Fan Wrong

It’s funny how sometimes people you’ve never met can have such a huge impact on your life. My brother Jack, for instance, went through a heavy metal phase in his teens on account of his obsession with Black Sabbath and KISS.

For years, my mother shuddered whenever she thought of how close she had came to losing her son to a band whose greatest hits included such memorable titles as ‘War Pigs’ and ‘Children of the Grave’. And then, when she finally watched Ozzie Osbourne in the reality show “Meet the Osbournes” doddering about his house in his bi-focals trying to keep his family of screaming wife and bratty children in line, she was completely disarmed.

“He’s such a lovely man!” she told her astonished mahjong kaki. “I don’t know why I was ever worried about his influence on Jack!”

“He bit the head off a live chicken!” her sister, Wai-ling, pointed out.

“It was a dove!” Mother said in a tone that indicated that this made all the difference.

Meanwhile, Jack, whose musical tastes graduated from Black Sabbath to Tracy Chapman without the slightest sense of irony, doesn’t see what the fuss is all about. “I liked their vibe,” he says. “And anyway, anyone with half a brain could see that Ozzie was completely harmless. Even when he was completely coked up and booze was seeping out of his pores,” he adds amiably.

My flatmate Amanda, on the other hand, is a card-carrying member of the Singapore Chapter of the “We Love Angelina Jolie” fan club. The fact that the club comprises entirely of her and honorary member, Sharyn, doesn’t faze her one bit.

“She’s my hero and my earth mother,” Amanda will tell anyone who cares to listen. “If it was legally possible, she’d be my religion!”, a comment that led Saffy to write yet another stinging letter to Harvard demanding that they immediately withdraw their law degree from Amanda.

“How could anyone not worship that woman?” Amanda would wonder to the world at large. “She rescues African children and fights for world peace! She deserves the Nobel Peace Prize!”

Saffy’s formidable chest will inflate. “She deserves to be in jail! She stole Brad Pitt from Jennifer Aniston!”

“It takes two hands to clap,” Amanda will reply cryptically.

At this point, Saffy will go bug-eyed. “What the hell does that even mean?”

Of course, all this became moot when news broke that Angelina had had a double mastectomy. In the world according to Amanda, this event has elevated Angelina to the status of sainthood.

Even Saffy had to pause in her ongoing vendetta against a Hollywood actress she’s never met, on behalf of another Hollywood actress she’s never met either.

“Really? She had both cut off?”

            Amanda’s eyes were shining. “Isn’t she just amazing? So brave!”

            By the look of doubt now etched on Saffy’s face, you could tell that she was conflicted by her lust for vengeance and her unexpected admiration and newfound respect. She’d not felt this way since she suddenly found herself rooting for JR Ewing in the new ‘Dallas’.

            Leave it to Sharyn to put things into perspective.

            “Aiyoh, I tell you, ah, I doh-no why some people, hor, must go and tell their personal life to the whole world! Your personal life is your personal life, right? You share share share until no more privacy! Seow, ah, I tell you!” Sharyn paused to draw breath and plunged back in.

“You break up with your boyfriend, break up, lah! Why must go and conduct interview with 8DAY? And then, hor, two second later, got new boyfriend, and lagi go call up 8DAY for another interview and this time say how much you love your new boyfriend and this time con-firm is the one! Last time you or-redi confirm is the one, what! Aiyoh, I just cannot stand these people!”

Saffy turned to Amanda and whispered out of the side of her mouth, “Do you have any idea who she’s talking about?”

Amanda, who only ever reads 8DAYS for the Hollywood gossip, hazarded a guess. “Gurmit Singh?”

Saffy was astonished. “Gurmit Singh is gay?”

Amanda coughed. “Wait, Gurmit Singh is a man? Oh, I had no idea, I was just picking random names.”

“I can’t believe you don’t know who Gurmit Singh is!”

“You know I don’t watch local TV!”

Sharyn suddenly noticed that no one was paying her any attention. “Ay, what are you two talking about?”

