If it’s one thing that gets up my goat, it’s shop assistants who think they’re God’s gift to humanity. And before the National Shop Assistants Guild gets all upset with me and sends me a long indignant letter – like this lady who got really riled with my recent story about vegetarians – let me quickly clarify that I’m talking about a select group of shop assistants.
I am not, for instance, talking about the nice folks at Isetan and Giordano. Or the lovely uncle down in my corner supermarket who always asks what I’ve been up to whenever he sees me. And to Saffy, he asks who she’s been up to, a question that never fails to send her into peals of hysterical laughter.
“He’s so cute!” she said once, to which Amanda said that ‘cute’ was not a word she would use to describe a 72-year old man whose habitual form of dress was a pair of dirty shorts and a Pagoda-brand singlet.
No, the shop assistants that I have an issue with are invariably dressed in head to toe black outfits from the designer shop that they work at. No names, of course, will be mentioned, but they know who they are.
“And they don’t even look good in those clothes!” Saffy huffed once, after being given the Look by one particularly rude assistant.
Do you know the Look? It’s that pitying glance that they give you when you walk into the shop. It’s a look that says, “I know you can’t afford anything in this shop, so I don’t think I want to serve you. Please don’t make eye-contact with me. I’m busy arranging the key-chains in this drawer.”
And while you walked in with every intention of buying something, you’re so disgusted with the Look that you decide to just torment them.
This pimply guy once followed me around the Gucci store, watching me with a beady eye as if I was a potential shop-lifter. Every time I touched something, he swooped in after me to rearrange and tidy up.
I fingered a shirt. “That’s made from cotton,” he told me in the kind of tone that, if this was a foreign language film, would also have said in subtitles, “Are you sure you’re in the right shop?”
I turned to him and focused on the pimple on his right cheek. “Yes, I know. But what sort of cotton is it?”
He hesitated, and you could tell that he knew he’d picked the wrong person to be rude to. “It’s 100% cotton!” he said finally.
“Yes, but is it Egyptian?”
By this time, even his pimple was turning red from embarrassment.
Then there was this one time I was getting a shirt made at this fancy shirt shop that my family has been going to for years. I’d grown sick of my wardrobe and decided to start the coming new year with new clothes. So there I was discussing fabric and collar styles with this auntie shop assistant when someone walked into the shop. She looked up, brightened and said to me, “Ah, excuse me, hor. I get my colleague to look after you. One of my important customer just come in!”
And with that, she scuttled off towards a fat American man, her Singlish accent suddenly turning into a Deep South drawl as she approached him. (And before the Fat American Men Association writes me an irate letter, let me just say that I’m not being derogatory. He was a man, he was American, and he was fat.)
Recently, Amanda was shopping for a bag at Bottega Venetta. She looked around for help. Six shop assistants milled around chatting about their lunch plans while Amanda tried to get someone’s attention. Finally, one reluctantly walked towards her.
“No more stock,” she said to Amanda’s question.
“Do you have the model X, then?” Amanda asked.
The assistant looked at her blankly.
“It’s from the new Autumn/Winter collection. It was just shown in Milan.”
As Amanda later said, it was clear as daylight that she knew more about the stock in the shop than the assistant did.
“I’m not sure,” the woman replied, looking really bored, and before Amanda could ask a follow up question, the assistant literally yelled across the floor, “Hey, you! Come serve customer! I have to go makan!"
Amanda walked out the store, her wallet still heavy with the $2000 that she had been itching to spend all afternoon. She called up her remisier and bought OUB shares instead.
This must be what they mean when they say it’s ‘Your Singapore’.
Monday, August 02, 2010
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Campaign Trail
My American friend Mark is on his way to Sydney and stopping over in Singapore. This is his first time and can I just say that it’s endlessly interesting seeing this town through his eyes. Things we’re so used to suddenly become brand new again.
For starters, he couldn’t get over the fact that are three Louis Vuitton boutiques all within a few minutes of each other.
“Why do you need so many?” he asked me as if I were personally responsible.
“Ask Amanda,” I said. “She knows all the staff and throws birthday parties for them.”
East Coast Parkway with its endless stretch of seafood restaurants threw him into a spin, as did the wet toilets everywhere he went. “It’s like someone had a shower in the sink!” he said when he emerged from the toilet at Toa Payoh interchange.
Which led Saffy to pipe up that she once saw a mother stand her 3-year old son on the edge of the sink in the public toilet at Cineleisure and loudly instruct him to pee into it.
“Shut up!” Mark said.
“I will if you sleep with me!” Saffy muttered. She later told her best friend Sharyn that she might need to carry a mop around with her if Mark stayed any longer.
“You need mop for what?” Sharyn asked, her eyes huge behind her Coke-bottle thick spectacles.
“I really need to be best friends with someone else,” Saffy told Amanda adding she now understood why there was white slavery. “I’d kidnap him in a second.”
A few nights ago, Mike came home and said he’d just spotted a poster on the MRT: “It’s not cool to pick your nose openly. It’s not cool to litter.”
“Seriously?” he said, his American sensibilities both bemused and mortified.
What is it about Singaporeans that we always seem to need someone to tell us what not to do? First, it was ‘don’t litter’. Then, it was ‘don’t spit’. After that, it was ‘don’t pee all over the toilet floor’. And now, ‘don’t pick your nose in public’.
Shouldn’t these things be self-explanatory? Why do we need to involve the government which, surely, must have better things to do with its time and expensively educated scholars? Like, I don’t know, govern the country.
My sister said to me recently this is why she’s stopped shaking hands when meeting new people. “Seriously, you just don’t know where their hands have been! If most people don’t wash their hands after visiting the loo, what makes you think they will when they’ve finished picking their nose? It’s a wonder the whole world isn’t dead from some foul plague!” she exclaimed, channelling her inner medieval-ness.
More to the point, how are people being brought up? What are the parents teaching their children? In what universe is it acceptable to pee all over the toilet floor? Because if we don’t do it at home, why is it suddenly acceptable to do it in public?
“I can’t even do a number two if I think someone can hear the splashes,” Saffy mumbled through a mouthful of spaghetti bolognaise. At which Amanda put down her fork and pushed her plate away. She glared at Saffy who looked up from her plate and said, “What?”
“Well, I think it’s a little strange,” Mark said. “What gets me is that there must be a lot of people picking their nose in public on the train if the government has to then launch a campaign to stop it.”
“Oh, it’s an epidemic!” Saffy said. “And it’s all on YouTube. You could be there all day! But you know what they should really do a campaign against, it’s people who clip their finger nails in public.”
Mark barked out a deep throated laugh and you could see Saffy shift uncomfortably in her seat. “Oh, they do not do that!” he said.
Automatically, Saffy’s ample bosom inflated. “It’s truly vile! I have seen mothers
give their children full on pedicures. And there was this one time I was nearly blinded when a sharp shrapnel ricocheted off the window and into my eye! I should have sued!”
“I really do pity the cleaners who have to clean the train at the end of the day,” I said.
“So what do you do when you see someone pick their nose? Are you supposed to report them?” Mark asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” Amanda said with a negligent toss of her shampoo ad hair. “I never take the MRT!”
Later that night, Saffy said to me that maybe there should be a social campaign against people like Amanda.
For starters, he couldn’t get over the fact that are three Louis Vuitton boutiques all within a few minutes of each other.
“Why do you need so many?” he asked me as if I were personally responsible.
“Ask Amanda,” I said. “She knows all the staff and throws birthday parties for them.”
East Coast Parkway with its endless stretch of seafood restaurants threw him into a spin, as did the wet toilets everywhere he went. “It’s like someone had a shower in the sink!” he said when he emerged from the toilet at Toa Payoh interchange.
Which led Saffy to pipe up that she once saw a mother stand her 3-year old son on the edge of the sink in the public toilet at Cineleisure and loudly instruct him to pee into it.
“Shut up!” Mark said.
“I will if you sleep with me!” Saffy muttered. She later told her best friend Sharyn that she might need to carry a mop around with her if Mark stayed any longer.
“You need mop for what?” Sharyn asked, her eyes huge behind her Coke-bottle thick spectacles.
“I really need to be best friends with someone else,” Saffy told Amanda adding she now understood why there was white slavery. “I’d kidnap him in a second.”
A few nights ago, Mike came home and said he’d just spotted a poster on the MRT: “It’s not cool to pick your nose openly. It’s not cool to litter.”
“Seriously?” he said, his American sensibilities both bemused and mortified.
What is it about Singaporeans that we always seem to need someone to tell us what not to do? First, it was ‘don’t litter’. Then, it was ‘don’t spit’. After that, it was ‘don’t pee all over the toilet floor’. And now, ‘don’t pick your nose in public’.
Shouldn’t these things be self-explanatory? Why do we need to involve the government which, surely, must have better things to do with its time and expensively educated scholars? Like, I don’t know, govern the country.
My sister said to me recently this is why she’s stopped shaking hands when meeting new people. “Seriously, you just don’t know where their hands have been! If most people don’t wash their hands after visiting the loo, what makes you think they will when they’ve finished picking their nose? It’s a wonder the whole world isn’t dead from some foul plague!” she exclaimed, channelling her inner medieval-ness.
More to the point, how are people being brought up? What are the parents teaching their children? In what universe is it acceptable to pee all over the toilet floor? Because if we don’t do it at home, why is it suddenly acceptable to do it in public?
“I can’t even do a number two if I think someone can hear the splashes,” Saffy mumbled through a mouthful of spaghetti bolognaise. At which Amanda put down her fork and pushed her plate away. She glared at Saffy who looked up from her plate and said, “What?”
“Well, I think it’s a little strange,” Mark said. “What gets me is that there must be a lot of people picking their nose in public on the train if the government has to then launch a campaign to stop it.”
“Oh, it’s an epidemic!” Saffy said. “And it’s all on YouTube. You could be there all day! But you know what they should really do a campaign against, it’s people who clip their finger nails in public.”
Mark barked out a deep throated laugh and you could see Saffy shift uncomfortably in her seat. “Oh, they do not do that!” he said.
Automatically, Saffy’s ample bosom inflated. “It’s truly vile! I have seen mothers
give their children full on pedicures. And there was this one time I was nearly blinded when a sharp shrapnel ricocheted off the window and into my eye! I should have sued!”
“I really do pity the cleaners who have to clean the train at the end of the day,” I said.
“So what do you do when you see someone pick their nose? Are you supposed to report them?” Mark asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” Amanda said with a negligent toss of her shampoo ad hair. “I never take the MRT!”
Later that night, Saffy said to me that maybe there should be a social campaign against people like Amanda.
Monday, July 19, 2010
YouTube, Brutus?
The other day, someone asked me what I couldn’t live without.
I think he was being intellectually provocative or, at the very least, he was blind drunk. You know how you sometimes meet people like that at parties? They come up to you round about 1.30am, slightly wobbly on the feet, and eyes with that unfocused gaze that comes from having nursed, all night, a deeply intimate relationship with Jack Daniels on the rocks. They lean forward, happily unaware that they’re invading your private space and then, in a haze of alcoholic vapour, they ask you what your name is.
Well, anyway, this guy at Marina’s party leaned in and whispered, “What can’t you live without, mate?”
I replied instinctively, without thinking: “YouTube”.
Drunk Guy stared at me for a bit, then blinked red-flecked eyes. “Me, too, what?”
It was my turn to blink. Mentally, I replayed the last five seconds. “Oh, no, not, ‘You, too’. YouTube!”
“Yeah, what about me?”
Just then, I felt a vacuum being formed next to me as Saffy sidled up, her legendary bosom carving out its own air-currents as it advanced.
“Hello, who are you?” she asked as she peered at Drunk Guy with interest. “You’re cute. Are you single?”
Drunk Guy slowly moved his head towards Saffy’s bosom which was currently generating its own gravitational field.
“I was jushh talking to your friend,” he slurred, “and he was about to tell me what he…couldnn…couldn’t…live without.”
“Oh, I can’t live without bee-hoon,” Saffy said immediately, demonstrating, once again, her ability to effortlessly turn any subject to herself. “It keeps me regular!”
“He…” Drunk Guy said, pointing me, “said ‘Me, too’! Which duh-zhun make senshhh!”
“No, I said ‘YouTube’!”
“There he goshhhh again!”
The next morning, Saffy said to me that it was a scandal that I was allowed out of the house unattended. “You were at a party. A man approached you. He was cute and obviously drunk! Why were you wasting time talking to him? Why didn’t you immediately send him over to me?”
“More to the point,” said Amanda, “why would you say that you can’t live without YouTube? Could you be a bigger dork?”
I replied stoutly that it was pointless trying to express how life-changing YouTube is to two women who thought ‘Twilight’ was literature.
Have you forgotten the theme song to ‘Wonder Woman’? What does Zsa Zsa Gabor sound like? On the other side of the world and missed the floods along Orchard Road? Looking for a hard-to-find Jeff Lynn album? Want to know if getting a tattoo hurts? Want to relive the opening number for the 2009 Academy Awards? Or watch a TV programme from the 70s and HMV doesn’t stock it? Not sure how to cook an omelette?
It’s all on YouTube.
I’m telling you, every class on the planet should have compulsory YouTube lesson. Forget about textbooks or endless lectures about how you should never pop a pimple. Screen a YouTube clip of the world’s biggest pimple being popped and it’ll put you off fatty, fried food for the rest of your life.
Just the other day, Mel Gibson’s rant at his ex-girlfriend was all over the news. You could read the transcripts in the newspapers all you like, but nothing brings home Mel’s madness more clearly than a quick trip to YouTube.
“That’s just strange, Jason!” Saffy announced at the end of my defence. “Why is Mel Gibson’s rant interesting in any way?”
I sighed as I pulled out my laptop and called up YouTube.
“Here!” I said, getting up from the dining table and heading into the kitchen to make lunch while Saffy and Amanda watched. Or rather, listened.
And when it was all over, they played it again. And again.
“I can’t stop listening to this!” Amanda complained. “It’s so incredibly vile and degrading, but I can’t stop listening!”
“I told you!”
“Who knew Mel Gibson was like this in real life!” Saffy said, as she hit the play button for the tenth time.
“I always thought there was something a little deranged about him,” Amanda said, adding, “Ooh, look, they have Christian Bale and Alec Baldwin’s rants as well! How clever of YouTube!”
“I told you!”
From Alec Baldwin, they moved onto 30 Rock bloopers which then, thanks to YouTube’s intuitive indexing, led them to David Letterman’s interview with Tina Fey, then to Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch.
By the time midnight came around, they were still watching. When I reminded Saffy that Drunk Guy had called earlier, she said, without once taking her eyes off a commercial from the 80s, “Oh, who cares?”
I think he was being intellectually provocative or, at the very least, he was blind drunk. You know how you sometimes meet people like that at parties? They come up to you round about 1.30am, slightly wobbly on the feet, and eyes with that unfocused gaze that comes from having nursed, all night, a deeply intimate relationship with Jack Daniels on the rocks. They lean forward, happily unaware that they’re invading your private space and then, in a haze of alcoholic vapour, they ask you what your name is.
Well, anyway, this guy at Marina’s party leaned in and whispered, “What can’t you live without, mate?”
I replied instinctively, without thinking: “YouTube”.
Drunk Guy stared at me for a bit, then blinked red-flecked eyes. “Me, too, what?”
It was my turn to blink. Mentally, I replayed the last five seconds. “Oh, no, not, ‘You, too’. YouTube!”
“Yeah, what about me?”
Just then, I felt a vacuum being formed next to me as Saffy sidled up, her legendary bosom carving out its own air-currents as it advanced.
“Hello, who are you?” she asked as she peered at Drunk Guy with interest. “You’re cute. Are you single?”
Drunk Guy slowly moved his head towards Saffy’s bosom which was currently generating its own gravitational field.
“I was jushh talking to your friend,” he slurred, “and he was about to tell me what he…couldnn…couldn’t…live without.”
“Oh, I can’t live without bee-hoon,” Saffy said immediately, demonstrating, once again, her ability to effortlessly turn any subject to herself. “It keeps me regular!”
“He…” Drunk Guy said, pointing me, “said ‘Me, too’! Which duh-zhun make senshhh!”
“No, I said ‘YouTube’!”
“There he goshhhh again!”
The next morning, Saffy said to me that it was a scandal that I was allowed out of the house unattended. “You were at a party. A man approached you. He was cute and obviously drunk! Why were you wasting time talking to him? Why didn’t you immediately send him over to me?”
“More to the point,” said Amanda, “why would you say that you can’t live without YouTube? Could you be a bigger dork?”
I replied stoutly that it was pointless trying to express how life-changing YouTube is to two women who thought ‘Twilight’ was literature.
Have you forgotten the theme song to ‘Wonder Woman’? What does Zsa Zsa Gabor sound like? On the other side of the world and missed the floods along Orchard Road? Looking for a hard-to-find Jeff Lynn album? Want to know if getting a tattoo hurts? Want to relive the opening number for the 2009 Academy Awards? Or watch a TV programme from the 70s and HMV doesn’t stock it? Not sure how to cook an omelette?
It’s all on YouTube.
I’m telling you, every class on the planet should have compulsory YouTube lesson. Forget about textbooks or endless lectures about how you should never pop a pimple. Screen a YouTube clip of the world’s biggest pimple being popped and it’ll put you off fatty, fried food for the rest of your life.
Just the other day, Mel Gibson’s rant at his ex-girlfriend was all over the news. You could read the transcripts in the newspapers all you like, but nothing brings home Mel’s madness more clearly than a quick trip to YouTube.
