New Things

There was an awesome development this morning: my husband figured out how to turn off the air conditioner (or the "air-con" in the charming local vernacular.  I'm going to adopt it forever and be totally obnoxious to all of you.  Just like when I came back from a semester in England and drove my friends crazy using the word "trousers" in a terrible, affected, "I've been abroad, you know," kind of way.  Though in that case, using the word "pants" to refer to outer clothing in the UK is a mistake you really only want to make once, and it was genuinely a habit of self-preservation). We had previously tried to adjust the thermostat, but if you turned it up past a certain point the air would just start feeling un-conditioned--really warm and swampy and sticky.  But ho, we turned the system OFF and now the whole apartment is a reasonable temperature and not too damp.  I was getting really tired of freezing the entire time I was indoors and then sweating the second I stepped outside.  As hardships go, I know, you can cry me a river, and I'm sure I would have gotten used to the thermal schizophrenia, but it feels like a gift and a milestone to not be miserably cold in my own dwelling.

Small victories are all I can claim, at the moment.  As I was discussing with the kids yesterday, my "new things" bucket is full right now.  Maybe overflowing.  I don't know who came up with the idea of buckets, or even of their origin in our family (maybe a book read aloud in my first-grader's class at school?), but the concept has been revelatory for me and the kids.  Quick primer--I think it started as a "love and caring" bucket.  Your bucket is filled by others' kindness and caring toward you, and in turn you fill the buckets of your friends and neighbors with kindness and caring acts, right?  I'm sure we're not the only ones who got the lesson about buckets.  We discovered quickly that this terminology worked really well for us.  I'd get a child crawling into my lap, and instead of me being a little concerned at their sudden decrease in activity, the child would just explain, "My cuddle bucket is feeling empty, Mom.  I just need to sit here for a minute."  And you know what, sometimes my cuddle bucket feels a bit empty, too, so I really get that.  It's a good metaphor and an apt summation of human emotional needs and resources, and I'd find myself forgiving nitwit drivers or surly cashiers, thinking that their buckets just needed filling, poor dears.  And I figured out that rather than getting the 5 o'clock grouchies, I could explain that my "noise" bucket was all the way full and I needed my wee, beloved, yet very loud noisemakers to take it outside or down a couple of notches (say, 50 notches). Way more effective than previous methods of identifying in an admittedly screechy voice my need for peace and communicating to them that those needs were totally not being met by their current game of "the floor is lava."

So yesterday we were talking about durian, the king of fruits, and a passion of many Singaporeans.  I personally think it smells like dead things and stinky feet at the same time, maybe a dead thing with really terrible foot hygiene, and when I attempted to enter a grocery store where they were selling it, I had to walk right back out again to take a deep breath of mall-scented air, and steel myself for re-entry, because that's not the kind of thing you can encounter unprepared.  Nonetheless, I really like stinky cheeses, and they too smell terrible, and there's a funk to a really good ripe melon that I know speaks to its sublime sweetness.  So I'll try durian, at some point.  Its flavor is described as rich and creamy, and I would hate to miss out on anything that inspires waiting lists for the very best ones (this, by the way, may make me a very good Singaporean.  It's said you can find the best foods by following the longest lines, or queues, a word which is entertaining my children as much as it has always entertained me, so it feels very locally correct to want to try something just because everyone else thinks it's awesome.). I think I'll try it, and keep trying it, and I suspect eventually I'll love it.  But not right now.  Everything is new right now, as in, every single tiny thing about the way I live my life, and until all these new things ferment into old ordinary things and trickle out the spigot at the bottom of my new things bucket, making room for more new things, I really don't want to pile extraneous stuff on top.  Overflowing buckets are bad, as I understand it (I really love this metaphor.  I'm sorry for beating it to death.).

So, I thought it would be fun to show and tell you about some of the small new things in my bucket, things that I didn't know to prepare for.  These are the little irritating things that I encounter at every turn, and at every turn I'm reminded that I'm not settled.

File this first one under things I hope don't kill me, like the fact that they drive on the "wrong" side of the road here and every crosswalk feels like a leap of faith (Not going to talk about that, though, out of pure superstition).  I discovered as the fog of exhaustion lifted in the first few days that all of the outlets in our apartment had these cute little switches, and since I'd also discovered that the power to the apartment shuts off when you take the key card out of its slot by the door when you leave, I thought the switches were earth/budget-friendly power-saving devices.  

