The Grey Area of Inpatient Healthcare

Say cheese! 

Hospitals are odious places. Around every corner, air is sterile, cold, and masked by iodine tipping off from bottles of sanitizers installed like ominous reminders that the place, virally contractible, is plagued with death. Patients, who if weren't writhing in pain in their beds are but also set off in a coma, smell really bad. They smell like sh**t and look just as soiled. Their pallid faces bear the same sorry countenance as to being run over. By bad luck. It's the pantomime of anger, sorrow, disgust, and disappointment they wear on their faces with frowns, mouth agape, like the horde of actors from The Walking Dead, except they shouldn't be coming back undead afterward, because they're the rotting flesh that insults the very essence of the living. In the main, hospitals are sickly, dreadful, and completely- wait for it- inhospitable places.

To and fro, nurses, doctors, medical officers, therapists, and anyone else in a scrub busily attending procedures, or pretending to be are always typing, always walking, and always never around when you need them. They are busy people who have little time for poorly instrumented questions. Since emotional therapy would cost you, it would be more useful to arrive with a journalistic formula before your kin's doctor-in-charge. (WHOM am I speaking to? Oh, you're the neurosurgeon, WHY, I can barely tell by looking at your age. WHAT's the patient's condition now? I see, so WHEN do you reckon he'll ever wake again? Hold on, WHERE is the toilet? I need to pee. WHY is he not waking again? Dammit Doc, he owes me money!) How could one stand being around is a thought that needs reflecting. If one weren't choked up on tears from a dying relative, one would've been choked up on vomit from the wafting odor of death. Looking on- optimistically, if I may- it seemed that the only untouched area is the Starbucks a floor below, whose baristas don't quite fit in either because- I feel bad for saying this- hospitals are not the places to go for a cup of Joe. Joe's up there, hacking his last breath.

Of course, I didn't mean any of that. Hospitals save lives everyday, and I ought to be thankful- notwithstanding everything it has to do with dying.

When I was I little, I used to think of hospitals to be cool places to be seen in. In every sense of the word, computers, interiors, and mint-colored scrubs painted a picture parallel to the television dramas I watched at prime time reruns: Doctors with their stethoscopes, nurses with their mysterious surgical masks, and patients, ever crooning in pain, became a crux to the compelling arc that made hospital dramas so interesting to watch in the first place. Granted, I knew nothing about reality. My only impression of hospitals were misguided episodes of ER, accompanied by the roleplaying kit gifted to me by my parents who, pegged me if only someday to become a doctor, thought there could also be no better career than to look cool, save lives, and make promiscuous amounts of money doing it.

And then I grew up, witnessed a passing of a relative, and learnt the god-awful truth behind hospital facades, all-boasting a misconstrued heroism. More common than its televised drama, there is pain, with every life lost on hospital ground. For instance, my grandmother passed quickly by the time she needed intensive care, and following suit, as did my grandfather. It was heartbreaking. I watched healthily able people degenerate into human shells where its spirit slowly left them behind. I picked up early signs of the dying on their rotting flesh; turning rosy complexions into a sallow ugly color like the headstones they were gradually matching with. It was abhorring, gothic, and frightening with how seeing lively persons reduced to almost-corpses can change your early impressions of a place. Dominantly, hospitals became the territorial equivalent of the morgue. Such that if you're absolutely, positively needed on one of its beds because you can't sleep on any other right now, you might as well be dead.

We napped, lolled, and lazed in bed all day.

I say this because a couple of weeks ago, I thought another person in the family was going to die. A beloved of mine whom I respect, and, should she ever pass someday, would miss dearly, had a close shave with death. It was on a Sunday, half-an-hour before midnight, when my phone pinged a text from a cousin whom I barely ever talked with: "Are you at SGH (Singapore General Hospital)?" I was unsure, curious, and, yet- quite frankly- too tired to care. Dug deeper and found out that it was Godmom who had been hospitalised, a sleepy Sunday night then erupted into a frenzy of tears, panic, and unsolicited thoughts of death. Not that anyone can fully prepare himself or herself for it, but entertaining its possibilities will always set off the worrier. Like me, one never suspects dying to be abrupt, but absurdly easy.

