Spirited Away

I remember a time when people would say exactly what they meant. When a husband forgot his wife’s birthday, she would go into a thundering sulk and not speak to him for days until he’d groveled so low even the cockroaches looked down on him. And when a child misbehaved, he’d get what was popularly referred to in the Unofficial Parents Handbook as “one tight slap”.

            These days, the wife is just as prone to say to the husband: “You’re not present in this relationship. I don’t think you’re being your authentic self!” Meanwhile, the 2017 parent would crouch down to the same level as the child and try to reason calmly and rationally with someone for whom the idea of eating what he’s just excavated from his nose is a simultaneous form of haute cuisine and great hilarity. 

            Just the other day, Saffy told her long-suffering boyfriend Bradley that she didn’t feel he was living life with any degree of presence. “You’re also not very authentic!” she added.

            Apparently, Bradley – who had come over earlier that evening with the vague expectation that he would make out with Saffy on the couch before proceeding to a full on Netflix and chill in the bedroom – blinked. “What?” he said. “I thought we were going to watch ‘Gilmore Girls’ like you wanted to?”

            Saffy sighed. She disentangled herself from Bradley’s embrace and struggled up on the couch. “You see, this is what I’m talking about,” she insisted. “You’re not living in the now! It’s like what Sadhguru says, you have lost the manual to your human operating system!”

            Bradley found himself only able to repeat, “What?” and then, because he felt the situation somehow needed something more, he added, “Who’s Sadhguru?”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated with urgency. “He’s a South Indian mystic! I went to see him with Sharyn the other day. He’s amazing! He says the world is only living either in the past or in the future, which is why we’re all so unhappy!”

            Bradley, being a man and thus capable of only one important thought at any given time, said, “OK, so does this mean we’re not Netflix and chilling tonight?”

            The next day, Saffy told us that the world is in such peril that it behooves us all to get more in touch with our inner self, to which Barney Chen said, if you asked him, touching one’s outer self is even more crucial.

            “I should start up my own spiritual movement,” he growled, warming up to his theme. “Only hot people can join and you have to have a body fat count of 10% or less! Is Sadhguru hot?”

            “Aiyoh! How can you talk like that about a ho-leee man, hah?” Sharyn moaned. “He got white hair, big white beard and he is, what, ah, Saffy, seventy year old?”

            “For some people, that’s really hot,” said Amanda, a committed equal opportunity campaigner when it comes to aging virility.

            “He’s at least a hundred,” Saffy confirmed. “He’s very holy! He kept me riveted for five hours!”

            “Coincidentally,” Barney said with an unseemly glint in his eye, “that’s exactly what happened to me last night with this guy I met on…”

            “As I was saying,” Saffy hurried on, “he talked about how spiritually empty we all are, and how we need to be careful otherwise we’ll completely destroy the whole planet and die!”

            “So how do we get to be spiritually full again?” Amanda asked.

            “Well, apparently, it helps to still the mind. He said the undisciplined mind is kind of like you waving your hand about all the time. So we showed us how to meditate, but only, I was very distracted because some people started crying and someone near the front kept shouting, so I didn’t feel very relaxed.”

            “Yah, lor, but then, hor, Sadhguru say, all the people who could not concentrate, who ask you to pay attention to the people shouting?”

            “Ooh, that’s deep!” Amanda said with admiration.

            “You think?” Saffy asked, doubt etched in her voice.

            “I tink, hor, they all in trance!”

            That evening, Amanda went online and YouTubed some Sadhguru lectures. The next day, her eyes were enraptured. “Oh my God! He’s so good!” She practically swooned. “Everything he says makes so much sense but without any mumbo jumbo! I’m going to see him the next time he comes to Singapore. I also need to find my authentic self!”

            Saffy sniffs that the only thing authentic about Amanda’s newfound enthusiasm for spirituality is her collection of Prada bags.

