That's What Friends Are For

Here’s the thing about being single: it’s all fun, frivolity and sunshine when you’re with your friends bar-hopping, eating out, settling down at the movies, and gossiping into the night. But when the chips are down, you know who the people most important in your life are when you’re laid low with an illness.

It crept up on us quietly like, to use Saffy’s immortal phrase, a pervert in a change-room. One minute, we were happily dashing about Orchard Road in the morning, inhaling a rojak in the evening, and the next, we were having a close and very personal encounter with the insides of a toilet bowl.

“Saffy, please hurry!” Amanda moaned as she leaned against the bathroom door. From behind it, we could hear Saffy retching while crying.

“God, it’s awful!” she wailed. “How did this happen?”

Amanda’s chest heaved as she threw open the bathroom door and rushed in, pushed Saffy aside and threw up.

“Oww,” Saffy said feebly as she curled up into a ball on the bathroom floor.

A warning gurgle in my stomach made me leave my place in the queue and I waddled hurriedly to the toilet in the maid’s bathroom at the back of the flat where I crouched, my head feverish and pounding with pain, and praying to die soon.

No one came to rescue us. Sharyn said stoutly over the phone that she was looking after her 75 year old post-stroke mother and she wasn’t going to risk it. Saffy’s boyfriend Bradley was away on a business trip. Our maid Ah Chuan said she had three houses to clean, but said she would leave us some soup at the door. Even Pooch, my beloved adopted mongrel dog, had been banished to our neighbour Lydia Kumarasamy.

From her bed, Amanda called me on the handphone and said that the way we were being treated, we might as well have leprosy, to which Saffy said, via conference call, that she wished she had leprosy because at least then maybe her head would drop off and stop hurting so much.

This all took place at 10 pm on a Saturday evening, a full three hours after our fateful encounter with that rojak. At 10.05pm, our stomachs turned over. Which is how we found ourselves sitting on the loo amidst thunderous explosions and toxic fumes and feeling even more sorry for ourselves.

We would take turns in the two toilets, crawling out of bed, one after the other, and then crawling back in, utterly defeated. At one stage, Saffy could be heard to moan, “How is it possible that it’s still coming out of me? I only had a few bites of rojak!”

“You had two plates, Saffy!” Amanda croaked.

“Oh, shut up, Amanda!”

Much later, when it was all over, Amanda said it was a miracle of sheer good luck that she’d remembered to stock up on toilet paper the day before at Cold Storage. “What if we’d run out? Can you imagine?” she wondered to the world at large.

Saffy said she’d never felt more alone in her life. And when Pooch returned to the flat, I scooped him up and hugged him tightly.

Of course, the whole sorry episode had two important consequences. One was that as soon as she could walk again in a straight line, Amanda marched down to the rojak stall and told the poor bewildered auntie that if any of us got sick ever again, she would feel the full force of a Harvard law degree. We’ve been getting free rojak ever since.

The second is that Saffy has been ruthlessly editing some friends out of her life. “Not even a phone call or a text message!” she said, her bosom trembling, as she deleted numbers from her handphone. “I could be dead for all they knew or cared! And to think I actually gave them two hundred bucks for their wedding angpow! Do you think I could ask for the money back?” she wondered.

Amanda said to me it was a good thing we’d all been sick together, otherwise our phone numbers would probably have been deleted as well. “Can you imagine?” she asked for the second time.

Saffy says it just goes to show that, when you come right down to it, despite the stats on Facebook, you can really only have a handful of good friends. They’re the ones who leave you chicken soup at the door. Or the ones who will happily dog sit for you. And they’re especially the ones who will move aside so that you can share the toilet bowl.

Lost in Translation

A few mornings ago, I woke to the sound of our part time maid Ah Chuan screaming at Saffy. It says something about how immune I was to the whole thing that I flipped over and went back to sleep for another ten minutes.

When I finally dragged myself out of bed and into the living room, I found Ah Chuan standing over Saffy waving her arms and shouting at the top of her voice in Hokkien. Saffy nodded and smiled reassuringly at Ah Chuan.

“Really?” said Saffy, who doesn’t speak a word of Hokkien. “That’s so interesting! Oh there, you are, Jason. What’s she saying?”

“Why are you asking me?” I said. “My Hokkien is as good as your’s!”

“The way she’s yelling, you’d think I’d just peed in her soup, or something!” Saffy said cheerfully and shouted back at Ah Chuan, “Would you like some coffee?”

Ah Chuan came to us highly recommended by one of the secretaries in my office who’d heard that I was desperately in need of someone to clean my flat. Though I’d only just moved in with Saffy and Amanda, it became clear very quickly that none of us knew how to clean. The first day Ah Chuan showed up on our doorstep, she immediately started screaming at the top of her voice and scared us half to death.

Saffy ran to her room and rang the police, while I retreated to the kitchen and eyed the knife rack. We should have taken our cue from my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch who immediately flipped over onto his back and, with a shaggy wag of his tail, invited Ah Chuan to rub his belly.

Thank God, Amanda arrived just in time to translate. “She’s saying that we’re all too thin and that we should be eating more and did we, uhm, oh yeah, did we want her to make us soup when she comes to clean?”

“Why is she yelling at us?” Saffy shouted from behind her locked bedroom door.

“That’s just the way she talks.”

“Really?” Saffy asked, poking her head out. “My God, if this is her being pleasant, what’s she like when she’s mad?”

“She’ll be whispering, I imagine,” Amanda said. “That’s when we should all be very scared.”

And that was that. Since that day, every Thursday, Ah Chuan will show up at the flat at 7.30 am. She takes one look at the mess and then starts yelling. She seems to save the worst for Saffy which, according to a very put out Amanda, means that Saffy is her favourite.

“She says you’re too thin and wants to know why you are still single!” Amanda translated in the second week, after a particularly virulent stream from Ah Chuan.

Saffy’s impressive bosom inflated. “Oh my God, she thinks I’m thin? I love this woman! Thank you very much!” she shouted back at Ah Chuan under the assumption that if you say something loud enough, the other person will understand everything you say, and that’s been pretty much the volume of their conversations ever since.

The fact that Ah Chuan’s can’t speak a word of English and Saffy’s Hokkien is limited to swear words she picks up from the courier man at her office doesn’t seem to bother either of them. Every so often, Amanda will translate, but by and large, they seem to get on like a house on fire.

“I’m surprised the neighbours haven’t called the police on us yet,” Amanda said the other day while Saffy and Ah Chuan yelled pleasantries at one another. “It almost sounds like someone is being killed!”

Saffy was showing Ah Chuan some photos she’d taken during a weekend trip she’d taken in Bali with her new boyfriend Brad. “Isn’t he cute?” she sang in a note that technically only dogs should have been able to hear.

Ah Chuan bellowed back something. Saffy looked at Amanda who sighed.

“She says he’s puny and she wants to know why he looks like an angmoh.”

“His mother is German!” Saffy shrieked happily, but you could tell from Ah Chuan’s expression that Saffy was much too good for the likes of Bradley who couldn’t even claim full Chinese ancestry. And as if to prove her point, her only comment – “Ridiculous!” – was delivered several octaves lower. Saffy glowed at all the attention she was getting.

Saffy later said there are moments when she literally believes that she was switched at birth and that Ah Chuan is her real mother to which Amanda said that it’s exactly the sort of inflammatory statement that gets people disinherited.

Father Figure

Every night, before I go to bed, I turn off my handphone. For some reason, this drives people insane.

“Alamak, why you off your handphone?” Sharyn once scolded me. “What if I’m trying to call you?”

“Why would you call me at 2am? I’m sleeping!”

“If emergency, how?”

“Call Saffy, she’s your best friend!”

Amanda says she wouldn’t be able to sleep if her phone was off. “I’d always be wondering if someone was trying to reach me!”

I’m not keen at all on the whole ‘I-must-be-contactable-at-all-times’ schtick. It’s not as if I’m the President of the United States. What’s the emergency?

So, a few mornings ago, just as we were all sitting down to breakfast, the home phone rang. It was my mother calling from a hospital in London.

“Oh, darling,” she sniffed. “It’s your father. He coughed up blood last night!”

My legs suddenly gave way and I had to sit down on the sofa.

“They spent hours doing up a whole set of tests,” she went on, her clear voice sounding like it was coming from the next room. “Then at about 10pm, they told us that they’d lost the test results!”

My jaw dropped. I’d still not said a word.

“This is what a first world medical health system looks like,” my mother sighed. “It’s no wonder Mrs Lee flew straight back to Singapore after she had her stroke in London!”

I finally managed to find my voice. “Why didn’t you call, Ma?”

“Oh, it was so late here in London and really, what could you have done? We wanted to be sure before we worried you children. Anyway, your father seems OK, now. They’ve run another set of tests and I told the doctor that if he lost the results again, I’m going to go all Wendi Murdoch on him. He looked so wonderfully scared as he scuttled off towards the lab!”

“I love your mother!” Saffy declared when I’d clicked off the phone and told them what had happened. “How do you lose a test result? A folder doesn’t just get up off the desk and wander off!”

“Are you OK?” Amanda asked.

I said I was, but, of course, I wasn’t.

You spend your whole life thinking your parents are always going to be always healthy, always opinionated, always strong. Always there. And then, one morning, just as you sit down to breakfast, you get a phone call and your whole world changes.

My sister rang from Hawaii where she was having a holiday and bawled for five expensive long distance minutes before she could speak. “If Daddy dies on me, I’m going to kill him!” she wailed. “He’s got to give me away at my wedding!”