To skimp on the details and get to the rub, Godmom was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) almost immediately after suspicions of a stroke were confirmed. She had a burst vessel in the brain, and was on her last leg if blood pressure readings didn't subside. Whereas the average human being should read below 120 and above 80 (120/80), Godmom was a gambler. Her bets were on 255. Abreast with standard procedures, the doctors then knew precisely how to act. They readied the scans, popped out the pills (that maintained the blood pressure), and steadied our twenty pax strong of kin with consolatory words and a hard truth: that if it's going to take a stroke to make some life changes, we better be prepared for it.

So for the past two weeks, I was a caregiver on duty. I was a bona fide nurse armed with an arsenal of wet wipes, talc, and a "Get Well Soon!" balloon for the sick. Godmom was in a state of stupor; her stroke-addled senses were retarded in speech and slowed down in movement. She could barely move, to say nothing of taking daily showers. Since saving her quickly, doctors were also confident that, though, she's out of the woods, with no physical impairment, her cognition still needs repair. With what came as a trauma to the left hemisphere, language processing has, thus, been affected. It may be hard to compute, but for a person who's as mathematical as any adept sales director of her own company, the arithmetic dysfunction will come as heartbreaking news. As for those life changes that I paced myself for, it included a new physical regime like easy exercises and routine short walks- don't sweat it- which will help improve her weakened right side of the body, shocked by the burst artery. (The brain has wondrous potential, according to a medical officer; it has capabilities to assume its weakened parts once it realises damage done to it.)

Wrap your mind around this: If a person who suffers a stroke does not receive immediate treatment, he, or she, may be physically, permanently handicapped. Or simply die. If there were no hospitals, no doctors, no fear of dying that edged us loved ones to our seats, 360-degree spin around, consequences of one would certainly throw us off, like a nosedive. A stroke patient needs care and support, in brief. And all I can finally think of is: "When can we get up, get out for that proper cup of coffee together again?"

As a matter of fact, I owe hospitals a buffet. They are efficient life-saving buoys that people cling onto everyday. One minute your arm's broken and the next a doctor has it already swathed up. If you've got a headache that over-the-counter pills can't get rid of, there's a scan ready by hall five that looks into your bitchin' migraine. And if it's an impending stroke, you're lucky to have found out this way. As gimmicky as that sounds, hospitals and its team staff do what they do best: save lives. The rest, as the word goes, is a weight I'm ready to bear on my shoulders.

Profile: Stan Smith

The Adidas Stan Smith: you don't become the man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. #motivationalwalker

When fashion outlier and Saint Laurent creative director Hedi Slimane rebuffed the sneaker trend as a footwear of yore, he predicted wrong. Over the past few years, sneakers have become the people's choice of street luxury and street casual. They are as ubiquitous as they're stylishly objects of desire.

One such sneaker here is the Adidas Stan Smith, a long withstanding force whose marketability has entailed numerous reissues today. Compared with the tennis superstar himself who has won 39 singles titles and 61 doubles titles back in 1973, the namesake label is the No. 1 player of street casual footwear. It's distinctiveness is pared down beside the Jeremy Scott halloween equivalent of teddy bears and homoeroticised wings, it's iconic structure in full smooth grain leather, perforated 3-stripes, and tonal rubber outsole is as breakthrough as its minimalist aesthetic. And whereas Smith now coaches in Hilton Head, Southern California, the Adidas Stan Smith, however, is still regnant- and every bit relevant all over the globe.

At 30 million pairs sold worldwide, these pristine simple classics are famous. Sported by celebrities from David Bowie to Rihanna, editors are too lining the front row in Stan Smith during fashion week like a front set of teeth. Designers like Phoebe Philo and Marc Jacobs have worn them down the runway, and every other netizen who wished they were normcore enough to take on the Stan Smith has touted them the cornerstone of classic footwear merchandising. More recently, Gisele Bundchen has modeled in them with no clothes on except for a white pair of socks, as raw as they looked.

