Oh, I see!

One of the few things that unites me with my two flatmates, Saffy and Amanda is our collective myopia. We’re all blind as bats. Without our assorted visual aids, we’d be forever bumping into a wall. Which is why when an ocular catastrophe happens to one of us, it’s of immediate deep concern, galvanizing the entire flat into a flurry of frantic and often pointless activity. United we stand, divided we fall with blurred vision.

So, you can imagine the chaos a few days ago when Amanda came out of the bathroom and announced that she was going blind.

“I’m going blind!” were her exact words before she burst into tears and fell to the floor, sobbing dramatically.

“What? What? What?” Saffy immediately started shouting, racing to Amanda’s side.

“I can’t see!” Amanda wailed, hands covering her eyes. “Everything has gone blurry!”

“Well, wear your contacts then!” Saffy said, clutching Amanda maternally to her heaving bosom.

“I am wearing them!” Amanda moaned. “I can’t see a thing!”

“Blink hard!” Saffy advised. “Sometimes, you just need to clear the air from the contacts.”

“I’ve tried everything,” Amanda sniffed. “I’ve put eye-drops. Rotated the lenses. Taken them out. Put them back in. Nothing. Nothing is in focus. I’m going blind!”

An emergency phone call was made to the optometrist. “I’m going to sue if he’s damaged my eyes!” Amanda said stoutly, her killer legal instincts briefly reasserting themselves.

“Uh huh. Uh huh. We’ve tried that,” Saffy said into the phone. “Uh huh. Mmmm. Nope, tried that as well. She’s blind. Uh huh? Really? Huh!”

When she hanged up, she reported that Mark, the cute optometrist had instructed us to come down at once to his office. By the time we arrived, we were all slightly breathless and a little ill tempered on account of a little mascara accident. On the way there in the cab, Amanda insisted Saffy help her put on some make-up.

“I can’t show up looking like a dog!” Amanda said, ever conscious of potential dating opportunities in any situation. Just then, the cab suddenly swerved to avoid a bus and Saffy’s hand slipped while fluffing Amanda’s eye-lashes, drawing a thick black slash across Amanda’s forehead.

“I don’t see why it’s my fault that the cab swerved!” Saffy grumbled to me as Amanda groped her way into Mark’s office. “And hello, but don’t you think there are more urgent things to worry about at the moment besides her stupid make-up? Ooh, maybe I should see Mark since I’m here. I’m also having trouble with my vision.”

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I’d turned off the stove before rushing out of the flat. It’s funny how people react differently to a crisis.

Amanda wasn’t in there very long before she emerged. Somehow, she’d managed to fix her hair and tidy up her make-up and was presently beaming up at Mark.

“Oh, thank you!” she lisped attractively, laying a hand gently on his arm. “You were just wonderful! Simply wonderful!”

As it turned out, Amanda wasn’t going blind after all. In the misty gloom of our bathroom, she’d mistakenly switched her contact lenses, inserting them into the wrong eyes.

“I can’t believe how silly I was!” she exclaimed cheerfully, the world suddenly bright again as we waited for Saffy’s examination to be over. “And Mark’s asked me out on a date.”

“How do you do that?” I demanded jealously. “You just breathe and you get dates!”

Meanwhile, the world was not as bright for Saffy.

“It’s outrageous!” she reported later. “He says my vision is a bit wonky because the eyes are dried out because I don’t shut my eyes fully how is that at all humanly possible that I don’t shut my eyes fully and how come you got asked for a date?”

“You mean you sleep with your eyes half open?” Amanda gasped. “Like a snake?”

“Apparently!” Saffy huffed. “He wants me to check if my eyes are closed when I sleep and how am I supposed to do that if I’m supposed to be asleep men can be so stupid!”

Then a thought occurred to her and she turned to me. “You have to sleep with me tonight and watch how my eyelids close! I can’t ask Amanda – she’s such an auntie, she can’t stay up past 10 o’clock!”

