Dating is so easy when you’re in your twenties. You go to a party. Meet someone cute. Ask them out for a coffee. Maybe a movie. Followed by dinner. Another meal and before you know it, you’re a couple. If you’re the girl, you get to cast pitying looks at your single girlfriends, and if you’re a guy, you get to carry your girlfriend’s handbag in public.
Of course, if it never gets to the movie or dinner stage because there’s just no chemistry or you find her laugh very annoying, it’s no big deal. You call up your friends and head out to the next party where you will probably find someone interesting. And the process starts all over again.
Then one day, you realise that you’re spending a lot more time at home on the weekends. And when you can muster the energy to drag your sorry ass off the sofa to go to a nightclub, you find that everyone who is even remotely interesting is chatting to someone else and not even looking in your direction.
And then you notice something else: everyone is younger than you are.
And you notice something else: you’re no longer in your twenties. But everyone else is. Which then makes you wonder if this is the reason why you’ve not been on a date since the first season of ‘Lost’.
See what a vicious downward spiral it is?
“God, imagine what’s going to happen when you hit 40!” Saffy said the other day while examining herself in her new dress in her bedroom.
On the bed, Amanda looked up from her latest copy of Vogue. Her eyes narrowed. “Why did you just use the word ‘you’?” You could feel the temperature in the room drop a few degrees.
“It’s a generic term!” Saffy said hurriedly. “‘You’ doesn’t mean ‘you’! It means ‘us’! Like ‘you’ and ‘me’ ‘us’! We’re nowhere near 40. Well, I know I’m not. But my point is,” she went on nervously, “when we hit 40, the dating pool will have literally dried up. And we’ll all die of dehydration!”
“So, you think I’m going to still be single when I’m 40?” Amanda asked, her eyes now the size of narrow slits.
“I’m going to shut up now,” Saffy murmured. “And try on this new dress.”
Amanda, never one to hold a grudge in the presence of a new outfit, instantly brightened. “When did you get that? It’s so pretty!”
“Oh, I got it at a Club 21 sale the other day. You think I can afford Armani on my salary? I thought I needed something nice to wear for my date but it’s so hard to find time to shop these days so I really had to rush over on the weekend and battle through all the aunties and this one I had to really fight hard for I’m babbling aren’t I why are you looking at me like that Amanda say something please you’re scaring me oh Jason help…”
The other thing about dating when you’re no longer in your twenties is that you now understand why people who get stuck up on an icy mountain, dying of starvation, eventually start eating one another. It’s a matter of survival: if the only thing standing between you and another night of going insane with hunger is your best friend’s forearm, you put aside your vegetarian scruples and start chewing.
“I have not been on a date for so long!” Amanda moaned much later when she’d had a moment to overcome her sudden fit of jealousy. “I don’t think I have it in me anymore to keep fighting for a date.”
“Didn’t you go for dinner last week with that lawyer?” I asked.
Amanda sighed. “Oh God, all he did was talk about his stock portfolio and SMS all night. If he’s like that on the first date, and mind you I was wearing vintage Versace so there was a lot of cleavage showing, what’s he going to be like two weeks into the marriage? Which leads me to think that maybe he was gay.”
Two days ago, we received a big fat glossy envelope in the post. It was a wedding invitation from our friend Jessie.
“What!” Saffy yelled.
“I thought she was still single!” Amanda shouted.
“Seriously? That four-eyed midget? How did that happen?” Saffy vented, really getting into the spirit of the occasion.
Things have calmed down a little since then, especially when Sharyn pointed out that there are always single eligible guys at weddings. “There’d better be,” Amanda threatened.
Saffy says Amanda’s mood swings are killing her.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Friday, October 01, 2010
Talking Cock
They say that if you want to know what that gorgeous girl you’ve been lusting after will look like thirty years from now, just take a good hard look at her mother. And by ‘they’, I mean, of course, my mother.
When my brother Jack brought home his first girlfriend, the first thing Mother did was to invite Mrs Jansen over for tea and mahjong. That evening, Mother said to Father that Marisa Jansen was never going to work out.
“Joyce Jansen looks like she’s a sausage roll! Imagine what Marisa is going to look like after she’s popped out a couple of children! And,” Mother added with gloom, “her mother can’t play mahjong for nuts. Anyone who doesn’t know how to pong properly will not be having any smart children.”
Jack never quite worked out why or how, but shortly after that, Marisa was transferred to another school. And that was that.
I was reminded of this recently while having lunch alone at PS Café. Next to me sat two thirty something women. Obviously BFF. I guessed SCGS followed by university in America. Tall, thin, long haired, Birkin bags and expensive manicures. I knew I was in for a great session of eavesdropping when one of them asked the other, “So, how was your date with Dutch Boy?”
BFF2: Oh, we had a lovely dinner. Bottle of wine, good conversation, great food. He’s super-fit. He’s training for a marathon.
BFF1: Did he pay?
BFF2: Of course, lah! He immediately reached for the bill when it came and I didn’t fight him for it. For once. I kept remembering what you said about my control and power issues.
BFF1: So…did anything happen?
BFF2: No! But we’ve kissed.
BFF1: Seriously, what’s with you? This is like, what, the fourth date? And all you’ve done is kiss? Isn’t it time to take it to the next level?
BFF2: I would, but I think getting me into bed is the one goal he's zoned in on right now. And I’m not quite sure I want that to happen just yet.
BFF1: Oh my God, Clarissa! What are you, your mother?
Clarissa: Choy, Cindy! I just think that he's one of those guys who will lose interest the minute I put out. Call me paranoid but I am just trying to suss things out.
Cindy: So you both just went home after dinner?
Clarissa: Well, he wasn't a pleased puppy when I called for the driver after dinner.
