Episode 1321: Yuppie Living

Met up with some JC friends for lunch and coffee today. The funny story behind that is that Claudia somehow managed to save my mobile number under Vivien's name, so for a day or so after I'd got back to Singapore, Claudia thought she was arranging to meet Vivien for lunch, until I chatted with her online. It's like a subplot straight out of Happy Endings or something! We had coffee at Maison Ikkoku after lunch, which is one of those quirky/stylish coffee places that've been popping up in Singapore lately as an alternative to chains like Starbucks. The place is pretty small, so there isn't much seating, though it actually spans two storeys (the upstairs section sells menswear and turns into a cocktail bar come evening). It's basically quite a yuppie sort of place, I guess. Nothing wrong with that though. Like I was saying to Claudia and Tsz San, maybe we should just own our yuppieness. The whole of Haji Lane is this weird mix of indie and ultra-trendy shops. Don't go there often myself, but I can see the appeal. It's unthreateningly bohemian, that's how I'd describe it. Like an antidote to capitalist machinations, but I suspect a significant percentage of the people flocking to it are in fact pretty well-heeled, considering the prices in one of the menswear shops we stepped into after coffee. (They were selling copies of Math Paper Press's Babette's Feast chapbooks though, so I approve.) Finished reading Jim Butcher's Side Jobs today as well, a companion collection of short stories to his ongoing Dresden Files series of novels. Can't wait for the next novel! There's something compulsively readable about Butcher's prose, especially the way he's managed to give Harry Dresden a really distinctive voice. I've yet to pick up another urban fantasy series, though I've owned Mike Carey's novels for ages now. I'm interested to see how they stack up, so I might just make those my mandatory holiday reading, once I'm done with Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse.