Month: August 2018

Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the ‘Human’ in ‘Humanities’

In my version of the future of work, STEM will not dominate over the humanities. For the “human” in “humanities” is what allows us to work with ambiguity and make sense of our complex narratives.

“Humanists ‘have known there is no right answer for hundreds of years,’ and they are comfortable with that.”

(David Blei, cited in Mackenzie 2013)

A few days ago, in my Future of Work seminar, all of us made a human bar chart which I titled in my notes ’30 Average Uni Students’ Level of Tolerance of Ambiguity’.

Later, I added a line about where I was among those 30—the highest end of the tolerance spectrum, along with another friend. I scored 30 (the median was about 55-60) on the Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale, a psychometric testing instrument of which the design alone seems to be another embedded test for a person’s patience towards confusing instructions. One is supposed to reverse the score they get for even-numbered questions, and the higher the final result, the less tolerant they are of uncertainty and change. Continue reading “Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the ‘Human’ in ‘Humanities’”

Puff Pastries

It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday, and I am stress-baking.

It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday, I have a metre-long to-do list for the weekend, and I am typing away while waiting for my batch of puff pastries to rise nicely in the oven. Stress-baking, that’s what it might be.

1.

When I was around 11-12, my Mum, my very Vietnamese Mum, took up baking—at the time, to most households, a convection oven was treated as a luxury. French gâteaux. French pastries. She printed out stacks of recipes on A5 sheets—with ingredients put in bold, measurements underlined, important notes in italic—all neatly laminated, hole-punched, and bound with a gold ribbon. Her proudest moment, one that I can recall vividly, was when she took a tray full of puffy croissants out of our tiny oven, joy dancing in her eyes; she had spent that entire Sunday folding and rolling out, from scratch, a batch of puff pastry.

For years, up until her career took a turn, Mum had kneaded and mixed and baked. These days, whenever they are flooding back, my teenage memories always fill me with the smell of dough and fresh cream and butter. Continue reading “Puff Pastries”

Delicately Blunt—on Laura Bates & the Everyday Sexism Project

On a project, a movement, a collection of blunt stories delicately handled.

entry_everdaysexism
A recent entry on the website

Of the 60,000 stories contributed by visitors worldwide on the Everyday Sexism website (Kellaway 2014), such raw, uneasy stories occupy a significant portion. Blunt as they sound, they are handled delicately by the team behind the project. Founded in 2012 by Laura Bates—a British feminist writer frustrated with blatant harassment—it aims to counter societal denial towards existing sexism (Everyday Sexism Project n.d.) through an ever-growing collection of stories, small and large. Visitors are greeted by a textbox asking them to recount any sexist incidents in their daily lives, and they can do so anonymously. Currently, the website comes in 25 country-versions and roughly 20 languages, including Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, and many more. Continue reading “Delicately Blunt—on Laura Bates & the Everyday Sexism Project”

On ‘Akira’ (1988)—The Beginning of the End

My take on the 1988 anime Akira.

The 1988 anime Akira has officially topped my list of hardest-to-watch films, packing millions of details in both the graphics and the content of each sequence, in the span of more than two hours. Admittedly, I yawned rather widely during the middle part, since it started to drag on and became too slippery (plus excessively violent) for my attention to grab on. Continue reading “On ‘Akira’ (1988)—The Beginning of the End”