Cindy: What is your problem? It’s not like you’re looking for anything serious now anyway. You’ve broken up with Mark for like, what, two months, so clearly, Dutch Boy is your rebound. You can get what you want from him, move on and let another girl get a crack at him.
Clarissa: But…
Cindy: No ‘but’. If you keep on this road, you’re just wasting everyone’s time. We’re not getting any younger, you know.
Clarissa: Why am I friends with you?
Cindy: Look. It’s like you try on a dress in a shop. You can dither and dither, but after a while, you either get to the cashier and pay for the dress, or you put it back on the rack and move onto the next shop! You have to date the way you shop! Efficiently!
Clarissa: Well, he’s gone to Taipei for work and he’s back this weekend. Let’s see if he calls.
Cindy: No, no! You can’t wait for him to call you. You ended the night, so you have to make it up to him. Just say you had a great night, sorry about the early night but you had had a long day, but could you make it up to him with dinner at your place? That’s a clear signal that the hunt is back on.
Clarissa: I did text him today to tell him we need to celebrate when he's back. He didn't really respond to that, but I think he's still brooding. He’s a bit petulant by nature, I think.
Clarissa: God. Welcome to my world and Dennis. He’s exactly like that. Last night I told him I had a headache and he acted like I’d siphoned off all his CPF money! So today, I had to manja him like hell!
Cindy: What’s wrong with men?
Clarissa: I remember my mother telling me that all men are petulant by nature. And it’s the woman’s job to get what she wants by mothering the guy a little. It’s a sick Freudian stereotype, but it’s so true.
Saffy says she wants to have lunch with me more often. “I swear, you get the best conversations!”
When my brother Jack brought home his first girlfriend, the first thing Mother did was to invite Mrs Jansen over for tea and mahjong. That evening, Mother said to Father that Marisa Jansen was never going to work out.
“Joyce Jansen looks like she’s a sausage roll! Imagine what Marisa is going to look like after she’s popped out a couple of children! And,” Mother added with gloom, “her mother can’t play mahjong for nuts. Anyone who doesn’t know how to pong properly will not be having any smart children.”
Jack never quite worked out why or how, but shortly after that, Marisa was transferred to another school. And that was that.
I was reminded of this recently while having lunch alone at PS Café. Next to me sat two thirty something women. Obviously BFF. I guessed SCGS followed by university in America. Tall, thin, long haired, Birkin bags and expensive manicures. I knew I was in for a great session of eavesdropping when one of them asked the other, “So, how was your date with Dutch Boy?”
BFF2: Oh, we had a lovely dinner. Bottle of wine, good conversation, great food. He’s super-fit. He’s training for a marathon.
BFF1: Did he pay?
BFF2: Of course, lah! He immediately reached for the bill when it came and I didn’t fight him for it. For once. I kept remembering what you said about my control and power issues.
BFF1: So…did anything happen?
BFF2: No! But we’ve kissed.
BFF1: Seriously, what’s with you? This is like, what, the fourth date? And all you’ve done is kiss? Isn’t it time to take it to the next level?
BFF2: I would, but I think getting me into bed is the one goal he's zoned in on right now. And I’m not quite sure I want that to happen just yet.
BFF1: Oh my God, Clarissa! What are you, your mother?
Clarissa: Choy, Cindy! I just think that he's one of those guys who will lose interest the minute I put out. Call me paranoid but I am just trying to suss things out.
Cindy: So you both just went home after dinner?
Clarissa: Well, he wasn't a pleased puppy when I called for the driver after dinner.
Cindy: What is your problem? It’s not like you’re looking for anything serious now anyway. You’ve broken up with Mark for like, what, two months, so clearly, Dutch Boy is your rebound. You can get what you want from him, move on and let another girl get a crack at him.
Clarissa: But…
Cindy: No ‘but’. If you keep on this road, you’re just wasting everyone’s time. We’re not getting any younger, you know.
Clarissa: Why am I friends with you?
Cindy: Look. It’s like you try on a dress in a shop. You can dither and dither, but after a while, you either get to the cashier and pay for the dress, or you put it back on the rack and move onto the next shop! You have to date the way you shop! Efficiently!
Clarissa: Well, he’s gone to Taipei for work and he’s back this weekend. Let’s see if he calls.
Cindy: No, no! You can’t wait for him to call you. You ended the night, so you have to make it up to him. Just say you had a great night, sorry about the early night but you had had a long day, but could you make it up to him with dinner at your place? That’s a clear signal that the hunt is back on.
Clarissa: I did text him today to tell him we need to celebrate when he's back. He didn't really respond to that, but I think he's still brooding. He’s a bit petulant by nature, I think.
Clarissa: God. Welcome to my world and Dennis. He’s exactly like that. Last night I told him I had a headache and he acted like I’d siphoned off all his CPF money! So today, I had to manja him like hell!
Cindy: What’s wrong with men?
Clarissa: I remember my mother telling me that all men are petulant by nature. And it’s the woman’s job to get what she wants by mothering the guy a little. It’s a sick Freudian stereotype, but it’s so true.
Saffy says she wants to have lunch with me more often. “I swear, you get the best conversations!”
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Testing the limits
As children, whenever my brother or I came home crying because we’d fallen out of the tree we were climbing or scraped our knees from skateboarding, our mother would look up from her mahjong table and frown.
Those of you who’ve grown up watching Dettol commercials might expect even the most negligent mother to immediately rush to her offspring, oozing maternal concern while leading them to the bathroom where she’ll gently clean their wounds and murmur encouraging words like “Dettol Antiseptic protects your family”.
Not Mrs Hahn.
She frowned at us and told us to stop being such wooses. “You think that’s painful?
Try giving birth!”
