Socially Inept

A few weeks ago, after two long and stressful months on a case, during which she literally spent days and nights at the office, Amanda decided she needed a quick weekend trip away.

Saffy sucked in her breath, her impressive bosom inflating to maximum capacity. “Hello, I need a break, too! I have been so stressed preparing the papers for the board meetings, everyone has been yelling at me, and if I see one more Powerpoint presentation, I’m going to barf!”

“Why don’t we all go away, then?” Amanda said.

Which is how we found ourselves in Cempedak, a gorgeous little island resort just off Bintan. For two days, we slept in late, lay by the pool, and decided what to have for dinner after waking up from our nap. The entire time, none of us touched our phones, except for Amanda taking one Instagram post of our three sets of toes by the pool.

            By the time we got back to Singapore, slightly sunburnt and a little hungover, and turned on our phones, that post had generated 189 Likes. There were also eleven comments and without exception, all were along the lines of “Wah, you have such a great life!”, “Wah, I want your life! You’re always on holiday!” and “Wah! No need to work, issit?”

            Which, for some reason, really bothered Amanda.

            “Isn’t this so irritating? I’ve been working 19-hour days for two months and eating breakfast, lunch and dinner at my desk. I take two days off, post one picture, and everyone thinks all I do is sit by the pool! Seriously?” she asked Saffy on FaceTime, during a quick 10-minute lunch break between meetings.

            Saffy sniffed. “Welcome to social media. People only see the good things and not the crap in our lives. Stella in my office told me it must be nice to always be on holiday. If there’d been a staircase nearby, I’d have pushed her down it!”

            “Haiyah, is liddat one, lah!” Sharyn said later that night when she and Saffy came over to Amanda’s office with da-bao from Lau Pa Sat. “Is social media, what! People, hor, dey only see happy picture, but dey don’t see how luan your life is before you take picture and after you post picture! What to do?”

            Saffy said she doesn’t believe Kim Kardashian’s life is at all luan. “She has people who do things for her. Like, you think Victoria Beckham actually made David’s birthday cake? No, she’s too busy designing fabulous dresses. She has people who buy birthday cakes!”

            “Yes, but I think Sharyn’s point is that even Victoria Beckham has crap in her life which she doesn’t show,” Amanda said. Sharyn nodded sagely, pleased to be actually quoted in a conversation. “Imagine the kind of stress she’s under designing her collections. Literally, the whole world is watching her on Instagram!”

            “Well, not literally the whole world,” Saffy said, slowly chewing her chai dau kwai. “God, I’m so tired, I can’t even chew.”

            I’d been day-dreaming the entire time and now suddenly zoned back into the conversation. “I just had a brilliant idea for a new app!” I said, sitting up straight.

            “You’re not still going on about your custom-made Hello Kitty coffins, are you?” Saffy said.

            I waved my hands. “It’s even better! You know how Instagram is just filled with beautiful pictures of beautiful people doing beautiful things and how everyone gets jealous?”
            Amanda and Saffy exchanged looks. Sharyn stared at me, with rapt attention.

            “Well,” I said, “how about an app where you only post the crappy stuff in your life?”

            Amanda frowned. “Like…”

            “Like that bunion toe. Or baby vomit all over your Ferragamo shoes. The rejection letter from your dream job. Your puffy face and red eyes from all your crying after your breakup with your cheating boyfriend! Pimples! Your living room after your dog has chewed it all up…”

            Silence descended on the room.

            “Huh,” Saffy said eventually. “That actually sounds like…”

            “And…and…we’d call it…wait for it…Instacrap!”

            Amanda sighed. Her eyes shone. “Oh my God, that’s just genius!”

            Encouraged, I went on. “And the corporate tagline would be ‘Instacrap…Feel Bad’.”

            Sharyn pursed her lips. “Hah? Liddat can make money, meh?”

            “Amanda’s right, Shazz,” Saffy told Sharyn. “It’s genius! I can feel it in my waters. People are sick at looking at how happy other people are! They want to rejoice in other people’s unhappiness! Sign me up!”

