I’d like to think that I live my life in a logical way to some extent… well at least it makes a lot of sense to me.  Right now I’m doing this startup with a “friend” of mine.  Now, I’m sure you can tell how that is going with the fact that I put quotes around the “friend” part.

Well anyway, I think about my life and some of the decisions that I’ve made and I wonder whether I made the right choices in my life.  And I think I’m pretty certain that everything in my past has been resolved at this point.  My most recent decision… the one to come here and startup a company with this “friend” in Singapore… I’m still debating about.

The reason this is a conundrum is that even though my girlfriend is nearby… she told me to make this decision without taking her into account.  I totally agreed with her.  So without thinking about the advantages of being near her, I still decided to come here to Singapore and start this company with this “friend” I barely knew.  I’ve been here only about a month and a half, and already I am seeing some major cracks in the foundation that is this company.  I still plan on seeing it through for at least a year, but I feel like I’m slowly dying inside.  Here’s the breakdown:

1. Business: The business is going so-so.  I’m starting to believe less and less in the idea and that it will honestly work.  Furthermore, I’m not sure I trust my business partner.  I get the feeling all he cares about with this venture is money and he will stab me in the back the first chance he gets when he doesn’t need me anymore.  If I leave after a year, I basically wasted a good year of my life.
2. Life: This is a conglomeration of many factors, but I realize that I’m not happy here.  I’ve met some Singaporeans whom I don’t have much in common with.  I don’t like the location at all, and, no Singapore isn’t growing on me.  And, I’m starting to lose my strong sense of identity in this conformist society.  I long for someone to stand up and just yell at the top of their lungs “I’m an individual!!!”  Coming to Singapore makes me even miss living in the US.  At least there is freedom.  Singaporeans don’t seem to mind that they are told how to live, their media gets censored, and soon their private lives might be open to the government (i.e. ODEX for example).
3. Relationship: I’ve never been happier in terms of my relationship with anyone before.  I go up to visit my girlfriend in Kuala Lumpur twice a month and I have to say I love every minute of it.  If I hadn’t come to Singapore, would we still be together?  Would I still feel this way about her?  Would we have really known each other at that point?  I feel like I understand her so much more now that I’m here.

Anyway, so that’s what it comes down to… the reason I came to Singapore isn’t turning out the way I planned (i.e. the career).  Also, I’m getting really depressed in my life here.  I’m still looking for a place to stay, but I think I’m generally disatisfied with the way of life here.  Finally, my relationship is really a bright point in my life.  Angel has been with me despite all my whingeing about Singapore and work.  She’s still so supportive.  Sometimes I worry that she will just break down and tell me to shut up, if she is just pretending to be supportive.  I guess that’s the true test of a good relationship.  Any relationship can survive when both people are happy, but can it also survive during the darkest hours?

I still believe I can make it for a year here.  It’s more a challenge to myself than anything.  At one point I was thinking of living in Bangladesh for a year.  If I can’t live in Singapore, then I think I would really wonder how many places in the world I could live in.  I need to do this for myself.  This company is quickly becoming something that is not mine.  I wish I could steer it more but my business partner is pretty inflexible and naive at this point.  It’s hard to work with people that have never worked in games before… they always think things magically get done.  But even more than that, I didn’t realize how badly my business partner’s personality clashes with mine.  He’s kinda the type of person I don’t want to associate with (maybe I’ll explain more about that later).

By December, my girlfriend will leave her current job.  What will she do?  I wonder… I will support her wherever she goes.  I just don’t know if I will be physically there wherever she goes. :(  So many unanswered questions.  It’s exciting to try and find out the answers.

Obviously all of my waking time is consumed with thinking about why I’m in Singapore these days. I’m still trying, but more and more I’m just starting to feel like I’m giving up trying. I don’t belong here, but I will just deal with it. I’ll just accept the fact that I have no social life. I’ll go along with the flow and just become the model no U-turning, no free thinking, law abiding Singaporean. Follow the rules! The rules are your friends. I used to be worried that I was losing my creativity and very uninspired here.