And there was that one time our sister accidentally hit herself with her own tennis racket when lunging for a forehand, and came home with a whopping big bruise on her forehead. Mother took one look at the slobbering mess that was Michelle and said, “Oh, darling, do stop crying. You’re going to get permanent wrinkles if you scrunch up your face like that. Giving birth is so much more painful!”
As Michelle later said, it’s a wonder the three of us didn’t grow up with more emotional issues.
A couple of weeks ago, my flatmate Saffy suddenly announced in the middle of dinner that she had to go for a Pap Smear Test. At first, I thought she was talking about some new entrance examination I’d not heard of. Like the GMAT or something.
“No, it’s a woman’s test,” Saffy explained in her most scientific voice. "Apparently, you’re meant to have them regularly and I’ve never been on account of the fact that I’ve only just gotten the hang of my hand booby test so I’m a little nervous because it’s not a DIY and you need to see a gynae about it and so I need one of you to come with me!”
Amanda looked up from her oyster omelet and blinked. “How you ever hit puberty is beyond me. I go every other year for my Pap Smear!”
Saffy was astonished. “Really? What’s it involve?”
Amanda shifted in her seat. “Well, they just…they just scrap some stuff out of you and look at it under the microscope and if you’re fine, you’re fine, and if you’re not, well, then they do another round of tests. Anyway, I can’t go with you. I’ve got that stupid trial all month.”
Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Scrape some stuff out from where?”
That night, Amanda posted on Facebook that she was living with a complete idiot, to which Saffy commented, “No, seriously. Where do they scrape the stuff from?”
Which is how, a few days ago, I found myself sitting in a roomful of women at Saffy’s gynaecologist.
“I tell you, if I had my life all over again,” Saffy announced loudly, “I’d never have been born a woman. You guys have it so easy. Every month, I have that stupid period. Then every six months, I have to touch my own boobs, which is so sad I can’t begin to tell you. And I’m now meant to schedule a stupid smear test every other year. Seriously, there are no advantages to being a woman! Is this going to hurt?” she asked the receptionist who came to collect the medical form.
“No, lah, Pap Smear Test very easy one,” said Nurse Tan. “OK, you can go in now!”
You could tell Saffy was struggling with herself as she trudged cautiously into the room. Through the thin doors, you could hear her muted nervous chatter and the doctor’s calm, soothing voice. There was a brief silence followed by the soft tinkle of something metal shifting on a tray.
“You’re going to put that where?” Saffy’s question punched through the closed door and hanged in the air with great outrage. Several women looked up in alarm, while I pulled my copy of the Peak higher over my face.
“No, seriously! I thought you were going to just use a cotton bud or something…Well, then why is it called a smear? That’s a shovel you’ve got there. Since when do you need a shovel to get a smear?...Yeah? Well, I don’t care what the correct medical term for it is, but something that huge is called a shovel! You could dig up potatoes with that!...I will not keep my voice down! I broke up with my ex-boyfriend because his penis was way too big and that shovel you’ve got there is ten times the size of his dong! Get away from me! Jason! Jason! Help!”
And, of course, all I could think about was what my mother would have said.
Those of you who’ve grown up watching Dettol commercials might expect even the most negligent mother to immediately rush to her offspring, oozing maternal concern while leading them to the bathroom where she’ll gently clean their wounds and murmur encouraging words like “Dettol Antiseptic protects your family”.
Not Mrs Hahn.
She frowned at us and told us to stop being such wooses. “You think that’s painful?
Try giving birth!”
And there was that one time our sister accidentally hit herself with her own tennis racket when lunging for a forehand, and came home with a whopping big bruise on her forehead. Mother took one look at the slobbering mess that was Michelle and said, “Oh, darling, do stop crying. You’re going to get permanent wrinkles if you scrunch up your face like that. Giving birth is so much more painful!”
As Michelle later said, it’s a wonder the three of us didn’t grow up with more emotional issues.
A couple of weeks ago, my flatmate Saffy suddenly announced in the middle of dinner that she had to go for a Pap Smear Test. At first, I thought she was talking about some new entrance examination I’d not heard of. Like the GMAT or something.
“No, it’s a woman’s test,” Saffy explained in her most scientific voice. "Apparently, you’re meant to have them regularly and I’ve never been on account of the fact that I’ve only just gotten the hang of my hand booby test so I’m a little nervous because it’s not a DIY and you need to see a gynae about it and so I need one of you to come with me!”
Amanda looked up from her oyster omelet and blinked. “How you ever hit puberty is beyond me. I go every other year for my Pap Smear!”
Saffy was astonished. “Really? What’s it involve?”
Amanda shifted in her seat. “Well, they just…they just scrap some stuff out of you and look at it under the microscope and if you’re fine, you’re fine, and if you’re not, well, then they do another round of tests. Anyway, I can’t go with you. I’ve got that stupid trial all month.”
Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Scrape some stuff out from where?”
That night, Amanda posted on Facebook that she was living with a complete idiot, to which Saffy commented, “No, seriously. Where do they scrape the stuff from?”
Which is how, a few days ago, I found myself sitting in a roomful of women at Saffy’s gynaecologist.
“I tell you, if I had my life all over again,” Saffy announced loudly, “I’d never have been born a woman. You guys have it so easy. Every month, I have that stupid period. Then every six months, I have to touch my own boobs, which is so sad I can’t begin to tell you. And I’m now meant to schedule a stupid smear test every other year. Seriously, there are no advantages to being a woman! Is this going to hurt?” she asked the receptionist who came to collect the medical form.
“No, lah, Pap Smear Test very easy one,” said Nurse Tan. “OK, you can go in now!”
You could tell Saffy was struggling with herself as she trudged cautiously into the room. Through the thin doors, you could hear her muted nervous chatter and the doctor’s calm, soothing voice. There was a brief silence followed by the soft tinkle of something metal shifting on a tray.