I paused. “You’re getting married?”

“Well, not immediately, but one day! And I want him to walk me down the aisle and not my stepfather!”

“Mother’s having an affair?” I yelled.

From the depths of the sofa, Saffy sat up straight.

“Oh, you are silly. I’m just saying. But I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if she remarried. She’s very eligible!” Michelle hiccupped through her tears.

“The women in your family are so practical!” Amanda observed later. I shrugged and flipped another page in the family album that I’d just pulled down from the top shelf of my library.

There I was aged five being swung high in the air by my father. And there he was in our garden watching me wrestle with Prince, our stupid German Shepherd. Sitting with me at the dining table as he helped me with my maths homework, him staring intently at my notebook while I peered at the camera. A dinner to celebrate Michelle’s Judo black belt. At Jack’s stage debut as the pumpkin in his school production of ‘Cinderella’. Picking me up from school in his new maroon Jaguar. At my high school graduation looking so pleased as if I’d just discovered the cure for cancer. I was taller than him by then. At my university graduation – his hairline now noticeably receded and snowy. At the airport, waving as I got on the plane for Singapore.

All in the past.

Last night, just before we turned in, Amanda took my handphone from me and walked towards her bedroom.

“Hey, where you are going with that?” I said.

“I’ll keep hold of it during the night,” she said. “No point you changing the habit of a lifetime now. I’m sure everything is ok, but I’ll keep it on for you. Just in case,” she paused and just as she closed her door, she whispered, “Good night.”

What's Love Got To Do With It?

Here’s the thing about human nature: we’re never satisfied. Nothing’s changed since the beginning of time. First, when we were all happily living outdoors and breathing fresh air, we decided we wanted somewhere dry and warm, so we built little huts out of twigs and mud. But we got cold inside, so we built little campfires and basically smoked ourselves like salmon.

Then we thought, “Oooh, I’m not liking having to pee in the bush all the time. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an en-suite?” And when we got that, we decided that, maybe, it would be fun to have a garage to park our swords and chariots. And the next thing you know, we’d gone and built the Great Wall of China.

It’s all just a never-ending sequence of greed and restlessness.

Another example: Saffy. For the longest time, she moaned to everyone that she was sick and tired of being single. “Do you have anyone you can hook me up with?” she said to my mother on their very first meeting.

“Uhm,” said Mother, a little panicked.

“Or maybe I just need to get laid! You know, just between us, I’ve not been laid since ‘Friends’ ended,” Saffy added. She later said that she felt so comfortable with my mother. “She’s very easy going!” she told me.

As soon as she got home, Mother emailed to say she wasn’t sure I had picked quite the ‘right sort of girl’ to live with. She said the same thing to her sister who then told her daughter Mei who then told our cousin Mark who immediately rang me all the way from Seattle and said, “Your mother says you’re living with a prostitute. Dude! Is that true?”

And then, one day, Saffy met the man of her dreams, Bradley. Here, finally, was a man who adored the ground she walked on. Who said her habit of sitting with her legs wide open on the window sill (“I’m airing myself!”) made complete sense to him and that people just needed to lighten up. Who told her that there was nothing wrong with eating an additional slice of cheesecake if she wanted. Who bought her Estee Lauder and told her she looked wonderful in a dress she was convinced made her look fat. Who reassured her endlessly that he couldn’t imagine life without her. And, more importantly, who patiently sat through a DVD marathon of ‘Notting Hill’, ‘Love, Actually’, ‘Cinema Paradiso’, and ‘Beaches’.

“Aiyoh,” sighed Sharyn, Saffy’s best friend. “I tell you, ah, if I not orredi marry, I sure kidnap Bladley, one!”

Saffy practically glowed.

A few mornings ago at breakfast, Saffy suddenly piped up, “Why doesn’t he want to marry me?”

Amanda looked up from her Blackberry. And then she looked at me. After much practice, we’d learnt that conversations with Saffy tend to include a lot of mentally connecting the dots.

“Uhm,” Amanda began. “Have you discussed this with him?”

Saffy’s chest expanded. “No, we’ve never talked about it.”

“Then how do you know he doesn’t want to marry you?” Amanda asked.

“Well, if he wanted to marry me, he’d have said so, wouldn’t he? He hasn’t said so. Therefore, he doesn’t want to marry me!”

Amanda later said that just when you think you’ve got Saffy all sorted out, she turns right around and gives you a virtuoso performance in spatial thinking. “It’s like living with Dustin Hoffman in ‘Rainman’!”

Leave it to Sharyn to point out some home truths to Saffy. “Aiyah, why you so gun zheong? You think you very easy girlfriend, is it? He so far not run away is enough, what! What for get so upset! Marriage, hah, I tell you, is not for everyone. Some people can take it. Some people marry, straightaway get die-vorce! Like my sister. She fall in love in JC, marry, have one baby and one year later, the husband have affair. He say after the baby, she get fat. Aiyoh!” she sighed tragically.

Of course, discontent still rules our little flat. In the world according to Saffy, the real test of a man’s love is a Tiffany’s engagement ring. A year ago, that test would have been passed if the man called you the day after the date.

“I hope I don’t become like that,” Amanda said, no doubt thinking of the fact that she’s not been on a date in two months.

This morning, at breakfast, Saffy said that sometimes she misses being single. “Being in a relationship is so stressful! Men just never do what you want them to do! It’s a wonder more women don’t become prostitutes!”

Head First

The thing about growing older is that it can sometimes lure you into a false sense of security. For instance, when you’re six years old, you can’t wait to be fifteen as that’s when you’ll be able to cycle to school and not be ferried about by your annoying mother who insists on touching your hair for no reason and sweeping you up, on the slightest provocation, for a cuddle and a kiss.

And then, when you’re fifteen, you can’t wait to be in your twenties, because you’ll have gotten an office job, moved out of home and not be bothered by anyone. And, of course, when you’re in your twenties, you realize that it was much better to be in your teens because nobody told you about something ridiculous called rent, mortgage and income tax.

In the case of my flatmate, Saffy, some days, it’s just much better to stay in bed.

A few days ago, at the breakfast table, she lowered her handheld mirror and stared at us in horror.

“How did this happen? It’s not like I’m still in puberty!” she whispered, her eyes wide open.

Amanda pursed her lips and frowned, while I tried hard not to stare at the ugly huge red pimple that pulsed angrily on the tip of her nose. You couldn’t even pretend it was something else like a mole or something. This was clearly a pimple and by the looks of it, it was here to stay.

Saffy raised the mirror for another look. She moaned. “This is a nightmare! I went to bed with clear skin and this morning, I wake up looking like Bill Bloody Clinton!”

“Could you maybe put some concealer on it?” Amanda said, still frowning and looking at the pimple sideways just in case it decided to leap off Saffy’s nose and attach itself to her face.

“I’ve already put an entire stick on it, but the shade is too light!” Saffy sniffed. “And it really hurts!”

“Have you tried, uhm, you know, popping it?” I said, leaning back.

“Are you mad?” Amanda snapped. “That’s a blind pimple. It won’t have a head! If you squeeze it, it will just built up pressure inside and make it grow bigger and more painful!”

Saffy squealed and promptly burst into tears.

As I later posted on Facebook, since when did pimples have categories? And leave it to Amanda to know them on a first name basis.

Saffy called in sick at work and refused to leave the flat. She disabled the FaceTime function on her iPhone and ignored all her Skype calls. “I simply cannot be seen!” she told Sharyn piteously on the phone.

“Aiyah, only a pimple, what! Why you so gun-zheong?” Sharyn said.

“Sharyn, this is no ordinary pimple! It’s a blind pimple!” Saffy said with grim pride.

“Hah? Where got such thing, one?”

Every other minute, Saffy would inspect her nose at close range by the light of the window, hoping that by some miracle, it had gotten smaller in the last two minutes. But this one refused to budge even though Saffy threw everything in her considerable arsenal of topical acne creams at it. And when that didn’t work, she sent Amanda off to a dermatologist with a fake acne problem.

“Make sure he gives you super strong antibiotics!” she said, shoving Amanda out the door.

“Saffy, he’s not going to believe I have acne!” Amanda protested as she scrabbled to get a firm grip on the edge of the door. “My skin is flawless and I’m not just saying that. It is! You’ve seen how much birds nest I drink!”

Finally, this morning, four days after it first appeared, Saffy announced that she detected the faintest hint of a white head. “The end is near!” she said with deep satisfaction as she turned her head in the mirror for a better angle.

She sat down at the dining table with a big bowl of hot water and draped a towel over her head. “I’m going to steam this bugger wide open!” she said, her voice somewhat muffled.

“But don’t do it too long!” Amanda said. “You don’t want to burst the fragile blood vessels in your face.”

Saffy later said that if Amanda ever got sacked as a lawyer, she’d have a great second career as a cosmetician. By then, Saffy had successfully burst the pimple in what she says was a spectacular dermatological explosion. “It was like a scene from ‘Alien’! God, it felt good!” she crowed. “I wonder if giving birth is like that! What! Don’t look at me like that! You know what I mean!”

Mind Games

For a long time now, I’ve been wondering if I’m becoming stupid. Or, at the very least, senile.

I can come home, wander around the flat doing household chores, have a shower, cook dinner, watch some TV and then suddenly realize that I’ve left the front door wide open the whole time. “I could have been mugged, raped and murdered!” I said glumly once to Sharyn.