So here I am in bed with Saffy and she’s only just fallen asleep. I can feel my allergies acting up. It’s very dusty in here and there are far too many pink frills about. It’s incredible what I have to put up with. Meanwhile, I’m too scared to move in case I wake Saffy but I’m a bit concerned that I may have left the stove on after dinner.

Doggy Position

There I was, quietly having breakfast a few mornings ago in the little apartment I share with my flat-mates Saffy and Amanda. The sun had only just begun to peep over the neighbouring HDB blocks, turning the sky a mellow gold. 

Saffy emerged from her bedroom, doing her best “Girl coming out of the TV in The Ring” impersonation.

“I’m fat!” she announced by way of greeting and promptly collapsed on the sofa, clearly exhausted by the effort of talking so early in the morning. “Ooh, don’t forget we have yoga tonight.”

A few weeks ago, Amanda had arrived home, flushed with excitement. “I just signed us up for yoga class!” she declared with the kind of fervour she normally reserves for a new Brad Pitt movie. “It’s very tomorrow, and I’m surprised we didn’t do it years ago. And Tock Oon is taking it. He’s gorgeous!”

And after a few false starts – we missed the first two lessons on account of The Voice – we were finally ready for our first lesson; the girls primed for their yoga debut on Orchard Road with a whole new wardrobe and matching scrunchies for their hair.

As usual, we were late, this time on account of the fact that you can never find a single taxi in Raffles Place on a Friday night. After a breathless dash to the MRT and loud complaints on my part that going to yoga on a Friday night with my flatmates was one reason why I was still pathetically single, we arrived in class with everyone already into the Archer’s Position.

And for the record, Tock Oon looks like a dog, and not in a good way either. He also has an annoyingly fake American accent that makes you want to turn off the radio, except he’s not on the air.

“What! Is Amanda kidding us?” Saffy mumbled as she grabbed a mat, looking splendid and not a little like Wonder Woman in her tight Spandex yoga outfit. “He’s a dog! But PS, I’m loving that guy in the third row. He can rearrange my chakras any time! Let’s go sit next to him!”

For the next hour, Tock Oon made us do things that I’m sure would be banned if they ever appeared in a cinema near you. At one stage, I suddenly found myself flat on my back and my legs thrown over the back of my head. It occurred to me that from this position, the world looks very strange upside-down amid a forest of unidentifiable legs.

“Hmm,” Amanda murmured beside me. “This reminds me of that time I dated that Italian gymnast, Paolo. Remember him?”

“Remember him? The painting on the wall between our bedrooms fell off its hook!” I gasped in pain, losing complete sensation in my ankles and wishing I’d worn some tighter underwear.

Meanwhile, Tock Oon had stopped next to Saffy who was struggling with her Forward Bend position.

“Stretch!” he exhorted her. “Reach for your toes! Reach! Why you not reach, one?” his perfectly modulated Mid-West, East Coast, West Coast and Texan inflected accent temporarily abandoning him.

“Well, maybe if you cut off my spine, I would be able to!” Saffy snapped, her body fixed at the vertical, her fingers unable to get past her knee-caps. “This is not natural!”

By the time we progressed to the Wheel Position, I was hurting in places that had no business feeling pain, convinced I’d dislocated my shoulder in several spots while Saffy moaned that her head still hurt after her fall from the head-stand position.

“I’m still waiting to be energized!” Saffy complained bitterly in the cab home. “And if this is how I’m supposed to feel with aligned chakras, then I want a refund! I can’t believe we actually paid money for that. What a rip-off!”

The next day, we received an email from Tock Oon announcing that Monday’s class was cancelled as he’d torn a ham-string while doing his Sun Salutation, completely vindicating Saffy’s conviction that yoga is an inherently dangerous activity, on par with bungee jumping and parachuting.

“It’s karma, I’m telling you!” she huffed with satisfaction as she picked up the phone and dialed the yoga school. “It’s for all that pain he put us through, the sadistic sicko. Yes, hello? I want to cancel my classes. I would like a refund. Yes, immediately. In this lifetime, definitely.”

