justina forever

putting one foot in front of the other since i could walk

  • spare time

    spare time

    In another life, I’d fill my spare time with knitting projects. But that’s not a viable option for me here in Singapore; wool plus swampy weather brings to mind the smell of wet sheep. So what’s a person to do?

    Fear not, I found a way to keep myself occupied! Here’s a round up of stuff I’ve been doing in my spare time lately (when I’m not trying to be social).

    Knitting

    Socks for friends and sisters

    I knit a bunch of socks for my friends and sisters. I might have kept some for myself, but it’s too hot to wear wool socks in Singapore. (Singapore is a terrible place for knitters.)

    For the socks in the photo here, I used recipes from Summer Lee’s book, The Sock Project. Right now I’m three-quarters through a pair of socks but have grown bored of knitting on skinny satay skewers. I’m itching to knit a sweater soon, which I’ll probably give to Jessica, because it’s too depressingly humid here to wear sweaters anyway.

    Sweaters for my nephews

    Speaking of sweaters, last year I knit my nephews a pair of matching jumpers. The pattern is Storm Sweater Junior by PetiteKnit. I love how these look! The stitch pattern gives the “feel” of a fisherman’s sweater without forcing the knitter to deal with a finicky cabling needle.

    I made labels for each sweater with a Sharpie on herringbone twill tape, along with a hand-drawn card. My nephews seemed delighted to see their cartoon selves on the card.

    Here’s a photo my sister sent me from when the boys decided to wear their sweaters one day! Hopefully they’ll squeeze another winter or two out of them in Hong Kong. They’re growing very fast — I knit each sweater a couple sizes bigger to account for this — but I can already see they will soon outgrow them.

    Making food

    Adventures in meal prep

    I don’t really enjoy cooking. I treat food as mostly functional.

    Anyway, for years I was eating some variation of a salad with red cabbage every day, until my dentist pointed out that chomping daily on red cabbage was wearing down my teeth (and staining them, too). Yikes! I’ve since switched out raw red cabbage and try to eat more cooked stuff now.

    My current Sunday ritual is to meal prep while listening to The Old Man and the Three (or the Young Man equivalent). If there’s a game on, I’ll watch it on League Pass.

    And so my fifteen-year-old meal-prep habit continues.

    Here’s a random selection of lunchstuff lately.

    Yogurt in this economy

    I’ve also started making yogurt in my Instant Pot. It’s much more economical than buying it at the supermarket. Greek yogurt at the supermarket costs $17.50 a tub. Meanwhile, milk sells at around $6.00 a jug and yields a tub’s worth of yogurt.

    I’m experimenting now with L. reuteri yogurt, because at dinner with Auntie A., all the aunties were gushing about gut health and how L. reuteri keeps their wrinkles at bay and minds sharp.

    Failed sourdough experiments

    Last year I experimented briefly with making sourdough. I gave up because I could not for the life of me understand how to use the oven in my old rental flat. It was one of those overly high-end built-in contraptions. So obscure was it that I couldn’t find a single Reddit thread from fellow troubleshooters…

    Now that I’ve moved into a flat with a normal oven, I’m thinking of reviving this sourdough project. Watch this space.

    Exercising

    I actually really like running

    Sadly, I got plantar fasciitis last year and had to stop running and playing soccer for a while.

    And running in Singapore sucks. Running is only bearable before the sun comes up. Otherwise it feels like you’re running through a thick warm soup. Before my plantar fasciitis hit, I’d get up at six-something and do Zone 2 stuff in my secret running loop nearby. Sometimes I’d throw in sprints at the end because I read somewhere that it can move a needle on your VO2 max.

    At some point, I was running 21 km a week and couldn’t figure out why my feet were hurting so much. I couldn’t walk around in bare feet at home! (In hindsight, 21 km a week sounds like too much. I wasn’t training for anything, and I have zero desire to run a half-marathon or marathon.)

    Anyway, I’ve been running on and off since I was a teenager. I find it’s the best way to get out of my own head. I picked it back up again when I lived in Shanghai a few years ago. I’d run along Suzhou Creek, stop to swing across the monkey bars, people-watch a bit, then run home. I picked it up again two years ago when my brother-in-law Chris invited me to run Bay to Breakers with him. Perfect running weather there in San Francisco.