The longer I stay here, the more I just don’t want to fight it anymore. I’ll just go to work and do a less than optimal job trying to be creative in an uncreative world. I’ll just follow the path that millions of Singaporeans follow every day.

1. Work is my life! Why you not working? Hard work = success = respect = better than your lazy ass.
2. Creativity? What that? You no make money from creativity!
3. Degrees, degrees, degrees… will make sure to mention them to make you impressed.
4. Shop, Eat, Work, Shop, Eat, Work. Is there really anything more to life? Sad
5. Live in super small HDB and like it la?

Obviously I’m a little bitter, and of course it’s bad to generalize… but I am starting to feel myself just giving up on being an individual. Just integrate and lose everything that I love about who I am. I imagine it’s a similar group mentality that drove the Germans to follow Hitler. Just do as you are told, and things will be good.

I really hope this isn’t a permanent change. I really hope I don’t lose all drive to creative pursuits because of being here.  I feel myself going on autopilot.  I hate going on autopilot.

I feel like such a hideous creature here in Singapore. I feel so bad for feeling like I don’t belong. I feel like I’m letting people down… like I overestimated my own abilities. But I feel, so horrible and depressed here. When I visit my girlfriend in KL, I feel happy again, but that is such a brief feeling… because I still end up in Singapore at the end. I need something more from my life. I need to feel a certain way. I just feel so hideous.

“Beautiful creature of darkness… what kind of life have you known? God gave me courage to show you… you are not alone!”

~Phantom of the Opera, Down Once More…

But what can I do? Everyone says “just give it more time” or “you aren’t trying hard enough,” but what does it honestly take and how hard must I try to belong in a place? Is there any place in the world where “just giving it more time” isn’t going to do it? I met one of my girlfriend’s friends here, Sell, and she said that even after 3 years living here, she didn’t like it here. How much longer can I keep this up? It feels like such a charade. It’s not me. I’m not being fair to myself anymore.

Why is it that management thinks it’s a good idea to lie to their employees?  I’ve recently been moved to a project that I am not excited about working on.  Originally I was hired to work on new IP on handhelds.  My team was great, but we got bounced around from project to project until they finally decided to move us all onto the big uber project for the company.  If I had known I would end up on that project, I would have never worked for this company.

Anyway, when I expressed my concerns over moving onto the uber team, I explained how working on that team did not fit in with my career goals at all, which were:

1. Work on something new and original
2. Work on a smaller team
3. Work on various aspects of the game
4. To not work mad amounts of overtime

I told my manager that this project fulfills none of my needs.  My manager then responded: “If you remove those concerns, would you want to work on this project?”  I told him that is impossible because those are things that are inherent about working on that project.  So I was given a choice, I can be on loan to this uber team for a month, I can move onto the uber team permanently, or I can move onto the smaller team that I really wanted to be on.  I told him that being on “loan” really was the same thing as being on the team permanently, yet he assured me that this was not true.

Apparently, I was never given the choice because management made the decision for me and moved me onto the uber project.  Still, my lead assured me that I could still move onto the project I really wanted to after a month.  I never believed him… not for a second.  Now, 3 weeks later, it’s abundantly clear that I am not on loan at all.  I will be on this team permanently.

So, why do managers do this?  I know that they are trying to satisfy everyone, but it is not my job as an employee to work in the best interest of this company.  If I don’t get anything out of this, then there really is no reason for me to be there anymore.  I’m angry, I’m disappointed, and I’m depressed.  So what is a disgruntled employee supposed to do?

I told them how I felt about the project and they still put me on it.  I’m going to talk to my lead on Thursday and tell him the truth: if this company is not working in the best interest of my career goals, I am going to look somewhere else.  I figure this is the best thing for both sides.  If the company knows that I am looking to leave, they will start aggressively looking for a replacement.  If I tell them I am going to leave, then the people I work with will not be so angry at me when I don’t do the mad amounts of overtime that they are doing and I leave in the middle of the project.  I still don’t want to burn any bridges… this industry is way too small.