All in White

As anyone who has taken a quick break from catching Raticates and Squirtles on Pokeman Go will tell you, the world has turned a particularly nasty shade of crazy. You just can’t do anything without coming up against something or someone who is out to get you.

            Case in point is America where if you’re born in a certain country, it’s not guaranteed that you will be allowed out of the airport and that they won’t send you back on the next flight out.

            “Is Singapore on that list?” Saffy said the other day, demonstrating once again the appalling lack of depth of her reading material.

            Amanda rolled her eyes. “If it is, you can be sure a lot of Singaporeans will be screaming blue murder about their children not being able to go back to their expensive schools after their Easter vacations.”

            Saffy nodded, her bosom inflating without much enthusiasm. “Seriously, what is the world coming to? You can’t go anywhere anymore. Or do anything. Sharyn says she bought a tray of water-colour paint for her kid in Hong Kong and packed it in her cabin luggage, but at the airport, the security people said it was liquid or gel and she had to leave it behind. I mean, how are you supposed to bring down a plane with water-colour paint?”

            As Amanda pointed out recently, you can’t even go to London these days because the air there is so toxic that 10,000 Londoners die each year. “Can you imagine it?” she said, lifting her eyes from her iPad on which she was reading the dreadful statistic. “The air quality on Oxford Street is apparently as bad as Shanghai’s! You go into Selfridge’s for a bit of shopping, you come out and collapse from a fatal asthma attack!”

Leave it to Sharyn to put things into patriotic perspective when she arrived that evening with a da-bao dinner of char kway teow and packets of rojak from Old Airport Road’s hawker centre. You could tell she was still sore about having to surrender her daughter’s water-colour.

“So siow, those airport people!” she huffed. “If, hor, I put all the tube of paint into my toiletry bag, then can go true. But because I put in the original box and carry separately, sah-dun-ly cannot. How they can anyhow do such ting, I oh-so do not know!”

“It’s a crazy world, we live in, Shazz,” Amanda told her, returning to her favourite theme. She opened a white Styrofoam box. “Oh, I love this rojak!”

“Yah, boy. Better stay home in Singapore and don’t go oversea for now. At least in Singapore, when the gah-men is crazy, somehow, got make sense, one!” said Sharyn, card-carrying PAP member since 1982. As Saffy once observed, if the PAP gave out the government equivalent of PPS memberships, Sharyn would have been a lifetime Solitaire member a long time ago.

“We really must stop using all these Styrofoam boxes,” Amanda murmured as she stood back and looked at the white rafts currently floating on our dining table. “This is all going into landfill and they’ll never decompose.”

            “Oh, yah,” Sharyn said. “I remember you don’t like, but today I rush from work to get to Old Airport Road and I forgot to bring my own container. Sorry, hor.”

            “I really should write to the Prime Minister and tell him,” Amanda said in a tone of voice that suggested that she and Mr Lee were on WhatsApp terms.

Saffy looked up from her plate of rojak, crunching noisily a particularly fresh mouthful of cucumber. “I the-riouth-ly…” She paused and chewed faster and swallowed and tried again. “I seriously think the PM has more important things to worry about than the biodegradability of hawker food containers!”

“That’s probably because no one has actually brought it up with him!”

By now, Saffy’s attention, never the sharpest knife in the kitchen, had wandered off into a whole different train of thought. “Actually, I wonder if the PM has actually da-bao’d anything. Surely he has people to do that sort of thing for him. And surely,” Saffy went on as another thought occurred to her, “he wouldn’t eat his rojak out of a Styrofoam box? I always imagine him eating off white fine bone china!”

Amanda couldn’t help herself. “Uhm…why white fine bone china?”

“PAP colour, mah!” Sharyn sighed in a tone that said Amanda’s Harvard education had been criminally wasted on her.

Saffy pointed her fork at Sharyn. “What she said,” she mumbled through a mouthful of char kway teow.

Amanda says it’s totally crazy how she’s friends with some people.
 