Die Die Must Die-vorce

In life, Mother Nature loves creating things in pairs. Night and day. Sonny and Cher. Singaporean casinos. Assorted bodily parts like nostrils, eyes, ears, hands, legs…American Idol grand finale sing-offs. It’s a long list, but Mother Nature loves her yin and yang. For better or worse, the scales must be balanced. And lately, it seems to me that the natural pairing du jour is marriage and divorce.

News recently reached the little apartment I share with Saffy and Amanda that our friend Jonathan had just separated from his wife, Trisha.

“He’s so, so heartbroken!” Amanda reported the other day as soon as she’d put down the phone from her friend Ting in Bangkok where Jonathan and Trisha were based.

I was floored. “But they just got married!” I bleated. “Like last April!”

“Which is a lifetime,” said Saffy, who grew up in the Age of Britney. She shook her head with sadness and even her fabled bosom seemed a little deflated.

“Last April,” I repeated. “We were there! And it was such a nice wedding!”

“Apparently, it wasn’t nice enough,” said Saffy.

Jonathan had worked in my old law firm Ong, Wu and Yi where Trisha was the HR manager, a post she’d taken over from Saffy. According to Sharyn who still worked in the firm and witnessed everything at close range, it was like being part of a Bollywood movie. From the start, it was a match made in heaven. Both were tall, attractive and intelligent. We called them the Supermodels and secretly envied their blinding white teeth and dazzling smiles. Both came from old family money, drove around in matching Mercedes convertibles and took holidays in the Maldives. As Sharyn once penetratingly pointed out, “Wah liau, where got people like this one? Hor?”

So when the engagement was announced, no one was in the least bit surprised, though Amanda was a little miffed that Jonathan had never asked her out on a date. “I could have given Trisha a run for her money!” she whispered to me at the Bangkok wedding dinner.

I remember Saffy leaned over and murmured, “Is it wrong that I find Trisha incredibly sexy in that Vera Wang shift?” Amanda and I turned our head to stare wordlessly at Saffy.

From Amanda’s side, Barney Chen rumbled, “Girl, let’s divide and conquer! You take Trisha and I’ll take Jonathan! I’m sure he’s in the closet!”

“You think everyone is in the closet!” I said.

“I’m seen the way he looks at me!” Barney insisted.

Amanda moaned that our conversation was such bad karma, while I took another sip of my club soda and wondered how long we had to wait before the boring speeches were over and we got to the good bits, ie, the cake.

And now, barely a year later, through the reliable Bangkok/Singapore grapevine, came news of the impending divorce.

Sharyn was astonished when we told her. “Hah?” she yelped, her eyes rotating wildly behind her thick Coke-bottle glasses. “But just got married how can now sar-dun-ly get die-vorced, one?”

Barney was triumphant. “I told you! He’s coming out! But no one ever listens to me!”

Karl was upbeat about the whole thing. “The good news is that people who look like that never stay single for long. You watch, they’ll be hooked up with another partner before the ink dries on the divorce papers. You know,” he added, “Trisha and I once dated before I met Marsha.”

Barney rolled his eyes. “If you trot out that stupid story one more time, I swear I’ll strangle you myself! And it won’t be in a good way, either,” he added. Later, he told Saffy that he was sure Karl was in the closet. Saffy, who’d also grown up in the Age of Trashy Magazines, said she wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised. As she observed, “All the good ones usually are.”

Meanwhile, Trisha passed through Singapore. “I’m looking for a job,” she told Sharyn. “Jonathan and I are just taking a small break. We need some time to sort out some issues, but we’re not getting divorced.”

“Really, ah?” said Sharyn. “Good, lah! If die-vorce, hor, very sad, leh.”

Amanda wrinkled her nose when she heard the latest through a series of SMS’s that passed between Sharyn, Saffy and Barney. “I just wish they’d get it over and done with. It’s so pointless dragging out a marriage that is obviously going nowhere.”