“You’re going to put that where?” Saffy’s question punched through the closed door and hanged in the air with great outrage. Several women looked up in alarm, while I pulled my copy of the Peak higher over my face.
“No, seriously! I thought you were going to just use a cotton bud or something…Well, then why is it called a smear? That’s a shovel you’ve got there. Since when do you need a shovel to get a smear?...Yeah? Well, I don’t care what the correct medical term for it is, but something that huge is called a shovel! You could dig up potatoes with that!...I will not keep my voice down! I broke up with my ex-boyfriend because his penis was way too big and that shovel you’ve got there is ten times the size of his dong! Get away from me! Jason! Jason! Help!”
And, of course, all I could think about was what my mother would have said.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Porn Identity
I know there are some things that one should never admit in public, let alone in a blog as wildly successful as this one. Like admitting that you always look into the toilet bowl after you’ve done a Number Two. That wouldn’t be me. I never look. But I know other people who look and since they’re not in the least bit embarrassed by it, I don’t feel in any way guilty about naming my flatmates Saffy and Amanda in public.
“I don’t know how you don’t look,” Saffy said the other day. “How else will you know what you’ve been eating?”
I stared at her for a moment. “You don’t know what you’ve been eating?” I asked finally.
Saffy shrugged. “Well, of course, I know what I’ve been eating, but it’s always interesting to see what a dinner of chilli crab and sambal kangkong looks like at the other end!”
“I imagine it would look like dhal!” I said as I got up and left the room.
As Saffy later said to her best friend Sharyn, if that particularly vivid image didn’t put you off Indian food forever, she didn’t know what would.
“Why you people talk about such strange things, one, hah?” Sharyn wanted to know. “Why you not talk about normal things like, like porn?”
Saffy spluttered into her teh tarik.
Sharyn edged away from the table. “Ay, you don’t anyhow spit, can? This is new G2000 blouse, OK?”
Saffy waved her hands as her eyes watered. “Porn? You watch porn?”
Sharyn leaned closer and whispered. “Yah, but don’t tell anyone, hor! My favourite is ‘Gossip Girl’! Damned sexy, that show! If my priest find out, I sure kena one hun-red ‘Hail, Mary’!”
Later that night, over a dinner of spaghetti bolognaise at home, Saffy wanted to know in which parallel universe would ‘Gossip Girl’ be considered porn.
“Maybe we’ve been watching the censored version?” Amanda asked. “Did you ask her what was so pornographic about it?”
Saffy slurped noisily on her pasta. “Mmm, I did. She said it was all those 18 year old girls having sex before marriage and drugs.”
“That’s what she considers porn?” Amanda asked, utterly amazed at the modern definition of porn. “What does she call actual porn, then?”
“I don’t think she’s ever watched any,” Saffy said. “This is a woman who is still having sex with her husband with the lights off!”
“And anyway, are there any drugs on that show?” Amanda asked.
“What about Jenny’s affair with that drug pushing ambassador’s son?”
“Oh, he’s cute. But a bit too short. And no one was actually seen taking any drugs. He was just selling them!” Amanda paused and looked worried. “I can’t believe I just made that distinction.”
Sharyn’s disclosure occupied everyone’s attention for days though Amanda couldn’t shake off the feeling that somewhere along the line, she’d somehow become desensitized to the greater moral issue that Sharyn seemed to have grasped very early on.
Saffy said that Amanda was over-analysing things. “It’s just a show! Real people in New York don’t look like Serena van der Woodsen or Nate Archibald! It’s all make-believe! I’m sure even Chace Crawford doesn’t wake up each morning looking that gorgeous! In fact, I’m sure Chace Crawford doesn’t even exist. He’s probably a special effect!”
Amanda frowned. “Yes, but that show is all about teenage sex, drugs, illicit affairs and scheming. Don’t you think it’s disturbing that we’re not disturbed by any of that and that we classify it as entertainment?”
“It’s make-believe!” Saffy repeated, her ample bosom heaving in rhythm. “It’s not real! Therefore, all the normal rules of morality don’t apply.”
And as if to prove her point, the next time they met, Sharyn said that she was now addicted to ‘True Blood’.
“Everyone is naked on that show! You can see their pee-gu!” she said breathlessly. “And the werewolves damn sexy! Wah, if my priest ever find out, hor, I sure excommunicated, one!”
“I told you it was a great show,” Saffy replied virtuously. “I am in absolute lust with Eric Northman.”
“I like Bill!” Sharyn admitted. “But when I watch, I have to hold my rosary in my hand.”
“There are no vampires,” Saffy said patiently. “You do know it’s all make-believe, right?”
“Ay, you don’t joke about such things, OK?” Sharyn said, her glasses fogging up with concern. “My mother say she once got attack by Pontianak!”
To which Saffy said if the Pontianak looked anything like Alexander Skarsgard, he could attack her any time he liked. The next day, she lent Sharyn her old DVD of ‘Banging Private Ryan’.
“I don’t know how you don’t look,” Saffy said the other day. “How else will you know what you’ve been eating?”
I stared at her for a moment. “You don’t know what you’ve been eating?” I asked finally.
Saffy shrugged. “Well, of course, I know what I’ve been eating, but it’s always interesting to see what a dinner of chilli crab and sambal kangkong looks like at the other end!”
“I imagine it would look like dhal!” I said as I got up and left the room.
As Saffy later said to her best friend Sharyn, if that particularly vivid image didn’t put you off Indian food forever, she didn’t know what would.
“Why you people talk about such strange things, one, hah?” Sharyn wanted to know. “Why you not talk about normal things like, like porn?”