“That’s just strange, Jason!” Saffy announced at the end of my defence. “Why is Mel Gibson’s rant interesting in any way?”
I sighed as I pulled out my laptop and called up YouTube.
“Here!” I said, getting up from the dining table and heading into the kitchen to make lunch while Saffy and Amanda watched. Or rather, listened.
And when it was all over, they played it again. And again.
“I can’t stop listening to this!” Amanda complained. “It’s so incredibly vile and degrading, but I can’t stop listening!”
“I told you!”
“Who knew Mel Gibson was like this in real life!” Saffy said, as she hit the play button for the tenth time.
“I always thought there was something a little deranged about him,” Amanda said, adding, “Ooh, look, they have Christian Bale and Alec Baldwin’s rants as well! How clever of YouTube!”
“I told you!”
From Alec Baldwin, they moved onto 30 Rock bloopers which then, thanks to YouTube’s intuitive indexing, led them to David Letterman’s interview with Tina Fey, then to Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch.
By the time midnight came around, they were still watching. When I reminded Saffy that Drunk Guy had called earlier, she said, without once taking her eyes off a commercial from the 80s, “Oh, who cares?”
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Blood Thirsty
When I was younger, I used to love watching scary movies. The scarier and gorier, the better. Nothing made my day more than settling down to a 90-minute scream fest in which all the pretty young things on screen were chopped, sliced and diced by Freddy Krueger. I always imagined that the horrible bullies at my school were the ones up there being tortured.
Needless to say, I watched ‘Scream’ and ‘Final Destination’ and all its sequels at least a dozen times each. But since no one I knew liked scary movies, invariably, I would go alone.
I loved the sensation of being scared witless, slowly slouching lower into my seat as the stupid girls on screen walked around the corridors of a dark deserted house in their bikinis while whispering, “Hello? Is anybody there?”
And when it was all over, and the credits rolled, still I would sit there, waiting for that last final thrill just in case there was extra surprise footage at the end. And usually, it would suddenly occur to me that I was the only one left in the cinema. Well, me and the cinema cleaner who was slowly sweeping up all the spilt popcorn.
And then I’d start wondering if the cleaner turned out to be a homicidal maniac, no one would hear me scream.
Then one day, I matured and grew up. I started watching the wave of Japanese and Korean horror ghost movies and brought my self-induced terror level up to a whole new dimension.
“You really are sick,” my flatmate Amanda said recently when I brought home a stack of DVDs I’d bought on sale at HMV. She picked through the titles. “Oh my God, ‘The Ring’?”
“The original version, not that stupid Naomi Watts thing that wasn’t even remotely scary!”
Later that night, I overheard her complaining to Saffy. “It must be a boy thing!”
“My brother’s exactly the same!” Saffy reported. “His all time favourite movie is ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’! It’s truly sick! And now, he’s addicted to ‘True Blood’!”
“Oooh, I hear that’s very good,” Amanda cooed.
“How can that be? It’s about vampires!” The air pressure dropped slightly from the force of Saffy’s puffed up bosom.
“But they’re cute vampires! And the werewolves are even hunkier!”
“Werewolves? Seriously, Amanda, who did you sleep with at Harvard to get that degree?”
There was a moment of wounded silence, but Amanda didn’t come top in her class, or end up the second highest fee-earner in her office by being soft, and it would take more than Saffy to inflict any long term damage.
“OK, where’s my iPhone?” Amanda murmured, rummaging in her bag. She whipped out her phone and slid her finger across the screen.
“Look at my screensaver!” she ordered and thrust the phone in front of Saffy who stared. And then stared some more.
“Good Lord, who is this guy?”
“It’s Alexander Skarsgard! He plays Eric Northman, a vampire in ‘True Blood’!”
“Oooh, he can scar me anytime!”
“I told you! And his father is Stellan! He was one of the fathers in ‘Mamma Mia’!”
You could practically see the exclamation marks hanging in the air.
“Oh, that’s not a good thing,” Saffy said doubtfully. “My mother always said that if you want to know what your boyfriend will look like in 30 years, take a look at his father.”
Amanda sighed. “Who cares what he’s going to look like in 30 years? He’s hot now! In 30 years, you and I will be so nipped and tucked we won’t be able to smile without farting!”
Saffy later said to me that it always astonishes her whenever she remembers that Amanda had gone to a Swiss boarding school. “She can be so incredibly crude! I’m sure that kind of talk was never on the school curriculum!”
“So, you’re watching ‘True Blood’ now?” I asked.
“Well, I’m just about halfway through the first season DVD box-set,” Saffy said. “It’s all rather creepy and everyone seems to doing things only at night! And can I just say that there’s a lot of very unnatural sex going on?”
When she mentioned this to Sharyn, her best friend gaped at her. “Ay,” Sharyn said, her thick glasses fogging up. “My pastor say you shouldn’t watch these devil shows! You die while watching, you kena go to hell!”
“There are no such things as vampires, Sharyn!” Saffy said calmly as she tucked into her bee-hoon lunch. “And if there were, they ain’t never gonna be as drop dead gorgeous as Bill Compton and Eric Northman, lemme tell ya!”
“Why you talk so funny?” Sharyn demanded.
“I'm talking like the characters. God, I wish my life was an HBO show!”
Needless to say, I watched ‘Scream’ and ‘Final Destination’ and all its sequels at least a dozen times each. But since no one I knew liked scary movies, invariably, I would go alone.
I loved the sensation of being scared witless, slowly slouching lower into my seat as the stupid girls on screen walked around the corridors of a dark deserted house in their bikinis while whispering, “Hello? Is anybody there?”
And when it was all over, and the credits rolled, still I would sit there, waiting for that last final thrill just in case there was extra surprise footage at the end. And usually, it would suddenly occur to me that I was the only one left in the cinema. Well, me and the cinema cleaner who was slowly sweeping up all the spilt popcorn.
And then I’d start wondering if the cleaner turned out to be a homicidal maniac, no one would hear me scream.
Then one day, I matured and grew up. I started watching the wave of Japanese and Korean horror ghost movies and brought my self-induced terror level up to a whole new dimension.
“You really are sick,” my flatmate Amanda said recently when I brought home a stack of DVDs I’d bought on sale at HMV. She picked through the titles. “Oh my God, ‘The Ring’?”
“The original version, not that stupid Naomi Watts thing that wasn’t even remotely scary!”
Later that night, I overheard her complaining to Saffy. “It must be a boy thing!”
“My brother’s exactly the same!” Saffy reported. “His all time favourite movie is ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’! It’s truly sick! And now, he’s addicted to ‘True Blood’!”
“Oooh, I hear that’s very good,” Amanda cooed.
“How can that be? It’s about vampires!” The air pressure dropped slightly from the force of Saffy’s puffed up bosom.
“But they’re cute vampires! And the werewolves are even hunkier!”
“Werewolves? Seriously, Amanda, who did you sleep with at Harvard to get that degree?”
There was a moment of wounded silence, but Amanda didn’t come top in her class, or end up the second highest fee-earner in her office by being soft, and it would take more than Saffy to inflict any long term damage.
“OK, where’s my iPhone?” Amanda murmured, rummaging in her bag. She whipped out her phone and slid her finger across the screen.
“Look at my screensaver!” she ordered and thrust the phone in front of Saffy who stared. And then stared some more.
“Good Lord, who is this guy?”
“It’s Alexander Skarsgard! He plays Eric Northman, a vampire in ‘True Blood’!”
“Oooh, he can scar me anytime!”
“I told you! And his father is Stellan! He was one of the fathers in ‘Mamma Mia’!”
You could practically see the exclamation marks hanging in the air.
“Oh, that’s not a good thing,” Saffy said doubtfully. “My mother always said that if you want to know what your boyfriend will look like in 30 years, take a look at his father.”
Amanda sighed. “Who cares what he’s going to look like in 30 years? He’s hot now! In 30 years, you and I will be so nipped and tucked we won’t be able to smile without farting!”
Saffy later said to me that it always astonishes her whenever she remembers that Amanda had gone to a Swiss boarding school. “She can be so incredibly crude! I’m sure that kind of talk was never on the school curriculum!”
“So, you’re watching ‘True Blood’ now?” I asked.
“Well, I’m just about halfway through the first season DVD box-set,” Saffy said. “It’s all rather creepy and everyone seems to doing things only at night! And can I just say that there’s a lot of very unnatural sex going on?”
When she mentioned this to Sharyn, her best friend gaped at her. “Ay,” Sharyn said, her thick glasses fogging up. “My pastor say you shouldn’t watch these devil shows! You die while watching, you kena go to hell!”
“There are no such things as vampires, Sharyn!” Saffy said calmly as she tucked into her bee-hoon lunch. “And if there were, they ain’t never gonna be as drop dead gorgeous as Bill Compton and Eric Northman, lemme tell ya!”
“Why you talk so funny?” Sharyn demanded.
“I'm talking like the characters. God, I wish my life was an HBO show!”
Friday, July 02, 2010
Raining champion
They say that you could be on the world’s most beautiful island – surrounded by nothing but Tiffany-clear water and a sky the colour of crushed sapphires – but after a while, you’ll start to get jittery. Let those jitters fester a little longer and you begin to go mad. ‘Island fever’, they call it.
But imagine what happens when you’re stuck inside a tiny flat with two bad tempered women and a hyperactive dog that’s not been out for a walk all day because, outside, it’s like Noah’s Ark: the Sequel.
“Seriously, how can there be so much rain?” Saffy complained as she peered out the window, her words almost drowned out by the loud clatter of rain drops against the glass. “I need to get out of here! I’m so late for my bikini wax!”
“I seriously doubt if anyone is making any of their appointments today,” I said, and was rewarded with a filthy look.
“You men always have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
I opened my mouth to reply but spotted the cleverly laid trap just in time, and shut up.
Sensing the spike in hostile emotions, my beloved mongrel dog Pooch looked up from under the dining table and growled softly. For a moment, I wished that I had a Doberman who was trained to leap and attack, and ask questions later.
Saffy looked disappointed her ruse had failed. She immediately turned on Amanda who was sitting on the lounge fiddling with her iPhone. “That’s very sociable of you, Amanda, to just sit there and not contribute to the conversation!”
“I’m watching a YouTube link Sharyn just sent me. Look at this, Orchard Road is flooded!”
Her bad mood generated by her meteorological captivity temporarily forgotten, Saffy bounced onto the sofa to peer over Amanda’s shoulder. “Turn it up,” she ordered.
The shaky image panned around for a 180 degree view of a flooded Orchard Road. Then the camera settled on the Hermès store in Liat Tower. Muddy water lapped against the shop and a disembodied voice announced, “Hermès kena!”
Saffy dissolved into squeals of laughter and for days after, at oddly inappropriate moments, she would suddenly say, “Hermès kena!”
Amanda wondered aloud whether she should station herself outside the store. “This might just be the time to grab a Birkin bag as it floats out of the store!”
At 3pm, it was still raining heavily and to make matters worse, our ancient microwave oven decided to call it a day and stopped working with a sad little ‘ping’.
Amanda who was in the midst of warming up her leftover prawn noodles when this happened spent a good five minutes screaming profanities at the machine. Saffy was endlessly impressed. “This is what they teach you in Swiss boarding school!” she whispered to me.
When Amanda emerged from the kitchen, her hair was a little mussed up, and she had a deranged look in her eyes as she picked up her phone to dial.
“Hello?” she snapped. “Do you sell microwave ovens? You do? Great. What model? Uh huh…uh huh…How much?...uh huh…mmm…yes…OK, and when can you deliver…uhm, what ‘s your name? Catherine? Cat-ereen? I’m sorry, I can’t understand you! How do you spell that? Wait, let me get a pen and paper. OK, go ahead…T…A…S…Uh huh…uh huh…Seriously? That’s your name?”
Sensing a welcome bout of diverting drama, Saffy looked at me.
When Amanda clicked off her phone, it was clear that her bad mood had lifted. “You know, I was sure she said her name was Katerine, like the Russian, but she pronounced it in such an odd way I had to ask her to spell it out. And it’s Taserine!”
I frowned. “As in Listerine?”
“Or tangerine?” Saffy said. “I’m just amazed at the names that Singaporeans make up for themselves. It shows such creativity!”
“It’s not creative, it’s weird!” Amanda said. “If she was African-American, I’d understand it, but this girl could not have been more Singaporean!”
“Maybe she’s an African-American who’s lived here her whole life?” Saffy suggested.
“Actually, she sounds like a comic super-hero,” Amanda said. “She’s Wolverine’s sister and her hair turns into deadly whips!”
And that’s how we pulled ourselves out of our cranky moods, entertaining ourselves for the rest of the day with strange names.
By the time the rain finally stopped, we were laughing again. We threw open the windows and the soft smell of a freshly washed earth wafted in. Sharyn came over with a da-pao dinner and listened earnestly to Amanda’s story.
“Wah!” she said, her glasses fogging up. “Lucky she not call herself Vaseline! Then, really kena with boys!”
But imagine what happens when you’re stuck inside a tiny flat with two bad tempered women and a hyperactive dog that’s not been out for a walk all day because, outside, it’s like Noah’s Ark: the Sequel.
“Seriously, how can there be so much rain?” Saffy complained as she peered out the window, her words almost drowned out by the loud clatter of rain drops against the glass. “I need to get out of here! I’m so late for my bikini wax!”
“I seriously doubt if anyone is making any of their appointments today,” I said, and was rewarded with a filthy look.
“You men always have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
I opened my mouth to reply but spotted the cleverly laid trap just in time, and shut up.
Sensing the spike in hostile emotions, my beloved mongrel dog Pooch looked up from under the dining table and growled softly. For a moment, I wished that I had a Doberman who was trained to leap and attack, and ask questions later.
Saffy looked disappointed her ruse had failed. She immediately turned on Amanda who was sitting on the lounge fiddling with her iPhone. “That’s very sociable of you, Amanda, to just sit there and not contribute to the conversation!”
“I’m watching a YouTube link Sharyn just sent me. Look at this, Orchard Road is flooded!”
Her bad mood generated by her meteorological captivity temporarily forgotten, Saffy bounced onto the sofa to peer over Amanda’s shoulder. “Turn it up,” she ordered.
The shaky image panned around for a 180 degree view of a flooded Orchard Road. Then the camera settled on the Hermès store in Liat Tower. Muddy water lapped against the shop and a disembodied voice announced, “Hermès kena!”
Saffy dissolved into squeals of laughter and for days after, at oddly inappropriate moments, she would suddenly say, “Hermès kena!”
Amanda wondered aloud whether she should station herself outside the store. “This might just be the time to grab a Birkin bag as it floats out of the store!”
At 3pm, it was still raining heavily and to make matters worse, our ancient microwave oven decided to call it a day and stopped working with a sad little ‘ping’.
Amanda who was in the midst of warming up her leftover prawn noodles when this happened spent a good five minutes screaming profanities at the machine. Saffy was endlessly impressed. “This is what they teach you in Swiss boarding school!” she whispered to me.
When Amanda emerged from the kitchen, her hair was a little mussed up, and she had a deranged look in her eyes as she picked up her phone to dial.
“Hello?” she snapped. “Do you sell microwave ovens? You do? Great. What model? Uh huh…uh huh…How much?...uh huh…mmm…yes…OK, and when can you deliver…uhm, what ‘s your name? Catherine? Cat-ereen? I’m sorry, I can’t understand you! How do you spell that? Wait, let me get a pen and paper. OK, go ahead…T…A…S…Uh huh…uh huh…Seriously? That’s your name?”
Sensing a welcome bout of diverting drama, Saffy looked at me.
When Amanda clicked off her phone, it was clear that her bad mood had lifted. “You know, I was sure she said her name was Katerine, like the Russian, but she pronounced it in such an odd way I had to ask her to spell it out. And it’s Taserine!”
I frowned. “As in Listerine?”
“Or tangerine?” Saffy said. “I’m just amazed at the names that Singaporeans make up for themselves. It shows such creativity!”
“It’s not creative, it’s weird!” Amanda said. “If she was African-American, I’d understand it, but this girl could not have been more Singaporean!”
“Maybe she’s an African-American who’s lived here her whole life?” Saffy suggested.
“Actually, she sounds like a comic super-hero,” Amanda said. “She’s Wolverine’s sister and her hair turns into deadly whips!”
And that’s how we pulled ourselves out of our cranky moods, entertaining ourselves for the rest of the day with strange names.
By the time the rain finally stopped, we were laughing again. We threw open the windows and the soft smell of a freshly washed earth wafted in. Sharyn came over with a da-pao dinner and listened earnestly to Amanda’s story.
“Wah!” she said, her glasses fogging up. “Lucky she not call herself Vaseline! Then, really kena with boys!”
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Team player
OK, hands up all those who don’t care about the World Cup?
If you do care, I suggest you keep surfing, because there’s nothing for you here this week. And anyway, I’m sure you’ll be far too busy following the misfortunes of the English team to be reading this blog.
For those of you still reading, here’s my beef in a nutshell: I’m sorry, but I just don’t get the appeal of a bunch of guys running around a field chasing a little black and white ball.
And I certainly don’t know why you would get so excited about it. I read somewhere that back in the 1950s, when Brazil played Uruguay, and Uruguay won unexpectedly, some Brazilian fans were so distressed they literally jumped off the top of the stadium and killed themselves.
I seriously couldn’t imagine another game where this sort of thing happens. I was thinking the other day what would happen if Roger Federer didn’t win Wimbledon (well, the way he’s been going this year, he’ll probably have lost in the quarter-finals by the time you read this) and, for the life of me, I just couldn’t imagine anyone throwing themselves off the top of the stadium in howling anguish.