I looked at Amanda’s innocent face. “You want to date him, don’t you?” She suddenly became absorbed with her cuticles. Saffy’s last word on the matter came last night. “I want a refund of my $180 wedding ang-pao plus the return air-ticket to HK!”

“I also say,” said Amanda, still trying to pretend that was all she cared about.

Ab-stinence

It’s funny how, sometimes, your life can change in just a few seconds. One minute, you’re calmly minding your own business, eating your cornflakes and the next thing you know, you’re busy taking your temperature twice a day, thinking up chic ways to wear a surgical mask and tossing back the Vitamin Cs like a professional drug addict.

Just the other day, I was at the dentist, flipping through a men’s magazine and trying hard to ignore the piercing whine of the drill that flooded the waiting room in full stereophonic splendour, when I came across a full page ad of a man’s stomach muscles. Ordinarily, I would immediately flip the page on point of principle. I mean, what kind of a sick world do we live in that people actually have to torture themselves and do sit-ups just so that they can have funny looking bumps on their stomachs?

But this ad was different. Next to the picture of the bronzed stomach, glistening with sweat, was a small bottle of lotion. “Ab Rescue!” it said proudly on the ad. It promised firmer, tighter, smoother looking abs in just 8 weeks. Just by rubbing the stuff on your stomach, Ab Rescue promised a 20% immediate improvement in skin tightness. All thanks to the product’s special thermogenic formula. I had no idea what a thermogenic formula did – the ad didn’t say – but it sure sounded impressive.

And just like that, I was sold. (Hey, I never said that I was against stomach muscles. I’m  just against the mind-numbingly boring exercises you have to do to get them in the first place.) So anyway, I cancelled the dental appointment and rushed out to get a bottle.

When I got home, my flat-mates, Saffy and Amanda were in the lounge-room in front of the TV, working out to Amanda’s home-exercise video. “And now, clench those glutes!” the woman on the TV exhorted. “Feel those muscles! Four more, and three, and two and one…”

“Oh, God!” Saffy moaned. “I could clench these glutes till the cows come home and got milked dry and I’d still never look like her! Oh, I’m in such pain! Did you take your temperature, Jason?”

“I’m not even sure I’m clenching the right muscles,” Amanda complained. “Where are the glutes anyway? Jason, what are you doing? What’s that you’re rubbing on your stomach?”

I held up Ab Rescue proudly and told them that exercising was now a thing of the past. “This stuff is miraculous!” I told them. “You just rub this on and you get abs like these,” and here, I held up the magazine page, “in eight weeks!”

“Really?” Amanda said, immediately stopping clenching her glutes, and wandered over to the sofa where I’d beached myself, slathering the lovely smelling lotion all over my fat tummy. “Are you supposed to be using so much?”

“Well, you see, I figured that if I doubled the dosage, I could reach my goal in four weeks!”

“What’s thermogenic?” Saffy asked, reading the label.

“Dunno, but it sounds impressively scientific! You want to try some?”

So, cut to two hours later and the three of us were sitting on the couch, intently studying our respective exposed stomachs, half expecting the fat to evaporate in slow motion, like a Discovery channel special, to expose the rock-hard six-packs that we knew was there and half disappointed when that didn’t happen.

“Well, at least it’s glistening like in the ad,” Amanda said after a while.

“I never knew my stomach had so many layers,” Saffy said as she lightly dabbed more Ab Rescue in between the crevices. More contemplative silence as we imagined how much more spectacular our lives would be with defined abs.

“You know,” Amanda announced, “it says here, in very small print, that this stuff works after eight weeks of use with regular exercise. But what’s regular?”

“What’s the point of this stuff then if we have to exercise?” Saffy huffed.

“Brisk walking is exercise,” I offered. “We could walk to the hawker center now and get dinner and if we did that every day, that’s regular right?”

“Absolutely. And I could do with some char kway teow,” Amanda exclaimed, brightly, struggling to get up.