Saffy spluttered into her teh tarik.
Sharyn edged away from the table. “Ay, you don’t anyhow spit, can? This is new G2000 blouse, OK?”
Saffy waved her hands as her eyes watered. “Porn? You watch porn?”
Sharyn leaned closer and whispered. “Yah, but don’t tell anyone, hor! My favourite is ‘Gossip Girl’! Damned sexy, that show! If my priest find out, I sure kena one hun-red ‘Hail, Mary’!”
Later that night, over a dinner of spaghetti bolognaise at home, Saffy wanted to know in which parallel universe would ‘Gossip Girl’ be considered porn.
“Maybe we’ve been watching the censored version?” Amanda asked. “Did you ask her what was so pornographic about it?”
Saffy slurped noisily on her pasta. “Mmm, I did. She said it was all those 18 year old girls having sex before marriage and drugs.”
“That’s what she considers porn?” Amanda asked, utterly amazed at the modern definition of porn. “What does she call actual porn, then?”
“I don’t think she’s ever watched any,” Saffy said. “This is a woman who is still having sex with her husband with the lights off!”
“And anyway, are there any drugs on that show?” Amanda asked.
“What about Jenny’s affair with that drug pushing ambassador’s son?”
“Oh, he’s cute. But a bit too short. And no one was actually seen taking any drugs. He was just selling them!” Amanda paused and looked worried. “I can’t believe I just made that distinction.”
Sharyn’s disclosure occupied everyone’s attention for days though Amanda couldn’t shake off the feeling that somewhere along the line, she’d somehow become desensitized to the greater moral issue that Sharyn seemed to have grasped very early on.
Saffy said that Amanda was over-analysing things. “It’s just a show! Real people in New York don’t look like Serena van der Woodsen or Nate Archibald! It’s all make-believe! I’m sure even Chace Crawford doesn’t wake up each morning looking that gorgeous! In fact, I’m sure Chace Crawford doesn’t even exist. He’s probably a special effect!”
Amanda frowned. “Yes, but that show is all about teenage sex, drugs, illicit affairs and scheming. Don’t you think it’s disturbing that we’re not disturbed by any of that and that we classify it as entertainment?”
“It’s make-believe!” Saffy repeated, her ample bosom heaving in rhythm. “It’s not real! Therefore, all the normal rules of morality don’t apply.”
And as if to prove her point, the next time they met, Sharyn said that she was now addicted to ‘True Blood’.
“Everyone is naked on that show! You can see their pee-gu!” she said breathlessly. “And the werewolves damn sexy! Wah, if my priest ever find out, hor, I sure excommunicated, one!”
“I told you it was a great show,” Saffy replied virtuously. “I am in absolute lust with Eric Northman.”
“I like Bill!” Sharyn admitted. “But when I watch, I have to hold my rosary in my hand.”
“There are no vampires,” Saffy said patiently. “You do know it’s all make-believe, right?”
“Ay, you don’t joke about such things, OK?” Sharyn said, her glasses fogging up with concern. “My mother say she once got attack by Pontianak!”
To which Saffy said if the Pontianak looked anything like Alexander Skarsgard, he could attack her any time he liked. The next day, she lent Sharyn her old DVD of ‘Banging Private Ryan’.
Friday, September 03, 2010
Close Encounter of the Wrong Kind
Anyone who’s spent any decent amount of time in Singapore will know that the government is nothing if not extremely concerned about our well-being. It wants us to be polite (hence the ‘Courtesy is for free’ campaign), considerate (‘Stand on the left’ rule on escalators), drug-free (death sentences, anyone?), and tidy (littering fines, but judging from the garbage on the streets after a recent night out on Mohamed Sultan Road, I’d say bring caning back).
On the whole, everything is remarkably effective. There’s nothing quite like the prospect of an inconvenient appointment with an executioner to make people in general, and drug dealers in particular, sit up and pay attention. But after my flatmate Saffy’s recent severe bout of flu, she is of the firm opinion that the government should seriously consider add sneezing in public to their list of crimes punishable by a mandatory death sentence.
So there she was in the crowded 7.05 p.m. northern line train from City Hall to Toa Payoh, minding her own business, as she puts it. Well, as much as a woman – who is barely five foot five in heels and, so, is usually in the position of having her face jammed into someone’s armpits – can be said to be minding her own business in a crowded train.
“Really, I wish people would use deodorant!” she complained from the depths of her sick bed. “Oh dear God, I feel like death warmed up! If I ever meet that little turd again, I’m gonna give it to him good. And not in a good way either!” she added grimly.
Saffy reports that, on this particular evening, it was hot and claustrophobic on the train. Because she’s been one of the last to board the train, she was jammed near the entrance, though there was, apparently, plenty of room in the middle of the cabin.
“Seriously, why don’t people move into the train instead of hanging around the entrance?” she complained.
“So when your station come, you easy get out, mah!” her best friend Sharyn, who’d come to visit, said. She was rewarded with a dark look. “Wah, like that also cannot say, ah!”
“You know what the problem was?” Saffy went on. “The problem was that I was too deep in my thoughts. I was thinking about how long it’s been since I’ve had sex, which then reminded me of my third date with Brad and that brought up the question of what exactly sex includes. Otherwise, I would have noticed the sniveling snot next to me!”
Saffy says that just as she was arriving at the unhappy conclusion that what she did with Brad in the front seat of his Mercedes SLX in the Shaw Centre car park did not, in fact, constitute sex, Sniveling Snot suddenly sneezed.
“It was like a typhoon!” Saffy reported. “It was like someone had turned on the overhead sprinkler. And at first that’s what I thought it was because I started panicking thinking there was a fire on the train but then I looked up and realized that there are no fire sprinklers on the train, so then I started thinking why aren’t there fire sprinklers on the train, when it rained again! I actually got droplets in my eyes!” Saffy said, her voice rising excitedly and a little croakily.