Reality TV

The other day, Saffy said at the rate we’re going, we’ll be discovered five years from now, sitting on our couch, just three puddles of liquefied decomposed mess.

            Amanda looked up from her horoscopes in the current issue of 8DAYS and frowned. “That’s really gross. Why?”
            Saffy’s chest expanded. “Hello, have you not noticed that we’ve not left this flat in two days?”

            Amanda cocked her head. “It’s the weekend. There’s no office to go to!”

            “Yes, but don’t you remember we used to go out during the weekend? We went to parties! We went clubbing. We had dinner. We went to the movies. We went out! Now, we just sit at home all day and watch Netflix!”

            Amanda hesitated. “Yes, but there’s so much to watch!”

            Which I guess is kind of Saffy’s point.

            Ever since Amanda signed up for Netflix and gave us all access to her account, all we’ve done is sit in front of our laptops and binge-watched one show after the other.

            You know how sometimes you’re at a restaurant and you look around and you see a table full of friends or families who are literally not talking to one another because they’re all busy on their phone?

            Well, that’s what’s happening in the little flat I share with Saffy and Amanda. Hours go by without any human interaction. Well, that’s not exactly true. Like yesterday, this happened.

            I was in the armchair. Amanda was on one end of the couch and Saffy on the other. I was deep into episode four of season two of Orphan Black. Have you seen it? It’s a mind-trip, let me tell you. One actress plays, like, ten clones with ten different looks and personalities, and they’re all totally different.

            I knew Amanda was watching The Crown because she’d mentioned it at breakfast five hours ago, but no one really knew what Saffy was watching because she said she had just finished Suits and was about to start something else.

            “God, those guys are cute!” she said, pursing her lips with dissatisfaction at the idea there are cute guys out there whom she’s never going to meet simply because she has the misfortune of being happily attached to the lovely Bradley who kisses the ground she walks on. “I also want to have Jessica’s wardrobe!”

            “Nobody dresses like that in a law office,” Amanda said. “If you’re going to watch fantasy, you should watch Stranger Things!”

            I said I’d just finished that in a marathon eight episode binge.

            Amanda sucked in her breath. “Wasn’t it so good?” she asked.

            “So good,” I confirmed. “That Winona Ryder!”

            Saffy carefully wrote down the name of the show in her phone. “OK, I’ll get onto that as soon as I’ve finished The OA.”

            “Oh? Is that any good?” Amanda asked, shifting in her seat.

            “I have no idea,” Saffy said. “I just started it. It’s a bit weird. Nothing is happening but I keep watching it because they surely can’t have made a show where nothing happens?”

            “Yeah, they can. The first four episodes of Sense8,” Amanda pointed out. “The only reason I kept watching was because the guys are so hot and then suddenly, bam!, they’re all having sex in an alternative dimension! It’s fabulous!”

            Saffy put that down in her phone too.

            And that was literally the end of our interaction for the next five hours. At one stage, I briefly surfaced from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and was conscious of my flatmates shallow breathing, but then I went under again. And when I resurfaced, it was because Saffy let out a long slow moan. “Oh my God, what just happened?”

            Amanda and I hit pause on our screens and looked up.

            Saffy sighed. “I just finished The OA! What the hell just happened? Was any of it real?”

            Which, as it turns out, is one of the unsatisfactory things about three people watching three different shows at the same time. You can never really talk about it. Though, as it turned out, Sharyn had just finished The OA, too.

            “Aiyoh, that OA, ah! So cheem, ah, I tell you! At first, in Russia, then sah-dun-lee in heaven, tok tok so cheem, I get headache!” she said, as she unpacked the da bao dinner she brought over that night.

            “But what do you think happened in the end?” Saffy pressed.

            “Aiyoh, how I know? I now scare to let my chil-ren eat in the school canteen! That last scene - wah lau ay!” 

            My mother says people like us are the reason Trump won.