justina forever

How to meet your downstairs neighbor

2026-02-15

Earlier in the week, Dad and I had made plans to hang up my artwork on Saturday, Valentine’s Day. I had the whole day planned out in my head: I’d take him to a nice brunch, we’d go to the hardware store to buy art-hanging hardware, then we’d hang everything up together. But Dad obliterated the dream-day I’d concocted as soon as we arrived at the brunch restaurant down the street.

“Thirty dollars for breakfast? Let’s go to McDonald’s!” (I do love a McDonald’s breakfast set but had thought it might be sweet to take him somewhere nicer for a change.)

To Maccas we went, and then to the hardware store, but it didn’t have the sawtooth hangers I was looking for, so we took a bus to the mall with the art store. Hardware procured, we got sidetracked poking our noses into other shops, then ate some chendol at the food court. Home we went, where we debated the best way to measure out how to hang stuff on the walls before landing on some combination of tape measure and eyeballs.

Pretty pleased with my living room!

Once I got over my fear of making holes in the walls of my rental apartment, we got to work! We were so absorbed, we got time blindness and didn’t realise it was already 7:00 — and we still hadn’t eaten lunch.

“Mala place?” Dad said.

“Yes!”

We put on our shoes and stepped outside, but it was pouring. So I cobbled together dinner from leftover zongzi, airfryer salmon, and some sad-looking carrots I found at the bottom of the produce drawer. (For a brief moment I felt bad for feeding my dad subpar food all day: fast food for breakfast, dessert for lunch, and now sad leftovers and scraps for dinner? Bad daughter!)

Revived with calories, we agreed to continue our work. Why stop? We had momentum! I was hammering a nail into the wall when the doorbell began to chime, a frantic finger pressing the button once, twice, ten times in a row. Was the building on fire? I bolted to the door. There stood an eighty-year-old man in a white V-neck tee wielding a long-handled shoehorn: my downstairs neighbor, whom I’d never met before. He looked irate.

“What are you doing? What’s going on here? My wife is not well! She’s trying to rest! What is all that noise?”

“I’m so sorry,” I clapped my hands over my heart. “I lost track of time.” I thought he was going to smack me with his shoehorn. My dad came over to defuse the situation.

“My daughter and I were trying to hang up her art; we’re so sorry for the noise. We’ll stop now.”

The man looked past my shoulder at the dog paintings on the wall and said, “Oh, those are great!” I began to cry as I imagined his sickly wife suffering from my foolish, inconsiderate hammering. As tears streamed down my face, my dad asked the man how long he’d lived in the building: twelve years. He had retired long ago.

Guard dogs in the entryway.

“What were you doing before you retired?” I asked.

And then…

I’m not sure what can of worms I opened, but this man and my dad started talking about their pasts: where they came from, what they did over the decades, all the many friends they have in common. Ten minutes went by. Then twenty. Then thirty. I invited him in to sit in the living room, poured them some rooibos, and he and my dad talked and talked and talked for one and a half hours. Every now and then, they’d stop to marvel at how much they have in common, how similar their senses of humor and general philosophies on life are, how many people they both know.

Wow, I thought, this guy’s poor wife must be wondering what the heck’s happened to her husband, because here he is yapping away with my dad. I asked him if he’d brought the shoehorn to smack me with it, but he said he’d carried it out of the house by accident.

I sketched the scene because I didn’t want to take a photo.

Some of my art still isn’t up. I guess I’ll work on it later.
Art I made for my apartment

2026-01-24

In my last post, I wrote about moving flats. Today’s post is about decorating said apartment.

When I first moved to Singapore, a friend told me about the “ID” he’d hired to help him with his flat. I stared at him, blinked twice (audibly, like a cartoon character), listened to him for another minute, then asked, “What’s an ID?” An interior designer. Oof, obviously!

Dear reader, help me out: Is hiring an interior designer… normal? Am I only noticing it now that I’ve reached a certain age? Or is this a uniquely Singaporean thing?

After a year spent living in a weirdly hotel-like loft studio that my friends jokingly referred to as my “boss bitch apartment,” I decided I would decorate my next home with intention.

This was not because I suddenly became a design person. I don’t have an innate sense of or interest in design and have historically dismissed publications like Dezeen and Design Anthology as cold and wanky. (My punishment for turning my nose up at design: sleeping one metre away from the ceiling for two years.) For some reason, acquaintances have some vague impression that I’m interested in design, but I’m just… not.

Historically, I’ve used milk crates as shelves and a cardboard box draped with a scarf as a side table. I’ve inherited whatever random furniture previous tenants left behind rather than shopping for it myself. I’ve never given a second thought to floors or walls.

I don’t want a designed home. I wanted a lived-in one!