“So disgusting!” Sharyn said primly, shaking her head with disapproval.
Once Saffy realized the source of the sudden precipitation, she apparently reached out and squeezed Sniveling Snot’s crown jewels. And she squeezed hard. “It was instinctive!” Saffy sniffled with deep satisfaction.
At that moment, someone on the other side of Saffy turned around to see why Sniveling Snot was alternately groaning and gasping, looked down at the position of Saffy’s hand and said, “Ay, you, ah! Get a room, lah!”
“As if!” Saffy later said when she was in the midst of a full blown flu. “He was a pimply, reedy twit with cheap glasses and a bad haircut! It wasn’t as if Brad Pitt had sneezed on me. I can’t believe he gave me the flu, the low down scum sucking pig!”
“You’re lucky you’re not charged for assault!” Amanda said. “Don’t give me that look. You know I’m right! You can’t go around squeezing other men’s balls!” She paused and considered what she’d just said.
Saffy puffed up. “I’d like to see what would happen if he sneezed all over the Prime Minister!”
“Ooh, I’d love for the Prime Minister to sneeze all over me!” Amanda said with loyal adoration in her voice.
Saffy blew her nose hard. “Oh, get a room, Amanda!”
On the whole, everything is remarkably effective. There’s nothing quite like the prospect of an inconvenient appointment with an executioner to make people in general, and drug dealers in particular, sit up and pay attention. But after my flatmate Saffy’s recent severe bout of flu, she is of the firm opinion that the government should seriously consider add sneezing in public to their list of crimes punishable by a mandatory death sentence.
So there she was in the crowded 7.05 p.m. northern line train from City Hall to Toa Payoh, minding her own business, as she puts it. Well, as much as a woman – who is barely five foot five in heels and, so, is usually in the position of having her face jammed into someone’s armpits – can be said to be minding her own business in a crowded train.
“Really, I wish people would use deodorant!” she complained from the depths of her sick bed. “Oh dear God, I feel like death warmed up! If I ever meet that little turd again, I’m gonna give it to him good. And not in a good way either!” she added grimly.
Saffy reports that, on this particular evening, it was hot and claustrophobic on the train. Because she’s been one of the last to board the train, she was jammed near the entrance, though there was, apparently, plenty of room in the middle of the cabin.
“Seriously, why don’t people move into the train instead of hanging around the entrance?” she complained.
“So when your station come, you easy get out, mah!” her best friend Sharyn, who’d come to visit, said. She was rewarded with a dark look. “Wah, like that also cannot say, ah!”
“You know what the problem was?” Saffy went on. “The problem was that I was too deep in my thoughts. I was thinking about how long it’s been since I’ve had sex, which then reminded me of my third date with Brad and that brought up the question of what exactly sex includes. Otherwise, I would have noticed the sniveling snot next to me!”
Saffy says that just as she was arriving at the unhappy conclusion that what she did with Brad in the front seat of his Mercedes SLX in the Shaw Centre car park did not, in fact, constitute sex, Sniveling Snot suddenly sneezed.
“It was like a typhoon!” Saffy reported. “It was like someone had turned on the overhead sprinkler. And at first that’s what I thought it was because I started panicking thinking there was a fire on the train but then I looked up and realized that there are no fire sprinklers on the train, so then I started thinking why aren’t there fire sprinklers on the train, when it rained again! I actually got droplets in my eyes!” Saffy said, her voice rising excitedly and a little croakily.
“So disgusting!” Sharyn said primly, shaking her head with disapproval.
Once Saffy realized the source of the sudden precipitation, she apparently reached out and squeezed Sniveling Snot’s crown jewels. And she squeezed hard. “It was instinctive!” Saffy sniffled with deep satisfaction.
At that moment, someone on the other side of Saffy turned around to see why Sniveling Snot was alternately groaning and gasping, looked down at the position of Saffy’s hand and said, “Ay, you, ah! Get a room, lah!”
“As if!” Saffy later said when she was in the midst of a full blown flu. “He was a pimply, reedy twit with cheap glasses and a bad haircut! It wasn’t as if Brad Pitt had sneezed on me. I can’t believe he gave me the flu, the low down scum sucking pig!”
“You’re lucky you’re not charged for assault!” Amanda said. “Don’t give me that look. You know I’m right! You can’t go around squeezing other men’s balls!” She paused and considered what she’d just said.
Saffy puffed up. “I’d like to see what would happen if he sneezed all over the Prime Minister!”
“Ooh, I’d love for the Prime Minister to sneeze all over me!” Amanda said with loyal adoration in her voice.
Saffy blew her nose hard. “Oh, get a room, Amanda!”
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
American Beauty
A few months ago, my friend Anne sent me an email all the way from Tokyo saying that her best friend Mitsy was moving to Singapore from San Francisco.
“She’s our age, she’s cute and she’s single,” Anne wrote with the same kind of precision and conciseness that won her the Fulbright Scholarship. “I want you to help her adjust to life in the Tropics.”
“This Anne sounds incredibly bossy!” Saffy said when I forwarded the email to my flat-mates. “And she didn’t even ask how things were with me. What’s her problem?”
I sighed. “Number one, she’s never met you, so why would she ask after you? Number two, she’s very busy. She speaks fluent Japanese, works in a Japanese bank and has two children to look after. She has no time for chit-chat.”
“She sounds horrible. She can stay in a hotel if she ever visits Singapore!”
“Is she pretty?” Amanda asked.
I hesitated. “I’ve never met her. Why?”
Amanda pulled a face. “If it’s one thing this country doesn’t need, it’s another single woman competing for a very limited pool of eligible, straight men.”