“I want oyster omelete!” Saffy said, considerably cheered now that we’d defined exercise. “But wait, let me dab some of this stuff on my thighs. I want to see if it works on cellulite as well.”

Ab-solutely...Not

It’s funny how, sometimes, your life can change in just a few seconds. One minute, you’re calmly minding your own business, eating your cornflakes and the next thing you know, you’re busy taking your temperature twice a day, thinking up chic ways to wear a surgical mask and tossing back the Vitamin Cs like a professional drug addict.

Just the other day, I was at the dentist, flipping through a men’s magazine and trying hard to ignore the piercing whine of the drill that flooded the waiting room in full stereophonic splendour, when I came across a full page ad of a man’s stomach muscles. Ordinarily, I would immediately flip the page on point of principle. I mean, what kind of a sick world do we live in that people actually have to torture themselves and do sit-ups just so that they can have funny looking bumps on their stomachs?

But this ad was different. Next to the picture of the bronzed stomach, glistening with sweat, was a small bottle of lotion. “Ab Rescue!” it said proudly on the ad. It promised firmer, tighter, smoother looking abs in just 8 weeks. Just by rubbing the stuff on your stomach, Ab Rescue promised a 20% immediate improvement in skin tightness. All thanks to the product’s special thermogenic formula. I had no idea what a thermogenic formula did – the ad didn’t say – but it sure sounded impressive.

And just like that, I was sold. (Hey, I never said that I was against stomach muscles. I’m  just against the mind-numbingly boring exercises you have to do to get them in the first place.) So anyway, I cancelled the dental appointment and rushed out to get a bottle.

When I got home, my flat-mates, Saffy and Amanda were in the lounge-room in front of the TV, working out to Amanda’s home-exercise video. “And now, clench those glutes!” the woman on the TV exhorted. “Feel those muscles! Four more, and three, and two and one…”

“Oh, God!” Saffy moaned. “I could clench these glutes till the cows come home and got milked dry and I’d still never look like her! Oh, I’m in such pain! Did you take your temperature, Jason?”

“I’m not even sure I’m clenching the right muscles,” Amanda complained. “Where are the glutes anyway? Jason, what are you doing? What’s that you’re rubbing on your stomach?”

I held up Ab Rescue proudly and told them that exercising was now a thing of the past. “This stuff is miraculous!” I told them. “You just rub this on and you get abs like these,” and here, I held up the magazine page, “in eight weeks!”

“Really?” Amanda said, immediately stopping clenching her glutes, and wandered over to the sofa where I’d beached myself, slathering the lovely smelling lotion all over my fat tummy. “Are you supposed to be using so much?”

“Well, you see, I figured that if I doubled the dosage, I could reach my goal in four weeks!”

“What’s thermogenic?” Saffy asked, reading the label.

“Dunno, but it sounds impressively scientific! You want to try some?”

So, cut to two hours later and the three of us were sitting on the couch, intently studying our respective exposed stomachs, half expecting the fat to evaporate in slow motion, like a Discovery channel special, to expose the rock-hard six-packs that we knew was there and half disappointed when that didn’t happen.

“Well, at least it’s glistening like in the ad,” Amanda said after a while.

“I never knew my stomach had so many layers,” Saffy said as she lightly dabbed more Ab Rescue in between the crevices. More contemplative silence as we imagined how much more spectacular our lives would be with defined abs.

“You know,” Amanda announced, “it says here, in very small print, that this stuff works after eight weeks of use with regular exercise. But what’s regular?”

“What’s the point of this stuff then if we have to exercise?” Saffy huffed.

“Brisk walking is exercise,” I offered. “We could walk to the hawker center now and get dinner and if we did that every day, that’s regular right?”

“Absolutely. And I could do with some char kway teow,” Amanda exclaimed, brightly, struggling to get up.

“I want oyster omelete!” Saffy said, considerably cheered now that we’d defined exercise. “But wait, let me dab some of this stuff on my thighs. I want to see if it works on cellulite as well.”