Anyway, the only way for employees to not be taken advantage of is if those employees know they have options.  This forces companies to effectively compete for the limited resources that are the employees, thus forcing working conditions to improve.  This is what happened to the dot com companies.  I’ve got options, and the time is coming where I’m going to make it perfectly clear that I do.

How many people do you talk to every day?  Of those people, how many are you really talking to?  I’ve come to the realization that I’ve gotten really good at talking without really talking.  Lets see… today I talked to 1 answering machine, 1 friend, 1 person selling me a polish sausage, 1 person at Safeway, and 1 person selling me a sandwich, and my 2 roommates.  That equals a whopping total of 7 social interactions in the whole day!  And guess how many of those conversations were actually meaningful?  Maybe the one with my friend, but it was only barely. :( 

So, I know I’m not the most social person in the world, but seriously, what has happened to the meaningful conversation.  I think I’m realizing the isolation that comes along with living in a big city.  Is it just me?  It seems like there are so many people around, but so few real social interactions.  It’s like people are living in a bubble… is this what city life does to people?  What scares me is that I feel myself falling into this same trap every day I live here.  I grew up in a small suburb, and I always thought I would love living in the city.  More and more, I’m realizing that I don’t want to live in a big city.  It’s really hard for me to say this, especially since I still love a lot of what the city has to offer.  On the other hand, the whole isolation thing is really getting to me.

How can people live like this?  How can people go through a day and not feel unfulfilled due to the lack of real meaningful conversations.  Even people in relationships don’t really talk here.  I hear my roommate talk to her friends and “visitors” and it’s painful to hear due to the lack of any real content.  You know what it’s like… the type of talk you say to a girl at a bar when you are trying to pick her up.  Just when I think I’ve readjusted back to life here, something snaps me back in place.  I’m not sure what did it this time, but something made me feel this way.  I wish I had more people that I could REALLY talk to.

Yesterday I went out with some friends 3 girls and 1 guy that joined later.  Somehow the topic that all three girls were single came up and all three proceeded to bash the entire male race.  They started talking about what they want out of guys, and kept saying that guys needed to do this and that more.  What really stood out to me is the desire not for equality but for disparity.  They explained how it was always the guys’ fault for their previous relationships failing.  They wanted the guys to do more cooking, cleaning, be more sensitive, and other stuff.   On the other hand, they still wanted to maintain their roles as the one being taken care of and being paid for by the guys.  It seemed like they wanted guys to take on more of the tasks usually attributed to the females, without taking on more of the tasks usually attributed to males. 

I’ve noticed for a while, but I’ve never said anything about it.  There’s a real dichotomy about living in the land of the free.  A place where racism is shunned publicly, but fostered privately.  This is the land where I grew up in… this is where I was born.  In any case, no one has a choice about their race (or their gender for that matter), yet everyone wants to discriminate based on it.

So what do I mean by the disadvantaged race?  I’ve noticed that being an Asian male is a huge disadvantage when looking for a significant other of the opposite gender.  It’s definitely not the case here for Asian females, nor as much so for gay Asian guys.  Every once in a while on craigslist, I read the personals more for entertainment than for anything else.  You see a lot of Asian females looking for SWMs (straight white males), and a good number of white males looking for SAFs (straight asian females).  You almost never see anyone looking for a SAM (straight asian male).  I met up with two of my friends today, and both are Asian, and both want to be with white guys.  I think a lot of guys find Asians exotic because of certain physical traits… and Asian females definitely tend to fit in more with the traits that are usually considered most desirable for females.  On the other hand, those same traits are what make Asian males less desirable (at least to females).

I mean seriously, what am I supposed to think when so many people want to be with white males and so few people want to be with Asian guys.  Part of me thinks it’s ok to discriminate and be a bit racist in terms of who you are in a intimate relationship with.  But part of me really thinks at some level it’s wrong.  I do it too, there are definitely some races that I am less attracted to… maybe because of the physical features or the racial stereotypes associated.  On the other hand I leave it open to the fact that maybe I could be in a relationship with those races.