Saffy looked up from filing her nails. “Oh my God, speaking of which, is it just me or were there a lot of girls holding hands with other girls today on Orchard Road? What’s going on here? It’s like ‘The L-Word’ just flew into town!”
You could tell by the way she was looking up in the air with a slight frown that Amanda was silently replaying the last few minutes of our conversation. “OK,” she said finally, “how did my sentence qualify as a ‘speaking of which’?”
As Saffy later complained on a private channel to me on Facebook, it didn’t surprise her in the least that Amanda was, with all her looks and money, still single. “She’s so literate!” she complained.
“You mean ‘literal’, don’t you?” I replied, unable to help myself, and that night, as we passed each other on our way to our rooms, Saffy gave me a dirty look.
We forgot all about Mitsy till a week ago when my phone rang.
“Hi! It’s Mitsy! Ah’m here!”
Turns out that Mitsy was originally from Savannah, Georgia and moved to San Francisco when she was 25 after she broke up with her fiancé, Hank, whom she’d caught cheating with her identical twin sister, Arlene.
I know all this because Mitsy told me within five seconds of her greeting.
“He claims he got us cun-fuuused, th-aat rat! Ah was hearrrt-broken, lemme tell ya.”
That’s how girls from Savannah, Georgia speak.
Barney Chen, who’s never met a Southern girl he didn’t like and whose all time favourite fancy dress costume is Scarlet O’Hara from ‘Gone with the Wind’, has already fallen in love with Mitsy.
“Even the name is flawless!” he said. “And I do love a girl from San Pan Disco!”
“Mitsy is what you would call your poodle!” Amanda announced.
Leave it to Saffy to find a new perspective on someone she’d never met. “It’s funny how Americans will tell you their entire life story within seconds of meeting you,” Saffy said. “The same thing happened the other night on ‘Project Runway’ when all the contestants met for the first time. They just let it all hang out! Every little dirty secret.” Saffy shook her head in amazement at the trusting friendliness of the world’s most powerful nation.
“I hope she’s ugly,” was all Amanda had to say on the subject when I said I’d set up an afternoon tea to welcome Mitsy. Not wanting to miss a thing, Barney Chen invited himself along.
The day before the afternoon tea, we came home to find a message from Mitsy on our answering machine.
“Hi, y’all! It’s Mitsy!”
“And here I thought it was Michelle Obama!” Amanda said sourly.
“Ah’m just calling to say that Ah’m soooo sorry but Ah have to can-cel our ave-tur-nooon tea. Ah’m not feeling all that perky. It musta been sum-thin’ Ah ate last night! So do y’all mind if we reschedule? Ah really do want to meet y’all. Anne has told me sooo much about-chu. Well, al-right now. I better git goin’! Take care now, and make it a great day!”
“Did she just tell us to ‘make’ it a great day?” Amanda asked.
“She’s adorable!” Saffy said. “I want to take her to parties and show her off!”
Amanda replayed the message. “‘Make it a great day?’” she repeated. “Did she seriously just say that? Who says that? Seriously.”
And for once, we had no answer.
“She’s our age, she’s cute and she’s single,” Anne wrote with the same kind of precision and conciseness that won her the Fulbright Scholarship. “I want you to help her adjust to life in the Tropics.”
“This Anne sounds incredibly bossy!” Saffy said when I forwarded the email to my flat-mates. “And she didn’t even ask how things were with me. What’s her problem?”
I sighed. “Number one, she’s never met you, so why would she ask after you? Number two, she’s very busy. She speaks fluent Japanese, works in a Japanese bank and has two children to look after. She has no time for chit-chat.”
“She sounds horrible. She can stay in a hotel if she ever visits Singapore!”
“Is she pretty?” Amanda asked.
I hesitated. “I’ve never met her. Why?”
Amanda pulled a face. “If it’s one thing this country doesn’t need, it’s another single woman competing for a very limited pool of eligible, straight men.”
Saffy looked up from filing her nails. “Oh my God, speaking of which, is it just me or were there a lot of girls holding hands with other girls today on Orchard Road? What’s going on here? It’s like ‘The L-Word’ just flew into town!”
You could tell by the way she was looking up in the air with a slight frown that Amanda was silently replaying the last few minutes of our conversation. “OK,” she said finally, “how did my sentence qualify as a ‘speaking of which’?”
As Saffy later complained on a private channel to me on Facebook, it didn’t surprise her in the least that Amanda was, with all her looks and money, still single. “She’s so literate!” she complained.
“You mean ‘literal’, don’t you?” I replied, unable to help myself, and that night, as we passed each other on our way to our rooms, Saffy gave me a dirty look.
We forgot all about Mitsy till a week ago when my phone rang.
“Hi! It’s Mitsy! Ah’m here!”
Turns out that Mitsy was originally from Savannah, Georgia and moved to San Francisco when she was 25 after she broke up with her fiancé, Hank, whom she’d caught cheating with her identical twin sister, Arlene.
I know all this because Mitsy told me within five seconds of her greeting.
“He claims he got us cun-fuuused, th-aat rat! Ah was hearrrt-broken, lemme tell ya.”
That’s how girls from Savannah, Georgia speak.
Barney Chen, who’s never met a Southern girl he didn’t like and whose all time favourite fancy dress costume is Scarlet O’Hara from ‘Gone with the Wind’, has already fallen in love with Mitsy.
“Even the name is flawless!” he said. “And I do love a girl from San Pan Disco!”
“Mitsy is what you would call your poodle!” Amanda announced.
Leave it to Saffy to find a new perspective on someone she’d never met. “It’s funny how Americans will tell you their entire life story within seconds of meeting you,” Saffy said. “The same thing happened the other night on ‘Project Runway’ when all the contestants met for the first time. They just let it all hang out! Every little dirty secret.” Saffy shook her head in amazement at the trusting friendliness of the world’s most powerful nation.