    Luckily my plantar fasciitis seems to have subsided now, and I’m starting to build up mileage again!

    Critters on my running loop: bats, chickens, squirrels, monkeys, frogs, birds, cats, dogs.

    In praise of Caroline Girvan

    Aside from running, I’ve been very consistent with strength training. I use Caroline Girvan’s workouts and work out at home. I came across her on Reddit in 2023, when I was looking for a no-nonsense way to become stronger.

    I’ve had gym memberships in the past, and I could be pretty consistent, but for some reason I’d eventually stop going after something trivial interrupted my habit, like catching a cold or going on a holiday.

    I’ve since figured out that the best way for me to work out consistently is to remove every single barrier: by working out at home. No need to worry about commuting, crowds, showering, warts or athlete’s foot from the change room, creepy dudes, dirty gym clothes, equipment hogs.

    Behold: my girl cave / gym corner.

    Riding my bicycle

    I don’t really consider bicycle-commuting exercise, but when the pollution isn’t bad, and when I’m not engrossed in a book and thus stealing chunks of time in my workday to read (like on the bus or subway), then I ride my bicycle to work. It’s the highlight of my day!

    (I’m currently engrossed in Personal History by Katharine Graham.)

    Here’s my ride. Isn’t she a beaut? My friend Galen helped me pick it out.

    Drawing

    Silly bookmarks and stickers

    When I’m bored, I sometimes draw little creatures, cut them in the shape of bookmarks or stickers, and “laminate” them with packing tape. Very fun. Actually my favorite thing to do is sit around with Jessica just drawing or knitting and shooting the shit.

    My favorite drawing so far is this picture I made of Jessica’s dog, Boris, from memory. I turned it into a postcard (i.e., “laminated” it with packing tape) and mailed it to my brother-in-law as a surprise.

    I also made a bunch of paintings for my apartment, which I shared about in another post.

    Making music

    Lastly: I’ve been experimenting a bunch more with singing and playing my guitar. I used to feel sort of embarrassed by how earnest I sound when I sing, but now I’ve come to accept that I’m probably just an earnest person, and I’d rather be earnest than apathetic.

    Experimenting with hymns:

    Experimenting with open guitar tunings:

    Experimenting with fingerpicking:

    Experimenting with weird arrangements of songs I liked as a teenager:

    And my favorite thing… singing with my sister.

    Stuff to do more of

    Interesting to reflect on what I get up to when left to my own devices. Most of these are solitary endeavors. It makes sense, though; in the past five years, I’ve basically started from scratch in two different cities (Shanghai and Singapore). Sometimes I do feel lonely still. And though I’ve grown to enjoy my solitude, I find myself cherishing connection, too…

    Looking forward, here’s how I hope to spend my time in the coming months!

    • Another attempt at sourdough
    • Pottery (it would be cool to make a mug that turns out to be someone’s favorite!)
    • Read more
    • Play soccer again
    • Spend time with family and friends
    • Volunteer somewhere (be more useful to society)
    • Go somewhere with cooler weather to hike and enjoy nature
    • Write more (thankfully I can scratch this itch at work)

    Thanks for reading this far, dear reader. What have you been up to lately?

  • How to meet your downstairs neighbor

    How to meet your downstairs neighbor

    Earlier in the week, Dad and I had made plans to hang up my artwork on Saturday, Valentine’s Day. I had the whole day planned out in my head: I’d take him to a nice brunch, we’d go to the hardware store to buy art-hanging hardware, then we’d hang everything up together. But Dad obliterated the dream-day I’d concocted as soon as we arrived at the brunch restaurant down the street.

    “Thirty dollars for breakfast? Let’s go to McDonald’s!” (I do love a McDonald’s breakfast set but had thought it might be sweet to take him somewhere nicer for a change.)

    To Maccas we went, and then to the hardware store, but it didn’t have the sawtooth hangers I was looking for, so we took a bus to the mall with the art store. Hardware procured, we got sidetracked poking our noses into other shops, then ate some chendol at the food court. Home we went, where we debated the best way to measure out how to hang stuff on the walls before landing on some combination of tape measure and eyeballs.