For me, it has never been as much about race as it is about who I relate to.  Personally, I relate better to people with a similar background to me: westernized Asian.  I’ve never been great at relating to the Asians that are “uber”-Asian (i.e. as if they came right off the boat).  Also, I’ve not been good at relating to Asians that are so Americanized that they hate everything Asian (including rice).  Where do I fit in?  I guess I fit in somewhere in the grey area in between.  And those are the types of people I relate to best.   What’s it like being in the grey area and part of the disadvantaged race?  It’s a constant battle for understanding, recognition, and most of all respect.

I think you’re blind to the fact that the hand you hold is the hand that holds you down.

~Everclear, Everything to Everyone

It seems like people in America don’t know the difference between “living” and “working”.  Some of my friends complain every day about how much they hate their work, but then they say that they do it because they like it.  The problem is that they can’t differentiate between their work and their life. They convince themselves that if their work is bad, then their life is bad too… and, feeling helpless to do anything about it, they convince themselves that they like their jobs too.  What bugs me is that this thinking becomes an excuse to not do anything about their situations.  They really want a change, but they are unwilling to do anything about it.

One of my roommates has the same problem.  She comes home every day saying how tired she is because she was working so hard at work.  She also says she likes her job.  Sometimes she even gives me a guilt trip since I go into work relatively late and leave relatively early.  But honestly, she chooses to work like that, so why should she complain about it taking over all her free time and making her be so tired?  As for me, I chose the job I work, I define what hours I work, and I do the things that I enjoy doing.

Which brings me back to the quote above.  I think most people are honestly afraid at their jobs.  Their jobs provide stability and security, and they are scared of what it would be like if they weren’t in the jobs that they are in.  Sometimes they even think that they wouldn’t be able to find another job or that they need more experience before they leave.  These are all excuses.  It seems to me that a lot of Americans in particular, use their jobs like crutches because they are afraid of walking.  Their jobs become “the hand you hold”.  What they don’t realize is that this hand they hold is what is holding them down.  I’ve noticed that this type of thinking is much worse here in the US than it was in Australia.  Am I just crazy for taking the risks that I do in my own life?

I’m not sure how I feel about the quasi-bastardization of one of my favorite flash games.  If you haven’t tried it already, you should definitely give it a try.  The game is called “La Bella Romanza” and it’s a simulation game where you play an italian woman who needs to deal with all the stresses of everyday life, family, and love over the course of several weeks.  I remember staying up until 5am playing that game!

Anyway, they released the next version of it as “Ciao Bella: The Zoom Zoom Episode“, and it retains pretty much the same feel of the original game except with constant references to the Mazda CX-7 and how great it is.  Honestly, I could do without the blatant advertising, but the game is good.  I’m kinda split about this… on the one hand, I want to play the game… on the other hand I don’t want to strain through having to read about the CX-7 all the time.  It’s kinda painful to see what they did to this game.  It feels like they really sold out.

I saw the musical Rent yesterday (for the 4th time might I add).  It wasn’t nearly as good as I remember it.  I’m not sure if it had something to do with the fact that it was my 4th time seeing it or if it really wasn’t a good performance.  Anyway, I’m not going to talk about Rent since that’s already been done before.  What I am going to talk about is what happened after the show.

I’ve never been bothered by it before, but I realized that a lot of people who graduated from my graduate program are really immature.  It was the first time that I had seen some of them in over 1.5 years, and going to Rent was kind of like getting to know them again.  But, honestly, I can’t believe how immature they are.  They started making fun of the songs in Rent and the lyrics as well.

Although it was a bit funny at first, it really dragged on me.  I mean, how many times can you find entertainment value in someone singing a song from Rent in a silly voice.  I thought it was all very purile.  I can see it coming from 6-10 year olds, but from people who are my age it just starts feeling ridiculous.

Anyway, so the thought came to me that maybe this is the problem with the games industry.  Since all these people graduated from my graduate program, they all went into the games industry.  Maybe the reason that the games industry can’t grow up is because all the people in the games industry are still immature.  They are still in the “dick and fart jokes” stage.  I really hope someday a mature group of individuals can pull together and make games with meaning, and I’m hoping that happens soon.