"You know, I think I've gotten used to the weather here. It's 14 deg C and I'm just sitting in my room with just a shirt on and I feel perfectly fine!"
And of course, Mother Nature just has to come back and slap me in the face for making such a bold statement.
If you've read the news about Hurricane Gonzalo, you should know to expect strong winds and showers over the next week or so. I brushed it off in that apathetic way Singaporeans are so prone to- but I realised my folly when I stepped out for my weekly grocery run.
In Singapore, I've always read the news, marvelling at the reports- but that was it. It was very rarely relevant to me and I took the news as some sort of foreign, detached extension of my country.
I'm not saying that Singapore does not have crime or that it rarely happens. What was true, though, was that it did not affect me, and that made all the difference.
Murder? Kidnapping? A break-in? They were broken down into no-nonsense reports, plain text on grey, and I would be suitably horrified but none of the locations were familiar places to me, and I would dismiss it as just another incident, just another crime statistic.
Don't look at me like that- you know a crime is so much more terrifying when it strikes close to home.
Just the other day I read about a brawl at Baa Bar that was so violent they set up police blockages. And you think-
I could have been there. I could have been in danger.-and does the prospect of you being harmed seem very real now? That, my friends, is the terrifying bit.
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