's advice and you're back on dry land.
Some of us can, though. And we've been there, we've tried that. We don't know why we're still lost at sea - and part of us begins to wonder if perhaps, at least at some subconscious level, we want to be cast adrift. Perhaps we navigate by starlight to ensure that we never smell land again, and meet as few boats along the way as we can.
******
Listening the other day to the fencing coach nattering on about how he loves Singapore best, because it is safe, I feel that I must have led a charmed life. I survived nearly a decade (mostly alone) in London walking unnoticed alleyways and sidestreets unmolested, a week alone in Sydney, and then a further 8 weeks years later wandering through the city's innards unharmed, and a fortnight in various parts of the united states (LA by night. SF by night.) - even doing the proverbial long-distance greyhound bus-trip one always reads about in sci-fi novels (perhaps that's why I did it : it was a novelty) and walked away from it all unmugged. (unless you count the shameless daylight robbery that is all of San Francisco)
In a way it felt almost anticlimatic, proving all the diehard nationalists wrong.
On the 'plane back, I read an article about four policemen being assaulted by twenty patrons of a Singaporean hawker stall and shook my head in disbelief. I read the articles about the cocaine circle and thought that it was about time it finally happened.
Perhaps crime is part of the natural order of things, and denying its existence or declaring it illegal is too simple a solution.
Perhaps the well-meaning paternalism we've taken shelter under has made us forget what true street smarts are - often I hear Singaporeans trying to be piercing and perceptive by saying so-and-so looks soft and clueless, and so-and-so has street smarts, and I wonder : would they really survive a day on the mean streets of LA - or even London, where girls get dragged into alleys and raped in broad daylight, sometimes?
I suspect that it was the simple things I always somehow knew, without knowing why, and automatically put into practice that kept me "lucky" these past sevenandabit years. Dress down, but not too casual; keep your hands in your pockets (and your wallet), conceal cameras, don't let go of your bags - or at least keep a foot on them - in public places, don't let anyone come too close to you to walk into you, and make eye contact when they try to. Walk down the main street at night, don't take short-cuts. When things turn the slightest bit dodgy, put an extra something into your walk that says you've done this, and been here before - difficult to explain, that last. Perhaps it was just paranoia, but it was paranoia that worked.
It's ironic that the parents still think I'm clueless, and are still convinced that I'll lose my wallet and stuff because I take them off and out when I'm eating (strange habit I've acquired, perhaps through being a doctor - I don't feel "clean" till I've removed my watch and ring, and for some reason the wallet and coins go with them) yet six years ago saw me ranting at my father for dressing in a garish shiny blue bomber jacket with his camera slung round his neck with TOURIST / MUG ME practically written all over his forehead in a hostile city somewhere in europe.
It's a different story when you're the sailboat cast adrift in the storm, when you're the storm-battered, disorientated master of that boat trying to weather out the waves, just trying to stay afloat. To stay alive.
Some of us can't see any better, some of us can't step out beyond the shell and look in upon ourselves - sometimes I envy people like that. Perhaps it's easier that way, all it would take would be to fasten onto some well-wisher's advice and you're back on dry land.
Some of us can, though. And we've been there, we've tried that. We don't know why we're still lost at sea - and part of us begins to wonder if perhaps, at least at some subconscious level, we want to be cast adrift. Perhaps we navigate by starlight to ensure that we never smell land again, and meet as few boats along the way as we can.
******
Listening the other day to the fencing coach nattering on about how he loves Singapore best, because it is safe, I feel that I must have led a charmed life. I survived nearly a decade (mostly alone) in London walking unnoticed alleyways and sidestreets unmolested, a week alone in Sydney, and then a further 8 weeks years later wandering through the city's innards unharmed, and a fortnight in various parts of the united states (LA by night. SF by night.) - even doing the proverbial long-distance greyhound bus-trip one always reads about in sci-fi novels (perhaps that's why I did it : it was a novelty) and walked away from it all unmugged. (unless you count the shameless daylight robbery that is all of San Francisco)
In a way it felt almost anticlimatic, proving all the diehard nationalists wrong.
On the 'plane back, I read an article about four policemen being assaulted by twenty patrons of a Singaporean hawker stall and shook my head in disbelief. I read the articles about the cocaine circle and thought that it was about time it finally happened.
Perhaps crime is part of the natural order of things, and denying its existence or declaring it illegal is too simple a solution.
Perhaps the well-meaning paternalism we've taken shelter under has made us forget what true street smarts are - often I hear Singaporeans trying to be piercing and perceptive by saying so-and-so looks soft and clueless, and so-and-so has street smarts, and I wonder : would they really survive a day on the mean streets of LA - or even London, where girls get dragged into alleys and raped in broad daylight, sometimes?
I suspect that it was the simple things I always somehow knew, without knowing why, and automatically put into practice that kept me "lucky" these past sevenandabit years. Dress down, but not too casual; keep your hands in your pockets (and your wallet), conceal cameras, don't let go of your bags - or at least keep a foot on them - in public places, don't let anyone come too close to you to walk into you, and make eye contact when they try to. Walk down the main street at night, don't take short-cuts. When things turn the slightest bit dodgy, put an extra something into your walk that says you've done this, and been here before - difficult to explain, that last. Perhaps it was just paranoia, but it was paranoia that worked.
It's ironic that the parents still think I'm clueless, and are still convinced that I'll lose my wallet and stuff because I take them off and out when I'm eating (strange habit I've acquired, perhaps through being a doctor - I don't feel "clean" till I've removed my watch and ring, and for some reason the wallet and coins go with them) yet six years ago saw me ranting at my father for dressing in a garish shiny blue bomber jacket with his camera slung round his neck with TOURIST / MUG ME practically written all over his forehead in a hostile city somewhere in europe.
