WELCOME TO FUNNYLAND (Luna Park in Sydney, Australia)

My Singapore-based small business, Tangram Lab, recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. The idea for Tangram Lab was conceived shortly after launching this blog in 2009, when I’d emerged from the corporate cocoon fearful, raw, and relatively certain that I wouldn’t ever be flying back to it again. During this period, I was also immersed in rewriting a graduate thesis for the sixth time, researching doctoral programs, and volunteering at a few charities in New York— a period of dignified avoidance culminating in the realization that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my stint on Earth. Although I was probably too young to be disenchanted with the opportunities life offered and too old to be pondering what I wanted to be when I grew up, that’s exactly where I found myself. Looking back, the recession probably didn’t help matters.

Over the course of a very dark week or so, I directed my free hours into designing “the perfect job at the perfect place which doesn’t currently exist and under the assumption that the human species has transcended its gauche and detestable obsession with money instead operating under a scheme weighing an individual’s positive and negative contributions to society.” Or something like that. The result of this exercise was Tangram Lab, an idea I nervously tried to sell to a few well-meaning smart folks, most of whom looked at me with a special kind of pity and said, “umm, I’m not sure what you have here is a business. How will you eat?”  Sadly, the etchings of Tangram Lab were concealed within a puke green folder and shoved into a filing cabinet. I went back to the business of trying to Google my future.

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Media entrepreneurship, kiasu, Singapore, small business, social enterprise

Singapore: One moon, one sun, thousands of wishing spheres

Researchers at the University of Hawaii disclosed this week that the Earth is likely being watched over by not one silvery sentinel, but two. Those of you who have shelved your social lives to read the most anticipated book of the year, Haruki Murakami’s 930 page tome, IQ84, may be feeling a bit on edge after learning this news. If you have yet to check it out, the cagey characters in Murakami’s Orwell-inspired tale (pronounced “Q-teen-eighty-four”) are indeed guided by two moons— one robust and familiar, the other small and sickly green— signifying a sinister parallel universe fraught with psychopathy, compromise, and inexplicable complication. Given the coincidence between our big blue marble and Murakami’s fictional one, perhaps the author’s real genius comes not from his literary prowess, but from his ability to prophesy. After all, how many of us this year have said, “is this for real?” or “what planet am I on?” or even, “stop the world, I want to get off”?

Like some of you, I’ve been preoccupied with figuring out how to escape cosmos A (war, famine, global warming, unemployment, usury, banksters, Newt Gingrich, the Kardashians, and privacy as defined by Facebook) and get to cosmos B (peace, abundance, awareness, fulfillment, jubilee, justice, competence, depth, and privacy as defined by people). This unfortunately left me with little appetite to blog. On a personal level, the Year of the Bunny has been a fast and twisted hop, one that often led me down the rabbit hole and into the unknown- from my first year in Singapore, my first go as a small business owner in the Eastern hemisphere, my first marathon, my first year feeling like a total outsider since the sixth grade and frankly, my first year sensing that nearly everything I’d been taught about the way life is supposed to work belonged in the manure heap (I’ve since concluded that yes, a lot of it was and is crap). So, with 2012 approaching— and taunting our minds with visions of doom thanks to bad movies and ancient rumor mills— I hope that we’ll at least begin to find the tunnel back to a world that’s wiser, saner, and kinder, a world with only one tried and true moon.

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Commentary 2012, Asia, corruption, pollution in Beijing, protest in Asia, year of the dragon

Scientists from NASA and Pennsylvania State University recently published a scenario analysis which investigates the potential implications of contact with ETIs (extraterrestrial intelligence) and ultimately suggests that alien-human interaction would be harmful to earthly beings, even if the ETI civilization held universalist ethics. The scientists reason that,

given we have already altered our environment in ways that may be viewed as unethical by universalist ETI, it may be prudent to avoid sending any message that shows evidence of our negative environmental impact. The chemical composition of Earth’s atmosphere over recent time may be a poor choice for a message because it would show a rapid accumulation of carbon dioxide from human activity. Likewise, any message that indicates widespread loss of biodiversity or rapid rates of expansion may be dangerous if received by such universalist ETI. On the other hand, advanced ETI may already know about our rapid environmental impact by listening to leaked electromagnetic signals or observing changes in Earth’s spectral signature. In this case, it might be prudent for any message we send to avoid denying our environmental impact so as to avoid the ETI catching us in a lie.

Ironically, reports of UFO activity in China have caught the attention of global news outlets this month, from an “unusual cloud”  in Chongqing resulting in the shutdown of Jiangbei International Airport to a super colossal sphere of light seen from Shanghai to Beijing. Even a few days ago- after cheering on Joe Biden’s caravan as it sped through Jianguomen- I gazed up at the night sky to witness two multi-colored triangular shapes hovering overhead. “Military intelligence? Spy technology? Alien armchair politicians? A sale at Uniqlo?” I pondered. “Just a few kites,” I was told. Still, I wonder… Read more…

Commentary air quality, aliens, Beijing, china, ETIs, global warming, nationalism, pollution

Those of you who have been following the show in Washington this month may now be glued to your sofas in a horrified stupor, unable to process the egocentric madness in Congress that could spark yet another global economic crisis. Or, perhaps you’re just severely ticked off that your stocks are tanking. Across the pond in China, the crowd can’t sit still following last Saturday’s high speed bullet train collision in the Eastern province of Zhejiang, killing at least 39 people and injuring nearly 200 others. While Beijing authorities initially blamed the accident on a freak lightning bolt, the Railway Ministry has since murmured something about a man-made engineering error, but you really have to clean your ears well to hear them.

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Commentary Beijing, Debt Debates, humanity, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, Washington

I arrived in Athens on the morning of the 25th for a three day stay amidst reports that Greece was burning in a toxic bonfire fueled by massive debt, government incompetence, and the rage of millions. My husband and I were en route to Crete to attend the wedding of close friends from New York, the bride-to-be a Greek-Austrian opera singer who had spent childhood summers in idyllic Rethymno, her paternal homeland. “Maybe skip Athens and come straight to the island,” wedding attendees suggested as news broadcasts on violence in Syntagma Square increased. “The media exaggerates,” I reasoned, and during the drive to our hotel in the northern section of the city, this appeared to be the case. Silver-green leaves of olive groves taunted the sun alongside a well-maintained stretch of highway, young couples and septuagenarian men sucked down frappes at outdoor cafés, and policemen shared cigarettes alongside sleeping stray dogs.

View of Athens from the Acropolis

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Commentary Athens, austerity measures, Greece, stay human, Syntagma Square