After sending myself on a weeks-long scavenger hunt for second-hand furniture from Carousell, the Salvation Army, and Hock Siong, and after putting in a big Ikea order for the rest, it was time to think about wall art.

I had the idea that it might be fun to make my own paintings. Around the same time, my cousin Chengxi told me she’d put her birthdate and time into ChatGPT to generate a birth chart / Bazi. I did the same (aren’t you, too, taking spiritual advice from AI these days?) and it gave me some pointers on which elements and colors to use and avoid. With that context, I asked ChatGPT to suggest images I could paint to bring good luck to my home (or, at the very least, not tempt misfortune).

I painted these using only cyan, magenta, yellow, white, and black acrylics, partly because someone once told me you can produce almost any color with just these, partly because the sheer number of paint brands at Art Friend overwhelmed me, but mostly because I was too cheap to buy more tubes, especially “niche” colors I might use once. I used the cheapest set of brushes I could find and finished each painting with a coat of satin Mod Podge.

And now, without further ado (and there was a lot of ado), here are the paintings I made, in the order I made them!

My sisters and me with our childhood dog, Reilly.

My sisters and me as budgies nestled in the fur of our other childhood dog, Jumbo.

Boris, my sister Jessica’s dog, and Amelia, my sister Jennifer’s dog. The Boris painting is my favourite because he looks like a thumb. I’ll put them by the front door, like a pair of guard dogs.

Wanchai Cat (2002–2023), a shop cat who lived in a Chinese pharmacy in Hong Kong. Her name was Hawaii. I made a video of her once that went viral (2 million views in a few days). I painted this at a friend’s house during an art-jamming session. Usually I begin with a pencil sketch, but for this one I anyhow whacked it and let the Spirit move me. I like how it turned out. I think it captures Hawaii’s spirit, and painting without a plan was fun! I drew the whiskers with a white Posca marker.

A painting of the moon over a still lake. ChatGPT told me not to include any solitary creatures or boats lest I be alone forever. It also advised me to keep the water calm to sweeten my dreams.

A painting of fuchsias. These are Jessica’s favourite flowers. They remind us of the papier-mâché sculpture Jess and I made when we were seven. Our art teacher banished us to a room separate from the rest of the class because we were too disruptive. Alone, we slapped strips of newspaper soaked in wheat paste over chicken wire and eventually made a weird sculpture shaped like fuchsias.

I really struggled with the colors here. The pinks and purples look really muddy against the green, but I was determined not to add other tubes of color into the mix. I think it looks good enough. ChatGPT was quite helpful when I was troubleshooting the colors!

And lastly, these paintings by my parents…

A painting by my mom, inspired by Balloonia, our favorite book she’d read to us as kids. She painted it at an art jam with my aunts in Singapore some years ago, when she was visiting from Hong Kong. My aunt gave it to me when I first moved here, and I nearly burst into tears thinking that my mom chose to paint something we have such fond, shared memories of!

A piece by my dad, using Posca markers, of some slogans arranged around a tree. He really tortured himself over what to put on the canvas; his notebook was full of sketches of the three “no evil” monkeys he was envisioning in his head , but they were a little too evil-looking (read: horrifying and probably inauspicious to hang on the walls — I didn’t need ChatGPT to tell me that!), so I gently dissuaded him from painting them. I could tell the thought of using acrylics intimidated him (my mom throws herself into new things, my dad less so), so I offered him Posca markers instead.

And that, dear reader, is how I got my home to feel like home!

Next task: figuring out how to hang all the art up!
On escaping from my unsalvageably fancy apartment

2026-01-18
In the summer of 2023, I moved to Singapore. I spent a month looking at apartments and signed a two-year lease on one that seemed to tick the boxes: good location, appropriately-sized for a single person.

Soon after moving in, I had that sinking feeling. I hated it, and nothing could change this. I mentally prepared myself for the two years I’d be bound to it.

Time will fly by. It’ll be fine.

Early on, I stopped trying to make it feel like home. I knew it never would be. The place was too unsalvageably fancy, and I have learned, the hard way, that I am not built for unsalvageable fanciness.

How unsalvageably fancy was it? Let me give you a tour.

The kitchen: a showroom

Who were these built-in appliances for?
- A wine chiller (I don’t drink alcohol)
- A combination steam oven (I don’t steam. I definitely don’t combination-steam.)
- An espresso machine (I didn’t drink coffee at the time)
- A dishwasher (my Reddit searches for troubleshooting advice turned up hundreds of irate comments)
Chrome appliances daring me to stain them with my grubby fingerprints. No thanks.

The bathroom: a fishbowl

Frosted glass walls. Dear guest: sorry for seeing your silhouette while you pee.

Four unlabeled confusing shower knobs, controlling:
- A rain shower
- A waterfall shower
- Two horizontal jets shooting from opposite walls (torture if turned on before the water warms up)
- A hose, just in case the other options weren’t enough
Did any of this make showering better? No.