    Pretty pleased with my living room!

    Once I got over my fear of making holes in the walls of my rental apartment, we got to work! We were so absorbed, we got time blindness and didn’t realise it was already 7:00 — and we still hadn’t eaten lunch.

    “Mala place?” Dad said.

    “Yes!”

    We put on our shoes and stepped outside, but it was pouring. So I cobbled together dinner from leftover zongzi, airfryer salmon, and some sad-looking carrots I found at the bottom of the produce drawer. (For a brief moment I felt bad for feeding my dad subpar food all day: fast food for breakfast, dessert for lunch, and now sad leftovers and scraps for dinner? Bad daughter!)

    Revived with calories, we agreed to continue our work. Why stop? We had momentum! I was hammering a nail into the wall when the doorbell began to chime, a frantic finger pressing the button once, twice, ten times in a row. Was the building on fire? I bolted to the door. There stood an eighty-year-old man in a white V-neck tee wielding a long-handled shoehorn: my downstairs neighbor, whom I’d never met before. He looked irate. 

    “What are you doing? What’s going on here? My wife is not well! She’s trying to rest! What is all that noise?”

    “I’m so sorry,” I clapped my hands over my heart. “I lost track of time.” I thought he was going to smack me with his shoehorn. My dad came over to defuse the situation.

    “My daughter and I were trying to hang up her art; we’re so sorry for the noise. We’ll stop now.”

    The man looked past my shoulder at the dog paintings on the wall and said, “Oh, those are great!” I began to cry as I imagined his sickly wife suffering from my foolish, inconsiderate hammering. As tears streamed down my face, my dad asked the man how long he’d lived in the building: twelve years. He had retired long ago.

    Guard dogs in the entryway.

    “What were you doing before you retired?” I asked.

    And then…

    I’m not sure what can of worms I opened, but this man and my dad started talking about their pasts: where they came from, what they did over the decades, all the many friends they have in common. Ten minutes went by. Then twenty. Then thirty. I invited him in to sit in the living room, poured them some rooibos, and he and my dad talked and talked and talked for one and a half hours. Every now and then, they’d stop to marvel at how much they have in common, how similar their senses of humor and general philosophies on life are, how many people they both know.

    Wow, I thought, this guy’s poor wife must be wondering what the heck’s happened to her husband, because here he is yapping away with my dad. I asked him if he’d brought the shoehorn to smack me with it, but he said he’d carried it out of the house by accident.

    I sketched the scene because I didn’t want to take a photo.

    Some of my art still isn’t up. I guess I’ll work on it later.

  • Art I made for my apartment

    Art I made for my apartment

    In my last post, I wrote about moving flats. Today’s post is about decorating said apartment.

    When I first moved to Singapore, a friend told me about the “ID” he’d hired to help him with his flat. I stared at him, blinked twice (audibly, like a cartoon character), listened to him for another minute, then asked, “What’s an ID?” An interior designer. Oof, obviously!

    Dear reader, help me out: Is hiring an interior designer… normal? Am I only noticing it now that I’ve reached a certain age? Or is this a uniquely Singaporean thing?

    After a year spent living in a weirdly hotel-like loft studio that my friends jokingly referred to as my “boss bitch apartment,” I decided I would decorate my next home with intention.

    This was not because I suddenly became a design person. I don’t have an innate sense of or interest in design and have historically dismissed publications like Dezeen and Design Anthology as cold and wanky. (My punishment for turning my nose up at design: sleeping one metre away from the ceiling for two years.) For some reason, acquaintances have some vague impression that I’m interested in design, but I’m just… not.

    Historically, I’ve used milk crates as shelves and a cardboard box draped with a scarf as a side table. I’ve inherited whatever random furniture previous tenants left behind rather than shopping for it myself. I’ve never given a second thought to floors or walls.

    I don’t want a designed home. I wanted a lived-in one!

    After sending myself on a weeks-long scavenger hunt for second-hand furniture from Carousell, the Salvation Army, and Hock Siong, and after putting in a big Ikea order for the rest, it was time to think about wall art.