Later, Amanda said that Sharyn’s unique brand of tough love could be a little hard to take.

“God, imagine if she had a talk show.”

“There’d be no one on it!” Amanda predicted. “Not even Angelina Jolie!”

Die die must diet

While the rest of the world is obsessing about falling employment, rising inflation, deflation, stagflation, collapsing economies and devalued currencies, in the little flat I share with Saffy and Amanda, all anyone can talk about is the new crazy assed diet that Amanda has gotten us on.

             As I told my sister over the phone, given that half the world’s population is undernourished or starving, it’s astonishing that some of us are even contemplating a diet.

            “It’s a First World problem!” Michelle said with firm authority, completely ignoring the fact that she has been on just about every single diet ever invented.

            “And I’m not even fat!” I said.

            “Fat has nothing to do with it,” said Amanda in the kind of tone you normally associate with Moses delivering the Third Commandment. “It’s about living a clean, healthy and responsible lifestyle!”

            From the dining table, Saffy looked up from her lunch and piped, “Exactly!”

            There was a brief moment of silence as Amanda and I stared at our flatmate.

            “Saf,” I said eventually, “you’re literally eating your third packet of mee goreng.”

            “Shut up!” Saffy mumbled through a mouthful of noodles. “This is my cheat day. I can eat anything I want.”

            “But you’ve already eaten, like, a thousand calories in half an hour!”

            “That’s the beauty of this diet!”

            During one of her regular trawlings through the diet section of the Internet, Amanda had come across an article that said that you can lose an unusual amount of weight if, for two days of the week, you only consume 600 calories, and you can eat whatever you want for the other five days.

            Demonstrating once again the mental agility that got her through a Harvard law degree, Amanda worked out that if she went on this diet for a month, she’d drop a dress size just in time for the wedding of her Best Enemy Forever, Francine Seow.

            And because no one likes to diet alone, she recruited Saffy and me into the campaign.

            “But we’re not even invited to the wedding,” Saffy had protested at first. “What’s in it for us?”

            “You’ll be able to fit into all my Dolce & Gabbana dresses!” Amanda said brightly.

            Saffy looked doubtful. “Well, only if I had a breast reduction. Your bustiers have absolutely no give!”

            I said firmly that I was not going on the diet. “Do you even know what 600 calories is?”

            Amanda paused. “Uhm…an apple and an egg white?”

            “No, I’m really asking. I really have no idea. But it doesn’t sound like a lot! You know what happens when I get hungry. I get cranky and my migraines start acting up!”

            Amanda sniffed. “Oh, you’ll be fine! Besides, according to the article, modern society consumes too much calories. Apparently, we only need about half the amount because we’re no longer doing any hard manual labour like our ancestors used to!”

            This time, it was Saffy’s turn to stare. “Seriously,” she said finally, “you sound like Richard Attenborough in some ass-numbing documentary about farm animals!”

As it turns out, 600 calories is the equivalent of two pints of semi-skimmed milk, four portions of vegetables, one portion of fruit, two pints of water, and a multivitamin pill.

            “Hah? Really, ah?” Sharyn pronounced when she heard about it. “That’s like my breakfast!”

            “You know, you could lose some weight, Sharyn,” Saffy said after casting a critical eye over her best friend.

            “Where got? I am 53 kay gee, OK!”

            Saffy was impressed. “Really? You eat all that fatty hawker food and you’re only 53?”
            “Abaden?” If Sharyn had been blessed with pneumatic breasts, they would have inflated at this stage.

            Of course, what no one can understand is how you could lose any weight if you starve for two days and then eat your normal diet of char kway teow and bah kut teh for the rest of the week.

            “Sure cannot work one, lah!” Sharyn said with a sneer etched over her face. “And then, hor, I tell you, people who go on diet are always unhappy! Confirm, one!”

            After eating normally all week, Saffy strategically commenced her two 600 calorie days on the weekend. By Sunday, she had turned into a raving lunatic whose hand has just been chewed off by a dog with gangrene and rabies.

