Aloha, welcome aboard (again)!

[If you have taken TheBus enough in Oahu, you might recognize the automated salutation. If you didn’t… aiyah, why am I even explaining??]

This is, I think, the third time I have started a blog. I had some fun running one until it became too difficult and stressful to sustain such medium-form writing.

Problem was, I started looking at viewership. And nothing dulls and saps fun faster than realizing people are watching.

This time, the animating impulse is more professional, and will, paradoxically, I think/hope be more long-lived. A younger, 2017-me would have been amazed, and perhaps a little disgusted: I’m starting a blog for networking reasons!

But I suppose that’s the other astonishing thing: that there would be enough material in my life, and my research, to justify a blog where I share what I have been working on!

Then again, 2017 is almost 10(!) years ago now. And so much has changed in my life these past 9 years.

I am on the path to becoming a historian now. I have done enough research to know, roughly, the direction I want to aim at. It was a dream I remember first writing down in 2017 too:

I think I want to be an environmental historian

And not just any environmental historian, you know? My time in Hawaii, both the great and the not-so, has convinced me that the region I hail from needs more environmental historians.

I want to be am an environmental historian of Southeast Asia

And all that these complicated words might imply, suggest, connote, open up.

I want to tell the complex, interwoven stories of how human societies have interacted with their natural environment over time.

Where other students of history might be fascinated with important phenomena like politicians, kings, and battles, or perhaps religious change, it’s also important to realise history was also playing out on a broader, more fundamental canvas: that of the natural environment.

Me? I have always liked stories. I grew up reading war stories. I still enjoy reading ghost stories, science fiction, and fantasy. I used to think these were guilty pleasures that had nothing to do with the more Intellectual and Serious Academic Labour of History-capital-H, but I see now how universes can bleed into each other; how such speculative fiction offers us other angles to think of the worlds we inhabit today, in ways very similar to what history (even capital-H History) can do.

It was reading about the tiger attacks of colonial Singapore in an undergraduate class that got me started down the path of environmental history, though…more on that another time, perhaps.

But this first blog post was just to put a few more words down to this new page, to give a more human voice to what has so far only a bland, flat list of My Achievements.

As much as I did intend for this page to function as an online CV, I think it’d be good to talk here occasionally too. I hope to share some (very light) updates about what I’m working on professionally, and also where I might be headed too.

Experience from the previous two worlds, I mean blogs, I spun up and later shuttered is to keep posts light and low-stakes, and not look too closely at viewership metrics. So maybe third time will be the charm.

So:

new blog, new me?

I prefer to think it’s not so much a newer me, than a clearer version of who I want to become.

If you’re new here: aloha! It’s nice to meet you. For friends who have joined me here from other writings, hello again.

In any case, I hope you will stay a while for this ride.