    I had the idea that it might be fun to make my own paintings. Around the same time, my cousin Chengxi told me she’d put her birthdate and time into ChatGPT to generate a birth chart / Bazi. I did the same (aren’t you, too, taking spiritual advice from AI these days?) and it gave me some pointers on which elements and colors to use and avoid. With that context, I asked ChatGPT to suggest images I could paint to bring good luck to my home (or, at the very least, not tempt misfortune).

    I painted these using only cyan, magenta, yellow, white, and black acrylics,  partly because someone once told me you can produce almost any color with just these, partly because the sheer number of paint brands at Art Friend overwhelmed me, but mostly because I was too cheap to buy more tubes, especially “niche” colors I might use once. I used the cheapest set of brushes I could find and finished each painting with a coat of satin Mod Podge.

    And now, without further ado (and there was a lot of ado), here are the paintings I made, in the order I made them!

    acrylic painting, cartoon style, of three girls hugging their pet husky

    My sisters and me with our childhood dog, Reilly.

    acrylic painting, cartoon style, of three budgies nestled in the fur of a german spitz

    My sisters and me as budgies nestled in the fur of our other childhood dog, Jumbo.

    acrylic paintings, cartoon style, of a jindo mix and hong kong tong gau

    Boris, my sister Jessica’s dog, and Amelia, my sister Jennifer’s dog. The Boris painting is my favourite because he looks like a thumb. I’ll put them by the front door, like a pair of guard dogs.

    acrylic painting of hawaii, the famous hong kong shop cat, also known as wanchai cat

    Wanchai Cat (2002–2023), a shop cat who lived in a Chinese pharmacy in Hong Kong. Her name was Hawaii. I made a video of her once that went viral (2 million views in a few days). I painted this at a friend’s house during an art-jamming session. Usually I begin with a pencil sketch, but for this one I anyhow whacked it and let the Spirit move me. I like how it turned out. I think it captures Hawaii’s spirit, and painting without a plan was fun! I drew the whiskers with a white Posca marker.

    acrylic painting of moonlight over still lake

    A painting of the moon over a still lake. ChatGPT told me not to include any solitary creatures or boats lest I be alone forever. It also advised me to keep the water calm to sweeten my dreams.

    acrylic painting of fuchsias

    A painting of fuchsias. These are Jessica’s favourite flowers. They remind us of the papier-mâché sculpture Jess and I made when we were seven. Our art teacher banished us to a room separate from the rest of the class because we were too disruptive. Alone, we slapped strips of newspaper soaked in wheat paste over chicken wire and eventually made a weird sculpture shaped like fuchsias.

    I really struggled with the colors here. The pinks and purples look really muddy against the green, but I was determined not to add other tubes of color into the mix. I think it looks good enough. ChatGPT was quite helpful when I was troubleshooting the colors!

    paintings by the post author's parents

    And lastly, these paintings by my parents…

    A painting by my mom, inspired by Balloonia, our favorite book she’d read to us as kids. She painted it at an art jam with my aunts in Singapore some years ago, when she was visiting from Hong Kong. My aunt gave it to me when I first moved here, and I nearly burst into tears thinking that my mom chose to paint something we have such fond, shared memories of!

    A piece by my dad, using Posca markers, of some slogans arranged around a tree. He really tortured himself over what to put on the canvas; his notebook was full of sketches of the three “no evil” monkeys he was envisioning in his head , but they were a little too evil-looking (read: horrifying and probably inauspicious to hang on the walls — I didn’t need ChatGPT to tell me that!), so I gently dissuaded him from painting them. I could tell the thought of using acrylics intimidated him (my mom throws herself into new things, my dad less so), so I offered him Posca markers instead.

    And that, dear reader, is how I got my home to feel like home!

    Next task: figuring out how to hang all the art up!

  • On escaping from my unsalvageably fancy apartment

    On escaping from my unsalvageably fancy apartment

    In the summer of 2023, I moved to Singapore. I spent a month looking at apartments and signed a two-year lease on one that seemed to tick the boxes: good location, appropriately-sized for a single person.