            Amanda says this time next year, we could be on our yacht, posting happy pictures on Instagram. “For real, this time!” she says.

           

Background Check

 The other day, Amanda posted on Facebook an article about an Irish woman in America who took one of those DNA ancestry tests. Basically, you swab the insides of your mouth with a cotton bud and send it off to a lab somewhere Singapore Airlines wouldn’t dream of flying to, and clever people in white lab coats analyse the saliva and then tell you all about your ancestors.

            So, this Irish woman sent her swab off, fully expecting it to come back confirming she was Irish. Turned out she and her siblings were all half-Jewish which made no sense, since both her parents were full-blown Irish. She started testing the rest of her family. Her mother, who was still alive, and her side of the family were all Irish. Her father was dead, but his siblings all had Irish stock, which could only mean that her father was the one who carried the Jewish strain.

            To cut a long story short, it turned out that her father had been born to a Jewish family and at the hospital, he’d been mixed up with another baby, and given to the wrong (Irish) family.

            “He didn’t look like his other siblings,” this Irish woman said of her father. Meanwhile, the other (Irish) baby had been sent home with the wrong (Jewish) family.

            “Can you imagine that happening?” Saffy said later that evening. “You think you’re family, but actually, you are compete strangers just because a nurse mixed up your identity tag.”

            “If that sort of thing doesn’t make you neurotic in the hospital, I don’t know what would,” Amanda sighed. “They should just make the mother slip the name tag on the kid as soon she pops it out! That way, there’s absolutely no doubt as to whose kid it is!”

            Meanwhile, my sister, who has long suspected that this very baby swap thing happened to her, says, she, for one, will be getting a DNA swab test.

            “Really?” I asked her on FaceTime. “You want to risk it? But you’re my sister! I can’t suddenly not have a sister!”

            Michelle’s fuzzy image shifted a few seconds behind real time. “Well, I don’t think relationships are based necessarily on blood ties,” she sniffed. “You’ll always be my brother, regardless of the results. I mean, what if I’m really the daughter of the King of Cambodia?”

            When my mother heard about Michelle’s plans, she said, “And what if she’s really the daughter of Jasmine Poon? Jasmine was in the hospital ward next to me when Michelle was born, and Jasmine was giving birth to Ophelia, that dreadful woman, and I can assure you that there’s a much higher probability that your ungrateful sister is Jasmine’s daughter than she is a Sihanouk! Let’s see how she would like being a Poon! God,” Mother said as a thought occurred to her. “If our babies really were swapped, that means Ophelia is your sister!”

            I literally yelped. Because Ophelia Poon was awful as a child, and she’s even worse now as a grown up. Everyone hates the woman. Especially her four ex-husbands. And her Filipino maid who recently reported her to the Ministry of Manpower for not paying her for the past eight months.

            “And who’s this Jasmine Poon?” Amanda asked.

            “A ghastly socialite contemporary of my mother’s,” I told her. “Her first husband left her when Ophelia was six and became a drag queen. Her stage name was Chantelle Lash. And Jasmine’s second husband liked to wear women’s underwear under his three-piece Turnbull & Asser suits!”

            “God, you had such interesting family friends!” Saffy moaned.

            Of course, I immediately called Michelle and reported our Mother’s inexpert forensic opinion. She gasped. “Oh my God, I could be a Poon?!”

            “I really don’t think you should open this can of worms. You’re much better off being a Hahn,” I told her earnestly. “And really, I can’t bear the idea of Ophelia Poon being my sister!”

            “Surely, those can’t be my only options,” Michelle said. “Mother or Jasmine! Who else was in the hospital the day I was born?”

            “This cannot end well,” I predicted. When we ended the call, Michelle had said she was going to meditate on it. “Ignorance is bliss!” I assured her.

            “You sound like one of those Instagram memes!” Amanda told me.

            “Can you imagine having Ophelia Poon as my sister?” I repeated for what must have been the eighteenth time that day.

            Saffy says the possibilities are enthralling. “What if Gong Li was your sister?” she asked. “How fab would that be?”

