By George!

Amanda says that at the rate she’s dating, she’s going to die a sad, single woman. 

            “My body will be discovered three months later half eaten by my ravenous pussy!” she declared at lunch the other day, a comment that made Saffy look up from her moules mariniere and frown.

            I saw the look and rushed in before an argument could break out at our little corner table. “That’s not going to happen, Amanda,” I said smoothly, while throwing major shade at Saffy. “We won’t get you a cat, ok?”

            “Well, if it’s not a cat, it’ll be a dog, or a cockroach, or whatever horrible insect crawls into the flat attracted by the smell of my decomposing body!”

            “And that’s me done with my lunch,” Saffy announced, pushing her bowl of mussels away from her. “OK, so seriously, what is going on with you? You’ve been a pathetic, mewling, emotional mess the past week and you’re completely put me off my food!”

            It turned out that Amanda has been very put out by the fact that every single eligible hunk she knows is either married or happily partnered with some random, cheap, and totally unsuitable floozy who’s just given birth to their baby.

            It also turned out that by ‘every single eligible hunk she knows’, Amanda is referring to Brad Pitt, Chris Hemsworth, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Ryan Gosling and…    

            “…and George Clooney!” she ended triumphantly.

            Saffy paused. You could tell there was so much she needed to say but this was going to take a while. “George Clooney?” she said finally.

            “Yes, George!” Amanda snapped. “He was never supposed to get married! He’d done it before and it hadn’t worked, so he was supposed to spend the rest of his life dating a succession of women who would eventually get fed up with his inability to commit!”

            “And how would that help you?” Saffy asked.

            Amanda sighed in much the same way Amos Yee’s parents must have when they first heard of their son’s latest cinematic offering.

            “He was always single and available! That meant there was hope for me!”

            Saffy’s eyes narrowed. “Hope that you might one day accidentally bump into him in the Ngee Ann City taxi line and he would find you so incredibly ravishing he would ask you for your number?”

“I’m always at the UN these days,” Amanda said. “George and I could have met there!”

“Seriously,” Saffy said, “this is a not a JLo movie! George and Amal met at some glitzy Hollywood party, not a UN conference on Boring Contracts!”

            Amanda ignored the sarcasm. “It could have been a UN conference! His best friend is Brad Pitt and Angelina is always hanging around the UN for all sorts of humanitarian meetings! I could have bumped into him there!”

            As Saffy later complained to Sharyn, sometimes, just when you think Harvard couldn’t have produced a dumber graduate, Amanda turns right around to drop the bar even further.

            Sharyn’s eyes, already magnified behind her Coke bottle-thick spectacles, widened. “Why, you think cannot meet like dat, meh? Ay, I ever tell you how I meet my husband?”

            Saffy rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, like five million times already! You were sitting for your SAT tests for Harvard and Roland was sitting next to you and afterwards he followed you all the way home to Bedok on the MRT and you called the police but it turned out he lived in the same block as you did but three floors down!”

            Sharyn sighed happily. “Oh, yah, hor, of course, I tell you or-redy! So, if I can meet the far-da of my chil-ren like dat, why you think Amanda cannot meet George Coo-ney in taxi-line or UN? Must have faith, mah!”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Whatever!” she said, relying a tried and tested method of changing a subject that was not going where she wanted it to. “Now Amanda’s also upset that Ryan Gosling knocked up Eva Mendes and is a father. She said the other day that she and Ryan – she calls him Ryan! – would have had gorgeous children together! She lives in Toa Payoh. He lives in Beverly Hills. Where were they ever going to meet?!”

            Meanwhile, Amanda continues to consume gossip magazines, carefully reading between the lines of every article about George and Amal for any hint of marital problems.

            “It can’t possibly last. She’s so much smarter than he is!” she said the other day after reading an on-line story of the couple. Well, it was more a picture of them coming out of a restaurant after dinner than it was a story.

            “Must have faith, mah!” Saffy told Amanda.