"It's like a canvas in a way," says Stan Smith, as reported by the New York Times. Being likened to a blank slate, the shoes are a simplicity that allows personalisation of one's own style to accent the austerity of its iconic white form. From selvedge denim to pipeline trousers, at the outset, the sneakers are what pulls it all together. It has a structure that makes wearing them louche still look cool. It has a sleekness that still screams an understated luxury. It's a shoe that, while does not brag like the bells and whistles of other designer footwear, still draws the attention to itself. Its appeal, synonymous to the white t-shirt, is contagious.

It's a shoe bag.
The New Yorker just can't help himself.
From masturbating all over the Smith's.

As with fashion to move where the pendulum swings, designers have caught on to the momentum by appropriating the Smith's. For its season, Raf Simons's customized "R" assumed the perforated 3-stripes, now available in a spectrum of colours. Alexander Wang, who referenced the athletic scene (each season more explicitly) in a sneaker fetish of a Spring 2015 collection, has a suite of bags lined up in sneaker simulacrum. Instead of washing out, the Stan Smiths are celebrated more than ever, in a collaborative effort with every cross cultural reference imaginable too. Like with the crass American Dad cartoon feature, or with the American heartthrob, Pharrell Williams, your pair of Stan Smith is an untouchable classic that will see better days ahead when reissues go through yet another life cycle.

NSFW: I Know Who You Slept With Last Summer

EL James and a new book, Open Wide! Photo credit: Dailymail.co.uk

Recently, I deleted a dating app because the results were lackluster. Like other curiosities I collect on my phone, there was no Christian Grey to be found on the app; and usernames like "Top4U", or "Looking 4 Dom"- ballsy, if you hadn't already googled what "Dom" meant, didn't impress as the enigmatic billionaire's. 

By now, we'd have known 50 Shades of Grey to be the epicenter of every woman's libido, all told from the perspective of protagonist/conquest Anastasia Steele. Whether its to be ferociously provocative, like begging to be slapped and f**ked, or genteel, whereby some form of romance is ought to be inspired from all that slapping and f**king, every woman who has acquainted with its now-familiar plot has a strong opinion about sex. Feminists think that the book is sexist (and that comes as no surprise with all the submissiveness buttressed in it), while others think it's liberating to have a discourse about sex this way today. Regardless, author EL James has opened a can of worms and 50 Shades is to be its conversation piece. That our submissive homegirl Anastasia Steele is that talked about chick every female loves to hate, or hates to admit to be, is a phenomenon that isn't quite yet flaccid, but just getting hard.

Fogging reading glasses worldwide, a new novel titled Grey has hit the shelves on 18 June, retelling the same story, except, through the lens of its namesake anti-hero, Christian Grey. It's sold 1.1 million copies in 4 days and has another 2.1 million ready to rockslide. Despite critical reviews, this novel is also its most intense.

"I have a sudden urge to drag her out of her seat, bend her over my knee, spank her, and then fuck her over my desk with her hands tied behind her back," reads one excerpt from the new book, when Anastasia first popped the question if Christian were gay. And no, to beg a second reading of the same plot, you'll find out that he wasn't even bi.  

Alright, let's come clean with ourselves: It's one thing to watch good sex on your laptop with a box of kleenex beside, and it's completely another to read about it on a public bus. They're two different communications, to be enjoyed separately. "Christian Grey is a complex character and readers have been fascinated by his desires and his motivations, and his troubled past," says EL James on the Dailymail. What Christian Grey has also evoked, for which the visual has yet to expatiate, is the fantasies we can only get from the pleasures of reading. He may be vapidly imagined, but his backstory should slide off your dirty mind like an ice cube. His sex is characterized, whereas there are no characters in pornography, and even if there were, there wouldn't any good acting involved either. Sexual desires, not sexual footages, are what 50 Shades is driving sales home with. "I'm going to make you cum like a freight train, baby," should be read like an afterthought. 