Welcome to shower-knob roulette.

The balcony I never used

At the risk of sounding like a whingy poohead, the balcony was:
- Too sunny (I’m a sun wimp)
- Too small for a table and chair
- Too dusty for hanging laundry
It became a holding area for neglected plants my cousins gave me. At least the plants thrived.

Bunch of plants that thrived while I ignored them completely.

Floors I was afraid to live on

Shiny, perfect marble floors.

The following would leave a permanent mark if not wiped up immediately:
- Spilled water
- A tiny piece of purple cabbage
- Vinegar
- Sweat
- Coffee (probably)
Another week, another stain seeping into the marble’s pores to mark the passage of time.

What’s with all the windows?

From the street, the building looked like a spaceship: sleek, dark, all glass.

From inside, floor-to-ceiling windows meant:
- Blinds up = blazing sun heats the apartment, electricity bill shoots up
- Blinds down = sun heats blinds, releasing a plastic chemical smell into the air, but electricity bill goes down
Only one side of the flat had windows. The deepest part — meant to be my office — was so dark I never used it.

Roller-blinds to prevent the sunlight and heat trying to burst through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Loft studios: a cautionary tale

Loft studios sound cool. But in practice:
- Mattress on a loft platform = two years of sleeping with my face one metre from the ceiling
- Making the bed = risk of concussion
- No room for a dining table or workspace
- Wasteful air-conditioning = expensive utilities
- No walls. No privacy.
- Could friends stay over? Not really.
But it wasn’t all bad!

Some really wonderful things happened while I lived there.
1. The groundskeeper gave me a ukulele after he heard a friend and me singing in the shared outdoor space.
2. I swam in the condo pool once and thought I saw a jellyfish. It turned out to be a fallen jacaranda flower, dancing in the water, rendered translucent.
3. I watched a cicada fly methodically into the bell of every jacaranda flower in the landscaping.
4. I rescued a tiny, tiny lizard from a cockroach trap. Olive oil weakened the adhesive. I thought it was dead, but it was alive! It was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen! I let it crawl up and down my arm. Sometimes it came back to visit.
5. Once, as I was leaving my flat, my neighbour opened her door and handed me a cake. Perfect timing — I was on my way to buy dessert for lunch at a friend’s!
Cicada flying into every single flower.

Tiny lizard on arm that one time I went on the balcony.

Look how tiny and CUTE he is!!!!!!

Surely I learned something?

You didn’t really think I’d endure two years in an unsalvageably fancy, decidedly un-Justina apartment without learning something, did you?

Six months in, I started planning my exit. Around the same time, I was fitting out a new office for work, which forced me to think much more seriously about how spaces actually function. (I wrote about that process on the company blog.)

First, I wrote out my use cases for a home:

Then I created a set of filters:
- Location: Near my favourite running loop, away from busy streets, walking distance to groceries, under 30 minutes to the office by transit or bike.
- Condo facilities: Don’t need, don’t care. Plus, they drive up building management fees.
- Balcony: Do not want. Jacks up rent without adding value.
- Floor plans: Square rooms; windows facing different directions.
- Building age: Avoid brand new. Seek dingy, lived-in.
If someone else has already dinged the floor, I don’t have to worry about dinging it myself. This, dear reader, is freedom.

Because I was so specific, it was easy to zero in on the flat of my dreams on PropertyGuru. I only visited one apartment.

I knew it was The One the moment the landlord’s rep opened the door to let me view the flat. I signed the lease that week and moved in five months ago.

Now I finally live in a place that feels like mine.

Who’d have thunk guitars could make nice decor?

Now I have a giant dining table for eating and working at! Tables and chairs collected second-hand from Carousell, the Salvation Army, and Hock Siong. (Exception: red chair from Ikea — I really wanted a red chair!)

Kleenex in boxes and plastic packaging are an eyesore, so I found these funny tissue boxes on Shopee to hide them.

I actually love writing with pencil crayons!

Enormous Klimt replica from Taobao. I assembled the stool at a carpentry workshop at Tombalek.

How nice it feels to finally feel at home!
a website i made for fun in 2003 about dissecting a frog

2026-01-11

Check out what I just came across as I wandered through some dusty old Dropbox folders like some sort of digital autoethnographer: a silly little webpage I made (for fun) as a memento of that time we dissected frogs in Grade 11 biology class in 2003.

Folks, this website is older than some young adults I’ve volunteered or played soccer with since moving to Singapore in 2023. (!!!)

How was that 23 years ago? Everything still feels so vivid and immediate. The stench of formaldehyde permeating the science corridor, the chill of winter rushing through a crack in the window at the back of the lab; the click of trackpad buttons on the school-issued Compaq laptops.

I thought it would be fun to share my frog-dissection webpage memento here. Behold!