    Soon after moving in, I had that sinking feeling. I hated it, and nothing could change this. I mentally prepared myself for the two years I’d be bound to it.

    Time will fly by. It’ll be fine.

    Early on, I stopped trying to make it feel like home. I knew it never would be. The place was too unsalvageably fancy, and I have learned, the hard way, that I am not built for unsalvageable fanciness.

    How unsalvageably fancy was it? Let me give you a tour.

    The kitchen: a showroom

    Who were these built-in appliances for?

    • A wine chiller (I don’t drink alcohol)
    • A combination steam oven (I don’t steam. I definitely don’t combination-steam.)
    • An espresso machine (I didn’t drink coffee at the time)
    • A dishwasher (my Reddit searches for troubleshooting advice turned up hundreds of irate comments)

    Chrome appliances daring me to stain them with my grubby fingerprints. No thanks.

    The bathroom: a fishbowl

    Frosted glass walls. Dear guest: sorry for seeing your silhouette while you pee.

    Four unlabeled confusing shower knobs, controlling:

    • A rain shower
    • A waterfall shower 
    • Two horizontal jets shooting from opposite walls (torture if turned on before the water warms up)
    • A hose, just in case the other options weren’t enough

    Did any of this make showering better? No.

    Welcome to shower-knob roulette.

    The balcony I never used

    At the risk of sounding like a whingy poohead, the balcony was:

    • Too sunny (I’m a sun wimp)
    • Too small for a table and chair
    • Too dusty for hanging laundry

    It became a holding area for neglected plants my cousins gave me. At least the plants thrived.

    Bunch of plants that thrived while I ignored them completely.

    Floors I was afraid to live on

    Shiny, perfect marble floors.

    The following would leave a permanent mark if not wiped up immediately:

    • Spilled water
    • A tiny piece of purple cabbage
    • Vinegar
    • Sweat
    • Coffee (probably)

    Another week, another stain seeping into the marble’s pores to mark the passage of time.

    What’s with all the windows?

    From the street, the building looked like a spaceship: sleek, dark, all glass. 

    From inside, floor-to-ceiling windows meant:

    • Blinds up = blazing sun heats the apartment, electricity bill shoots up
    • Blinds down = sun heats blinds, releasing a plastic chemical smell into the air, but electricity bill goes down

    Only one side of the flat had windows. The deepest part — meant to be my office — was so dark I never used it.

    Roller-blinds to prevent the sunlight and heat trying to burst through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

    Loft studios: a cautionary tale

    Loft studios sound cool. But in practice:

    • Mattress on a loft platform = two years of sleeping with my face one metre from the ceiling
    • Making the bed = risk of concussion
    • No room for a dining table or workspace
    • Wasteful air-conditioning = expensive utilities
    • No walls. No privacy.
    • Could friends stay over? Not really.

    But it wasn’t all bad!

    Some really wonderful things happened while I lived there.

    1. The groundskeeper gave me a ukulele after he heard a friend and me singing in the shared outdoor space.
    2. I swam in the condo pool once and thought I saw a jellyfish. It turned out to be a fallen jacaranda flower, dancing in the water, rendered translucent.
    3. I watched a cicada fly methodically into the bell of every jacaranda flower in the landscaping.
    4. I rescued a tiny, tiny lizard from a cockroach trap. Olive oil weakened the adhesive. I thought it was dead, but it was alive! It was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen! I let it crawl up and down my arm. Sometimes it came back to visit.
    5. Once, as I was leaving my flat, my neighbour opened her door and handed me a cake. Perfect timing — I was on my way to buy dessert for lunch at a friend’s!
    Cicada flying into every single flower.
    Tiny lizard on arm that one time I went on the balcony.
    Look how tiny and CUTE he is!!!!!!

    Surely I learned something?

    You didn’t really think I’d endure two years in an unsalvageably fancy, decidedly un-Justina apartment without learning something, did you?

    Six months in, I started planning my exit. Around the same time, I was fitting out a new office for work, which forced me to think much more seriously about how spaces actually function. (I wrote about that process on the company blog.)