However, if you're going to make a social commentary, you're going to be feeling quite sore. From reading. Fault-finding would be like demanding to be part of the flogging between Ana and Christian, you just won't fit into the pages. Moreover, because book sales aren't as divisive as your opinions, it's most fun to take the backseat and read it as it is, with the same voyeuristic interest as at swiping through your neighbours' Tinder profiles. Trawling through the pages with a passionate scrutiny for potentially sexist scenes is simply a waste of time. At face value, the predictive backlashes aren't anything spectacularly new about 50 Shades of Grey. (What else could you contribute, apart from the I'd-never-let-anyone-clamp-my-nipples protest?) At the raw, reading Grey should be like reminiscing last year's crazy sex from your partner's point of view, all over again. You wouldn't waste precious sexual energy on wondering why you guys never dated afterward. 

Photo credit: Dailymail.co.uk

One common critique that hasn't been agreeable to the books' style of writing is that there are better erotica on the shelves. That's true- the writing's as bad as its scrupulously honest. But comparing, say, Miller's Tropic of Cancer and James's Grey is antagonistic. Tropic of Cancer, published in 1934, is disproportionate to 50 Shades today. While both were (and still is) reflective of its times, the only difference being that the former had only marginal success in contrast to EL James's popular sexualized work is due to the social pressures impressed upon women then. Here's an excerpt of Tropic of Cancer:

Later, when I had taken up with Claude, and I saw her night after night sitting in her accustomed place, her round little buttocks chubbily ensconced in the plush settee, I felt a sort of inexpressible rebellion toward her; a whore, it seemed to me, had no right to be sitting there like a lady, waiting timidly for someone to approach and all the while abstemiously sipping her chocolat. Germaine was a hustler.

And here's one from Grey again:

My cock agrees and stiffens in greeting.

I'll take that as an approving nod. Because back then, women weren't allowed to publicly discuss their sexuality. Salacious literature had to be smuggled behind discreet book jackets, where the only place to let off steam from last night's private reading was in the even private corners of the office cafeteria. Now, sexuality is being celebrated. It's as openly talked about, written about with whim, and whined about, to whoever's willing to lend an ear. This may not justify the stalking, creeping, prowling, pounding that's to appear anywhere in the book, but it has opened up a sensitive area that's been waiting to be prodded.

Therefore, the relevant critique one should consider before purchase isn't why anyone should be reading this; rather, the question of, what does this say about me? 50 Shades isn't the virus that's plaguing literature, in other words, it's literature that's contagion to people to judge a book simply by its cover. Frankly, 50 Shades isn't even really literature. It's cliterature, as the Dailymail accurately names it to the list. It's a genre of readable porn, culturally more relevant than the old fashion likes of Nora Roberts, on your kindle or iPad, or in the pages of its physical copy. It's something to be enjoyed without being afraid of falling prey to judgement- as compared to the stifling past. And if that's distasteful that sex should sell, we should, thus, be reminded of who bought it the first place. 

Your Friends Are Not Empty Calories

#Jay

On a fragrant hot afternoon, my friends and I decided to stop over the Starbucks counter for a fix of its one-for-one's. I don't usually drink there, but I am a sucker for flash promos. Our eyes slitted at the menu as we pandered to our options before settling for each of its latest offer: Orange Honey Comb Crunch and Triple Coffee topped off with jelly- it's chin chou. They didn't sound delicious in name, nor looked as tangy or as jelly in print, but we married up nicely for it anyway. The barista had a cocksure look, cocking his head with a marker perched in one hand. He asked for our names, ready to mark our cups like a professional script artist. So when it got to my turn, I decided to throw him a curveball, "Amanda and Jay please- Jay, with a hashtag."

"O-Okay." His cool was lost on him by the time he stuttered.

"#Jay" had nothing to do with awkward baristas. It was an inside joke I felt familiar in sharing a laugh with my friends, which wasn't a very funny one in the first place. Though I won't distract with details like the other butt stupid things we flippantly do among those bantering during class hours, doodling lame caricatures on each other's steno pads, or stealing each other's pens (that I also never return), it was also a quip that'll probably live on as an anecdote for future round table chatters. Later, in that hour as we gathered, paced ourselves with the fraps, and drank in the calm, cool, collected interior of the coffee shop, I cracked up at something awfully funny, somewhere in between, and the rest of our time spent hence became a boisterous happening.