            Mother says sometimes she wishes she’d been a nun and had never had children. 

            

Fall Back Position

My friend Annette sent me a YouTube clip the other day. “It’s about 45 minutes long, but it’s totally worth it,” she said.

            Given that my attention span is normally the same period of time it takes for a dream to die, I told her I seriously doubted it.

            “Just watch it, lah! Aiyoh!” she said. As I later said to Amanda, if Annette’s eyes had rolled any further back, she’d have been blind.

            “So did you watch it?” Amanda asked. In response, I tapped my phone and forwarded Annette’s clip.

            When Saffy came back from her pedicure humming a mangled version of ‘Despacito’, Amanda was still sitting in front of her laptop at the dining table, staring slack-jawed at the screen.

            “Watcha watching?” Saffy said, coming around to Amanda side. “Why are you watching a half-naked Indian man on…Oh. My. God! What is he doing?” she screamed.

            “Will you please stop screaming? It’s just Iyengar!”

            “What is that? Oh my God! How is he doing that? Why is he half-naked?” Saffy moaned, clearly too traumatised to be able to process too much information at the same time. She immediately pulled up a chair next to Amanda and sat down.

            “He’s practically folded his body backwards over his leg!” Saffy pointed out. “How is he doing that? Really, could someone please tell him to put a shirt on? This is so disturbing!”

            “This is how the yogis practise yoga!” Amanda told her.

            Saffy’s bosom puffed out to such a volume, it threatened to obstruct Amanda’s view of the laptop screen. “This is yoga? No way is this yoga! I mean….oh God….look! He’s just wrapped both legs over his head! Oh…I can’t watch this….I swear, if his thing pops out of his loin cloth, I am going to just die!”

            Later that night, over a dinner at the newly renovated Chomp Chomp, it was all the girls could talk about.

            “Is that not the most disturbing thing you’ve ever seen?” Saffy asked me.

            “Actually, I thought it was quite life-changing,” I replied. “For the first time in my life, I finally got a sense of what yoga actually means!”

            “Totally!” Amanda said, stabbing a piece of cucumber out of the rojak. “I loved what he said how his body was in a million pieces, but his mind was whole!”

            “You guys are seriously strange,” Saffy huffed. “That was not normal, what I saw. No one should be able to twist and turn like that!”

            “If you practise enough, it should!” Amanda said serenely. “And that’s the whole point, you have to let the body break complete. That’s how the mind heals itself!”

            “I don’t see how that can be true,” Saffy said firmly. “I mean, how damaged must my mind be if it has to be healed by me literally looking at my ass from the other direction?”

            Of course, that’s the trouble with YouTube. You can never just look at one video any more than you can have just one version of ‘Despacito’. There’s always another clip to look at. Which is how we all eventually came to watch ‘Primary Series Ashtanga with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois’.

            “So, who’s this dude?” Saffy wanted to know as we all settled in with a tube of Pringles to watch the clip that Amanda had started streaming onto our AppleTV. “And is Ashtanga different from Iyengar?”

            “I’m too lazy to Google it,” I told her. “Which in and of itself is so encouraging as it must mean my mind is already in a million pieces, so I’m halfway there to having a complete mind!”

            If watching Iyengar go through his postures was depressing, watching Sri K. Pattabhi Jois teach Ashtanga made Saffy positively suicidal.

            “Why are they always half naked?” she complained within two minutes of the clip. “And how are these students able to just float like that?”

            “Look how they can touch their whole palms on the ground!” Amanda said with deep admiration. “I have to really strain to touch my toes, and this is after years of very expensive classes at Como Shambhala!”

            “I don’t think they eat anything,” Saffy concluded. “Look at their stomachs! They must have zero body fat! Maybe that’s how they can touch their toes, Amanda. There’s no fat to get in the way!”

            Amanda turned toward Saffy. “Are you saying I have fat?” she said stiffly.

            “If you keep putting away Pringles like that, you sure will!” Saffy huffed.

            Amanda says that in her ongoing journey towards true spirituality, the fact that she hasn’t smothered Saffy in her sleep must count for something.