But when it comes to football, something strange happens to grown men and women. They get all giddy and excited like a diabetic who suddenly finds himself trapped in a Willy Wonka movie set.
The other day, I came home to find our cleaning lady, Ah Chuan screaming Hokkien vulgarities at our TV screen. From a safe distance at the door, I could just make out that Spain was playing Honduras. It turns out that the woman who’s been washing our underwear for years is a rabid Spanish fan. And watches TV when she should be cleaning.
“Thank God Spain won!” I later told my flatmates. “For a really tense moment there, I thought she was going to throw her mop through the TV screen!”
“It just goes to show,” said Saffy, “that it’s the stillest waters that run the fastest.”
“I’m sure what you meant to say was…” Amanda began.
“I mean what I mean!” Saffy interrupted smoothly. “But I think I understand what the fuss is all about!”
Amanda looked surprised. “You do? Since when do you follow football?”
“I don’t! Well, at least, I didn’t until Barney Chen sent me a recent copy of Vanity Fair!” Saffy said, reaching into her handbag and pulling out said magazine.
On the cover was Ronaldo and some football player none of us had heard of. Both were wearing nothing except very skimpy underwear.
“Good Lord,” was all Amanda could say after a long moment of silence.
“And look at this guy!” Saffy said cheerfully, as she flipped the pages and stabbed a fingernail at a Cameroon player, her sharp index fingernail dragging a neat circle over his, shall we say, southern hemisphere.
Amanda pulled the magazine closer and peered. “Is that even real?” she asked.
“That’s what I asked Barney Chen, but he said that having played in a few team sports in his time, which knowing him I’m certain is code for something sexual, he’s 90 percent sure there’s been no air-brushing involved.”
“Seriously, someone should write a letter to Fido…” Amanda began.
“FIFA,” I said automatically, surprising even myself at the depth of my football knowledge.
“Whatever, and tell them that they need to have the whole game played in underwear! It’s a wonder that anyone would watch football when the players all wear those ugly baggy shorts. Put them into Armani underwear, I say, and the viewership numbers would skyrocket!” Amanda breathed deeply as she lingered over the assorted bulges on Ronaldo’s body.
And that was how the girls have, thanks to a multiple photo-spread in Vanity Fair, become fans of football.
Of course, the tension level in our little flat has escalated somewhat. When Ah Chuan found out that Saffy had become a fan of Cameroon, Saffy’s precious white satin underwear emerged from the washing machine stained a darker shade.
“Oh, silly me! I must have forgotten to separate the whites from the darks when I did the laundry,” Ah Chuan said in Hokkien, her entire body vibrating with innocence.
Saffy turned to Amanda. “What did she say?”
“She hates your guts,” Amanda translated.
Saffy turned to Ah Chuan and smiled weakly. “It’s OK! No worries! I was going to throw these panties out anyway!” she shouted, still laboring under the impression that Ah Chuan will understand English if you say it loudly enough.
That night, she slept with her door and windows locked.
If you do care, I suggest you keep surfing, because there’s nothing for you here this week. And anyway, I’m sure you’ll be far too busy following the misfortunes of the English team to be reading this blog.
For those of you still reading, here’s my beef in a nutshell: I’m sorry, but I just don’t get the appeal of a bunch of guys running around a field chasing a little black and white ball.
And I certainly don’t know why you would get so excited about it. I read somewhere that back in the 1950s, when Brazil played Uruguay, and Uruguay won unexpectedly, some Brazilian fans were so distressed they literally jumped off the top of the stadium and killed themselves.
I seriously couldn’t imagine another game where this sort of thing happens. I was thinking the other day what would happen if Roger Federer didn’t win Wimbledon (well, the way he’s been going this year, he’ll probably have lost in the quarter-finals by the time you read this) and, for the life of me, I just couldn’t imagine anyone throwing themselves off the top of the stadium in howling anguish.
But when it comes to football, something strange happens to grown men and women. They get all giddy and excited like a diabetic who suddenly finds himself trapped in a Willy Wonka movie set.
The other day, I came home to find our cleaning lady, Ah Chuan screaming Hokkien vulgarities at our TV screen. From a safe distance at the door, I could just make out that Spain was playing Honduras. It turns out that the woman who’s been washing our underwear for years is a rabid Spanish fan. And watches TV when she should be cleaning.
“Thank God Spain won!” I later told my flatmates. “For a really tense moment there, I thought she was going to throw her mop through the TV screen!”
“It just goes to show,” said Saffy, “that it’s the stillest waters that run the fastest.”
“I’m sure what you meant to say was…” Amanda began.
“I mean what I mean!” Saffy interrupted smoothly. “But I think I understand what the fuss is all about!”
Amanda looked surprised. “You do? Since when do you follow football?”
“I don’t! Well, at least, I didn’t until Barney Chen sent me a recent copy of Vanity Fair!” Saffy said, reaching into her handbag and pulling out said magazine.
On the cover was Ronaldo and some football player none of us had heard of. Both were wearing nothing except very skimpy underwear.
“Good Lord,” was all Amanda could say after a long moment of silence.
“And look at this guy!” Saffy said cheerfully, as she flipped the pages and stabbed a fingernail at a Cameroon player, her sharp index fingernail dragging a neat circle over his, shall we say, southern hemisphere.
Amanda pulled the magazine closer and peered. “Is that even real?” she asked.
“That’s what I asked Barney Chen, but he said that having played in a few team sports in his time, which knowing him I’m certain is code for something sexual, he’s 90 percent sure there’s been no air-brushing involved.”
“Seriously, someone should write a letter to Fido…” Amanda began.
“FIFA,” I said automatically, surprising even myself at the depth of my football knowledge.
“Whatever, and tell them that they need to have the whole game played in underwear! It’s a wonder that anyone would watch football when the players all wear those ugly baggy shorts. Put them into Armani underwear, I say, and the viewership numbers would skyrocket!” Amanda breathed deeply as she lingered over the assorted bulges on Ronaldo’s body.
And that was how the girls have, thanks to a multiple photo-spread in Vanity Fair, become fans of football.
Of course, the tension level in our little flat has escalated somewhat. When Ah Chuan found out that Saffy had become a fan of Cameroon, Saffy’s precious white satin underwear emerged from the washing machine stained a darker shade.
“Oh, silly me! I must have forgotten to separate the whites from the darks when I did the laundry,” Ah Chuan said in Hokkien, her entire body vibrating with innocence.
Saffy turned to Amanda. “What did she say?”
“She hates your guts,” Amanda translated.
Saffy turned to Ah Chuan and smiled weakly. “It’s OK! No worries! I was going to throw these panties out anyway!” she shouted, still laboring under the impression that Ah Chuan will understand English if you say it loudly enough.
That night, she slept with her door and windows locked.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
That's life!
When you’re growing up, a single day can sometimes feel like a year and at the end of the day, as you’re being tucked into bed, it’s hard to believe that you’d ever managed to pack in so much – playing, reading, chatting, napping, laughing, crying, poo’ing, eating at least five times and then playing some more.
Then, one day, just when you least expect it, you realize that you’re all grown up now, there’s so much to do, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to pack it all in.
“Seriously, I have a to-do list as long as my arm!” Amanda complained the other night. She walked in the door, carelessly kicked her Manolo Blahniks into the corner and collapsed onto the sofa. “I’ve been in meetings all day and I still have 40 unanswered emails to sort through. And it’s nearly midnight! Where did my day go?”
From the other end of the sofa, Saffy looked up from an old episode of ‘The Amazing Race’ that she’d recorded a few months ago. “I hate emails!” she said. “They’re like a venereal disease, you just can’t get rid of them! Whoever invented that damned thing should be shot! Oooh, is it just me or are those cowboys, Jet and Cord super-hot?” Saffy cooed, demonstrating, not for the first time, her complete inability to stay focused on anything longer than a commercial break.
“I’d marry them in a heart-beat!” Amanda said immediately. “Even it means I have to live on a dusty old ranch, lasso horses, milk cows and say ‘Hey, y’all!’ all day!”
“That could almost be the lyrics to your next hit country single, Amanda!” Saffy giggled.
But still, Amanda’s question – ‘Where did my day go?’ – haunted us. As I write this, it’s the middle of June. And I distinctly remember us just celebrating the new year. At this rate, Christmas will be arriving tomorrow.
“You know what will really irritate me?” Amanda asked the next day. “It’s if I wake up and suddenly, I’m 60!”
“That’s all you’re worried about?” Saffy piped up. “I have nightmares that I’m going to wake up 60 and find I’m still single!”
“Choy, choy, choy!” Amanda said hurriedly as they both knocked religiously on our wooden dining table.
Saffy’s formidable bosom shifted with all the slow motion majesty of a John Woo gun fight. “Really, when you come right down to it, what’s the point of all this?” she asked, waving her hands around. “Each morning, we wake up. Drag ourselves to work. Suffer the indignity of being yelled at by fat ugly bosses. Get stressed with 300 emails and stupid deadlines. Go home and get ready to do it all again the next day. Oh, and we also get to take home five dollars a month! For what?” she added with great dissatisfaction.
“And at the rate the years are slipping by, 60 isn’t that far away!” Amanda said, stubbornly returning to her original point.
“60 doesn’t bother me at all!” Saffy huffed, though Amanda later said that was a bit rich coming from someone who’s been 29 for the past five years. “What does bother me is that I’m still going to be single at that age. How depressing would that be?”
What would be more depressing, I ventured, would be you weren’t single, but that you were shacked up with some Hong Kong movie star who insisted that no one knew the two of you were dating. Like how nobody knew Ronald Cheng and Charlene Choi had gotten divorced, when the greater shock was that no one had known they were married in the first place.
“Oh, yeah, those two weirdos!” Saffy said. “I’ll never understand that. And don’t get me started about that whole Fann Wong and Christopher Lee fandango. Why bother being attached if no one knows about it? I mean, isn’t the whole point of a boyfriend is so all those smug married couples can stop judging you?”
“And pitying you!” Amanda added.
Saffy sighed. “Ugh, I hate the pitying.”
Meanwhile, the bigger issue of how fast time is passing remains unsolvable. If Saffy and Amanda don’t want to wake up one day 60 and single, I don’t want to wake up one day realizing that I’d not done half the things I’ve always wanted to do. Like bungee jump. Learn how to ride a horse. Play the piano. Take part in a Bollywood dance number. Save the world.
And all because I spent the greater part of my life chained to a stupid desk.
Then, one day, just when you least expect it, you realize that you’re all grown up now, there’s so much to do, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to pack it all in.
“Seriously, I have a to-do list as long as my arm!” Amanda complained the other night. She walked in the door, carelessly kicked her Manolo Blahniks into the corner and collapsed onto the sofa. “I’ve been in meetings all day and I still have 40 unanswered emails to sort through. And it’s nearly midnight! Where did my day go?”
From the other end of the sofa, Saffy looked up from an old episode of ‘The Amazing Race’ that she’d recorded a few months ago. “I hate emails!” she said. “They’re like a venereal disease, you just can’t get rid of them! Whoever invented that damned thing should be shot! Oooh, is it just me or are those cowboys, Jet and Cord super-hot?” Saffy cooed, demonstrating, not for the first time, her complete inability to stay focused on anything longer than a commercial break.
“I’d marry them in a heart-beat!” Amanda said immediately. “Even it means I have to live on a dusty old ranch, lasso horses, milk cows and say ‘Hey, y’all!’ all day!”
“That could almost be the lyrics to your next hit country single, Amanda!” Saffy giggled.
But still, Amanda’s question – ‘Where did my day go?’ – haunted us. As I write this, it’s the middle of June. And I distinctly remember us just celebrating the new year. At this rate, Christmas will be arriving tomorrow.
“You know what will really irritate me?” Amanda asked the next day. “It’s if I wake up and suddenly, I’m 60!”
“That’s all you’re worried about?” Saffy piped up. “I have nightmares that I’m going to wake up 60 and find I’m still single!”
“Choy, choy, choy!” Amanda said hurriedly as they both knocked religiously on our wooden dining table.
Saffy’s formidable bosom shifted with all the slow motion majesty of a John Woo gun fight. “Really, when you come right down to it, what’s the point of all this?” she asked, waving her hands around. “Each morning, we wake up. Drag ourselves to work. Suffer the indignity of being yelled at by fat ugly bosses. Get stressed with 300 emails and stupid deadlines. Go home and get ready to do it all again the next day. Oh, and we also get to take home five dollars a month! For what?” she added with great dissatisfaction.
“And at the rate the years are slipping by, 60 isn’t that far away!” Amanda said, stubbornly returning to her original point.
“60 doesn’t bother me at all!” Saffy huffed, though Amanda later said that was a bit rich coming from someone who’s been 29 for the past five years. “What does bother me is that I’m still going to be single at that age. How depressing would that be?”
What would be more depressing, I ventured, would be you weren’t single, but that you were shacked up with some Hong Kong movie star who insisted that no one knew the two of you were dating. Like how nobody knew Ronald Cheng and Charlene Choi had gotten divorced, when the greater shock was that no one had known they were married in the first place.
“Oh, yeah, those two weirdos!” Saffy said. “I’ll never understand that. And don’t get me started about that whole Fann Wong and Christopher Lee fandango. Why bother being attached if no one knows about it? I mean, isn’t the whole point of a boyfriend is so all those smug married couples can stop judging you?”
“And pitying you!” Amanda added.
Saffy sighed. “Ugh, I hate the pitying.”
Meanwhile, the bigger issue of how fast time is passing remains unsolvable. If Saffy and Amanda don’t want to wake up one day 60 and single, I don’t want to wake up one day realizing that I’d not done half the things I’ve always wanted to do. Like bungee jump. Learn how to ride a horse. Play the piano. Take part in a Bollywood dance number. Save the world.
And all because I spent the greater part of my life chained to a stupid desk.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Time after Time
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I love TV. I live and breathe TV, and if I could eat it, I would. Nothing says ‘home’ to me more than being able to kick off the shoes at the end of a long horrid day at the office, reach for the remote control, and settle back for an evening of great entertainment with a nice bowl of pasta for company.
Of course, there are some people who say that TV is trash, but there’s a good reason why I’m not friends with them. (And besides, I have one word to say to them: “Glee”.)
It’s fair to say that TV has been my life’s bedrock. It’s seen me through the good times, the bad times and all the boogy in between. Because no one told me life was going to be this way. My job was a joke, I was broke and my love life was DOA. It was like I was always stuck in second gear, when it hadn’t been my day, my week, my month or even my year. But through it all, TV has been there for me, through thick and thin. And at night, long after I’ve turned it off and gone to bed, I’ve heard it call my name, and it feels like home.
And then a few days ago, I was trawling through HMV’s TV section, looking at all the discounted box sets and lovingly flashing back to all those wonderful TV shows of my past, now conveniently collected in one ready to view marathon. Recent favourites like Lost, CSI, House, Grey’s Anatomy, Arrested Development, Desperate Housewives, Friends and Entourage led to golden oldies like Dr Who, To the Manor Born, Keeping Up Appearances, Six Million Dollar Man and, yes, even Baywatch.
And in the midst of this homey nostalgia, it suddenly occurred to me that, in my life, I’ve watched a lot of TV.
“And let’s not count all those shows that I’ve watched in private, but would never admit in public to loving,” I later said that night to my flatmates.
“Such as?” Amanda said, ever ready to assume the road of cross-examiner.
“Well, such as American Idol, Brothers and Sisters and Ugly Betty!”
“So, what’s your point?” Saffy asked.
“It all adds up to a lot of time!” I exclaimed.
Saffy frowned. “I’m not following.”
“Look, take one show, say Lost. Each season has about 23 episodes. Make it 20 for easy maths. Each episode is 40 minutes. And the damned thing went for 6 years. So, what’s that…20 times 40, that’s uhm…”
There was a brief silence as the three of us screwed up our faces, cast our eyes up towards the ceiling and counted, fingers twitching and mouths moving soundlessly.
“4800 minutes!” I said finally, just as Amanda had admitted defeat and whipped out her phone. “And if you divide that by 60 minutes, that makes, uhm…”
“80 hours,” Amanda said.
“80 hours!” I repeated in horror.
“That’s not so bad, is it?” Saffy said. “That’s only three days in your life. I’m sure you can spare three days!”
“Saffy, that’s just one show! What about all those other shows? What about Friends? That went for ten years!”
“But that’s only 20 minutes long!” Saffy said, ever the optimist.
“Or,” said Amanda, her fingers dashing across her phone, “67 hours, assuming 20 episodes per season.”
By now, even Saffy was looking troubled, the vast accounting of her life suddenly turning into a flickering montage of TV theme songs and silly plots.
“You see what I mean?”I said. “Imagine me having this dawning realization in the middle of HMV, surrounded by all those box sets!”
“It’s like a Harry Potter moment!” Saffy said, her bosom inflating. “All your life captured in digital code!”
“How much of my life have I spent watching TV?” I asked in despair. “At least the cast of Friends each earned $1m per episode. What do I have to show for it? My God, I could have learnt a second language! I could be speaking fluent Greek by now!”
That gave everyone some pause as they thought about what they could have done with all the time they’d otherwise spent following the convoluted plots of Alias.
“I might have made partner,” Amanda said.
“And I’m sure I would have found a husband,” Saffy murmured, the weight of her immense tragedy causing her to slouch forward in the sofa where her hand automatically found the TV remote control. She clicked on the TV and instantly, our faces were bathed in the flickering light of a commercial.