“Please, lah,” she replied, “you think you in New York, is it? This is Sing-gah-pore! You mug someone already kena rattan cane. Where got someone so stupid go and mug, rape and murder you, one?”

Or I can leave the flat and halfway down to the bus-stop, I suddenly think, “Did I turn off the stove?”, and then I have to turn right around and go home to check. I once walked back into the flat to find my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch in the middle of raping our Ikea sofa cushion. He managed to look both guilty and extremely pleased I was home so soon.

And just the other day, I was talking to Saffy about a recent episode of ‘True Blood’ when I suddenly drew a complete blank. “Oh my God, what’s the name of that vampire…John? Richard? Thelma?”

“What is wrong with you?” Saffy demanded. “What self respecting vampire is going to call himself Thelma?”

“Elmo?” I hazarded.

Saffy stared at me.

“I think I’m losing my mind!” I told Karl.

“Wait till you get married,” he said comfortably.

“I can’t seem to be able to remember anything! The other day, I was at a wedding and spent the entire night chatting to this girl and the next afternoon at a lunch party, I stuck my hand out and introduced myself to someone and she said, ‘Yes, we’ve met. You sat next to me last night at Jeremy’s wedding!’”

I don’t think I redeemed myself at all by laughing nervously and replying, “Hahaha! I didn’t recognize you in daylight!”

“Oh my God, you made her sound like she was a prostitute!” Amanda exclaimed. “Seriously, what is wrong with you?”

You can imagine my relief at a recent report that said Google is making us all a little bit stupid. The gist of it is that because we can find out the answer to anything at any time with just a few quick keystrokes into our computer and handphone, nobody bothers to learn anything anymore, let alone commit anything to memory.

Why bother learning what the capital of North Sudan is if you can just Google it in a few seconds? Which reminds me of the time I was shopping at Tang’s and the cashier asked me to fill out a form and I got stuck when I had to provide my handphone number.

She looked at me owlishly in the same way you’d look at a two-headed cow in a museum. “You don’t know your handphone number?”

“Well, why would I? I never call myself.”

Of course, that didn’t stop me looking up the symptoms for Alzheimer’s Disease. Google was very helpful here, coming up with a nice selection of articles within 0.06 seconds according to the Google clock. I opened one, read it and panicked.

I immediately called Amanda (using my phone’s memory book).

“I’m very busy, what is it?” she asked by way of friendly greeting.

“One of the tests for Alzheimer’s is remembering what you had for breakfast, lunch and dinner yesterday!” I announced. “I can’t remember what I had! Can you?”

“A pear and coffee for breakfast, egg salad for lunch and tofu salad for dinner!” she said immediately.

“Oh, dear God.”

I called Saffy.

“Fried beehoon with extra chilli for breakfast, laksa for lunch, and fish an chips for dinner! It’s now wonder I feel so fat. Listen, are you really going senile?”

Another test for Alzheimer’s is being able to count backwards from 100 in sevens.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Saffy said. “One hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, uhm, seventy-nine, seventy-two…”

Panic filled my mouth. I called Karl. “That’s a stupid test. I’m lucky if I can remember how many children I have!” he said.

“But you don’t have any children!” I pointed out.

“Well, there you go then. We can grow gaga together!”

I’m not taking any chances. I’ve just set up an appointment with a neurologist. Amanda thinks my problem isn’t senility so much as it is stupidity. “And laziness!” she said the other night. “Stop using Google and exercise your brain!”

I don’t care what she says. I’ve read some very good things about this neurologist online. I just hope I remember what to ask him.

Wearing thin

The other morning at the breakfast table, Saffy looked up from her zhee cheong fun and said, “I have way too much underwear!”

I buried my face deeper behind the newspaper. A silence settled over the dining table and after a while, even it felt a little embarrassed.

Saffy drew in an audible breath. “I said, I have way…”

“Saf, we heard you the first time,” Amanda interrupted, not once looking up from her Blackberry.

“Well, thank you for making the effort to reply!”

Amanda sighed, clicked her Blackberry one last time, put it down and turned her luminous eyes on Saffy. “Yes, what about your underwear?”

“I have too much of it and I’m wondering if I should donate some of it to charity or something! What! I saw that look! I’ll have you know that there are plenty of people out there who would be grateful for a pair of my Marks and Spencer’s lacey thongs!”

“Name two!” Amanda shot back.

Saffy’s jaws clamped shut.

“I thought so,” Amanda said smugly.

All of which made me think about how much stuff I’ve got. For starters, I have an entire wall of books, nearly three-quarters of which I’ve not read. I’m the sort of person who will innocently walk past Borders and suck up three books in my wake. I’ll take these home, put them up on the shelves, stand back to admire how they look and then walk away. Ten years later, they’ll still be up there, gathering a thick layer of dust and turning mottled with age and humidity.

Meanwhile, Amanda has an entire wardrobe of clothes that still have their price tags dangling from the sleeves.

“And don’t get me started on my shoes,” she said the other day as she stood in front of her shoe cabinet and stared lovingly at her Jimmy Choos. “Why do I have so many pairs when I can only wear one at a time? Well, I know why. I love shoes. And that’s all there is to say about it!”

“It’s all rather obscene, don’t you think?” I said. “Not just about your shoes, I mean, but in general. We just accumulate so much stuff!”

“Which brings me back,” said Saffy, “to my point about giving the extra away! Really, could you both please keep up?”

“Saffy,” Amanda sighed, “there’s a big difference between giving away Jason’s unread copy of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ and a pair of your frequently worn panties!”

Saffy remained stubbornly unconvinced. “I bet I could sell these on Japanese eBay and make a fortune! Oooh, maybe I could rent one of those vending machines in Tokyo! How fab would that be?” she cooed, her impressive bosom straining with effort.

That evening, as I looked at my bookshelves, I couldn’t help but think that I’ve spent a lot of money on things that I either don’t need or don’t use. I can only read a book at a time, wear one pair of shoes at a time and use one pen at a time. So, why do I have ten pairs of black shoes and at least 20 pens that I’ve swiped from hotel rooms around the world?

More to the point, why have I allowed so much clutter to build up in my life? Because, in the end, it’s all clutter. If you’re not using it, it’s clutter. So, why am I still shopping?

Leave it to Sharyn to put this existential crisis into perspective. “Aiyoh, you, ah! If you only buy what you need, then you might as well curl up and die, right? Life so short, why you stress yourself? For what? If you want to buy, buy lah! I love to shop!” she added happily. “To the day I die, I can still shop, I tell you! I’m very Singaporean!”

Meanwhile, Saffy had culled her underwear drawer to ten pairs of panties and ten bras. “I can wear a new one every day for a week and a half. That’s all I need!”

To which Sharyn said, “Eeeee! How like that? You must change a new pair in the evening, right? Udder-wise, whole day wear same underwear very chao, you know!”

Which, of course, sent Saffy into a big panic. She rushed downstairs to the rubbish bin to forage for all the underwear that she’d thrown down the chute with such happiness just a few hours earlier.

Upstairs, the phone rang. Saffy’s tinny voice sang through. “Oh. My. God. Someone has taken the bag I threw away! I knew there was a market for my underwear! This world is full of sick people!”

The Year of Cleaning Dangerously

I sometimes can’t help but think that people are not, in general, very clean. By which I mean, of course, they are dirty. Now, I know there are degrees of cleanliness and in the spectrum of clean, I suppose I’m on the far end of neurotic. But every day, I find more and more evidence of disturbing behaviour by people who really should know better.

Just the other day, I was having lunch at Pantry with Nicole, an old friend from school. I’d not seen her for years and there was a lot of catching up to do. Too much, as it turned out.

Nicole is married to Mark, a banker. They live in a swanky three-bedroom apartment on Paterson Road. Apparently, with just the right angle of their binoculars, they can see directly into David Gan’s living room. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, Nicole was moaning about how Mark is always travelling and how she never gets to see him anymore.

“We have no sex life!” she told me, with more than a little desperation in her voice. From the corner of my eye, I could tell that the tai-tais at the next table had stopped talking and chewing.

I reached across my salad, took Nicole’s hand in mine and told her firmly that as much as I enjoyed our nostalgic trip down memory lane and gossiping about old school friends, we were now venturing off that lane into TMI County.

“Oh, it’s horrible! I’ve started, you know, uhm, fantasizing about Mr Baker!” Nicole went on, her lack of sex clearly having also affected her hearing and better judgment.

I blinked. “Our high school phys-ed teacher? He’s at least 105 years old!”

“Not back then, he wasn’t. He was hot back then!”

“Uhm, don’t you have any, uh, more contemporary role models?”

Nicole sighed. “I tried. My daughter is in love with Tay Ping Hui, so I tried thinking about him, but that just didn’t work. He always looks so sulky. Then I tried George Clooney but his face kept getting blurred with Brad Pitt and then I started thinking about Angelina Jolie!”

By this time, the tai-tais at the next table had actually put down their cutlery to just stare down at their food.

“So, in the end, I just get up out of bed and bake.”

“You could try cleaning. Amanda does that when she’s, uh, you know, stressed, that way.”

“Clean? I don’t clean. Mark fired our maid a year ago. He said we could save money and do it ourselves. I sometimes wonder if he knows who he married. So I don’t clean and he’s always travelling…”

I leaned in with a mix of dread and curiosity as I asked the obvious question. “So, who cleans?”

“Nobody! The apartment hasn’t been cleaned for a year!”

I drew back, suddenly seized with this desperate need to be somewhere else. But there was more.