While our drinks may have been a letdown since it barely hit the tarty notes per advertised, my behaviour could have been poorer. I probably behaved like a fool, at that moment, when I wasn't acting my age. Had the jokes not ceased by the time we had to leave, I would probably have been asked to. In its brief hour, I felt like I was in a simpler time with a group of people I'm safe with. My friendship with the people I spend most of my work week with revealed a public affair where I'm allowed to be silly. And unlike those that we grow up from too quickly, mine still has childhood spunk that does not wither with age; however, it brings me back to its embrace.

It's the simpler times that tugs at our heartstrings. Then, good times spent were less contrived, less convoluted. Play time meant being crazy, not tipsy. Therefore, anything that simulates the same amount of fun that makes us go along with a certain degree of courage at being our stupid selves again should be applauded for. Funny, I almost forgot what it felt like to laugh today. Today, in an adult world, I guess the politically correct thing to do would be to wear a suit of seriousness, in which jokes should be kept clever. Crassness has no merit, a form of decorum between two people should be maintained, and anything below dirty bar jokes is considered immature, or even, God forbid, "lame". While being cool comes with a greater reponsibility that I'd have to behave aloofly with a steely exterior to upkeep its image, I was beginning to wonder if my image generation, one that has conscientiously worked so hard for to portray a teasing smart look, has much to live for if we were to all but play by its rules, in the first place. Have we forgotten, thus, how embarrassing, carefree, and careless we were before being introduced this sinuous path that is to be adulthood? Where's the fun if we were to grow up too quickly? Why grow up, for a lack of better phrasing, if we could still be happily stupid?

Friends don't let friends count their calories. They count the dollars saved when one promotion begins. And in a way, I would have its marketing acumen to thank for because it opens people up to continuously reach out for that one cheapo friend you can count on to share a drink with- and spend a great time over. Starbucks, which understands this cheap thrill, has my gratitude. Because like happiness, my friendships are saccharine and I'm its sucker.

Letter to Jack Kerouac (in a sentence)

Dear Jack,

By being the "crazy catholic mystic" that you were, you were meta-YOLO even before the Instagram age: When On the Road was published in the late 1940s, you gave America its great Western story, written, as you'd have called "spontaneously" with a bulk of collective insights amassed over the twenty years of high times spent with the rest of the gang- what the road did to you, you maniacally typed on a continuous, one hundred and twenty-foot scroll of tracing paper sheets that were cut to size and taped together, as quick as it's short of breath to read along in fast, punctuated, rhythmic sentences; what I would like to know, was how long it really took for God's chair to warm you up to such speediness, deftly stringing recounts after recounts of the vivid expressions you single-handedly captured- on the "scroll"- like the "three weeks" as I've later learnt in your reply on the Steve Allen show (though, rebuked as untrue, since, in three weeks, I'd still be reading On the Road, and again if there were some parts of America I would like to revisit in your novel); from Denver, to Hollywood, California, to the "dirty fag" part of town that New York played center stage, wherein most of your debaucheries found its way to the heart of the novel, I'd like to know if you invented the Beat, or did the Beat invent your characters like a cautionary tale every "Aunt Sally" would pander to; that the Beat also became the main event, overrunning every other character written by young adult fiction writers: Dean Moriaty, the protagonist whose manic episodes witnessed his rolling down the abyss in a torrent of self-destruction has become a summary of the romance we've had with being lost; Marylou, a loveliness that met with a quick demise by the maniac of her boyfriend, Dean Moriaty, whom she associated too cloyingly with, like the anima to our deep longing for love; and Sal Paradise, whom you've made him as you'd make us want to live just like him, such with the long winding snake roads that have connected the rest of the Beat life's forlorn disciples to the landmarks you've made sacrilegious, where all of them are but profane, relatable, in which nothing is holy except the unholiness you've inspired; only if you'd Google Maps then, perhaps too, your mystery novel would have been truncated to two pages long, as living on the road could have been told in those selfies you would have taken; those hashtags that millennials operationalize, which you would have corrected them over because drinking on a school night pales in comparison to what you were spearheading then; those couple of tweets you would have thrown in- #RIPME Marylou is askin’ for a 3some, get some, #YOLO- whereby everything would have gone south, instead; or have you speculated all that already? 

Best Regards,

TJ