Of course, there are some people who say that TV is trash, but there’s a good reason why I’m not friends with them. (And besides, I have one word to say to them: “Glee”.)
It’s fair to say that TV has been my life’s bedrock. It’s seen me through the good times, the bad times and all the boogy in between. Because no one told me life was going to be this way. My job was a joke, I was broke and my love life was DOA. It was like I was always stuck in second gear, when it hadn’t been my day, my week, my month or even my year. But through it all, TV has been there for me, through thick and thin. And at night, long after I’ve turned it off and gone to bed, I’ve heard it call my name, and it feels like home.
And then a few days ago, I was trawling through HMV’s TV section, looking at all the discounted box sets and lovingly flashing back to all those wonderful TV shows of my past, now conveniently collected in one ready to view marathon. Recent favourites like Lost, CSI, House, Grey’s Anatomy, Arrested Development, Desperate Housewives, Friends and Entourage led to golden oldies like Dr Who, To the Manor Born, Keeping Up Appearances, Six Million Dollar Man and, yes, even Baywatch.
And in the midst of this homey nostalgia, it suddenly occurred to me that, in my life, I’ve watched a lot of TV.
“And let’s not count all those shows that I’ve watched in private, but would never admit in public to loving,” I later said that night to my flatmates.
“Such as?” Amanda said, ever ready to assume the road of cross-examiner.
“Well, such as American Idol, Brothers and Sisters and Ugly Betty!”
“So, what’s your point?” Saffy asked.
“It all adds up to a lot of time!” I exclaimed.
Saffy frowned. “I’m not following.”
“Look, take one show, say Lost. Each season has about 23 episodes. Make it 20 for easy maths. Each episode is 40 minutes. And the damned thing went for 6 years. So, what’s that…20 times 40, that’s uhm…”
There was a brief silence as the three of us screwed up our faces, cast our eyes up towards the ceiling and counted, fingers twitching and mouths moving soundlessly.
“4800 minutes!” I said finally, just as Amanda had admitted defeat and whipped out her phone. “And if you divide that by 60 minutes, that makes, uhm…”
“80 hours,” Amanda said.
“80 hours!” I repeated in horror.
“That’s not so bad, is it?” Saffy said. “That’s only three days in your life. I’m sure you can spare three days!”
“Saffy, that’s just one show! What about all those other shows? What about Friends? That went for ten years!”
“But that’s only 20 minutes long!” Saffy said, ever the optimist.
“Or,” said Amanda, her fingers dashing across her phone, “67 hours, assuming 20 episodes per season.”
By now, even Saffy was looking troubled, the vast accounting of her life suddenly turning into a flickering montage of TV theme songs and silly plots.
“You see what I mean?”I said. “Imagine me having this dawning realization in the middle of HMV, surrounded by all those box sets!”
“It’s like a Harry Potter moment!” Saffy said, her bosom inflating. “All your life captured in digital code!”
“How much of my life have I spent watching TV?” I asked in despair. “At least the cast of Friends each earned $1m per episode. What do I have to show for it? My God, I could have learnt a second language! I could be speaking fluent Greek by now!”
That gave everyone some pause as they thought about what they could have done with all the time they’d otherwise spent following the convoluted plots of Alias.
“I might have made partner,” Amanda said.
“And I’m sure I would have found a husband,” Saffy murmured, the weight of her immense tragedy causing her to slouch forward in the sofa where her hand automatically found the TV remote control. She clicked on the TV and instantly, our faces were bathed in the flickering light of a commercial.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Work it out
When I was a young impressionable kid growing up, I watched my father come down to breakfast every morning dressed in a crisp white shirt and tie. He’d sit and eat his soft boiled eggs drizzled with soya sauce, sip his black coffee while reading the newspapers and then pop into the study to fill his briefcase with important looking files and books before heading out the door.
“Where’s Papa going?” I remember asking the maid once.
“He’s going to the office!” Connie replied with all the enthusiasm of a condo security guard on a slow night.
“What for?”
She shrugged. “I think he does something important. I don’t know.”
A thought occurred to me. “What’s an office?”
“It’s a place where Sir make money so he can afford to buy your mother diamonds and feed you three!”
I, of course, found the whole idea so intriguing that I went to Mother and reported the conversation. “That’s really rich coming from someone who eats an entire loaf of bread a day!” Mother said stiffly.
But years later – right through school and then university – I dreamt of the day when I would get to work in an office and do mysterious things like my father. To me, the whole idea of working in an office was the same as growing up.
I couldn’t wait to grow up.
And then came the day when I actually walked into an office for my first day at work as a junior legal clerk. I sat at my desk staring around the tiny space. On one side was a tiny grimy window that looked out into another building. Next to it was a grubby desk on which sat a clunky pre-Apple computer with a keyboard with grey keys. A filing cabinet and a dying pot plant sat next to another wall, and overhead was a flickering fluorescent lamp.
I was profoundly moved by the moment. This was the mythical office of my childhood. This was the source of Mother’s diamonds and Connie’s daily loaf of bread. This was what it meant to be grown up.
I think the novelty lasted all of one hour. The secretary came in with a pile of dusty old files that I was actually meant to read and do something about. The phone started ringing and then my boss started screaming about something to someone and he kept using a word rhyming with ‘fire-truck’ repeatedly. The whole office, I soon realized, lived in a state of unrelenting paranoia and fear. And before long, the flickering fluorescent light lent the whole place the atmosphere of an asylum where the craziest person in the joint was the warden.
At the end of the day, I went home in a stunned daze, sat down on the sofa and called my sister. “I can’t believe this is what I’ve been working towards my whole life!”
“You always did live in La La Land!” my sister announced with all the sympathy of the school yard bully. “At least you get an office! I work in an open plan space with a bunch of Neanderthals who spend half the day telling fart jokes and the other half staring at my boobs. I hate my life!”
I’ve long since left my first office – even though, some nights, I still dream of my terrible boss screaming at me. The other two law firms I went to weren’t that much better. My third boss had an even nastier temper than the first and, by then, I realized that being a lawyer is just not like Ally McBeal or The Practice at all. There is not a trace of glamour about it. In fact, if you ask me, it’s more like being the victim on CSI.
The other day, Saffy said that if she has to work in an office for the rest of her life, she’d rather kill herself. “This whole commuting to work and staring at the stupid computer screen from 9 to 6 crap is just so incredibly inhumane!” she declared, her ample bosom heaving with force.
“You guys are weird! I love working!” Amanda piped up. “It gives me such a buzz to go into the office each day!”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re really weird, Amanda,” Saffy declared as she hoisted her handbag and headed for the door. She later sent me a text message: “I wonder what it must b like 2 live in A’s world. Earning all dat money wld give me a huge buzz too!”
I just want to go back in time and give my younger self this message: “Don't be an idiot. Being a lawyer sucks big time. Take up golf.”
“Where’s Papa going?” I remember asking the maid once.
“He’s going to the office!” Connie replied with all the enthusiasm of a condo security guard on a slow night.
“What for?”
She shrugged. “I think he does something important. I don’t know.”
A thought occurred to me. “What’s an office?”
“It’s a place where Sir make money so he can afford to buy your mother diamonds and feed you three!”
I, of course, found the whole idea so intriguing that I went to Mother and reported the conversation. “That’s really rich coming from someone who eats an entire loaf of bread a day!” Mother said stiffly.
But years later – right through school and then university – I dreamt of the day when I would get to work in an office and do mysterious things like my father. To me, the whole idea of working in an office was the same as growing up.
I couldn’t wait to grow up.
And then came the day when I actually walked into an office for my first day at work as a junior legal clerk. I sat at my desk staring around the tiny space. On one side was a tiny grimy window that looked out into another building. Next to it was a grubby desk on which sat a clunky pre-Apple computer with a keyboard with grey keys. A filing cabinet and a dying pot plant sat next to another wall, and overhead was a flickering fluorescent lamp.
I was profoundly moved by the moment. This was the mythical office of my childhood. This was the source of Mother’s diamonds and Connie’s daily loaf of bread. This was what it meant to be grown up.
I think the novelty lasted all of one hour. The secretary came in with a pile of dusty old files that I was actually meant to read and do something about. The phone started ringing and then my boss started screaming about something to someone and he kept using a word rhyming with ‘fire-truck’ repeatedly. The whole office, I soon realized, lived in a state of unrelenting paranoia and fear. And before long, the flickering fluorescent light lent the whole place the atmosphere of an asylum where the craziest person in the joint was the warden.
At the end of the day, I went home in a stunned daze, sat down on the sofa and called my sister. “I can’t believe this is what I’ve been working towards my whole life!”
“You always did live in La La Land!” my sister announced with all the sympathy of the school yard bully. “At least you get an office! I work in an open plan space with a bunch of Neanderthals who spend half the day telling fart jokes and the other half staring at my boobs. I hate my life!”
I’ve long since left my first office – even though, some nights, I still dream of my terrible boss screaming at me. The other two law firms I went to weren’t that much better. My third boss had an even nastier temper than the first and, by then, I realized that being a lawyer is just not like Ally McBeal or The Practice at all. There is not a trace of glamour about it. In fact, if you ask me, it’s more like being the victim on CSI.
The other day, Saffy said that if she has to work in an office for the rest of her life, she’d rather kill herself. “This whole commuting to work and staring at the stupid computer screen from 9 to 6 crap is just so incredibly inhumane!” she declared, her ample bosom heaving with force.
“You guys are weird! I love working!” Amanda piped up. “It gives me such a buzz to go into the office each day!”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re really weird, Amanda,” Saffy declared as she hoisted her handbag and headed for the door. She later sent me a text message: “I wonder what it must b like 2 live in A’s world. Earning all dat money wld give me a huge buzz too!”
I just want to go back in time and give my younger self this message: “Don't be an idiot. Being a lawyer sucks big time. Take up golf.”
Friday, May 28, 2010
Baby Talk
It’s taken me a long time to realize this, but it’s only clear to me now that the idea of children means different things to different people.
For me, children have always been kind of like a flowering shrub: Pretty to look at, but I don’t spend too much time lingering. It’s just another flowering shrub. Move on. Plenty of those around.
I just don’t get it when people hover over the pram of a complete stranger’s baby and coo, making mushy gushy noises like someone with a very bad cold.
I tried doing that once to a friend who came into the office with her new baby. Dutifully, I bent over the pram and went, “Awww, she’s so cute!”, to which the mother icily said, “It’s a boy!”
“How was I to know it was a boy?” I later complained to Sharyn who rolled her eyes.
“Aiyoh! How you not know? Nine months she tell us in the office is a boy and when she had her going away party, we all sign a card that said ‘Good luck, Son-shine!’ and you still doh-no! How like that?” she pleaded, her worried eyes huge behind her Coke-bottle thick spectacles.
But my bigger point is that as I bent over the child and cooed, I felt nothing except a mild case of disinterest. Like I said, another flowering shrub.
And then there are people like Amanda who go into hormonal spasms at the merest hint of a baby within 20 metres. She’ll stop and gaze at the child with such penetrating wistfulness that, eventually, the parent will get all uncomfortable and push the pram off hurriedly in the other direction.
My sister says that she could never bring a child into a world as whacked out as this one is. “This is not a safe world,” she said the other day when I told her I was going to write about children for my next column. “You’d have to be criminally negligent to have children in a world that thinks it’s ok to blow up cars and eat whales.”
“So you don’t want kids. Interesting,” I said, as I scribbled into my notebook.
“No, I didn’t say I didn’t want kids,” Michelle said. “I want kids so badly, I sometimes think I could just die from the sheer unhappiness of it all. But I think I’d be so worried for its future, I’d be one of those anal-retentive mothers who has a nervous breakdown when her child fails her Chinese exam!”
“Interesting!” I repeated, scribbling harder.
My mother on the other hand firmly believes that her children were put on this earth to look after her and our father when they get old. “Why else would you have children?” she would tell her table of mahjong-kakis who, as one, would nod solemnly.
“Do you think,” she once asked in a voice that could penetrate steel, “that I endured three years of morning sickness, got all out of shape, and had three epidurals on top of a total of 28 hours of eye-popping labour pain just for fun?”
I remember my father leaning over the dining table and whispering to me, “Do not answer that question! Don’t even look her in the eye!”
Meanwhile, Saffy, never one for toning down her drama-meter, once had to sit down and blow into a paper bag when she made the mistake of walking through the Forum. “All these baby clothes!” she wailed as she puffed hysterically.
By the time she pulled herself together, an interested crowd of Sunday shoppers had gathered around her.
“Ay, what’s wrong, hah?” someone asked.
“Doh-no, I think she lost her baby!”
“Aiyoh, really ah? Where’s my Sharon, ah? Girl? Where are you!”
Later, as she recovered her composure at Starbucks, Saffy said that being in such proximity to all those baby clothes made her realize that her biological clock was ticking very loudly.
“It’s deafening! Can you hear it?” she asked Amanda who actually stopped sipping her latte and listened.
“I think I’m hearing my own clock,” Amanda concluded sadly. She looked down at her bag of children’s outfits that she’d bought while Saffy was having her breakdown in front of Mommy’s Lil’ Sweetheart. “Did I really just buy all these kids’ clothes? I don’t have kids! Is that sad? I don’t even have a boyfriend! What’s wrong with me?”
“I don’t think that’s sad at all,” Saffy said stoutly. “What’s sad is that I actually think just being inside Forum has made me lactate! My bra feels wet! Here, feel this! No seriously, Jason, feel it! Hey, where are you going?”
For me, children have always been kind of like a flowering shrub: Pretty to look at, but I don’t spend too much time lingering. It’s just another flowering shrub. Move on. Plenty of those around.
I just don’t get it when people hover over the pram of a complete stranger’s baby and coo, making mushy gushy noises like someone with a very bad cold.
I tried doing that once to a friend who came into the office with her new baby. Dutifully, I bent over the pram and went, “Awww, she’s so cute!”, to which the mother icily said, “It’s a boy!”
“How was I to know it was a boy?” I later complained to Sharyn who rolled her eyes.
“Aiyoh! How you not know? Nine months she tell us in the office is a boy and when she had her going away party, we all sign a card that said ‘Good luck, Son-shine!’ and you still doh-no! How like that?” she pleaded, her worried eyes huge behind her Coke-bottle thick spectacles.
But my bigger point is that as I bent over the child and cooed, I felt nothing except a mild case of disinterest. Like I said, another flowering shrub.
And then there are people like Amanda who go into hormonal spasms at the merest hint of a baby within 20 metres. She’ll stop and gaze at the child with such penetrating wistfulness that, eventually, the parent will get all uncomfortable and push the pram off hurriedly in the other direction.
My sister says that she could never bring a child into a world as whacked out as this one is. “This is not a safe world,” she said the other day when I told her I was going to write about children for my next column. “You’d have to be criminally negligent to have children in a world that thinks it’s ok to blow up cars and eat whales.”
“So you don’t want kids. Interesting,” I said, as I scribbled into my notebook.
“No, I didn’t say I didn’t want kids,” Michelle said. “I want kids so badly, I sometimes think I could just die from the sheer unhappiness of it all. But I think I’d be so worried for its future, I’d be one of those anal-retentive mothers who has a nervous breakdown when her child fails her Chinese exam!”
“Interesting!” I repeated, scribbling harder.
My mother on the other hand firmly believes that her children were put on this earth to look after her and our father when they get old. “Why else would you have children?” she would tell her table of mahjong-kakis who, as one, would nod solemnly.
“Do you think,” she once asked in a voice that could penetrate steel, “that I endured three years of morning sickness, got all out of shape, and had three epidurals on top of a total of 28 hours of eye-popping labour pain just for fun?”
I remember my father leaning over the dining table and whispering to me, “Do not answer that question! Don’t even look her in the eye!”
Meanwhile, Saffy, never one for toning down her drama-meter, once had to sit down and blow into a paper bag when she made the mistake of walking through the Forum. “All these baby clothes!” she wailed as she puffed hysterically.
By the time she pulled herself together, an interested crowd of Sunday shoppers had gathered around her.
“Ay, what’s wrong, hah?” someone asked.
“Doh-no, I think she lost her baby!”
“Aiyoh, really ah? Where’s my Sharon, ah? Girl? Where are you!”
Later, as she recovered her composure at Starbucks, Saffy said that being in such proximity to all those baby clothes made her realize that her biological clock was ticking very loudly.
“It’s deafening! Can you hear it?” she asked Amanda who actually stopped sipping her latte and listened.
“I think I’m hearing my own clock,” Amanda concluded sadly. She looked down at her bag of children’s outfits that she’d bought while Saffy was having her breakdown in front of Mommy’s Lil’ Sweetheart. “Did I really just buy all these kids’ clothes? I don’t have kids! Is that sad? I don’t even have a boyfriend! What’s wrong with me?”
“I don’t think that’s sad at all,” Saffy said stoutly. “What’s sad is that I actually think just being inside Forum has made me lactate! My bra feels wet! Here, feel this! No seriously, Jason, feel it! Hey, where are you going?”
Friday, May 21, 2010
Mother Dearest
My sister has never had an easy relationship with our mother. Father likes to say that Michelle was born literally screaming at Mother. “And she’s not stopped screaming since,” he said recently with the doting, indulgent smile of a father who’s never fallen out of love with that wrinkled bundle of squawking, pooping mess he first cradled in his arms.
When she was 15, Michelle got into a great row with Mother over a pair of diamond ear-rings.
“Why can’t I wear them to Dionne’s birthday party?” she yelled.
“Because unless you’re the Queen of England, you do not wear Van Cleef and Arpel ten-carat flawless diamonds to a fifteen-year old’s birthday party!” Mother said in that maddeningly serene way of her’s.