“I don’t even do the laundry! I get all my clothes dry-cleaned. Even my underwear!”

“What about your bed-sheets?” I whispered.

“They’re actually OK,” Nicole said. “I have a shower before I go to bed so the sheets stay quite clean.”

“A year? You’ve not washed your sheets for a year?” My voice rose several octaves. I also felt itchy all over.

“Well, Mark is never around. So for the first six months, I slept on the right side of the bed. And then these past six months, I’ve been sleeping on the left side. The cleaner side,” she added as if I’d missed the point.

I couldn’t wait to get away from that lunch to rush home where I had a half hour hot shower, scrubbing furiously.

“She hasn’t washed her bed-sheets for a year?” Saffy asked later that night. “Who is this woman? And, more importantly, why are you friends with her?”

“But what’s she going to do now that she’s slept on both sides of the bed?” Amanda asked demonstrating once again her ability to spot a loop-hole in any argument.

“Apparently, it’s a king sized bed,” I reported, scratching myself, “so she’s been sleeping on the far edges, which means that the bit in the middle of the bed is still clean!”

“Oh. My. God. Are you telling us that she’s going to go for a year and a half of not washing her bed sheets?”

“You’re making this up, aren’t you?” Saffy demanded.

“I swear I am not!”

“Because that is not how people live!”

“Especially the people who live on Paterson Road!” said Amanda, Princess District 9.

Saffy’s nose wrinkled. “Maybe that’s why her husband Mark is always away for work!”

I’ve not stopped scratching since.

Kitchen Aid

I’m sorry, but I need to get something off my chest. It’s been bothering me for a while. So, let’s just put it out there and shout it loud and proud: I love Nigella Lawson!

Now, there are bound to be some of you out there currently scratching your heads and going, “Ay, ee gong see-mee?”, while others will be asking in more fluent Hokkien, “Is that a cupcake?”

To which I say, better than a cupcake. Way better.

Nigella Lawson is a British food writer who is best known for her TV cooking programmes. But that’s just like saying the sun is a round, very hot and bright ball. Technically correct, but completely underwhelming in conveying the full majesty of this woman.

Woman? What woman? She’s no mere woman. She’s a Rubenesque, dark-haired, ever cheerful voluptuous goddess who, as far as I’m concerned, could cook dirt in her kitchen and I’d still adore her.

I have friends who can’t stand her. These are the same people who also can’t stand Oprah. My 2012 new year’s resolution is to seriously reassess my friendship with each and every single one of them.

Thankfully, in the little flat that I share with Saffy and Amanda, Nigella can do no wrong.

Because this woman enjoys her food. You won’t ever find her using margarine in her cooking. And she’ll never utter the word ‘diet’ unless it’s in a derogatory way. Which she does so charmingly.

The other night, as I was padding out past Amanda’s room on my way from the bathroom back to my bedroom, I saw her and Saffy seated around her desk in front of her laptop.

“What are you watching?” I asked, poised at the door.

Saffy lifted her face from the soft warm glow of the screen. “Did you know,” she began, her bosom swelling beneath her nightgown, “did you know that Nigella has a new TV series out? Why do we not know about this?”

“Really?” I stepped smartly to their side and bent down.

“It’s all on YouTube,” Saffy added.

And there she was, in all her radiant Nigella-comeliness, dressed in a red figure-hugging sweater that accentuated every soft womanly curve. Her precise clipped English accent floated over the blitzing whirr of her food processor.

“What’s she cooking?” I asked.

“Asian braised beef shin with spicy salad!” Amanda murmured. “It looks amazing and she’s serving it with noodles.”

A few minutes later, as Nigella began serving the dish to her guests, Saffy said, her chest still going up and down, “Oh my God, whoare those two guys? They are so cute!”

Amanda and I looked up and turned to her. It was as if someone in church just told you he’d farted.

“They’re, like, 18, Saffy!” Amanda said, finally.

“Really, who died and made you the chief inspector of the moral police?” Saffy said stiffly.

“Let’s watch the next one,” I said, my attention veering back towards Nigella like a stray asteroid that’s just wandered into the gravitational field of black hole.

Amanda clicked on the next YouTube link.

“Oooh, a lemon polenta cake! Do we like polenta?” Saffy wondered.

“Not really, but I’m sure it’s going to be sensational.”

It was 3am before we finally tore ourselves away from the laptop and went to bed. “I love that woman!” Amanda said by way of goodnights. “I wish she was my mother!”

The next day, Saffy decided that she too wanted to make the braised beef shin. She spent an hour in Cold Storage buying the ingredients, another half an hour waiting at the taxi stand outside Orchard Towers (during which time three fat Australian men came up to her and asked her “How much for an hour, love?”), and the next three hours in our kitchen screaming.

She called Amanda in the middle of Amanda’s client meeting and shouted, “It’s not working! I think I must have missed a vital ingredient because the beef seems to have dried out even though I put foil over it and stuck it back into the oven like Nigella said but it’s probably because our stupid oven doesn’t work properly and the worst thing is I was cutting the chilli for the spicy salad and then I rubbed my eyes and now I’m in absolute agony and I’ve gone blind! Hello?”

Later that night, after we’d tipped Saffy’s efforts into the bin and gone out for nasi padang down at our local hawker centre, Amanda said sometimes it felt like she was living in an episode of ‘The Osbournes’. Having just seen Saffy’s version of Asian braised beef shin, I said it was more like an episode of ‘True Blood’. Saffy never looked up from her beef rendang.

Underground Activity

So here I am in London in summer. Which means it’s awful.

It always amuses me that the English have the nerve to call this kind of weather summer. Outside, the sky is grey and dank, and it’s raining cats and dogs. I have to head out to lunch in a bit and all I can think about is which raincoat and rubber boots I should wear. Meanwhile, inside, I’m wearing a fleece jumper and trying to decide if I should turn on the heater.

Last year, when I was here for summer, we had a few days when the temperature reached 25 degrees Celsius and the English all insisted on calling it a heat-wave. And as if to prove their point, a few little old ladies dropped dead from heat stroke. As Saffy pointed out on Skype at the time, it’s a miracle the British ever stayed in Singapore long enough to claim the place as a colony.

But what fills me with greater dread is the thought of having to take the Underground Tube to lunch. I’m always surprised the Koreans and Japanese don’t set more of their horror movies down in those musty, icky, drab, filthy rabbit-warren tunnels.

Amanda once made the mistake of venturing down there to take a train to Knightsbridge to shop. When she emerged, she rushed straight to Harrods, bought a completely new outfit and gave the sales assistant firm instructions to either burn her old Pradas or donate them to charity.

“Oh my God, it was so incredibly revolting!” she later reported once she was safely back in Singapore. “The air was putrid. You can literally see a grey pall of…of…crap floating in the air! Oh God, I hope I don’t get a respiratory disease!”

The other thing about the Tube is that you always need to be prepared to just sit there for ages, stuck in some dark tunnel in a stationary train. Invariably, there’s a signal failure somewhere ahead of you, or there’ll be severe delays (they actually say ‘severe delays’ on the PA) caused by someone falling onto the tracks. “That’s just bloody rude!” Saffy fumed when she was an hour late for ‘Lion King’. “Couldn’t they have just fallen off a bridge or something?”

That’s all assuming the train drivers don’t go on strike, in which case you might as well cancel all your appointments for the day as it’s almost impossible to leave the house because (a) it’ll take hours to get to where you need to go by bus; and (b) you can’t afford to take a taxi since it’ll cost you £5 just go down to the street corner. Meanwhile, on weekends, three quarters of the train lines are shut down for maintenance work.

And don’t get me started on how uncomfortable the actual trip is when the trains are actually running. The stations and trains aren’t climate controlled, which means it’s hot, claustrophobic and stuffy in summer, and freezing, claustrophobic and stuffy in winter. And during peak hours, you’re jammed in tighter than a Sammi Cheng concert.

“How is this a First World country?” I remember Saffy complaining on the trip back to our hotel after ‘Lion King’.

All of which makes me think with amusement about the hullaballoo during the General Elections when all anyone could talk about was how awful the MRT is. My Facebook friends spent days complaining about the pitiful state of the trains. Another moaned that she could never get a seat while her friend replied on his Blackberry that he’d been standing for the past ten minutes in the southbound train to Raffles Place.

To which Amanda posted a reply saying that at least you had network coverage in the MRT. “There’s no signal in the Tube!” she wrote.

Paul replied, “What Tube? Where r u?”

My point is that sometimes, you just don’t know how good you have it till you go somewhere else and see how other people live. Sure, the MRT trains are crowded. But at least they’re clean, modern and efficient, and, more importantly, they work. Imagine if the entire MRT network was shut down every weekend for maintenance and repair work. Or if there was no air-con on any of the trains. Or phone coverage. Or the air quality in the trains and stations is so bad that when you wipe your face, the tissue actually comes away a murky grey.

So, here I am, staring out the window at the dreary rain and wondering if I should just cancel lunch and make a phone call to my travel agent to catch an earlier plane home to Singapore. And can we also talk about Heathrow?

Holiday Spirit

They say you should never go on holiday with the people you live with. Well, when I say ‘they’, I am, of course, talking about me. I have learnt from bitter experience that it’s never a good idea to board a plane with the same people you see first thing in the morning and the last thing in the evening. It’s almost as bad as, to take a random example, sleeping with your secretary.