    First, I wrote out my use cases for a home:

    Then I created a set of filters:

    • Location: Near my favourite running loop, away from busy streets, walking distance to groceries, under 30 minutes to the office by transit or bike.
    • Condo facilities: Don’t need, don’t care. Plus, they drive up building management fees.
    • Balcony: Do not want. Jacks up rent without adding value.
    • Floor plans: Square rooms; windows facing different directions.
    • Building age: Avoid brand new. Seek dingy, lived-in.

    If someone else has already dinged the floor, I don’t have to worry about dinging it myself. This, dear reader, is freedom.

    Because I was so specific, it was easy to zero in on the flat of my dreams on PropertyGuru. I only visited one apartment.

    I knew it was The One the moment the landlord’s rep opened the door to let me view the flat. I signed the lease that week and moved in five months ago.

    Now I finally live in a place that feels like mine.

    Who’d have thunk guitars could make nice decor?
    Now I have a giant dining table for eating and working at! Tables and chairs collected second-hand from Carousell, the Salvation Army, and Hock Siong. (Exception: red chair from Ikea — I really wanted a red chair!)
    Kleenex in boxes and plastic packaging are an eyesore, so I found these funny tissue boxes on Shopee to hide them.
    I actually love writing with pencil crayons!
    Enormous Klimt replica from Taobao. I assembled the stool at a carpentry workshop at Tombalek.

    How nice it feels to finally feel at home!

  • a website i made for fun in 2003 about dissecting a frog

    a website i made for fun in 2003 about dissecting a frog

    Check out what I just came across as I wandered through some dusty old Dropbox folders like some sort of digital autoethnographer: a silly little webpage I made (for fun) as a memento of that time we dissected frogs in Grade 11 biology class in 2003.

    Folks, this website is older than some young adults I’ve volunteered or played soccer with since moving to Singapore in 2023. (!!!)

    How was that 23 years ago? Everything still feels so vivid and immediate. The stench of formaldehyde permeating the science corridor, the chill of winter rushing through a crack in the window at the back of the lab; the click of trackpad buttons on the school-issued Compaq laptops.

    I thought it would be fun to share my frog-dissection webpage memento here. Behold!

    Content warning 🐸: Frog dissection ahead.

    Now’s your chance to slam your laptop lid shut and toss your machine out the window if you don’t want to see a frog being sliced open with a scalpel by very earnest teenagers.

    CLICK HERE and scroll sideways!!!

    (Note: I’m on a pretty barebones WordPress plan, so I couldn’t upload the html file to a file manager. Instead, I copypasted the HTML into ChatGPT and asked it to make the HTML play nice with embedding custom HTML in a WordPress page. What you see above is the result.)

    Sometimes I’m surprised by how little my taste has changed over time — if you can call it taste. The look, feel, vibe, tone of this page is still up my alley today. Unpolished photos, silly captions, bright clashing colors? I still like that stuff today! Even my voice feels basically the same. Does that mean I’m still the same Justina as my teenage self? Yikes.

    Anyway, here’s how I intended the page to look:

    My first foray into building websites was using HTML in Notepad, making graphics in Jasc PaintShop Pro (and silly pixel animations in MS Paint). This was probably around 1999. My sister Jess wrote a really great article about our internetolescence detailing our early adventures. At some point, I figured out a faster way to get what I was looking for: build in Microsoft Word to take advantage of WYSIWYG, export the document as a webpage, then clean up the HTML in Notepad.

    I suspect I made this frog-dissection memento using this method. I would have then uploaded it via WS_FTP to my little home on the internet — a directory Jess had set aside for me on our domain, balloonia.com.

    At the time, I felt a little guilty, maybe even dirty, for taking shortcuts with Word’s WYSIWYG instead of aspiring to become a true HTML/CSS master. Now, I think it’s pretty rad that my younger self was just happy to experiment quickly and put things out into the world.

    I think my instinct has always been to play around and publish, not to be particularly perfect at anything — trusting that somebody out there might find it fun, funny, interesting, thought-provoking, moving, useful, or stupid.

    It’s all good!

    The early 2000s… what a time to be a teenager putting stuff out on the internet! Maybe later I’ll post some other stuff from the archives.