Upstairs in our bedroom, my brother Jack turned to me and said seriously, “You know, I stopped understanding that sentence after ‘England’!”
“You’re so mean!” Michelle’s scream reverberated through the house. “I’m moving out as soon as I’m 18!”
“Be my guest,” Mother said calmly. “I’m sure these diamonds would look much better on your brothers’ wives anyway!”
Michelle, who’s always had the instincts of a barracuda, promptly shut up. She dropped the subject and showed up at Dionne’s birthday party in a pretty pink Target frock paired with cheap costume jewellery. But for years, she always brought up the Diamond Incident as an example of Mother’s uncaring feelings for her.
“Oh my God, is she still going on about those stupid Rip Van Winkle diamonds?” Jack cried the other day all the way from Rio where’s he hiding from another of Mother’s mad match-making schemes.
“Van Cleef and Arpel,” I said automatically. “And I’ve always wondered if Mother still has them or if she’s given them to the Mother Teresa’s nuns like she was always threatening to do.”
“It would just be so typical of her if she has,” Michelle said when I spoke to her. “I always believed she would have been much happier if she’d had three sons!”
And there it was. The unspoken fear that haunts us all at some stage of our relationship with our parents – that suspicion that we were, in fact, not wanted. For how else did you explain the careless words, the unthinking glances of disapproval and quick silences between half meant words?
More than Jack or I ever did, Michelle has struggled the most in her ongoing love-hate relationship with Mother. If it wasn’t Mother’s critique about Michelle’s hair (“Darling, do you really think purple is an appropriate colour for hair?”), it was about her sense of dress (“Darling, why are you always wearing black?”); make-up (“Darling, less is more!”); boyfriends (“Those are a lot of tattoos, dear!”); and grades (“How do you fail in Chinese? It’s your mother tongue!”).
Of course, looking back on it now, you can see so clearly where Mother was coming from but I suppose when you’re dealing with a rebellious 18, you just can’t win as a parent. You just learn to tread a little more carefully which, in turn, is interpreted as uncaring. But there’s very little you can do about the accumulating pile of little wounds which never really heal.
I remember Mother once wondering which of her three children she’d come to stay with when she got old.
“Why would you want to stay with us?” Michelle immediately asked.
“Well, you can’t expect me to stay in an old folks home!”
“What are we, life insurance policies?” Michelle murmured to me later.
“Yes, if you want her to leave you those diamonds,” I said, wise beyond my nineteen years.
Of course, one of the things about growing up is that you slowly, and belatedly, come to realise that things are never quite as black and white as they once were when you were a child shouting for your mother’s attention; that the wall we build up to keep from getting hurt might also be what’s keeping us from being loved.
“Was I a handful when I was a kid?” Michelle suddenly asked the other day on Skype.
“Define ‘handful’.”
There was a hesitation. Then: “Was I really mean to Mother?” A pause. “I think I was. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I behaved as a child.”
And just like that, a piece of brick in that high wall came loose. It couldn’t have been an easy admission to make. After a lifetime of fighting, what would Michelle’s busy heart now do with itself? Which is not to say that she’s ready to let go of a lifetime of hurt, tears and anger. There’s still the issue of the diamonds.
But it’s a good start.
When she was 15, Michelle got into a great row with Mother over a pair of diamond ear-rings.
“Why can’t I wear them to Dionne’s birthday party?” she yelled.
“Because unless you’re the Queen of England, you do not wear Van Cleef and Arpel ten-carat flawless diamonds to a fifteen-year old’s birthday party!” Mother said in that maddeningly serene way of her’s.
Upstairs in our bedroom, my brother Jack turned to me and said seriously, “You know, I stopped understanding that sentence after ‘England’!”
“You’re so mean!” Michelle’s scream reverberated through the house. “I’m moving out as soon as I’m 18!”
“Be my guest,” Mother said calmly. “I’m sure these diamonds would look much better on your brothers’ wives anyway!”
Michelle, who’s always had the instincts of a barracuda, promptly shut up. She dropped the subject and showed up at Dionne’s birthday party in a pretty pink Target frock paired with cheap costume jewellery. But for years, she always brought up the Diamond Incident as an example of Mother’s uncaring feelings for her.
“Oh my God, is she still going on about those stupid Rip Van Winkle diamonds?” Jack cried the other day all the way from Rio where’s he hiding from another of Mother’s mad match-making schemes.
“Van Cleef and Arpel,” I said automatically. “And I’ve always wondered if Mother still has them or if she’s given them to the Mother Teresa’s nuns like she was always threatening to do.”
“It would just be so typical of her if she has,” Michelle said when I spoke to her. “I always believed she would have been much happier if she’d had three sons!”
And there it was. The unspoken fear that haunts us all at some stage of our relationship with our parents – that suspicion that we were, in fact, not wanted. For how else did you explain the careless words, the unthinking glances of disapproval and quick silences between half meant words?
More than Jack or I ever did, Michelle has struggled the most in her ongoing love-hate relationship with Mother. If it wasn’t Mother’s critique about Michelle’s hair (“Darling, do you really think purple is an appropriate colour for hair?”), it was about her sense of dress (“Darling, why are you always wearing black?”); make-up (“Darling, less is more!”); boyfriends (“Those are a lot of tattoos, dear!”); and grades (“How do you fail in Chinese? It’s your mother tongue!”).
Of course, looking back on it now, you can see so clearly where Mother was coming from but I suppose when you’re dealing with a rebellious 18, you just can’t win as a parent. You just learn to tread a little more carefully which, in turn, is interpreted as uncaring. But there’s very little you can do about the accumulating pile of little wounds which never really heal.
I remember Mother once wondering which of her three children she’d come to stay with when she got old.
“Why would you want to stay with us?” Michelle immediately asked.
“Well, you can’t expect me to stay in an old folks home!”
“What are we, life insurance policies?” Michelle murmured to me later.
“Yes, if you want her to leave you those diamonds,” I said, wise beyond my nineteen years.
Of course, one of the things about growing up is that you slowly, and belatedly, come to realise that things are never quite as black and white as they once were when you were a child shouting for your mother’s attention; that the wall we build up to keep from getting hurt might also be what’s keeping us from being loved.
“Was I a handful when I was a kid?” Michelle suddenly asked the other day on Skype.
“Define ‘handful’.”
There was a hesitation. Then: “Was I really mean to Mother?” A pause. “I think I was. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I behaved as a child.”
And just like that, a piece of brick in that high wall came loose. It couldn’t have been an easy admission to make. After a lifetime of fighting, what would Michelle’s busy heart now do with itself? Which is not to say that she’s ready to let go of a lifetime of hurt, tears and anger. There’s still the issue of the diamonds.
But it’s a good start.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Happily Never After
One of the rituals of growing up is the bedtime fairy tale. Cinderella, Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Princess and the Pea, Hansel and Gretel…All miniature stories where the hero, after battling a bunch of evil stepmothers, giants and nasty witches, triumphs and heads off into the sunset.
My sister Michelle especially loved the fairy tales where the princess marries the prince and lives happily ever after. “One day,” she told me very seriously when she was eight, “one day, I’m going to marry Prince Charming! And then he’s going to lock Mummy up in a dark prison!”
To which our mother, who’s always had the sensitive hearing of a bat, shouted from the kitchen, “Not if I get to him first!” Not surprisingly, Michelle would grow up blaming Mother for all her social inadequacies. “If I die a lonely spinster, it will be all her fault!”
But the one thing fairy tales never really tell you is just what exactly happens after the “happily ever after” bit. Did Snow White get bored of her sex life with the Prince and have an affair with one of the dwarves? (This would be the cue for my mother to tell you about the live sex floor show she once saw in Amsterdam featuring a transvestite Snow White and seven real life dwarves.) Did Sleeping Beauty turn out to be a nagging shrew and divorce her good for nothing Prince?
For some reason, all these questions raced around my head as I listened to our friend Lynette sob on our couch. Her husband Tim, it seemed, was having an affair with his secretary.
What made the revelation all the more shocking was we’d always thought Lynette and Tim were the golden couple. They were the ones we all aspired to be one day. They were high-school sweethearts. Married when they were 24. Three children by the time they were 28. He, a devastatingly handsome and successful lawyer. She, a gorgeous high flying banker.
“I want to have children with that man,” Saffy drunkenly told everyone at her table at Tim’s wedding. “Heck, pour me another gin and tonic, and I’d have children with that woman, too!”
“They’re going to have such beautiful children,” Amanda predicted without a single note of jealousy in her voice.
Which is why news of Tim’s affair struck not just Lynette, but it wounded my flatmates. For here was absolute proof that landing the man of your dreams was no guarantee that the happily ever after glow was going to last forever.
For days, it was all the girls could talk about. What Saffy couldn’t understand was why Tim would cheat in the first place.
“Doesn’t he know how horrible the dating scene is?” she asked. “What are the odds of finding someone who likes you back?”
“Six trillion to one!” said Amanda, who’s actually done the maths.
“It’s the jackpot!” Saffy sang like some gospel choir. “And he wants to give all that up? For what?”
“It just goes to show that you never can tell,” Amanda said.
“Men are stupid!” Saffy decided.
Of course, what worried the girls more was the fact that if two such perfectly matched people as Lynette and Tim couldn’t make it work, what hope was there for singletons like them? And more importantly, what was the point of all the dates they’d been subjecting themselves to, if the end result was an unhappy marriage?
“I’d be better off speaking French!” Saffy declared.
“Learning French, you mean,” Amanda said. She was rewarded with a Look.
“My point,” Saffy said with stiff dignity, “is that we might as well all just stop dating. It’s pointless. I don’t want to torture myself every Friday night, primping, waxing, exfoliating, getting dressed and going on a date only to have it all end up in a divorce court!”
“Oh, they’re not getting divorced,” I piped up. “They’re getting marriage counseling. Tim told me at lunch.”
Both heads swiveled around in my direction. “You’re having lunch with that cheating prick?” Saffy asked, her bosom heaving.
“Hey, there are two sides to this, you know,” I said stoutly.
“That’s such a cop-out! You don’t go have an affair just because you have marriage problems!” Amanda said.
“That’s so typical of you men, always sticking together even when you’re clearly in the wrong,” Saffy sniffed.
The latest is that Lynette is making Tim get a blood test to check for any nasty sexually transmitted diseases, but Amanda says he should also be taking an IQ test. Meanwhile, Saffy has signed up for French lessons. “Je suis not taking any chances,” she told the bewildered woman at Alliance Francaise.
My sister Michelle especially loved the fairy tales where the princess marries the prince and lives happily ever after. “One day,” she told me very seriously when she was eight, “one day, I’m going to marry Prince Charming! And then he’s going to lock Mummy up in a dark prison!”
To which our mother, who’s always had the sensitive hearing of a bat, shouted from the kitchen, “Not if I get to him first!” Not surprisingly, Michelle would grow up blaming Mother for all her social inadequacies. “If I die a lonely spinster, it will be all her fault!”
But the one thing fairy tales never really tell you is just what exactly happens after the “happily ever after” bit. Did Snow White get bored of her sex life with the Prince and have an affair with one of the dwarves? (This would be the cue for my mother to tell you about the live sex floor show she once saw in Amsterdam featuring a transvestite Snow White and seven real life dwarves.) Did Sleeping Beauty turn out to be a nagging shrew and divorce her good for nothing Prince?
For some reason, all these questions raced around my head as I listened to our friend Lynette sob on our couch. Her husband Tim, it seemed, was having an affair with his secretary.
What made the revelation all the more shocking was we’d always thought Lynette and Tim were the golden couple. They were the ones we all aspired to be one day. They were high-school sweethearts. Married when they were 24. Three children by the time they were 28. He, a devastatingly handsome and successful lawyer. She, a gorgeous high flying banker.
“I want to have children with that man,” Saffy drunkenly told everyone at her table at Tim’s wedding. “Heck, pour me another gin and tonic, and I’d have children with that woman, too!”
“They’re going to have such beautiful children,” Amanda predicted without a single note of jealousy in her voice.
Which is why news of Tim’s affair struck not just Lynette, but it wounded my flatmates. For here was absolute proof that landing the man of your dreams was no guarantee that the happily ever after glow was going to last forever.
For days, it was all the girls could talk about. What Saffy couldn’t understand was why Tim would cheat in the first place.
“Doesn’t he know how horrible the dating scene is?” she asked. “What are the odds of finding someone who likes you back?”
“Six trillion to one!” said Amanda, who’s actually done the maths.
“It’s the jackpot!” Saffy sang like some gospel choir. “And he wants to give all that up? For what?”
“It just goes to show that you never can tell,” Amanda said.
“Men are stupid!” Saffy decided.
Of course, what worried the girls more was the fact that if two such perfectly matched people as Lynette and Tim couldn’t make it work, what hope was there for singletons like them? And more importantly, what was the point of all the dates they’d been subjecting themselves to, if the end result was an unhappy marriage?
“I’d be better off speaking French!” Saffy declared.
“Learning French, you mean,” Amanda said. She was rewarded with a Look.
“My point,” Saffy said with stiff dignity, “is that we might as well all just stop dating. It’s pointless. I don’t want to torture myself every Friday night, primping, waxing, exfoliating, getting dressed and going on a date only to have it all end up in a divorce court!”
“Oh, they’re not getting divorced,” I piped up. “They’re getting marriage counseling. Tim told me at lunch.”
Both heads swiveled around in my direction. “You’re having lunch with that cheating prick?” Saffy asked, her bosom heaving.
“Hey, there are two sides to this, you know,” I said stoutly.
“That’s such a cop-out! You don’t go have an affair just because you have marriage problems!” Amanda said.
“That’s so typical of you men, always sticking together even when you’re clearly in the wrong,” Saffy sniffed.
The latest is that Lynette is making Tim get a blood test to check for any nasty sexually transmitted diseases, but Amanda says he should also be taking an IQ test. Meanwhile, Saffy has signed up for French lessons. “Je suis not taking any chances,” she told the bewildered woman at Alliance Francaise.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Vege Might
A few months ago at dinner, Saffy looked up from her bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and announced that she was going to become a vegetarian.
Her statement was greeted with the kind of scepticism that must have greeted Jesus when he said he was going out for a stroll on the sea.
“Why?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t last a week,” Amanda predicted.
“I love how supportive you are!” Saffy said stiffly.
“No, really, why?” I asked.
Saffy’s bosom shifted slowly as she thought. “Well, I read somewhere that eating beef is really bad for the environment. Apparently they fart a lot and all that gas is choking us to death!”
Amanda later said that if Saffy had been involved with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, that movie would have sunk under the weight of her sloppy research.
“Not eating beef isn’t going to save the planet!” she sniffed with all the disdain that a Harvard law degree can generate. To which Saffy replied that if Amanda had to kill a cow to get her hamburger, she’d be a vegetarian too.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” Amanda exclaimed. “What about vegetables?”
Saffy blinked. “What about them?”
“Well, you’re killing a carrot when you uproot it! Does that mean you can’t eat vegetables too?”
Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Vegetables don’t have feelings!”
Amanda snorted. “Just because they don’t moo or cluck or bleat doesn’t mean vegetables don’t feel things. It’s probably more traumatic to rip an onion from the ground than it is to put a bullet between a cow’s eyes!”
As I later said to Karl, if that horrific image didn’t make me want to become a vegetarian myself, I didn’t know what would.
As it was, Saffy said she didn’t care what anyone thought. She was going to give vegetarianism a go. And so, the next night, she struggled home from Cold Storage with bags of broccoli, spinach, tofu and tins of beans.
“Beans?” Amanda whispered to me. “She’ll be farting the whole night!”
I looked at all the food spread out over the kitchen counter. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Saf?” I asked. “Going cold turkey, pardon the expression, may not be the wisest thing to do, you know.”
“I’m doing this for the cows,” Saffy said.
“But it doesn’t make sense! Whether you eat them or not, they’re still going to be around and farting into the atmosphere.”
“Only if we keep breeding them for food! If we stop eating them, then they’ll all die off naturally and we’ll have a cow-free world!”
“So, you’d rather they went extinct?”
Saffy shrugged. “Better them than me!”
For days, her strange but oddly compelling logic haunted me and for a brief moment, I too flirted with the idea of making a vegan-burger a lifestyle choice. But by then, Saffy had turned into a raving lunatic.
Her body, so used to its daily infusion of char-siew, beef rendang, chicken tikka and sop kambing, and now so suddenly deprived, began turning on her. She trembled and became grumpier by the day and her eyes took on a glazed sheen whenever the perfume of fried chicken wings from our neighbour Lydia Kumarasamy’s kitchen wafted in through our window. She even began looking at the food bowl of Pooch, my beloved adopted mongrel dog, in a way that made him so nervous that he would gulp down his dinner of minced beef and rice with both eyes cocked in her direction.
“You’re giving that dog indigestion!” Amanda said one day.
“I think I’m hallucinating,” Saffy murmured. “Pooch keeps transforming into a hot dog!”
Which got us all so concerned that I took Pooch with me everywhere, even into the toilet. “I’m not letting him out of my sight!” I reported to Karl.
And of course, Amanda and I began eating our meals in hawker centres. We didn’t know what would happen if we ever unwrapped a packet of chicken rice in front of Saffy.
The breaking point occurred when Saffy was aimlessly flipping TV channels and suddenly, Nigella Lawson came on. “Now, I love spring!” Nigella chirruped in her provocatively posh English accent. “And for me, nothing says spring more than a juicy roast leg of lamb!”