There’s a very good reason for this rule. Things tend happen on holiday that, if known by the wrong people (such as friends and family), could amount to social suicide. It’s like that YouTube clip of those sorority girls bobbing up and down in the Jacuzzi and then suddenly one of them does a very liquid Number Two. In the water. To this day, I’ve yet to see people leap out of a hot tub faster. Or scream louder.

“I cannot believe you’re making such a big deal about this!” Amanda said the other morning at breakfast. “It’s not as if the three of us have never gone on holiday together before!”

I put down my cereal spoon and pointed out that on our last trip, we were nearly thrown off the plane after Saffy drunkenly gave the chief steward an impromptu lap dance.

Saffy’s bosom immediately puffed up. “Hey, I gave that man the biggest thrill of his life! He should be thanking me!”

“And what about the time we were in Bangkok and somehow we all ended up in that tiger show club and you insisted you wanted to try and blow a dart out of your…your…whatsits!” I finished lamely.

“I was drunk!” Saffy shouted. “You guys were the ones who kept buying those shots! You know I’m free and easy after two tequilas!”

“Well, you and Amanda can go on holiday together,” I said firmly. “I will be sunning myself on a beach in Penang!”

Amanda exchanged glances with Saffy. “What, by yourself?” she asked.

“What’s the fun in that?” Saffy added.

“Living with you two is such 24/7 drama! It’ll be nice to work on my tan in blissful quiet and solitude!”

“Huh,” Saffy said, looking glum.

Amanda sniffed. “That’s fine, you go to Penang and get fat on char kway teow, while Saffy and I will go to London! The pound is so weak against the Sing dollar now, we can go shopping and eat at Michelin star restaurants all day!”

Saffy looked at the ceiling for a few moments and then said: “But London is so far away!”

“Just think of it as five George Clooney movies and we’ll have arrived! Let me check ticket prices!”

A few days later, Saffy sidled up to me in the kitchen and said very casually, “So, are you still planning on holidaying in Penang?”

I paused my onion chopping. “Yes. Why?” I asked suspiciously.

“Oh alright, stop badgering me, already! I’ll tell you!” Saffy complained. She went on urgently: “Listen, you’ve got to save me from this London trip! Amanda has gone nuts! She wants us to fly business class! On Singapore Airlines!”

“It’s a great way to fly,” I pointed out loyally.

“Are you crazy? Do you know how expensive an SQ business class ticket to London is? I could feed three entire African villages for a decade with that kind of money! And she really was serious about eating at those Michelin star restaurants. I mean, look at me!” she commanded. “I’m wearing a Giordano tee-shirt! My favourite dish is fried beehoon and I love beer! What do I care about foie gras and champagne?”

“Well, just say you don’t want to spend all that money.”

“But then she’ll be miserable! And you know Amanda. Remember that time we flew economy to New York? She literally threw money at the stewardess and begged to be upgraded to business class! I can’t be responsible for her unhappiness. She’s not been on a date in five months. Flying economy might just tip her over the edge! Listen!” she grabbed my arm. “You have got to let us come with you to Penang!”

“Oh, no–,” I began.

“You have to!”

“That’s not a good idea, at a–”

“Yes, please say yes!”

“Absolutely not!”

As I write this, I’m sitting on the balcony of my lovely room at the E&O in Penang. Through the adjoining door connecting our rooms, I can hear Saffy shouting, “Seriously, Amanda, what did you have for dinner?”

There was a knock at my door and Saffy stalked in. “I’m sleeping with you tonight! Amanda’s farts are practically weapons of mass destruction! Uhm, why are you packing?”

Black Death

Saffy and I recently treated ourselves to a Blackberry each. I’m still not sure why exactly we did it, but like the tattoos we got ourselves some years back, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Amanda can’t seem to live without her’s,” Saffy reasoned as we stood in the SingTel shop. “And it might be fun to be able to surf the net while I’m sitting on the MRT. Well, I use the word ‘sit’ very loosely. Today, I missed the first three trains because it was so crowded I couldn’t get on, and when I finally managed to squeeze myself onto the fourth train, I was pressed up against this uncle who I swear to God was giving me a filthy look and then just as we were pulling into Dhoby Ghaut, he shifted around and…”

By this time, I’d wandered off to the next window to look at another Blackberry model. When Saffy starts talking, it’s best to just step away if you want to emerge from the conversation with your sanity intact. Thank goodness a sales assistant popped up at the right moment.

“Yah, hello, can I help?”

“Oh, yes, you can!” I said gratefully. “I want to get a Blackberry.”

“We!” Saffy said, sidling up from behind. “We want to get a Blackberry! Your name is Jackman Ho?” she added, glancing at his name tag. “That’s an unusual name. So does that mean you ja–”

“Which model would you suggest?” I interrupted quickly. I literally grabbed him by the elbow and shoved him towards the counter.

“Why don’t you get the Bold?” said Jackman Ho, a little flustered. “You get 500MB free data.”

“Is that a lot?” I asked and I swear he gave me a look. “That was a serious question. I know nothing about computers.”

Two dozen stupid questions later, we emerged triumphantly from the store with a glossy Blackberry Bold 9780. The first person Saffy emailed was Sharyn who immediately called. Saffy put her on the speaker-phone.

“Aiyoh, why you buy the Bold? The 9780 some more! Old model, you know. You should get the Torch, lah! Touch screen and latest model! Aiyoh, you two, hah, so suaku!”
Later, on a crowded train, Saffy said that she could just imagine what Sharyn’s wedding night must have been like. “Can you picture it? She’d be telling him off for doing all the wrong things. The poor man. Maybe,” she said, suddenly sitting up straight, “maybe that’s why they’ve never had children? He’s so scared of her, nothing works! And when I say ‘nothing’, I mean–”

I interrupted Saffy. “I know exactly what you mean!” I said hurriedly, glancing at the auntie next to us who was very busy pretending not to be listening to our conversation.

Barney Chen thinks I’m insane for getting a Blackberry. “I do wish you’d consult me before you go off and make a decision as life-changing as this,” he growled. “You should have got the iPhone! It’s so much more fun and interactive. And it takes much better pictures! Speaking of which, have a look at this picture I took of myself in the bathroom today. Do you think I look fat?”

Karl says my life is going to be changed forever. “It’ll creep up on you very slowly. You are a month away from sleeping with this under your pillow.”

“Oh my God!” Amanda said cheerfully. “I do that too! I thought it was just me!”

A few mornings ago, Saffy emerged from her room looking very grumpy and her hair resembled a rat’s nest. She was clutching her Blackberry. “I have not slept for two nights. I’ve been up playing with this stupid thing!”

“Why don’t you just turn it off?” Amanda told her.

“You think I didn’t think of that?” Saffy sounded bitter. “I tried that, but I just can’t help thinking that someone is trying to send me an email which I should read immediately. And then my Facebook alerts me that someone’s posted something, so I read that. And then I read the response to my response to the email. I tweet that I’m not sleeping, and before you know it, it’s dawn!”

“It’s dire!” Amanda said. “You’re turning into a Crackberry addict! I’ve seen it happen before. Some people bring it with them into the toilet, it’s so unbelievably gro–”

Saffy shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

“That’s disgusting, Saffy!” Amanda exclaimed. “I hope you remembered to wash your hands and wipe down the keypad!”

I later told Karl I hoped that it wasn’t just the keypad that Saffy remembered to wipe.

Reality Bites

Now that the American Idol season is over, the inevitable question arises: ‘What are we going to do with our lives now?’

Some of you out there may be struck by the incredible shallowness of the question. After all, there are bigger, more important issues that deserve our attention. Such as what will happen to Nikita’s vendetta against Division? Is there life after nationals for the William McKinley High kids? Will Meredith’s marriage survive her sabotage of Derek’s Alzheimer clinical trials? Who’s moving into Wisteria Lane? When will the kids on 90210 graduate? Is Bill Compton going to lead a vampire revolt to become the next king of Louisiana or will Sookie come to her senses and sleep with Eric? And speaking of Sookie, is she really a fairy?

These questions haunt me.

“You are so weird, you know that?” Amanda said the other morning when I was moaning about the empty nights stretching head of me, now that all my favourite TV programmes have ended their seasons. “You spend way too much time watching TV!”

Saffy later said that Amanda’s hypocrisy was staggering. “You’d think that while you were quote wasting your life unquote, she was out there discovering a vaccine for cancer when she was right by our side every night watching the same shows! And, excuse me,” she added, drawing breath, “but didn’t she cry like a baby when Lauren sang her last song to her mother on ‘American Idol’? I mean, seriously!”

When I was eight, I badgered my parents to get me a TV for Christmas. “It’s a valuable learning tool!” I argued. “Jack learnt the alphabet and how to count watching ‘Sesame Street’! And I’ve learnt all my biology watching David Attenborough documentaries! Think of all the money you’ve saved on tuition fees!”

My parents had huge misgivings about getting a TV for an eight year old, but then my sister craftily added that our Aunt Hwei-Ling got our cousin Michael an 18-inch for his birthday and that sealed the deal. “I can’t stand that mother of his!” our mother said uncharitably of her own sister. “Always rubbing her millions in our faces!”

Which is how I ended up with a lovely colour 13-inch screen in the bedroom I shared with my brother. “We should get one for the bathroom, too!” Michelle said, demonstrating at a very early age, a precocious talent for consumerism.

While other kids were out climbing trees, sucking up fresh air and learning how to hotwire cars, we were holed up in the bedroom. We told our parents we were watching National Geographic nature programmes (“There’s a great show on sharks by Jacques Cousteau tonight!” Michelle lied to my parents), but really, we were filling our minds with Grade A Trash.

