AMAZING

... that I have finally picked a dressmaker for the gown. I'm still 50-50 about the style. I had one in mind but the last one I saw kinda had my name spelled all across it.

... that we started the search for the elusive ideal apartment. Here's how it sounded when I tried to explain it to the friend for the benefit of my foreign self. We don't want to buy a house, we want to rent. But we are too cash-strapped to rent because of something called the Central Provident Fund that takes something like $500 out of our salary. That money still 'belongs' to us although we can use it for anything other than what the Singapore gahmen tells us we can purchase, ie. a house or to use as a retirement fund when you turn 55. So, we are too poor to rent and therefore have to buy a house.

So, buy a house we go, but we are told that we are above the income gap that entitles us a decent house loan and that we may not qualify for the cheapest housing we want. We may have to buy a bigger apartment than we need or want. Even more upsetting and ridiculous is the possibility that we may have to purchase a condominium. So now we may be too 'rich' to qualify for a decent Housing Development Board loan to buy a cheap apartment that we want. They're rationale: "if you buy a 3BR apartment when you can afford to buy a 4BR apartment, you are disadvantaging the pool of buyers who can only afford to buy a 3BR." Isn't this supposed to be a privilege of my citizenship, the subsidies that the gahmen affords to all?

In order to get around this slight problem of "total gross household income ceiling" we have statutorily declared my fiance unemployed since he is in mission school. So now one unemployed young man is buying a house with his fiancee. And, he should remain unemployed in order to buy an apartment! How strange it sounds that he should remain unemployed so that we are entitled to a home loan to buy a house we don't want to buy because we are too poor to rent!

Amazing. This is the logic by which Singapore is run!