Content warning 🐸: Frog dissection ahead.

Now’s your chance to slam your laptop lid shut and toss your machine out the window if you don’t want to see a frog being sliced open with a scalpel by very earnest teenagers.

CLICK HERE and scroll sideways!!!

(Note: I’m on a pretty barebones WordPress plan, so I couldn’t upload the html file to a file manager. Instead, I copypasted the HTML into ChatGPT and asked it to make the HTML play nice with embedding custom HTML in a WordPress page. What you see above is the result.)

Sometimes I’m surprised by how little my taste has changed over time — if you can call it taste. The look, feel, vibe, tone of this page is still up my alley today. Unpolished photos, silly captions, bright clashing colors? I still like that stuff today! Even my voice feels basically the same. Does that mean I’m still the same Justina as my teenage self? Yikes.

Anyway, here’s how I intended the page to look:

My first foray into building websites was using HTML in Notepad, making graphics in Jasc PaintShop Pro (and silly pixel animations in MS Paint). This was probably around 1999. My sister Jess wrote a really great article about our internetolescence detailing our early adventures. At some point, I figured out a faster way to get what I was looking for: build in Microsoft Word to take advantage of WYSIWYG, export the document as a webpage, then clean up the HTML in Notepad.

I suspect I made this frog-dissection memento using this method. I would have then uploaded it via WS_FTP to my little home on the internet — a directory Jess had set aside for me on our domain, balloonia.com.

At the time, I felt a little guilty, maybe even dirty, for taking shortcuts with Word’s WYSIWYG instead of aspiring to become a true HTML/CSS master. Now, I think it’s pretty rad that my younger self was just happy to experiment quickly and put things out into the world.

I think my instinct has always been to play around and publish, not to be particularly perfect at anything — trusting that somebody out there might find it fun, funny, interesting, thought-provoking, moving, useful, or stupid.

It’s all good!

The early 2000s… what a time to be a teenager putting stuff out on the internet! Maybe later I’ll post some other stuff from the archives.
What Justina Can’t Live Without

2025-10-07

as told to Jessica

The other day, Jessica sent me this listicle:”What Sally Jessy Raphael Can’t Live Without.” Normally I hate when she sends me listicles (unless they’re from ClickHole), but this one is truly funny. We were shocked to learn that SJR turned 90 this year. Then we had a lot of fun thinking about all the stuff in our lives.

Bormioli Rocco Quattro Stagioni Jar, 1 Litre

I drink water out of giant mason jars. I might be overhydrated. Maybe if I were a plant, I’d be dying from root rot. I like these jars because they don’t tip over easily.

Sharpie Permanent Marker, Fine Point, Black

Got a weird scuff mark on a black shoe? You can fix anything with a Sharpie! A Sharpie also dials up the aggression when you write a passive-aggressive note to the guy who hung his sweaty bike clothes next to the water fountain. Hi! We don’t want to smell the sweat from your nether regions while filling our water bottles. 🙂

Decathlon Urban Bike Pannier Bag 900 25L, V3 – Grey

Riding a bicycle with nothing on your back is the best! I use a cheap pannier from Decathlon to lug my backpack to the office. Bonus: Decathlon has a 365-day exchange policy, so if a plastic hook snaps because a car brushed a little too close, they’ll replace it for free.

Index Cards, 3″ x 5″, Blank

There is something very satisfying about holding a 3″ x 5″ index card in your hand. I write down stray thoughts, stash them in a drawer, and either string them into stories or put them in the recycling bin. Even more fun: draw on one side, “laminate” with packing tape, and you have charming janky postcards to snail mail to your favorite people around the world.

Cardboard, Found, Used

At the other end of the pulp spectrum: cardboard. An upside-down box draped with a shawl was my entryway table for years. I made a cardboard taxi for my nephews and built a cardboard cubicle around my office desk to block unwelcome distractions.

Bandaids (But Generic)

I stick a bandaid on my umbrella handle so I can spot it in an umbrella stand. It looks gross, which means no one will steal it.

Purple Cabbage, Not Organic

I eat purple cabbage most days of the week. Once I figured out that the pH of the water in the office was way too high because it kept turning blue when it came in contact with my cabbage remnants. Crucifers can teach us a lot about chemistry!

Dr. Bronner’s Baby Unscented Pure Castile Soap

I once had a job putting contact lenses into people’s eyes on the set of a SyFy TV series. The actors were painted head-to-toe as aliens, so they couldn’t touch their own eyes without ruining their makeup. I think I touched 100 eyeballs that year. I washed my hands constantly, and this soap was the only soap that didn’t crack my skin.

I originally created this using Gamma, aka the app Jess and her friends have been working on for the last half a decade. See the original post in Gamma! Disclaimer: this page contains zero affiliate links.