We watched everything. Melrose Place. Baywatch. LA Law. Hill Street Blues. ER. Long before I took my first trip to America, I learnt all about the land of the free on the box and when I finally arrived in New York, I was so disappointed that everything was so clean and that I didn’t witness a single high speed car chase. I went to Times Square and stood around hopefully waiting for a prostitute to accost me.

And now that I’m all grown up, I find myself still deep in my love affair with television. As Saffy recently pointed out during a particularly gripping moment in ‘True Blood’, it’s just like reading a book, but without the tedious effort of having to turn the pages. “And I want to have Eric Northman’s baby,” she added, completely derailing her own conversation.

Meanwhile, I’ve travelled the world watching TV. And saved a lot of money, too. I’ve been all over America. I may never visit Seattle, but thanks to ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, I don’t feel like I’ve missed much. Because of ‘Nikita’, I’ve even been inside the CIA headquarters at Langley. During the ‘American Idol’ auditions, I dropped in on Boston, Mississippi and Houston. ‘The Amazing Race’ has shown me the insides of a school in Mumbai, the top of an Austrian mountain and a dirt poor African village.

“I love TV,” Saffy declared recently at a dinner party. The entire table went deadly quiet.

“That’s interesting,” said the VP of a major bank sitting next to her in a tone that Saffy later said made her want to push him down some stairs.

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “I could watch TV all day! My life ambition is to star in my own reality programme! It’ll be called ‘Twin Peaks’! Because of my breasts. Get it?”

Saffy says her programme has ratings winner written all over it.

Read between the Lines

In every relationship, there are distinct key first time ever moments. The first glance. The first handshake. The first smile. The first phone call. The first date. The first kiss. The first fight. The first make-up. And on it goes.

But the most crucial ‘first’ is the moment someone says, “I love you”.

Three simple words where love’s the central theme, as the song goes. And yet, some couples never say it. My sister once asked our mother if she’d ever said “I love you” to Daddy, and Mother replied, “Oh, don’t be silly, darling, we’re not Americans!”

Michelle later said that with parents like ours for role models, it’s a miracle we and our baby brother didn’t end up in a monastery and a nunnery. “I think it’s important to tell someone you love them. Otherwise, how will they know?”

Leave it to my flatmate Saffy to put things into perspective.

As regulars of this column will know, after years of fruitless dates (including one Henny Hartono who really was a fruit, if you know what I mean), endless Friday nights at home consoling herself with the DVD box-set of Sex and The City and a huge plate of pasta, Saffy recently met the very lovely Bradley.

Bradley, as it turns out, is not only extremely sweet, he’s also unfairly good looking and thinks the world begins and ends with Saffy. His devotion to her recently reached a fevered pitch when he bought her, without being asked, a bottle of Estee Lauder’s Advanced Night Repair serum.

“Good Lord,” Amanda sighed when Saffy came home from her date with Bradley, carrying her little Estee Lauder pouch, “where did you find this guy?”

“I know,” Saffy said with immense satisfaction, her bosom inflating. “Any man who will voluntarily walk up to a beauty counter and spend half an hour discussing the merits of various facial creams for his girlfriend, which would be me, is basically a walking lottery jackpot.”

Amanda’s eyes were dewy. “That’s amazing. Has he said ‘I love you’ yet?”

“No, and I don’t think he’s ever going to,” Saffy said.

Amanda sat up straight. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ve said it many times, and he just blushes and hugs me and kisses me,” Saffy said. “Once he replied, ‘That’s sweet of you!’ and then he did that thing he does with his teeth and completely distracted me, and that was that.”

“You’re ok with that?” I asked, mentally taking copious notes.

“I just don’t think he’s an ‘I love you’ kind of a guy, you know? And really, what does it all mean in the end? They’re just words. It’s taken me a long time to work this out, but there was a time when having a guy say ‘I love you’ to me was the single most important thing in the relationship. Because if he doesn’t say it, how will I know where the relationship is going?”

I was startled. “Have you been speaking to my sister?” I asked.

“We’ve had this conversation so many times before,” Saffy said. “And, anyway, the last time a guy said ‘I love you’ to me, he turned out to be married with two kids.”

And not only that, he was also having an affair with Rommy, his Indonesian maid. Saffy took great satisfaction in reporting him to both the Ministry of Manpower and to his wife. When news arrived that she’d ditched him in a very expensive divorce, Saffy took us all out to Morton’s to celebrate.

Which, of course, then started everyone on a romantic retrospective when we thought back on all our past relationships in which “I love you” had been uttered and realized that they were exactly that: Past.

“Remember the time, I said ‘I love you’ to Andrew Pang and he said, ‘Thank you’ and how pissed I was?” Amanda said. “Gosh, maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.”

“No, he was a jerk,” Saffy said firmly. “Any man who is still splitting the bill after the fourth date is not someone you want to walk down the aisle with.”

A few days later, when the subject came up at lunch, Sharyn said, “Aiyoh, why you people always must say ‘I love you’, one? I tell you, hah, tok is cheap! Anyone can say ‘I love you’! I go Andy Lau concert, I scream ‘I love you’ also, but mean nothing, right? More important is how the man treat you. If he buy you Estee Lauder, he sure love you! When he buy you Louis Vuitton, confirm he will marry you!”

Amanda says someone should give Sharyn her own talk show. “She’s Oprah with a Singlish accent!”

Hide and Seek

It used to be fun being on Facebook. You’d log on in the morning and you’d have all these lovely posts of friends to read through to see what they were up to and then you’d spend a calming half hour seeing what other people were saying about other people and then you added your two cents worth. And when you all met up in person, you’d have a bit of a giggle and, if you’re the techie sort, you’d immediately Facebook on your handphone that you’d just had a giggle.

A complete waste of time, of course, but then so is Gossip Girl, and what’s my point?

Well, my point is, Facebook was meant to be fun. So, what I want to know is when did it become such a political mine-field?

The other morning, at the breakfast table, we were all on our assorted electronic electronic gadgets, me on the iPad, Amanda on her iPhone and Saffy on her laptop.
Suddenly, Saffy gasped. Even her impressive cleavage stopped in mid-heave.

“Oh. My. God.”

“What?” Amanda asked, her eyes never leaving her screen.

“Remember Ridiculous Richard, my ex-boss? He’s just asked to be my friend on Facebook!”

Amanda looked up. “Seriously, what do people do that?”

Saffy’s bosom inflated to dangerous proportions. “I know, right? It’s so incredibly inappropriate!”

“Oh, you can’t be Facebook friends with your ex-boss!” I said firmly. “Just ignore it!”

“I can’t ignore it. His wife Mayzie is my Friday night salsa gal pal, and we’re on the cusp of becoming afternoon tea gal pals!” Which, in Girl Speak, is apparently at the same level as a cabinet minister, as opposed to being a mere MP. You’re in the inner circle of friends.

“How awkward would it be,” Saffy continued, “if we really start hanging out together which means I’d be seeing more of Ridiculous Richard and there’ll always be this Facebook question mark hanging in the air?”

“Well, then accept his friend request.” I thought it was a perfectly reasonable course of action. Apparently not.

“Oh my God, are you crazy?” Amanda cried. And to prove how seriously she was taking this matter, she actually put her phone down on the table. “She can’t be Facebook friends with her ex-boss! That’s just weird!”

“Not to mention creepy!” Saffy added. “I’ve seen the way he stares at my boobs!”

Leave it to Saffy’s best friend Sharyn (who, in Girl Speak, is basically the Deputy Prime Minister) to put the whole matter into perspective.

“Aiyoh, like this can also make drama! Just ignore, lah! Or say you never on Facebook! You know how many unaccepted friend request I have or not? Eighty-two! I don’t care, one! Especially, hor, if I doh-no you, I don’t friend.”

“But I see Mayzie all the time and sometimes Ridiculous Richard joins us for drinks!” Saffy said. “It’ll be so awkward!”

Sharyn paused. “Oh, like that, one, ah! Then you accept, but you hide him! Come, I show you how.”

Which is how Saffy spent an instructive Saturday afternoon being shown by Sharyn how to keep unwanted Facebook friends at bay. As she later said, “Seriously, this woman may look like a wet market auntie, but she’s got the electronics IQ of a freaking genius! The CIA should hire her!”

Sharyn blushed modestly. “No, lah! Pie say, pie say!”

Amanda looked at Saffy’s copious notes and said doubtfully, “It looks very complicated!”

Sharyn grunted in a rather unattractive way. “Once you do a few time, very easy! But if too much, you do this, ok? You accept this person as your friend. Then next day, you delete!”

“Uhm, isn’t that a bit rude?” I asked.

Sharyn sighed, her breath fogging up her Coke bottle-thick spectacles. “Aiyah, most people these days, hor, they have a few hundred friends. You think they sit there every morning and do inventory of their friends, is it? One missing, they never know, one! Trust me! I got 862 friends. If you unfriend me now, I also won’t notice!”

That night, as we sat down to dinner, Amanda asked, “Since when did this whole Facebook thing become so difficult? I want to be friends with people I like, and not because I have to!”

“That Sharyn is amazing!” I said with deep admiration. “How did she get to be so good at computers? I have problems finding the on switch on my laptop!”

Saffy snorted. “I still can’t get over the fact that I’m taking social etiquette lessons from a woman who still thinks it’s acceptable to spit out her chicken bones directly onto the table next to her plate!”