Hypnotised, Saffy watched Nigella stuff the leg with garlic and herbs and by the time it emerged from the oven, brown and sizzling, she was dialing McDonalds.
“I told you it wouldn’t last,” Amanda said smugly. But I’m not taking any chances.
My bedroom door is still locked while Pooch is tucked in with me in bed.
Her statement was greeted with the kind of scepticism that must have greeted Jesus when he said he was going out for a stroll on the sea.
“Why?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t last a week,” Amanda predicted.
“I love how supportive you are!” Saffy said stiffly.
“No, really, why?” I asked.
Saffy’s bosom shifted slowly as she thought. “Well, I read somewhere that eating beef is really bad for the environment. Apparently they fart a lot and all that gas is choking us to death!”
Amanda later said that if Saffy had been involved with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, that movie would have sunk under the weight of her sloppy research.
“Not eating beef isn’t going to save the planet!” she sniffed with all the disdain that a Harvard law degree can generate. To which Saffy replied that if Amanda had to kill a cow to get her hamburger, she’d be a vegetarian too.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” Amanda exclaimed. “What about vegetables?”
Saffy blinked. “What about them?”
“Well, you’re killing a carrot when you uproot it! Does that mean you can’t eat vegetables too?”
Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Vegetables don’t have feelings!”
Amanda snorted. “Just because they don’t moo or cluck or bleat doesn’t mean vegetables don’t feel things. It’s probably more traumatic to rip an onion from the ground than it is to put a bullet between a cow’s eyes!”
As I later said to Karl, if that horrific image didn’t make me want to become a vegetarian myself, I didn’t know what would.
As it was, Saffy said she didn’t care what anyone thought. She was going to give vegetarianism a go. And so, the next night, she struggled home from Cold Storage with bags of broccoli, spinach, tofu and tins of beans.
“Beans?” Amanda whispered to me. “She’ll be farting the whole night!”
I looked at all the food spread out over the kitchen counter. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Saf?” I asked. “Going cold turkey, pardon the expression, may not be the wisest thing to do, you know.”
“I’m doing this for the cows,” Saffy said.
“But it doesn’t make sense! Whether you eat them or not, they’re still going to be around and farting into the atmosphere.”
“Only if we keep breeding them for food! If we stop eating them, then they’ll all die off naturally and we’ll have a cow-free world!”
“So, you’d rather they went extinct?”
Saffy shrugged. “Better them than me!”
For days, her strange but oddly compelling logic haunted me and for a brief moment, I too flirted with the idea of making a vegan-burger a lifestyle choice. But by then, Saffy had turned into a raving lunatic.
Her body, so used to its daily infusion of char-siew, beef rendang, chicken tikka and sop kambing, and now so suddenly deprived, began turning on her. She trembled and became grumpier by the day and her eyes took on a glazed sheen whenever the perfume of fried chicken wings from our neighbour Lydia Kumarasamy’s kitchen wafted in through our window. She even began looking at the food bowl of Pooch, my beloved adopted mongrel dog, in a way that made him so nervous that he would gulp down his dinner of minced beef and rice with both eyes cocked in her direction.
“You’re giving that dog indigestion!” Amanda said one day.
“I think I’m hallucinating,” Saffy murmured. “Pooch keeps transforming into a hot dog!”
Which got us all so concerned that I took Pooch with me everywhere, even into the toilet. “I’m not letting him out of my sight!” I reported to Karl.
And of course, Amanda and I began eating our meals in hawker centres. We didn’t know what would happen if we ever unwrapped a packet of chicken rice in front of Saffy.
The breaking point occurred when Saffy was aimlessly flipping TV channels and suddenly, Nigella Lawson came on. “Now, I love spring!” Nigella chirruped in her provocatively posh English accent. “And for me, nothing says spring more than a juicy roast leg of lamb!”
Hypnotised, Saffy watched Nigella stuff the leg with garlic and herbs and by the time it emerged from the oven, brown and sizzling, she was dialing McDonalds.
“I told you it wouldn’t last,” Amanda said smugly. But I’m not taking any chances.
My bedroom door is still locked while Pooch is tucked in with me in bed.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Past Tense
My sister sent me a book for my birthday. It’s called “Letter to my 16 Year Old Self”. In it, a whole bunch of famous people like Yoko Ono, Will Young and Annie Lennox write a letter to, well, their 16 year old self telling them they should expect from their future and how they should deal with growing up. It’s easily one of the best books around: Incredibly moving in some bits, deeply funny in others, and always thought provoking.
In her birthday card, my sister wrote that she would tell her 16 year old self that “diets are stupid and stay away from Marie Chen, cause she’s going to steal your boyfriend, that self serving little cow”. And she wrote in her postscript that she would also tell her younger self to hug her brother Jason more because “he’s always going to be there for you”.
When Saffy read the card, she burst into tears.
“That’s such a lovely thing to…to…sniff…to say! I wish someone would say that about me!” she snuffled into a tissue.
Which, of course, got us all thinking. If we had a chance, what would each of us say to our 16 year old self? For days, we thought about it, and then one Sunday evening, we sat down at the dining table with pen and paper, and this is what we wrote:
Amanda’s letter to her 16 year old self:
“Dear Princess, you’re probably not going to believe this, but you know how you’ve got this dream of becoming a supermodel like Naomi Campbell? Well, you’re going to end up a lawyer. Sorry to break it to you like this, but the good news is, you’ll be earning a tonne of money and you’ll be wearing all those expensive runway clothes you read about in Vogue. Oh, and you should snap up shoes by Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo. And as soon as you can afford it, I want you to buy shares in Apple. That company is going to get really huge! But don’t buy the first iPod or iPhone or iPad. Wait till the third generation. You’re also going to meet a guy who looks like a cockroach. DO NOT give him your number! Seriously. He’s bad news. It’s OK to be single. Really. Love you lots, A”
Jason’s letter to his 16 year old self:
“Dear Me, This will come as a bit of a shock, but you’re going to hate being a lawyer. A law firm looks nothing like what you see on TV. You’ll be drafting stupid documents that no one will ever read and making your bosses very rich. The people you will be working with will be fat and ugly, and they’ll also be screaming at you a lot. The money isn’t going to be worth the hassle. The good news is you’ll switch career mid-way and you’ll be a lot happier. Poorer, but happier. Your parents are wrong: you can actually be happy when you’re poor. But you need to sit down once in a while and have a chat with your mother. Not just because she might leave you a lot of money, but because, sometimes, she gets lonely (you, Michelle and Jack are all going to leave home…I know, what a shocker!). Stay strong. Me”
Saffy’s letter to her 16 year old self:
“Dearest Saff, I have so much to tell you! But first things first. Stop crying about your flat chest. Next year, around June, you will wake up and be shocked when you look down! Trust me. Next, you shouldn’t be so mean to that pimply kid who sits next to you in drama class. After high school, he’s going to go to Hollywood and be a star! His skin will clear up, he’ll go to the gym and he’s going to be super hot! So you need to be his best friend. I also wouldn’t bother too much with physics. You’re never going to be a scientist. And you’re also going to meet this incredibly gorgeous guy called James. He’s going to break your heart. (He’s going to cheat on you with Mary-Louise Tan, that stinker.) And it’s going to really hurt. You’ll think the world is going to come to an end. But it won’t. So, you should cry over him for about a week MAX and then just get over it. Oh, and James Cameron is going to make a movie about the Titanic. Put all your money and savings with the bookies and bet that it’s going to win 11 Oscars. XOXO. S”
In her birthday card, my sister wrote that she would tell her 16 year old self that “diets are stupid and stay away from Marie Chen, cause she’s going to steal your boyfriend, that self serving little cow”. And she wrote in her postscript that she would also tell her younger self to hug her brother Jason more because “he’s always going to be there for you”.
When Saffy read the card, she burst into tears.
“That’s such a lovely thing to…to…sniff…to say! I wish someone would say that about me!” she snuffled into a tissue.
Which, of course, got us all thinking. If we had a chance, what would each of us say to our 16 year old self? For days, we thought about it, and then one Sunday evening, we sat down at the dining table with pen and paper, and this is what we wrote:
Amanda’s letter to her 16 year old self:
“Dear Princess, you’re probably not going to believe this, but you know how you’ve got this dream of becoming a supermodel like Naomi Campbell? Well, you’re going to end up a lawyer. Sorry to break it to you like this, but the good news is, you’ll be earning a tonne of money and you’ll be wearing all those expensive runway clothes you read about in Vogue. Oh, and you should snap up shoes by Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo. And as soon as you can afford it, I want you to buy shares in Apple. That company is going to get really huge! But don’t buy the first iPod or iPhone or iPad. Wait till the third generation. You’re also going to meet a guy who looks like a cockroach. DO NOT give him your number! Seriously. He’s bad news. It’s OK to be single. Really. Love you lots, A”
Jason’s letter to his 16 year old self:
“Dear Me, This will come as a bit of a shock, but you’re going to hate being a lawyer. A law firm looks nothing like what you see on TV. You’ll be drafting stupid documents that no one will ever read and making your bosses very rich. The people you will be working with will be fat and ugly, and they’ll also be screaming at you a lot. The money isn’t going to be worth the hassle. The good news is you’ll switch career mid-way and you’ll be a lot happier. Poorer, but happier. Your parents are wrong: you can actually be happy when you’re poor. But you need to sit down once in a while and have a chat with your mother. Not just because she might leave you a lot of money, but because, sometimes, she gets lonely (you, Michelle and Jack are all going to leave home…I know, what a shocker!). Stay strong. Me”
Saffy’s letter to her 16 year old self:
“Dearest Saff, I have so much to tell you! But first things first. Stop crying about your flat chest. Next year, around June, you will wake up and be shocked when you look down! Trust me. Next, you shouldn’t be so mean to that pimply kid who sits next to you in drama class. After high school, he’s going to go to Hollywood and be a star! His skin will clear up, he’ll go to the gym and he’s going to be super hot! So you need to be his best friend. I also wouldn’t bother too much with physics. You’re never going to be a scientist. And you’re also going to meet this incredibly gorgeous guy called James. He’s going to break your heart. (He’s going to cheat on you with Mary-Louise Tan, that stinker.) And it’s going to really hurt. You’ll think the world is going to come to an end. But it won’t. So, you should cry over him for about a week MAX and then just get over it. Oh, and James Cameron is going to make a movie about the Titanic. Put all your money and savings with the bookies and bet that it’s going to win 11 Oscars. XOXO. S”
Monday, April 26, 2010
Date Line
Flip open any women’s magazine these days, and every other page will have an article on how to dress to thrill, which shoes best accentuate your calves, how to take a day look into evening glam, what make-up to buy, and how to catch and keep a man.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the sub-text here. If you’re not looking as good as the models in the magazines, here’s how you do it. And once you’ve done it, you’ll be so busy dating, you won’t have time to sit around on Thursday nights watching the American Idol results show. The sub-sub text to that is that you won’t be a loser. Any more.
The corollary is that if you’re not dating, that means you’ll still be single come Chinese New Year. Which means more pitying looks from relatives than you know what to do with. And nobody wants that.
See how you get from shoes to pity?
All this came up the other day over lunch with my friend, Janet. Janet is a successful, thirty-something lawyer. She’s smart, she’s sassy. She’s a banker. Owns her own apartment. She’s also well-travelled, well-read and, in the immortal words of my best friend Karl after meeting her at a party, “well-stacked”.
And she’s single.
“It’s ridiculous,” she said, munching vigorously on her chicken salad. “I wear all the right clothes and make-up. And I look hot in a bikini! Any mother-in-law would be proud to have me marry her son, but for some reason, I’ve not been on a date since Lee Kuan Yew was prime minister. What’s wrong with the men in this town?”
I ventured that maybe her CV scared men off. “If you were a man, I’m sure you’d be onto your third marriage and fifth mistress by now.”
“You know,” Janet said, “I never thought of it that way. If I were a woman, I know I’d marry me!”
And Janet being Janet, she’s decided that she’s taking matters into her hands. Shortly after our lunch, she went back to her office, shut the door, went online and signed herself up with a dating profile.
A few days later, she Facebooked that she’d been on two dates already.
Saffy was deeply impressed. “Really? With an actual real man?” she asked in much the same tones Mrs Moses must have used when her husband came down from the mountain and reported that he’d met God. “Huh. I always thought you only ever met complete losers on these dating sites.”
“Oh, you do!” said Amanda, veteran of the dating scene. “They’re all liars! Remember that guy I once met online? Said he was a doctor and it turned out he was a vet?”
“You are such a job-ist!” Saffy accused. “He was perfectly lovely! Well, except for his bad breath.”
“And his cross-eyes!” Amanda said, warming up to her theme.
I said that Janet’s first date had been a cinematographer with National Geographic. “He’s into wild life!” I said.
“That’s no way to talk about Janet!” Saffy said and for the rest of the day, amused herself immensely with this witticism.
“And her second date was with a lawyer!” I went on. “It went really well, she said.”
“I give that relationship two months,” Amanda predicted. “Lawyers make terrible boyfriends. They look good on paper, but they’re never around. They’re either working late or stuck in some stupid long distance, late night conference call with New York!”
“But you’re a lawyer!” Saffy pointed out.
“Yes, but I’m a woman. And that means I can multi-task. I can mentally draft a brief while having dinner. A guy can’t.”
Janet says that so far her two dates have been working out really well. Mr National Geographic is rugged, outdoorsy and tanned, while Mr Lawyer is rich, successful and looks like the Chinese version of Jude Law. And the bonus is that neither of them lives at home. “Do you know how difficult it is to find a guy in this town who doesn’t live with his mother? And I’m dating two of them!” she said, looking very pleased with her good fortune.
Saffy says it’s so unfair that Janet is dating two guys. “Maybe I should be using her dating site as well? After all, at the rate this year is disappearing, it’ll be Chinese New Year again soon!”
Amanda says Saffy is better off placing a bet at the casino, but last I heard, Saffy was online busy creating a profile. I just got an SMS from her: “If anybody asks, I’m a model with Victoria’s Secret!”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the sub-text here. If you’re not looking as good as the models in the magazines, here’s how you do it. And once you’ve done it, you’ll be so busy dating, you won’t have time to sit around on Thursday nights watching the American Idol results show. The sub-sub text to that is that you won’t be a loser. Any more.
The corollary is that if you’re not dating, that means you’ll still be single come Chinese New Year. Which means more pitying looks from relatives than you know what to do with. And nobody wants that.
See how you get from shoes to pity?
All this came up the other day over lunch with my friend, Janet. Janet is a successful, thirty-something lawyer. She’s smart, she’s sassy. She’s a banker. Owns her own apartment. She’s also well-travelled, well-read and, in the immortal words of my best friend Karl after meeting her at a party, “well-stacked”.
And she’s single.
“It’s ridiculous,” she said, munching vigorously on her chicken salad. “I wear all the right clothes and make-up. And I look hot in a bikini! Any mother-in-law would be proud to have me marry her son, but for some reason, I’ve not been on a date since Lee Kuan Yew was prime minister. What’s wrong with the men in this town?”
I ventured that maybe her CV scared men off. “If you were a man, I’m sure you’d be onto your third marriage and fifth mistress by now.”
“You know,” Janet said, “I never thought of it that way. If I were a woman, I know I’d marry me!”
And Janet being Janet, she’s decided that she’s taking matters into her hands. Shortly after our lunch, she went back to her office, shut the door, went online and signed herself up with a dating profile.
A few days later, she Facebooked that she’d been on two dates already.
Saffy was deeply impressed. “Really? With an actual real man?” she asked in much the same tones Mrs Moses must have used when her husband came down from the mountain and reported that he’d met God. “Huh. I always thought you only ever met complete losers on these dating sites.”
“Oh, you do!” said Amanda, veteran of the dating scene. “They’re all liars! Remember that guy I once met online? Said he was a doctor and it turned out he was a vet?”
“You are such a job-ist!” Saffy accused. “He was perfectly lovely! Well, except for his bad breath.”
“And his cross-eyes!” Amanda said, warming up to her theme.
I said that Janet’s first date had been a cinematographer with National Geographic. “He’s into wild life!” I said.
“That’s no way to talk about Janet!” Saffy said and for the rest of the day, amused herself immensely with this witticism.
“And her second date was with a lawyer!” I went on. “It went really well, she said.”
“I give that relationship two months,” Amanda predicted. “Lawyers make terrible boyfriends. They look good on paper, but they’re never around. They’re either working late or stuck in some stupid long distance, late night conference call with New York!”
“But you’re a lawyer!” Saffy pointed out.
“Yes, but I’m a woman. And that means I can multi-task. I can mentally draft a brief while having dinner. A guy can’t.”
Janet says that so far her two dates have been working out really well. Mr National Geographic is rugged, outdoorsy and tanned, while Mr Lawyer is rich, successful and looks like the Chinese version of Jude Law. And the bonus is that neither of them lives at home. “Do you know how difficult it is to find a guy in this town who doesn’t live with his mother? And I’m dating two of them!” she said, looking very pleased with her good fortune.
Saffy says it’s so unfair that Janet is dating two guys. “Maybe I should be using her dating site as well? After all, at the rate this year is disappearing, it’ll be Chinese New Year again soon!”
Amanda says Saffy is better off placing a bet at the casino, but last I heard, Saffy was online busy creating a profile. I just got an SMS from her: “If anybody asks, I’m a model with Victoria’s Secret!”
Friday, April 16, 2010
The Mirror Crack'd
When I first saw Robert Pattinson in one of the Harry Potter movies and then again in Twilight, the thing that struck me most was what it must be like to walk about looking like him. What does he see when he looks into the mirror? I wondered. Does he see someone who is unspeakably good looking or does he just see a face with two eyes, a nose, a mouth and perhaps a pimple or two?