“I am starving!” she screamed at Nigella Lawson on TV.

“Sip more water,” I advised from the safe distance of my bedroom door. Saffy stared at me with hungry malevolence. I sent a text to Amanda who, at that very moment, was enjoying a diet-free day with a Sunday brunch of Eggs Benedict: “It’s been nice knowing you.”

How App

They say that jealousy is not a good colour on anyone. And by they, I mean, of course, my mother. It’s something she’s always saying to her sisters whenever they lose to her in mah-jong, or when she shows up at her weekly book-club wearing new diamonds that my father bought her in a mad fit of guilt over some fight they had had the night before about something that had really been my mother’s fault but which she had skillfully turned into his.

            In the little flat that I share with Saffy and Amanda, we’re always jealous about other people’s good fortunes.

I’m jealous that Dan Brown can write a multi-million dollar best seller without even raising a sweat.

“How difficult can it be to write a stupid blockbuster novel?” I say to myself every day as I sit in front of my computer staring at a blank screen.

Amanda is jealous that Prince William never looked her way when she showed up in her slinkiest most revealing Prada dress at the Botanic Gardens in the high heat of the day, hoping that he would fall so madly in love and lust with her that he would immediately cause an international scandal by ditching the Duchess of Cambridge and moving in with us in our little flat.

“And to think that he may actually have knocked Kate up while they were in Singapore,” Saffy observed quietly.

“Hate her!” Amanda sniffed.

Meanwhile, Saffy is jealous that her most treasured possession, her formidable twin-peaked bosom, has yet to land her a coveted Victoria’s Secret Angel gig.

“Seriously,” she said while we watched last year’s show on YouTube for the millionth time, “can someone really tell me that she hasn’t had a boob job? Whereas my babies, which are all natural, aren’t as deserving of prime time TV?”

“It’s an absolute crime,” Amanda said.

Saffy, who wouldn’t recognize irony if she had a one-night stand with it and got knocked up, nodded in sisterly solidarity. “I know, right?”

What bugs us is just how easily good fortune seems to come to other people. As Amanda observes, the only reason she can see why she’s not the current Duchess of Cambridge is that she lives in a flat in Toa Payoh.

“I’m just as pretty as that Kate woman!” she said the other day as she grudgingly admired, for the hundredth time, pictures of the Royal Wedding in her souvenir Women’s Weekly edition. “And I’ve got a degree from Harvard! What does she have?”

“Royal connections and a posh British accent,” Saffy piped up helpfully.

“Oh shut up, Tyra!”

But what really gets our goat is all those people who became instant millionaires because of an app they designed. ‘Angry Birds’ get us particularly incensed.

            In one year, the developers made $100m. One hundred million dollars. From a game that basically shoots badly drawn cartoon birds at badly drawn cartoon pigs.

            “Wah, so fun, I tell you!” was Sharyn’s verdict as she tried out the Christmas edition. “I play play play till I cannot sleep! Jia-lat!”

            This only made Saffy even grumpier as she thought of all the hundreds of millions of Sharyns out there who’d just parted with good money for such a stupid game.

            “Why can’t we come up with an app of our own?” she demanded the other morning. The question haunts her waking hours as she scribbles ideas into a notebook that's devoted to app development. So far, her best idea is a variation on Angry Birds, but instead of birds, round heads bearing a remarkable resemblance to Prince William are hurled at a pair of bouncing breasts. “Modelled on mine,” she adds just in case anyone missed the resemblance.

            Leave it to Sharyn to come up with an app idea that might actually make money. She told me about this afternoon at lunch, leaning in over a steaming bowl of bah kut teh.

“You know how there are apps that help you find people, like dates and friends?” she whispered, the steam from the soup fogging her thick glasses. “They show you on a map and where other people are, right?”

            She took my silence as encouragement to go on. “What if you have an app that tells you if your enemies are near! Then you can fast fast run away!”