Campaign Trial

So, the very exciting 2011 elections have come and gone. It all feels slightly anti-climactic, if you ask me. All that fuss on Twitter and Facebook about rallies and the regrets of certain winsome candidates, and it suddenly feels like it’s back to business as usual.

Or as our friend Sharyn recently posted on her Facebook wall, “Now, no more erection to get gun zheong about every day, how?”

To which Barney Chen posted, “Girrrrl, which constituency are YOU at? I must move!” His response attracted 12 Likes.

Sharyn posted, “Sorry, lah. My English not cheem enuf!”

Meanwhile, Saffy says that not running for office this year is shaping up to be her biggest regret. “I might have won a seat!” she said the other night while slowly chewing on her slice of pizza. (She’d read somewhere that if you chew each mouthful of food at least 40 times before swallowing, you’re guaranteed to lose weight. When she spoke, she’d been chewing, according to the watch I was surreptitiously keeping time on, for at least ten minutes.)

Amanda snorted back a laugh. “And which party would you have represented?”

Saffy looked surprised. “My own, of course! The SAP! Saffy’s Amazing Party! Talk about great branding! Imagine my campaign flyers – ‘Looking to change your life? Saffy’s Amazing Party is the answer!’ My party colours would be Dolce & Gabbana gold and Tiffany blue! And I’d probably get the majority of the male vote simply on the basis of these twin assets!” she said as she stared down at her chest with the kind of pride you normally see on the face of a mother who’s just delivered miracle IVF triplets.

Which, of course, led to a heated debate about party policy. Amanda said that ‘No More Strange Names Like Talvin’ was not a serious election platform to which Saffy replied stoutly that as the SAP was her political party, she could jolly well do as she pleased.

Amanda said it was precisely this kind of crassness that landed you on YouTube and earned you endless ridicule on Facebook.

“Well, what would you campaign on then, Miss Smartypants?” Saffy demanded.

“Well, immigration for starters…”

“What’s wrong with it?” Saffy interrupted.

“It needs to be adjusted. There is a strong community feeling that perhaps there are too many foreigners who are taking away jobs from Singaporeans.”

“Like what kind of jobs?” Saffy wanted to know, adding, “because as far as I can see, they’re all doing the jobs that I really don’t want to be doing anyway, so I say, let them! Like waitressing. Can you imagine me waiting on tables at Tung Lok?”

“Uhm…”

“Oh my God! Customers in this town can be so rude! Just the other day, I was at Crystal Jade and I saw this tai-tai tell scold the poor Chinese waitress for bringing her the bill when she hadn’t asked for it. If Lulu wants to wait on tables all day, give her citizenship, I say!”

Amanda paused. You could tell she was mentally rewinding the conversation. “Who the hell is Lulu?”

“The Chinese waitress! That’s not her name, of course, but she looked like a Lulu. She had that wild hair Michelle Chong has!”

Amanda later said that she should know by now never to engage in a conversation with Saffy on any topic more advanced than the current Gossip Girl plot line.

“She just skips all over the place!” she complained. “But the infuriating thing is, what she says actually makes sense! I mean, the only reason all these foreign workers are coming into Singapore is because there are all these jobs that local Singaporeans don’t want to do! So, somebody’s got to do it! But if you bring in outside help, you get roasted. If you don’t bring someone in, the work piles up and everybody gets unhappy, and you still get roasted. You can’t win!”

I said I couldn’t imagine having to deal with anything more difficult than trying to decide which movie to watch tomorrow night, a comment that led Amanda to conclude that you couldn’t get her to run for politics if you paid her. “What a horrible job!” she said, her admiration for the Prime Minister ratcheting up in multiples.

Meanwhile, Saffy says she’s putting her political ambitions on hold for the moment. After being glued to the TV watching the election results, she says that she’s now torn between running with the PAP or with the Workers Party. “I don’t think I’d look good in all whites, so that kind of rules out the PAP, and the WP have such boring dress sense!”

Amanda says she worries for this country’s future.

Home Improvements

On TV, you see people bounce out of bed looking perfect. They’re not wiping off any drool marks from the sides of their mouths. There’s no sleep crust sealing shut their eyes. Their hair is messy, but in a perfect way. The girls wake up with a little lip gloss and eye-liner, while the guys have no sleep creases anywhere on their bodies.

I wake up looking like Steven Tyler. Saffy stumbles around the flat for half an hour without actually opening her eyes, while Amanda looks like a cat with ADD played with her hair all night.

Now imagine what we look like when we’re woken up at 7 am on a Saturday morning by the sound of drilling from the apartment above us.

First came a pitiful whine from Amanda’s room. From under my bed, my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch began barking. Then Saffy barged out of her room and screamed at the ceiling. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Ohmygod! Shut up!”

She actually paused and waited expectantly as if the noise would actually stop. And when the drilling kept on rumbling, making our entire flat physically vibrate (“And not in a good way, either!” as she later complained to Sharyn), she looked vaguely surprised.

We threw on clothes and escaped to our local hawker coffee shop.

“Every day for three weeks!” Saffy groused. “What are they building up there? The pyramids?"

Amanda snorted into her kopi-o. “The pyramids were built in less time! I’m sure there’s some kind of building regulation that limits the renovation period. I’m going to look it up first thing on Monday morning and they’re going to be getting a letter from me!”

“Why do they need to work on a weekend?” Saffy moaned. She picked sadly at her tee-shirt that said ‘Twin Peaks’ and tried to comb her hair with her fingers. We’d all rushed out of the flat so fast we’d not taken much time to consider our Saturday morning outfit, but as Amanda pointed out, it wasn’t as we were at Ritz-Carlton.

“It’s bad enough that they drill and pound away on a weekday,” Saffy added, “but at least we’re not home, but to do that on a weekend is just plain rude!”

“They’d never dare pull that stunt if the Prime Minister was living in our flat!” Amanda said darkly. “He’d be onto them like a bad rash faster than you could say ‘General Elections’!”

The worst bit about the renovations was the sudden hail of cigarette butts that pelted down onto our window planter boxes. Well, maybe not hail. And there was probably not a lot of pelting going on – more like a light sprinkle, if I was forced to be literal – but some of the butts were still smouldering when they landed on top of the bourganvilleas and it felt Biblical.

So, that Monday, Amanda woke up especially early and steamed into the office to do some research on noisy renovations. A few billable hours later, she faxed a stern ‘desist or I’ll sue’ letter to the contractor and cc’d our condo management office, the owner of the flat and the Prime Minister. “You never know,” she told us later. “It’s an election year. My vote could be the one that decides if we get a new government!”

“But you’re in love with the PM,” Saffy pointed out. “Don’t you want him hanging around for as long as possible?”

Amanda blushed. “Well, yes, but I think he’s working way too hard and maybe he could relax a little bit if he wasn’t so busy sacrificing himself to run the country.”

Saffy later said it still astonishes her that Harvard ever gave Amanda a law degree. “Does she really think the Prime Minister reads any of his faxes? If it was that easy to get in touch with him, we’d all be doing it!”

A few nights ago, the head contractor knocked on our door.

Amanda opened the door and literally gasped at the sight of the six foot two man in tight tee shirt and even tighter jeans before her.

“Ay, we got your fax,” he began, turning red at the sight of Amanda standing there in her Victoria’s Secret nightgown. “Sorry, hor, we make so much noise. But we finish orredi. You need anything fix in here, I do for you FOC!”

Amanda blinked. Slowly, she took his card, cleared her throat and said she’d think about it. She shut the door, turned around and slowly let out her breath. “Oh my God! How hot was he? I know exactly what he can fix for me FOC!”

“Are you cc’ing the Prime Minister on that one, too?” Saffy asked.

Home Alone

One of the things about getting older is that you realise how many things you’ve been taking for granted.

When I was younger, I could eat whatever the hell I wanted. I’d have a big plate of nasi lemak for dinner and two hours later would think nothing of scoffing back a bowl of bah kut teh followed by chendol. These days, I just have to look at a picture of a cheesecake and immediately put on a kilo.

Or, I could stay up all night partying, surfing the net, chatting to friends or playing cards, and still be at work the next morning, bright eyed and bushy tailed. The other night, I fell asleep on the couch while reading a book. Saffy says it was 9.30pm.

Another thing you take for granted when you’re young is that you assume life is always going to stay the same. You think you’re always going to have flawless skin, the same super efficient metabolism and that your parents will never grow old. And that you will have all the time in the world to find someone special to fall in love with and get married.

Recently, after years of disastrous dates and broken relationships, Saffy met and fell in love with her company’s accountant Bradley. Well, at least, I think that’s what he is. He might actually be in payroll, but as Saffy says, it’s something to do with numbers and who cares, really, when the guy has six-pack abs and looks like the love child of Brad Pitt and Andy Lau?

We’ve not seen a whole lot of Saffy as a result. She’s either at his place or they’re holed up in her room. Talking, Saffy says.

“He likes to talk. What can I say? All the guys I’ve ever dated have only wanted to grope me, but for the first time, here’s a guy who actually wants to talk occasionally. The rest of the time he gropes me, but that’s ok!” Saffy giggled.

“Talk about what?” Amanda asked.

Saffy blinked. “Oh, you know. Things. Like feelings and the future. Where the relationship is heading. It’s very refreshing. I’ve never met anyone like that!”

“Are you sure he’s straight?” Barney Chen asked.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Saffy said as she headed for the door on another date with Bradley. “And don’t wait up!”

The other night, Amanda and I found ourselves at home having dinner together while watching ‘American Idol’.

