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March 20th, 2014. It was a Thursday.
0-ish minute read.

I get a lot of questions from friends still in college. The most popular being:

“What’s life like after graduation?”

Well…

Today, there’s no running water in my apartment, no food in my fridge, and no cash in my bank account.

There are days like that.

Today, I gave a spontaneous presentation for a product development workshop at 1871, and afterwards one of the facilitators was nice enough to offer me the chance to run a workshop of my own.

There are days like that.

Today, TechCrunch wrote about us because we raised 15 million dollars and we’re moving to Silicon Valley.

There aren’t a whole lot of days like that.

“What’s life like after graduation?”

Honestly? It’s never quite what you expect.

November 24th, 2013. It was a Sunday.
12-ish minute read.

I first wrote this piece in 2013, and a lot has changed since then. Base, the company I joined, ran out of money, laid a bunch of us off, and was bought by Zendesk. Many of the links stopped working, and I removed most of them but left a few redirects. For me.

This piece was originally published on Medium with the subtitle ‘Breaking every rule of common sense along the way’, and it was moderately popular! I still get a notification about it every now and then.

Julie Mehretu, Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation

Six months ago, I was being herded out of Ohio Stadium after a four-hour commencement ceremony, one in a graduating class of over 10,000.

I wasn’t excited. I didn’t feel special — just unprepared, and poor.

The world of employment seemed impenetrable through the Clinton-era web design of online job boards, and I ended up deciding on something of a gamble. The degree I’d just earned would have given me far more leverage in Columbus, but I made up my mind that I wanted to move to Chicago, even though I had no idea where I was going to live, or how I was going to get there.

I had 90 days to find a job, or I would be on a plane back to Kuala Lumpur. And I didn’t know it at the time, but I was also about to be dumped by my then-girlfriend.

Peaches.

September 2nd, 2013. It was a Monday.
4-ish minute read.

When I was three years old and living in Singapore, I would go to the Berenstein Bears section of the bookstore and, reciting the my parent’s bedtime stories, pretend to read out loud to onlookers. I don’t remember these incidences - they were recounted to me with amusement by my parents years later. But I don’t doubt them. It’s not hard to believe that even at an early age I was a pretentious twat.

When I was nine, and my sister seven, my parents declared a new household rule: no reading at the dinner table. My sister and I, grumbling beneath our breaths, never stopped stealing glances at books placed covertly in our laps. This ruse never went unnoticed, but every now and then, it was ignored.

July 15th, 2013. It was a Monday.
5-ish minute read.

Yinka Shonibare, Refugee Astronaut

“I’m teaching my last class at 8PM tonight,” he says. “You should drop by!”

I check my map. The venue is an hour away by train. The return journey, after the train stops running, will take close to two hours. The route includes stretches of walking through a couple of neighborhoods I’ve been warned against walking through.

I hesitate.

In the privacy of my mind, I’ve painted a portrait of myself as a sort of romantic traveler. A spontaneous, adventurous type who doesn’t care where he’s going or how he gets there. Someone who scoffs at traditional itineraries, who isn’t afraid to show up in a new city with no accommodation, no travel arrangements, and no plans.

A cherry picked record of my travels might present such a face, but many of my adventures are more a result of poor planning and mismanaged finances than an actual devil-may-care attitude to exploring the globe.

Most days, I’m Christopher Columbus discovering India on the wrong side of the world.