            When Amanda heard about this, her reaction was: “Oh. My. God. That is sheer genius! Why didn’t we think of that? I have so many enemies I’m always scared of bumping into!”

            Saffy says the first person she’d add with this new app would be Sharyn. 

Fly By

It’s funny what sleep deprivation can do to you.

            Recently, Saffy and Amanda and I took a holiday to London. It will go down as one of the worst in recorded history. The calendar said we were in April, but the weather insisted it was early January. Grey skies, rain and cold. It was so miserable. Then one day, it started snowing.

            “Isn’t it meant to be sunny?” Amanda complained.

            Saffy shivered. “I’m so cold. I only packed tee-shirts!”

            “Let’s get out of here and go somewhere warmer,” I said.

            Which is how we found ourselves at the airport one early morning waiting for a plane to Greece. It was one of those really weird continental flights on a super cheap budget airline that takes off at 7 a.m. You know the one. It’s not quite nighttime but it also doesn’t feel like morning, so everybody is very confused, not sure whether to go back to sleep or have breakfast.

So, we decided to eat since Amanda said that it had taken her an hour to get her hair just right and she couldn’t afford to mess it up.

“You know what would be a brilliant idea?” Saffy suddenly said in the middle of chewing an awful, stale muffin she’d bought from the airport café.

“I think they should convert the front half of the plane into an activity room!” she declared and sat back in triumph, sipping her cappuccino and waiting for the songs of praise to begin.

I put down my scone. “Well, first of all,” I said, “who are they?”

“The airplane people, of course!” Saffy said. “The ones who control what’s going on. I think they have an office up in that tower where they spend a lot of time blinking at radar screens and saying things like, ‘Flight Niner one Foxtrot, you’re clear for descent on runway two. Tractor beams are engaged on my count. Three, two, one. Welcome home, Galactica!’”

I stared at her for a while. “Thank god you’re pretty!” I said eventually. “I don’t think you should drink so much coffee before sunrise.”

“But not as pretty as me, of course,” Amanda added, not wanting to be left out of the conversation.

Saffy ignored the barb. “No, really, listen to me! If they got rid of First and Business Class – no one sits in them anyway, they’re always half empty – and moved the rest of us up, you’d have at least half a plane worth of space. Just think about it, you could put in a gym. You could arrive at your destination toned and ripped!”

Sometimes, great ideas come from such unexpected quarters.

“Or a library,” I said slowly, a whole new world of frequent flyer activity opening up before me.

“There you go!” Saffy said, beaming. “I would install a spa. Light a few aromatherapy candles, put in a few massage beds and have hunky Swedish masseurs called Lars on standby.”

“Or a lap pool,” I said.

“Then where am I going to sit?” Amanda said eventually. “You know I can’t travel Economy!”

“You should stay home more, Amanda,” Saffy said gently.

But I think Saffy is onto something. There’s no end to what you could do. With some very clever planning, you could even put in a golf driving range, though of course you wouldn’t want Tiger Woods to be playing, since he’d probably drive a hole right through the rear of the plane.

“Oh, don’t be silly!” Saffy said. “Tiger Woods has his own plane. He would probably put in a tennis court on his. It’s like how Michael Jordan plays baseball and golf in his spare time. Tiger Woods probably practises forehands in his. Anyway, we don’t care what he does in his own plane. I want a dance-floor with strobe lights.”

Later, on the flight to Greece, Saffy said that we could also put in bedrooms which make the Mile High Club more comfortable. “Not to mention so much more sanitary. Imagine having to do it in that little toilet!”

“I’m not sure why anyone would want to do it anywhere!” said Amanda, who is currently single and therefore insanely jealous of anyone who is in a relationship.

The options for all that extra space are endless. You could put in a Jacuzzi and steam room. Or a restaurant. Or a full sized movie screen, so you never again have to squint at the tiny screen. And those big-assed A380s? Waste of space – has anyone you know ever gone upstairs? You could rip up the upper deck floor and turn the whole thing into a bungee jump.

Now, wouldn’t that be something?