“That Haley really annoys me,” Amanda said through a mouthful of mee goreng. “I hope she gets voted off soon!”

I said they should give Steven Tyler his own show. “The man is one cool dude. No wonder his daughter is so laid-back.”

Amanda sighed. “He’s married, isn’t he? All the good ones are.”

“Not all,” I said, and blushed.

“You know, I always thought I’d be married by the time I was this age,” Amanda went on, absent-mindedly spearing a small cube of tahu goreng. “Or at least, divorced once! With a couple of kids and a horrible mother-in-law whom I would bitch about with my girlfriends. Instead, I have a great career, an amazing wardrobe, a drop dead figure, lots of money, but I’m still single.”

I said some women would kill to have any one of those things.

“I know. I should be grateful, but…but it would be nice to be with someone, you know? I just miss that tingly feeling you get when you’re with someone you really, really like. I mean, where does it say that you can’t have it all? Happens to men all the time!” she sighed and pushed her plate of mee goreng away.

I said I was sure the right guy was just around the corner.

Amanda snorted. “Huh, he’s probably making out with someone else already.”

I kept quiet.

“I guess this whole Bradley business with Saffy is making me realise just how lonely I am, and whether any of that is ever going to happen to me. Strange though, I never felt it before, maybe because I was too busy carving out a career and shopping at Prada. But I’m feeling it now!”

When I reported all this to Saffy, she immediately cancelled her next evening with Bradley, called Sharyn and took Amanda out for a girls night on the town.

“Boyfriends come and go, but best friends are forever!” she declared as they walked out the door. Two seconds later, she popped her head back in and said, “Uhm, let’s keep what I just said between us, OK? There’s no need to repeat that to Bradley. Men can be so sensitive!”

“Shut up, Saf. I’m enjoying my cheesecake!”

Dead Calm

I went to a funeral the other day. It was for my Great Aunt Sophie. She was 86 and a real old cow. And before anyone jumps down my throat and tells me off for being disrespectful, I just want to say that she was born in 1925, which was the year of the Ox. Which makes Great Aunt Sophie a cow. A real old one.

Of course, no one liked her. She was nasty. She never had a nice thing to say about anyone or anything. Give her a bunch of flowers and she’d ask you if you thought she was dead. Cook her a meal and she’d wonder aloud why anyone bothered to cook when the food at Crystal Jade was so much better. Yes, she was that kind of nasty.

Both her husbands died within three years of marrying her. “Coincidence?” my mother said at the funeral of Husband No.2. “I don’t think so.”

When her only daughter Mabel married an Italian Australian professor of applied linguistics, Great Aunt Sophie promptly disinherited her for marrying outside her own kind. “She is such a Nazi!” my mother said incredulously at the time which my sister Michelle said was a bit rich especially given the silent treatment Mother was dishing out to Michelle on account of the fact that Michelle was dating Danny Hancock, the school’s basketball captain.

“It’s not because he’s not Chinese!” Mother said primly. “His father is a mechanic!”

“His father owns the Rolls-Royce dealership!” Michelle screamed during one memorable dinner. “Oh my God, you’re a racist and a middle-class snob!”

“Excuse me, but I am not middle-class! I am upper middle-class. There is a difference!”

“Yeah, well tell that to Great Aunt Sophie!” Michelle yelled. My baby brother Jack’s eyes were wide as saucers as he peered up over the dining table. “I can so see the family resemblance!”

They say time heals all wounds, but let me tell you, scabs were being peeled off at Great Aunt Sophie’s funeral and the fresh wounds they revealed were not pretty.

For starters, Mabel showed up in a bright red Versace mini dress with a plunging neck line with husband number three, a kindly American who, according to Mother’s loud whispers to us from the first aisle in church, was an ex-CIA official.

“How do you know these things?” Michelle hissed.

“Great Aunt Mary told me!” Mother replied calmly.

Jack turned to me. “Oh my God, that woman is still alive? Isn’t she older than her sister?”

Michelle who’d been observing Mabel as she chatted with the minister pursed her lips. “She is very inappropriately dressed for her own mother’s funeral, don’t you think?”

“For any funeral,” Jack said.

“She’s even wearing red lipstick! And she doesn’t seem the least bit sad.”

Mother turned around and whispered theatrically, “I’ll give you ten dollars if you see anyone shedding a tear at this funeral.”

Just then, Mabel’s two sons Matthew and Ben sidled up to us.

“We’re so sorry about your granny!” we all started saying.

“Save it, guys!” Ben said. “The woman was a bat and hated everyone and everyone hated her. I think so many people showed up today just to make sure she really is dead!”

And right on cue, we heard Mabel burst into peals of laughter. The entire congregation swivelled their heads in her direction and found her chatting on her handphone while she stood in front of her mother’s coffin. The minister studied his right foot very intently.

As I later said to Saffy and Amanda, it was as if she was having a drink at a bar and had to take a call.

“How awful,” Amanda said. “To be hated like that. By her own daughter and grand-children as well.”

“If anyone ever stands in front of my coffin and laughs, I’ll be back to haunt them!” Saffy decided.

“So how did it go?” Amanda asked after giving Saffy a look.

“The minister was so embarrassed, he raced through the whole thing. He read a bit from the Bible but never once said anything personal about Great Aunt Sophie. It was almost like we weren’t there for any particular person. It was very weird.”

And it got even weirder at the cemetery because just as the coffin was being lowered into the ground, Mabel – icy and aloof the entire afternoon – suddenly burst into tears and all but hurled herself to the ground, screaming “Mama! Mama!”

And all my mother could say was, “Darling, get up! You’re ruining your pretty dress! Jack, I am not giving you ten dollars!”

Saffy says she really wishes she’d been invited.

Face off

People who know me will be surprised to know that I’m actually on Facebook. After all, I had spent years fiercely resisting persistent calls by friends to sign up.

“Will you please get onto it?” Saffy once said. “My God, even our cleaning lady is on it! How embarrassing is that?”

“What is it with you and technology?” Amanda piped up. “It took you years to get a handphone! And, now that I think about it, it was also just about the same period of time it took you to get an e-mail address!”

Of course, my point was that I didn’t like the fact that people would have so many ways of getting in touch with me.

“What, you think you’re Osama bin Ladin, is it?” Sharyn demanded.

Eventually, I succumbed and opened an account. To my surprise, I found I rather enjoyed the novelty of being in touch with so many friends around the world.

But, lately, I’ve been troubled. Not so much by how much time I’m on the site, but by the lurkers.

You know the ones. They practically beg you to be their Facebook friend.

“Ay, friend me, lah!” said Richard when I bumped into him on Orchard Road. “I sent you a request months ago and still nothing!”

“But I already have 50 friends,” I pointed out, somewhat naively as it turns out.

“I have 1,056!” he said which, of course, made me immediately question how anyone can have 1,056 friends.

Richard continued to hound me by e-mail and because we move around in the same media circles, we’d bump into each other a fair bit and he’d whine that I was ignoring him.

So, finally, one evening, during a commercial break on ‘American Idol’, I accepted his Facebook request. Then, I clicked on his profile, curious to see what sort of Facebook social life someone with 1,056 friends has.

And there was nothing. Just his profile picture, some basic information about where he was born, where he worked, and the sites he was a fan of. There were no posts by him, and the last time someone posted something on his wall was two years ago from someone called Marine Boy 23: “Hey man, how are you?” Richard ever replied.

“Seriously, what is the point of being Facebook friends with someone who doesn’t do anything?” I complained to Amanda who peered at the screen.

“Oh my God, you’ve just accepted a lurker!”

“What’s a lurker?”

“Not a lurker, a Lurker! With a capital L!”

“What the hell is that?”

“Someone who just accumulates friends, doesn’t post anything but just lurks around to see what everyone else is doing. He knows all about what you’re up to, who you’re partying with, what you’re doing, but he’ll never tell you anything about himself! They’re awful, those people!” Amanda said firmly. “Never be friends with them. Why did you accept him in the first place?”

I was shocked. “But how was I supposed to know he was a Lurker?”

At this point, attracted by the sounds of our excited conversation, Saffy emerged from her bedroom. “What’s going on? What am I missing?” she immediately wanted to know.

“Jason accepted a Lurker on Facebook!” Amanda reported.

Saffy gasped. “Oh my God! Why?”

“How was I supposed to know he was a lurker, sorry, Lurker, until I’d accepted him as a friend?”

“The first tell tale sign is if he persistently wants you to accept him. That usually means all his Facebook friends have stopped talking to him, so he needs new victims!”

“Ooh, good point, Manda! And besides,” Saffy pointed out, “you wouldn’t accept a lift home from a stranger would you?”

“But I’ve known him for ten years! Plus, he’s got 1,056 friends! Well, 1,057 with me.”

“I’m pretty sure he had more to start off with,” Amanda said, “but gradually, they’ve un-friended him leaving 1,056 who are also all Lurkers!”

We went back to Richard’s page and randomly clicked on the profile of his friends and sure enough, most of them also posted very little on their wall.

I was flummoxed. Just when you thought you couldn’t be surprised any more.

“And if he’s like that on Facebook,” Saffy went on, “goodness knows what he’s like in real life. I’m willing to bet he’s single, lives at home and has never had a steady girlfriend.”

As Amanda later pointed out, just when you thought Saffy couldn’t come up with another politically incorrect jibe, she surprised you with a doozy.

Meanwhile, I’ve un-friended Richard. With 1,056 other friends to Lurk through, I figure he won’t notice I’m missing.