 

Adorable little switches---of death

Then someone told us that no, since the power here is 230 Volts, as opposed to the 110V in the US, if you get a shock plugging or unplugging when the outlet is live, it could kill you, not just give you a zing like I felt when I was seven and playing "mad scientist" with paperclips.  Greeeaaaat.  Details are not my thing.  I'm pretty sure I'm not actually capable of making sure the little switch is turned off before I fiddle with a plug--I'll claim that I just constantly have my mind on larger ideas, ok?  I have discovered that fortunately you can't put anything in the outlet if the switch is on (because I absent-mindedly tried to plug in the toaster to a live outlet, of course), and the plugs themselves are wide and have little idiot-guards for people like me with no sense of self-preservation, so I may yet evade the reaper.  But this is a thing in my new things bucket that will be a great relief when it becomes an unthinking habit to use the switch correctly.

Maybe this post is not about new things so much as it's about technology, now that I move on to thing two and sense a pattern.  Maybe I'm too old and stubborn to learn new things easily (Maybe I did more damage than I thought playing with electrical outlets).  Because I had thought the next new thing was about the metric system, but really it's about appliances.  I think science is fun, I've always thought it was kind of silly that the US is a holdout for Fahrenheit and miles, and I've always thought I had a decent grasp of metric/US equivalents.  Living here for just 10 days has put the lie to that idea.  I went to use the oven for the first time the other day and encountered this:

 

Which is fine, thanks to Google.  A little irritating, but not out of the ordinary; I've used recipes at home that I had to convert.  But there was also this:

 

Come on, now.  None of those things are the universal sign for heat. Some of the symbols have zig-zaggy lines and some have straight--is there a difference?  Am I supposed to be able to intuit that difference from the symbols?  I did guess that the fan indicates convection cooking, but I don't use it at home and haven't used it before.  So it took more time than I'd probably like to admit, sitting on the kitchen floor in front of the oven, Googling like the wind, to figure out how to do the simplest task of turning on the stupid oven.  The next day, we decided for the apartment with the new appliances, where I'd been told I'll receive one-on-one, in-person instructions on how to use all the appliances before we move in.  Make of that what you will.  

I also accidentally turned the refrigerator up to 52 degrees because I thought it had been set below freezing and then did my mental math wrong and then couldn't make it turn back, necessitating the waste of a perfectly lovely leftover roast chicken.  So I'm feeling that the kitchen appliances and I are having a bit of an adversarial relationship, at the moment.  I'm trying to make friends, however; new things.

I'm not going to bore you with a laundry story.   But here's my washer/dryer.  

 

Americans who do laundry, especially for kids, I know you know.  I'm learning the system, though, and I think the situation will be much improved when I have the space and tools to hang more things to dry.

I think the largest thing on my new things plate is transportation.  We will have a vehicle, provided by the company, in a few weeks, and though I've gotten over my initial exhaustion-fueled horror of driving in Singapore (wrong side of the road!) and think I'll likely figure out how to drive here, our one vehicle will be in use most weekdays and I'll be finding other ways to get around.  I have a love of public transportation, rooted in my socialist leanings and calcified by spending lots of time with a beloved small boy with a passion for trains and busses.  I'm also a little timid with strangers, totally flustered by crowds, and stuck with memories of taking the wrong bus in Houston and ending up stranded in the rain in an unfamiliar neighborhood, so I'm not sure my love of public transport is at all based in anything but fantasy.  I do look forward to figuring out the busses and trains to all of my favorite places, but I just don't have the mental resources, at the moment, to face changing busses twice with two children to get to a playground.  Not when Uber is pretty cheap, easy, fast, air-conditioned, and only rarely carrying the scent of durian.  I feel a little guilty, like I'm taking the easy way out.

 

So much easier than three different busses! And look at that cute, happy driver!

I think, in time, I'll be able to walk to many of the places I might need to go, and that will be easier when I'm not taking my two smaller fellow adventurers along with me.  I may never understand why children who can run and jump and swing nonstop for three hours are tired and have a stitch in their side and need a drink and need a snack after two minutes walking to get somewhere, but I remember the feeling from my own childhood and try to be sympathetic to small legs, even when I want to fling pleading arms to heaven and beg for just another 50 steps.  I think also that this might be a point where I have to abandon my Houston ideas and accept that Uber and taxis are the way things are done in a more densely populated city. Different is not wrong, new is not necessarily more difficult, and in time I might breathe deeply and contentedly of my durian-scented Uber as I zip to the nursery to buy more tropical houseplants.

One last new thing is helping to soothe my soul: an endless supply of Cadbury DairyMilk Buttons.  I feel like it's kind of un-American to not have my first love in chocolate to be Snickers or Hershey's, but I swear, these creamy, chocolatey snackable things are making my life.  Contrary to the above evidence, I'm an easy woman to please.