Which then made me wonder about what other people see when they look at me, perhaps for the first time. Do they also think, “Oh my God, he’s gorgeous!” or do they think, “Seriously, only a mother could love that one!”?
“I think of you like a door knob,” said Saffy after thinking about the question for a while before adding in a rush, “but not that you look like a door knob! But you know, it’s kind of like it doesn’t matter how beautiful a door knob is, after a while, when you’ve seen it a thousand times a day, it’s just a…well, you know, it’s just a door knob! But that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful!”
“So you don’t look at me and think I’m good looking?” I asked.
“Define good looking,” Saffy said cagily.
“Richard Gere in a tuxedo in Pretty Woman.”
“Oh, definitely not,” Saffy replied promptly. “I’d say more Jackie Chan in Lust, Caution!”
There was a moment of silence when mental visual libraries were rifled through, and then rifled again. “Jackie Chan wasn’t…” I began.
“It doesn’t matter,” Saffy said smoothly. “It’s six of one and a dozen of the other! The point is, you’re you, and you’re a beautiful child of God! Surely, that’s enough?”
The next morning, at breakfast, Amanda suddenly looked up from her cereal and asked, “What do you guys see when you look at me?”
Saffy choked into her coffee.
“There isn’t anything about your looks that I’ve not already said many times in my blog, Amanda,” I said loyally before turning sharply to Saffy. “Who else have you been gossiping to?”
Saffy looked shifty for a moment and decided that the best way out of this was to just go on the offensive. “Seeing as you looked so hurt about that door knob comment, I was just looking for a second opinion! What is your problem? You are always making such a big fuss about nothing!”
“You look nothing like a door knob, Jason,” Amanda said kindly, patting my hand. “I was just asking because I’ve seriously been thinking about getting a nose job.”
To everyone’s surprise, it turns out that the most beautiful woman I personally know has secret issues of her own. Apparently, Amanda’s nose has long been a bone of contention between her and her sister. “It’s why we’re not very close,” Amanda admitted. “I always thought that my parents preferred her because she has the prettier nose.”
“But Amanda, you’re identical twins!” Saffy said, her eyes wide as saucers.
“No, if you look at her profile, her nose is one degree higher than mine. I know this because we once took a Polaroid from exactly the same position and then we measured the angle. One point three degrees higher to be exact. So that gives her the edge in the looks department,” Amanda added with great dissatisfaction.
For days afterwards, the look on her face haunted me. Here we have a highly successful, driven career woman with the kind of looks that stops traffic and she wants a nose job because she thinks her parents prefer her identical twin because her nose is one point three degrees higher.
This, obviously, is a woman who does not see in the mirror what the rest of us see. Which, in turn, leads to me to wonder, yet again, what Robert Pattinson sees when he looks into the mirror each morning.
“Maybe he sees Ricky Gervais?” my best friend Karl suggested.
“No, he doesn’t,” Barney Chen said firmly. “Beautiful people like Robert Pattinson will always say that they don’t think they look very special, but deep down, in the darkest part of their personality, they know they’re drop dead gorgeous, but they just have too good manners to actually say it!”
“So, who do you see when you look in the mirror?” Karl asked.
“Someone I’d definitely date if I wasn’t already dating someone!” Barney replied. “I have no issues with my looks! None at all!”
Meanwhile, Saffy is trying to decide what she sees when she looks into the mirror. So far, the list includes Angelina Jolie and Penelope Cruz.
Which then made me wonder about what other people see when they look at me, perhaps for the first time. Do they also think, “Oh my God, he’s gorgeous!” or do they think, “Seriously, only a mother could love that one!”?
“I think of you like a door knob,” said Saffy after thinking about the question for a while before adding in a rush, “but not that you look like a door knob! But you know, it’s kind of like it doesn’t matter how beautiful a door knob is, after a while, when you’ve seen it a thousand times a day, it’s just a…well, you know, it’s just a door knob! But that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful!”
“So you don’t look at me and think I’m good looking?” I asked.
“Define good looking,” Saffy said cagily.
“Richard Gere in a tuxedo in Pretty Woman.”
“Oh, definitely not,” Saffy replied promptly. “I’d say more Jackie Chan in Lust, Caution!”
There was a moment of silence when mental visual libraries were rifled through, and then rifled again. “Jackie Chan wasn’t…” I began.
“It doesn’t matter,” Saffy said smoothly. “It’s six of one and a dozen of the other! The point is, you’re you, and you’re a beautiful child of God! Surely, that’s enough?”
The next morning, at breakfast, Amanda suddenly looked up from her cereal and asked, “What do you guys see when you look at me?”
Saffy choked into her coffee.
“There isn’t anything about your looks that I’ve not already said many times in my blog, Amanda,” I said loyally before turning sharply to Saffy. “Who else have you been gossiping to?”
Saffy looked shifty for a moment and decided that the best way out of this was to just go on the offensive. “Seeing as you looked so hurt about that door knob comment, I was just looking for a second opinion! What is your problem? You are always making such a big fuss about nothing!”
“You look nothing like a door knob, Jason,” Amanda said kindly, patting my hand. “I was just asking because I’ve seriously been thinking about getting a nose job.”
To everyone’s surprise, it turns out that the most beautiful woman I personally know has secret issues of her own. Apparently, Amanda’s nose has long been a bone of contention between her and her sister. “It’s why we’re not very close,” Amanda admitted. “I always thought that my parents preferred her because she has the prettier nose.”
“But Amanda, you’re identical twins!” Saffy said, her eyes wide as saucers.
“No, if you look at her profile, her nose is one degree higher than mine. I know this because we once took a Polaroid from exactly the same position and then we measured the angle. One point three degrees higher to be exact. So that gives her the edge in the looks department,” Amanda added with great dissatisfaction.
For days afterwards, the look on her face haunted me. Here we have a highly successful, driven career woman with the kind of looks that stops traffic and she wants a nose job because she thinks her parents prefer her identical twin because her nose is one point three degrees higher.
This, obviously, is a woman who does not see in the mirror what the rest of us see. Which, in turn, leads to me to wonder, yet again, what Robert Pattinson sees when he looks into the mirror each morning.
“Maybe he sees Ricky Gervais?” my best friend Karl suggested.
“No, he doesn’t,” Barney Chen said firmly. “Beautiful people like Robert Pattinson will always say that they don’t think they look very special, but deep down, in the darkest part of their personality, they know they’re drop dead gorgeous, but they just have too good manners to actually say it!”
“So, who do you see when you look in the mirror?” Karl asked.
“Someone I’d definitely date if I wasn’t already dating someone!” Barney replied. “I have no issues with my looks! None at all!”
Meanwhile, Saffy is trying to decide what she sees when she looks into the mirror. So far, the list includes Angelina Jolie and Penelope Cruz.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Don't Look Down
I don’t know if it’s a sign of age, but lately, I find myself talking a lot about the state of my stomach. I will finish a meal, burp, rub my tummy and mutter, “Oy, I really shouldn’t have eaten so much!” And then, I’ll spend the rest of the day complaining that my tummy feels terrible.
“I’m incredibly gassy,” I will confide to my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch who I know will never judge me.
“Don’t walk so close behind me,” I instruct Saffy when we’re navigating the crowds along Orchard Road. Because I know she will be the first to judge me.
Of course, when this goes on for more than a couple of days, I start to worry. After all, you can’t be a card-carrying hypochondriac like me (and a fan of ‘House’, to boot) without thinking that even a simple case of indigestion might actually be early signs of advanced bowel cancer.
So I speed-dialed Dr Chan, my lovely gastroenterologist and demanded an immediate appointment.
“Next week?” I asked her receptionist. “Next week? Seriously? I could be dead next week! Do you want that on your conscience?”
Which is how, a few hours later, I found myself waiting my turn to see Dr Chan. From behind the surgery’s brand new copy of Tatler, I peeked at the two other people who were waiting and entertained myself wondering what specific gastroenterological problem had brought them here. I decided that the fat old man was here for his bi-yearly colonoscopy while the Indonesian lady with the big hair and Bottega Veneta bag was probably keeping her husband awake all night with her thunderous farts.
“Please, lah!” Dr Chan looked scandalized when I asked her. “Have you never heard of doctor-patient confidentiality?”
“Who am I going to tell?” I asked in a wounded tone while trying not to think too much about this column.
“So what’s the matter with you this time?” Dr Chan asked as she flipped through my thick file. So, I told her all about my rumbling stomach and the discomfort I felt whenever I sat for too long.
“Are you regular?” she asked as she began prodding my stomach.
“Listen, if you’re going to keep doing that,” I said urgently, “I suggest you get out your nose-plugs!”
“I’ve got a cold today, so I can’t smell a thing!” she giggled rather inappropriately for someone who got her medical degree from Oxford. “So are you regular?”
“Every morning, at 7 am,” I replied promptly. “You could set the clock by me.”
“What colour?”
I blinked. “What?”
“What colour? And what shape?”
“What do you mean what shape?” I demanded.
Dr Chan sighed and looked up. “What is the colour and shape of your stools?”
“What sort of a question is that? How would I know?”
“Don’t you look?”
There might have been a brief moment when I squealed like a girl, but in my defence, I repeat, what sort of a question is that to ask someone who, at that moment, is lying in a very vulnerable position while someone is prodding you in the stomach?
“What do you mean you never look?” Saffy demanded later that night.
I was astonished. “You mean you do?”
“Always!”
“But why?” I cried.
It was Saffy’s turn to look a little put out. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just do. Just in case there are any nasty surprises!”
Amanda, who was brought up in a Catholic boarding school, looked ill. “That’s just disgusting, Saf,” she said. “You couldn’t pay me enough money to look!”
“But apparently, you’re meant to look,” I said, telling them that Dr Chan had spent a very unpleasant half hour explaining to me what healthy poo should look like. “And she says the shape is very important! We should all be aiming for an S shape,” I reported.
“I’ve never heard of anything more revolting in my life,” Amanda declared firmly, adding, “and since living with you two, I’ve heard a lot!”
Saffy looked intrigued. “Really? An S shape is good? You know, I’ve never noticed. Did she say what it meant if you had other letters?”
“Round balls aren’t good, she said. Apparently, that means you’re not getting enough roughage.”
Saffy sat back in her chair, more stunned by these revelations than she’d been after reading ‘The Da Vinci Code’. “Huh!” she said and you didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what she was planning to do the next morning in the toilet. Meanwhile, Amanda says that she’s been so disturbed by our conversation that she’s been constipated for the past two days.
“I’m incredibly gassy,” I will confide to my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch who I know will never judge me.
“Don’t walk so close behind me,” I instruct Saffy when we’re navigating the crowds along Orchard Road. Because I know she will be the first to judge me.
Of course, when this goes on for more than a couple of days, I start to worry. After all, you can’t be a card-carrying hypochondriac like me (and a fan of ‘House’, to boot) without thinking that even a simple case of indigestion might actually be early signs of advanced bowel cancer.
So I speed-dialed Dr Chan, my lovely gastroenterologist and demanded an immediate appointment.
“Next week?” I asked her receptionist. “Next week? Seriously? I could be dead next week! Do you want that on your conscience?”
Which is how, a few hours later, I found myself waiting my turn to see Dr Chan. From behind the surgery’s brand new copy of Tatler, I peeked at the two other people who were waiting and entertained myself wondering what specific gastroenterological problem had brought them here. I decided that the fat old man was here for his bi-yearly colonoscopy while the Indonesian lady with the big hair and Bottega Veneta bag was probably keeping her husband awake all night with her thunderous farts.
“Please, lah!” Dr Chan looked scandalized when I asked her. “Have you never heard of doctor-patient confidentiality?”
“Who am I going to tell?” I asked in a wounded tone while trying not to think too much about this column.
“So what’s the matter with you this time?” Dr Chan asked as she flipped through my thick file. So, I told her all about my rumbling stomach and the discomfort I felt whenever I sat for too long.
“Are you regular?” she asked as she began prodding my stomach.
“Listen, if you’re going to keep doing that,” I said urgently, “I suggest you get out your nose-plugs!”
“I’ve got a cold today, so I can’t smell a thing!” she giggled rather inappropriately for someone who got her medical degree from Oxford. “So are you regular?”
“Every morning, at 7 am,” I replied promptly. “You could set the clock by me.”
“What colour?”
I blinked. “What?”
“What colour? And what shape?”
“What do you mean what shape?” I demanded.
Dr Chan sighed and looked up. “What is the colour and shape of your stools?”
“What sort of a question is that? How would I know?”
“Don’t you look?”
There might have been a brief moment when I squealed like a girl, but in my defence, I repeat, what sort of a question is that to ask someone who, at that moment, is lying in a very vulnerable position while someone is prodding you in the stomach?
“What do you mean you never look?” Saffy demanded later that night.
I was astonished. “You mean you do?”
“Always!”
“But why?” I cried.
It was Saffy’s turn to look a little put out. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just do. Just in case there are any nasty surprises!”
Amanda, who was brought up in a Catholic boarding school, looked ill. “That’s just disgusting, Saf,” she said. “You couldn’t pay me enough money to look!”
“But apparently, you’re meant to look,” I said, telling them that Dr Chan had spent a very unpleasant half hour explaining to me what healthy poo should look like. “And she says the shape is very important! We should all be aiming for an S shape,” I reported.
“I’ve never heard of anything more revolting in my life,” Amanda declared firmly, adding, “and since living with you two, I’ve heard a lot!”
Saffy looked intrigued. “Really? An S shape is good? You know, I’ve never noticed. Did she say what it meant if you had other letters?”
“Round balls aren’t good, she said. Apparently, that means you’re not getting enough roughage.”
Saffy sat back in her chair, more stunned by these revelations than she’d been after reading ‘The Da Vinci Code’. “Huh!” she said and you didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what she was planning to do the next morning in the toilet. Meanwhile, Amanda says that she’s been so disturbed by our conversation that she’s been constipated for the past two days.
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Sleeping with the Enemy
Now I realise that there are some people out there who will frown at what they’re about to read next, but I don’t care. I pay my taxes every year. I’m a decent citizen. I don’t jay walk and, most importantly, I have nothing but the highest undiluted praise for the government (my proposal for the PAP’s next general election campaign is “Yay, Mr Lee!” Catchy, no?).
So, my point is that I think I’ve earned the right to declare, loudly and proudly, that I like to sleep in public. Not – for those of you with bad eyesight or mild dyslexia – sleep around in public, but just sleep. Whichever mode of transportation I may be taking – planes, trains, automobiles or, indeed, anything in which a rhythmic rocking motion is involved (a camel is my absolute favourite mode of transportation) – you will find me napping. It doesn’t matter that I might be leaning against the train door, sitting upright on the bus, or slouched down on my plane seat, within two minutes of settling down, I’m sound asleep.
It’s a talent, I know. Some people can sing in tune. Some people can play a Bach concerto. Some people can programme a new TV while others can bend over and touch their toes. I can nap anywhere.
Meanwhile, my friend Warren thinks that people who sleep in public are a disgrace and should be locked up.
“Isn’t that a bit severe?” I once asked him.
“Certainly not! You don’t poo in public, do you?”
Leave it to Saffy to pipe up at that moment to admit at she had once been forced to pee in the Botanic Gardens on account of the fact that she had had too much coffee to drink over lunch and as she pointed out, “When you gotta go, you gotta go!” And so she did. Right behind some bushes in the Orchid Garden.
“Yes, but that was an emergency,” said Warren who has always had a crush on Saffy and would rather have his finger-nails pulled out than to contradict anything she says. “Sleeping in public is not an emergency. You can sleep at home. You don’t need to sleep in public. But peeing in public in an emergency is acceptable!” he said firmly, while beaming at her.
“But what about on the plane?” I asked, cleverly finding a loophole in his argument.
“You’re crossing time zones. Sleeping in those circumstances is a natural and equally acceptable activity.”
“Huh,” said Saffy. Later in private, she told me that it was a great pity that Warren was already married to the obnoxious Mary Wong because there was nothing more sexy about a man than a piercing intelligence.
“I still think he’s being ridiculous about this whole sleeping in public thing,” I said stubbornly. “There’s no rule that says you can’t! And let me tell you, if there was, Singapore would have had it years ago!”
“Well, I think it’s an amazing skill,” Saffy said loyally. “I wish I could sleep like you. I am still suffering from the worst insomnia!”
Amanda says she’s with Warren on this one. “There’s nothing more unattractive than watching people sleep on the train. Their heads are lolling all over the place, sometimes they dribble, and then they lean their heads on your shoulder and start snoring! It’s disgusting!” she said with a delicious shiver.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Saffy interrupted. “When was the last time you were on a bus?”
“Oh, never!” Amanda replied without the least trace of social embarrassment. “A friend of mine sent me this YouTube clip of this person who fell asleep on the train. It’s actually quite interesting how spacious the MRT is!”
Saffy later said that it constantly astonished her that there were people in this world like Amanda. “You know, if I didn’t actually live with her, I wouldn’t believe she existed. How do you live your life without once getting on a train? I’m horribly jealous! I want to never have been on a train! Dammit, why did my parents have to be school teachers and not property developers?”
I said that I was sure the Prime Minister had never been on a train either.
“That’s different, he’s the Prime Minister!” Saffy said, a soft misty look clouding her eyes whenever the subject of the PM came up. “If he was wasting time on the MRT, no one would be running this country.”
Which, in turn, led me to wonder if the Prime Minister ever sleeps. That, and what other public bushes Saffy has peed behind. Amanda says you could go blind thinking about things like that.
So, my point is that I think I’ve earned the right to declare, loudly and proudly, that I like to sleep in public. Not – for those of you with bad eyesight or mild dyslexia – sleep around in public, but just sleep. Whichever mode of transportation I may be taking – planes, trains, automobiles or, indeed, anything in which a rhythmic rocking motion is involved (a camel is my absolute favourite mode of transportation) – you will find me napping. It doesn’t matter that I might be leaning against the train door, sitting upright on the bus, or slouched down on my plane seat, within two minutes of settling down, I’m sound asleep.
It’s a talent, I know. Some people can sing in tune. Some people can play a Bach concerto. Some people can programme a new TV while others can bend over and touch their toes. I can nap anywhere.
Meanwhile, my friend Warren thinks that people who sleep in public are a disgrace and should be locked up.
“Isn’t that a bit severe?” I once asked him.
“Certainly not! You don’t poo in public, do you?”
Leave it to Saffy to pipe up at that moment to admit at she had once been forced to pee in the Botanic Gardens on account of the fact that she had had too much coffee to drink over lunch and as she pointed out, “When you gotta go, you gotta go!” And so she did. Right behind some bushes in the Orchid Garden.
“Yes, but that was an emergency,” said Warren who has always had a crush on Saffy and would rather have his finger-nails pulled out than to contradict anything she says. “Sleeping in public is not an emergency. You can sleep at home. You don’t need to sleep in public. But peeing in public in an emergency is acceptable!” he said firmly, while beaming at her.
“But what about on the plane?” I asked, cleverly finding a loophole in his argument.
“You’re crossing time zones. Sleeping in those circumstances is a natural and equally acceptable activity.”
“Huh,” said Saffy. Later in private, she told me that it was a great pity that Warren was already married to the obnoxious Mary Wong because there was nothing more sexy about a man than a piercing intelligence.
“I still think he’s being ridiculous about this whole sleeping in public thing,” I said stubbornly. “There’s no rule that says you can’t! And let me tell you, if there was, Singapore would have had it years ago!”
“Well, I think it’s an amazing skill,” Saffy said loyally. “I wish I could sleep like you. I am still suffering from the worst insomnia!”
Amanda says she’s with Warren on this one. “There’s nothing more unattractive than watching people sleep on the train. Their heads are lolling all over the place, sometimes they dribble, and then they lean their heads on your shoulder and start snoring! It’s disgusting!” she said with a delicious shiver.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Saffy interrupted. “When was the last time you were on a bus?”
“Oh, never!” Amanda replied without the least trace of social embarrassment. “A friend of mine sent me this YouTube clip of this person who fell asleep on the train. It’s actually quite interesting how spacious the MRT is!”
Saffy later said that it constantly astonished her that there were people in this world like Amanda. “You know, if I didn’t actually live with her, I wouldn’t believe she existed. How do you live your life without once getting on a train? I’m horribly jealous! I want to never have been on a train! Dammit, why did my parents have to be school teachers and not property developers?”
I said that I was sure the Prime Minister had never been on a train either.
“That’s different, he’s the Prime Minister!” Saffy said, a soft misty look clouding her eyes whenever the subject of the PM came up. “If he was wasting time on the MRT, no one would be running this country.”
Which, in turn, led me to wonder if the Prime Minister ever sleeps. That, and what other public bushes Saffy has peed behind. Amanda says you could go blind thinking about things like that.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Hissy fit
The subject of snakes came up the other day during dinner. On the menu was spaghetti and meatballs, and for some reason, Amanda suddenly announced that the slippery texture of the pasta reminded her of snakes.
Of course, that was all it took for Saffy and me to put our folks down and push our chair back from the table. To my credit, I remained outwardly calm but Saffy’s formidable bosom began to heave asthmatically.
“Seriously, Amanda,” I began.
“You are just sick!” Saffy hissed, her eyes narrowing to slits.
Amanda looked astonished. “What?”
“You know how we feel about those…those things!” I said.
Saffy nodded. “And thanks to you, I can’t ever eat pasta again because every time, I do, I will be thinking about…about what they look like…and, oh God, I need to get away from this table!”
And with that, Saffy got up from the table and disappeared into her room. The next morning, she said she didn’t sleep a wink. “I kept imagining there were snakes crawling up my bed and under my sheets!” she reported. “And the air-con kept me awake because it kept hissing at me, so I turned that off, and then it got too hot and I had to open the window, but then I‘d read somewhere that there are snakes that can climb up trees and leap ten feet in the air and I kept thinking it would be just my luck that one of them decided to leap into my open window right onto my bed! So, I got up and closed the window and of course, I couldn’t sleep because it was so hot. I am a mess!” Saffy moaned.
Now, I know there are readers out there who have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. “Snakes?” they’re probably thinking. “What’s he on about? Nothing wrong with them! Not the friendliest creatures I know, but I’ve got nothing against them anymore than I have against, ooh, say, chickens. And they taste good in a soup too!”
The thing is, I’ve always been afraid of snakes. Can’t stand them. Can’t stand the idea of them. Can’t stand the look of them. Can’t stand even the word. And, of course, like all phobias, it’s utterly irrational since as far as I can tell, I’ve never actually met a real snake. My sister, who has the same fear, thinks it must be a reincarnation thing. “We probably fell into a snake pit in a previous life,” she told me when she was 10 and I was eight. I had nightmares for six months and for years afterwards, I would ask everyone I met what their Chinese horoscope was and if the answer was ‘snake’, I ran for the distant horizon and never looked back.
Leave it to my mother to tell us the story of when her father fell ill, he drank his way back to health with a tonic made from a snake marinated in alcohol. Even at the age of seven, I remember thinking it was the most revolting thing I’d ever heard of in my life.
Years later, I read about this stupid schmuck who kept an anaconda as a pet and then one day when it got hungry, the dumb thing turned around, strangled its owner and then swallowed him. It was the grossest thing I’d ever read but all I could think about was that it served the guy right. “Why, oh why would anyone be stupid enough to have an anaconda as a pet?” I asked Barney Chen who replied that thinking about questions like that gave you wrinkles.
Meanwhile, Saffy is so annoyed with Amanda that they’ve not spoken in days. “Can you believe that anyone would be so cruel to say such a thing? I love pasta and now I can’t even walk past an Italian restaurant!” she posted on Facebook.
Her best friend Sharyn said all this reminded her of the time when she was growing up in a kampong in Kelantan in Malaysia and one day, while her granny was squatting on outdoor toilet, she looked down and saw a snake peering back up at her. When she heard that story, Saffy was simultaneously frightened out of her wits and furious. That night, she took Sharyn off her Facebook friends list.
“Oh God,” she groaned to me. “Now, I can’t even go to the toilet! Why do people tell us such horrible stories?”
“They’ll be punished in their next lives,” I promised her while thinking about the SMS I’d received that afternoon from Amanda: “In HMV. Am buying ‘Snakes on the Plane’ for Saffy. Haha!”
Of course, that was all it took for Saffy and me to put our folks down and push our chair back from the table. To my credit, I remained outwardly calm but Saffy’s formidable bosom began to heave asthmatically.
“Seriously, Amanda,” I began.
“You are just sick!” Saffy hissed, her eyes narrowing to slits.
Amanda looked astonished. “What?”
“You know how we feel about those…those things!” I said.
Saffy nodded. “And thanks to you, I can’t ever eat pasta again because every time, I do, I will be thinking about…about what they look like…and, oh God, I need to get away from this table!”
And with that, Saffy got up from the table and disappeared into her room. The next morning, she said she didn’t sleep a wink. “I kept imagining there were snakes crawling up my bed and under my sheets!” she reported. “And the air-con kept me awake because it kept hissing at me, so I turned that off, and then it got too hot and I had to open the window, but then I‘d read somewhere that there are snakes that can climb up trees and leap ten feet in the air and I kept thinking it would be just my luck that one of them decided to leap into my open window right onto my bed! So, I got up and closed the window and of course, I couldn’t sleep because it was so hot. I am a mess!” Saffy moaned.
Now, I know there are readers out there who have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. “Snakes?” they’re probably thinking. “What’s he on about? Nothing wrong with them! Not the friendliest creatures I know, but I’ve got nothing against them anymore than I have against, ooh, say, chickens. And they taste good in a soup too!”
The thing is, I’ve always been afraid of snakes. Can’t stand them. Can’t stand the idea of them. Can’t stand the look of them. Can’t stand even the word. And, of course, like all phobias, it’s utterly irrational since as far as I can tell, I’ve never actually met a real snake. My sister, who has the same fear, thinks it must be a reincarnation thing. “We probably fell into a snake pit in a previous life,” she told me when she was 10 and I was eight. I had nightmares for six months and for years afterwards, I would ask everyone I met what their Chinese horoscope was and if the answer was ‘snake’, I ran for the distant horizon and never looked back.
Leave it to my mother to tell us the story of when her father fell ill, he drank his way back to health with a tonic made from a snake marinated in alcohol. Even at the age of seven, I remember thinking it was the most revolting thing I’d ever heard of in my life.
Years later, I read about this stupid schmuck who kept an anaconda as a pet and then one day when it got hungry, the dumb thing turned around, strangled its owner and then swallowed him. It was the grossest thing I’d ever read but all I could think about was that it served the guy right. “Why, oh why would anyone be stupid enough to have an anaconda as a pet?” I asked Barney Chen who replied that thinking about questions like that gave you wrinkles.
Meanwhile, Saffy is so annoyed with Amanda that they’ve not spoken in days. “Can you believe that anyone would be so cruel to say such a thing? I love pasta and now I can’t even walk past an Italian restaurant!” she posted on Facebook.
Her best friend Sharyn said all this reminded her of the time when she was growing up in a kampong in Kelantan in Malaysia and one day, while her granny was squatting on outdoor toilet, she looked down and saw a snake peering back up at her. When she heard that story, Saffy was simultaneously frightened out of her wits and furious. That night, she took Sharyn off her Facebook friends list.
“Oh God,” she groaned to me. “Now, I can’t even go to the toilet! Why do people tell us such horrible stories?”
“They’ll be punished in their next lives,” I promised her while thinking about the SMS I’d received that afternoon from Amanda: “In HMV. Am buying ‘Snakes on the Plane’ for Saffy. Haha!”
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Bag of Tricks
They say that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he packs his luggage. And when I say ‘They say’, I really mean ‘I say’.
People who are naturally messy in life – messy desk, unmade bed and even messier love life – will just throw their clothes into their Samsonite. They then find that the luggage won’t close naturally and will have to sit on the lid to lock it. These are usually also the same people who, at the airport check-in counter, are told that they are overweight and need to either unload some things or pay excess luggage. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy standing behind these people as they are forced to open their luggage in front of everyone and everything spills out: dirty underwear, tacky souvenir purchases, crushed boxes of chocolates, flattened soft toys, terrible fashion and dog-eared copies of porn magazines, I’ve seen them all. And when you’re stuck in a check-in queue, this kind of drama is hugely entertaining.
Then you have people like my friend Barney Chen who carefully sorts out all his clothes into neat vacuum sealed packs. I’ve never quite worked out what his system is. Sometimes, the packs are organized by days. Sometimes, it’s by outfit. Sometimes, it’s by occasion. Meanwhile, his toiletries – all neatly decanted into matching Muji bottles – are carefully slipped into ziplock bags.
Barney Chen is the god of packing, and he’s my idol. I’m convinced if everyone packed like him, the world would be a much nicer place.
“I really don’t think it’s normal to pack like that,” Saffy said firmly the other day after she came back from a visit to Barney’s flat. Out of a combination of sheer boredom and idle curiosity, she’d spent the afternoon watching him pack for a three day business trip to Hong Kong. “His suitcase was like when you open the box that your new TV arrives in. Everything fit together like a neat jig-saw puzzle. If you ask me, it’s the sign of an unhealthy mind,” she declared, her bosom trembling a little.
I replied that this was really rich coming from a woman who carefully arranges the magazines on our lounge table into a fan pattern.
“That’s so different!” Saffy puffed and disappeared into her room with a whiff of Chanel No. 5 and injured dignity.
A few days later, Amanda announced that she and her on-again, off-again insectile looking boyfriend – aka The Cockroach – were going off to Hong Kong for a week’s holiday.
“Why?” Saffy asked.
“Well, because we both have holidays to clear and there are cheap flights to Hong…”
“No, what I meant was, why are you still dating that loser?”
Amanda later complained to me that it was a pity she’d ever told Saffy all her deepest and darkest secrets, because she’d have kicked Saffy out of our flat in a New York second if she wasn’t so frightened that Saffy would turn right around and blackmail her.
As it was, Amanda nobly ignored Saffy’s question. “My point is,” she said icily, “it came up during our conversation that I would be bringing my Louis Vuitton trolley bag and Cockroach said that I should just bring a back-pack.”
This time, it was Saffy’s turn to sit up. “What, in addition to your trolley bag?”
“No. Instead of.”
“And check-in luggage?”
“None.”
“What, a week in Hong Kong with just a back-pack?” Saffy asked.
“Yes. And he got a little upset when I said I needed to check in some luggage. He says he hates waiting for luggage to come off a plane.”
“And you’re still dating this man because…”
“Oh, shut up, Saffy!”
For days, it was all Amanda could talk about. “What is it with some guys? Does he seriously think that I wake up each morning looking like this?” she demanded, waving her hand over her perfectly made up face, expensively coiffed tresses and this season’s Prada and Jimmy Choo slingbacks. “I need a separate bag just for my make-up and toiletries. And what about my shopping? Does he think it can all fit into a back-pack?” Her face wrinkled into a frown. “And you know what, I don’t think I even know what a back-pack is!”
Saffy says this is one of the reasons why she’s sometimes actually glad that she’s single. It’s just too disheartening, she says, to have to discover that the man you might actually want to have children with has the EQ of a coffee bean. “If he’s like this on the subject of holiday bags, what will he be like when the topic of vasectomies comes up?” she wondered.
People who are naturally messy in life – messy desk, unmade bed and even messier love life – will just throw their clothes into their Samsonite. They then find that the luggage won’t close naturally and will have to sit on the lid to lock it. These are usually also the same people who, at the airport check-in counter, are told that they are overweight and need to either unload some things or pay excess luggage. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy standing behind these people as they are forced to open their luggage in front of everyone and everything spills out: dirty underwear, tacky souvenir purchases, crushed boxes of chocolates, flattened soft toys, terrible fashion and dog-eared copies of porn magazines, I’ve seen them all. And when you’re stuck in a check-in queue, this kind of drama is hugely entertaining.
Then you have people like my friend Barney Chen who carefully sorts out all his clothes into neat vacuum sealed packs. I’ve never quite worked out what his system is. Sometimes, the packs are organized by days. Sometimes, it’s by outfit. Sometimes, it’s by occasion. Meanwhile, his toiletries – all neatly decanted into matching Muji bottles – are carefully slipped into ziplock bags.
Barney Chen is the god of packing, and he’s my idol. I’m convinced if everyone packed like him, the world would be a much nicer place.
“I really don’t think it’s normal to pack like that,” Saffy said firmly the other day after she came back from a visit to Barney’s flat. Out of a combination of sheer boredom and idle curiosity, she’d spent the afternoon watching him pack for a three day business trip to Hong Kong. “His suitcase was like when you open the box that your new TV arrives in. Everything fit together like a neat jig-saw puzzle. If you ask me, it’s the sign of an unhealthy mind,” she declared, her bosom trembling a little.
I replied that this was really rich coming from a woman who carefully arranges the magazines on our lounge table into a fan pattern.
“That’s so different!” Saffy puffed and disappeared into her room with a whiff of Chanel No. 5 and injured dignity.
A few days later, Amanda announced that she and her on-again, off-again insectile looking boyfriend – aka The Cockroach – were going off to Hong Kong for a week’s holiday.
“Why?” Saffy asked.
“Well, because we both have holidays to clear and there are cheap flights to Hong…”
“No, what I meant was, why are you still dating that loser?”
Amanda later complained to me that it was a pity she’d ever told Saffy all her deepest and darkest secrets, because she’d have kicked Saffy out of our flat in a New York second if she wasn’t so frightened that Saffy would turn right around and blackmail her.
As it was, Amanda nobly ignored Saffy’s question. “My point is,” she said icily, “it came up during our conversation that I would be bringing my Louis Vuitton trolley bag and Cockroach said that I should just bring a back-pack.”
This time, it was Saffy’s turn to sit up. “What, in addition to your trolley bag?”
“No. Instead of.”
“And check-in luggage?”
“None.”
“What, a week in Hong Kong with just a back-pack?” Saffy asked.
“Yes. And he got a little upset when I said I needed to check in some luggage. He says he hates waiting for luggage to come off a plane.”
“And you’re still dating this man because…”
“Oh, shut up, Saffy!”
For days, it was all Amanda could talk about. “What is it with some guys? Does he seriously think that I wake up each morning looking like this?” she demanded, waving her hand over her perfectly made up face, expensively coiffed tresses and this season’s Prada and Jimmy Choo slingbacks. “I need a separate bag just for my make-up and toiletries. And what about my shopping? Does he think it can all fit into a back-pack?” Her face wrinkled into a frown. “And you know what, I don’t think I even know what a back-pack is!”
Saffy says this is one of the reasons why she’s sometimes actually glad that she’s single. It’s just too disheartening, she says, to have to discover that the man you might actually want to have children with has the EQ of a coffee bean. “If he’s like this on the subject of holiday bags, what will he be like when the topic of vasectomies comes up?” she wondered.
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