“I hope she’s ugly,” was all Amanda had to say on the subject when I said I’d set up an afternoon tea to welcome Mitsy. Not wanting to miss a thing, Barney Chen invited himself along.
The day before the afternoon tea, we came home to find a message from Mitsy on our answering machine.
“Hi, y’all! It’s Mitsy!”
“And here I thought it was Michelle Obama!” Amanda said sourly.
“Ah’m just calling to say that Ah’m soooo sorry but Ah have to can-cel our ave-tur-nooon tea. Ah’m not feeling all that perky. It musta been sum-thin’ Ah ate last night! So do y’all mind if we reschedule? Ah really do want to meet y’all. Anne has told me sooo much about-chu. Well, al-right now. I better git goin’! Take care now, and make it a great day!”
“Did she just tell us to ‘make’ it a great day?” Amanda asked.
“She’s adorable!” Saffy said. “I want to take her to parties and show her off!”
Amanda replayed the message. “‘Make it a great day?’” she repeated. “Did she seriously just say that? Who says that? Seriously.”
And for once, we had no answer.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Will and No Grace
The other day, my mother rang me very early in the morning.
Which worried me as she usually only rings when she’s coming to visit.
“We have a lot of house-guests right now, Mother,” I said automatically the moment I heard that dangerously honeyed voice on the line.
“That’s nice, dear,” she said, “but I am just ringing to let you know that your father and I are changing our wills. We’re leaving all our money to the poor orphans in Africa!”
As my sister Michelle later said, it’s just so typical of our parents to spring that kind of nasty surprise on us just as we’re barely awake. “More to the point,” she added in heavy tones, “would someone please tell me what you, Jack and I will be when they die and leave us nothing, if not poor orphans? Does she not get the irony?”
“You are all grown up now and making a good living on your own,” Mother said. “You don’t need our money!”
“That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard in my life!” Michelle replied with some heat. “What makes a complete stranger in Africa more deserving than me? They don’t even know our parents! In fact, they never had to grow up with Mother always taunting them about their weight and boyfriend issues! The way I see it, that inheritance is compensation for all those years of mental abuse! And anyway,” my sister went on, “does anyone seriously think that an accountant makes any money these days? This is so incredibly depressing!”
That’s the thing about money: you can never have too much of it. And no matter how rich you are, you’re always haunted by the suspicion that you might be happier if you had just a little bit more. Invariably, too, it’s always the wealthy folk like my parents who say that it’s much better to live simple lives that are poor in material things, but rich in spiritual fulfilment.
To which Michelle replied that you can’t pay for a Gucci bag with spiritual fulfilment. “I’ve always thought that I was adopted. Now I know,” she announced on Facebook.
My flatmate Saffy doesn’t believe that my parents will leave us nothing.
“Your parents have been saying that for years. And anyway, what about all that real estate?” she asked. “Surely, an African orphan will have no need for an apartment in London?”
“Apparently, the rental from one month could feed an entire village for a year,” I said.
“If you ate beans for a year, maybe, but how fair is that on you, the villagers or the air quality above the village?” Saffy asked, clearly reliving the time she went on a bean diet and spent an entire week tortured by thunderous, foul smelling farts.
Amanda thinks that we should take out an injunction against our parents. “I’m sure giving all your money to someone else’s children has got to constitute some kind of child abuse,” she said firmly.
“I am not suing my parents!” I said. “How embarrassing would that be?”
“I wouldn’t rule out that option,” Michelle threatened by e-mail.
Meanwhile, my mother finally tracked down our brother Jack who is currently on a yoga retreat in Bhutan. Immediately after, he called me to say that he was so disturbed by the news that he sprained his ankle while doing a downward dog. “I know I’m supposed to be zen-like and all that crap, but seriously, I can’t help but feel a lot of resentment towards those poor orphaned kids.”
Then a few days ago, Mother called again and said that she and Father had been thinking it over and perhaps they’d been a little too hasty in their testamentary gifts. “Maybe we won’t give everything to the African orphans,” she said smoothly. “By the time we die, Madonna would probably have adopted them all, and I just read somewhere that she’s got more money than God, so they won’t be needing our money!”
“Maybe when your parents die, Madonna could adopt you!” Saffy suggested brightly. “You’d be an orphan and you’d be poor. You might have to spend a bit more time in the sun though.”
I’m almost at a point that I no longer care. I’ve gone from severe shock to anger to depression and now, I’m just about resigned to my fate of dying a poor, homeless writer. Saffy and Amanda say that I’ll always have a room with them. Even when I can no longer afford the rent. I don’t know whether to be relieved or even more depressed.
Which worried me as she usually only rings when she’s coming to visit.
“We have a lot of house-guests right now, Mother,” I said automatically the moment I heard that dangerously honeyed voice on the line.
“That’s nice, dear,” she said, “but I am just ringing to let you know that your father and I are changing our wills. We’re leaving all our money to the poor orphans in Africa!”
As my sister Michelle later said, it’s just so typical of our parents to spring that kind of nasty surprise on us just as we’re barely awake. “More to the point,” she added in heavy tones, “would someone please tell me what you, Jack and I will be when they die and leave us nothing, if not poor orphans? Does she not get the irony?”
“You are all grown up now and making a good living on your own,” Mother said. “You don’t need our money!”
“That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard in my life!” Michelle replied with some heat. “What makes a complete stranger in Africa more deserving than me? They don’t even know our parents! In fact, they never had to grow up with Mother always taunting them about their weight and boyfriend issues! The way I see it, that inheritance is compensation for all those years of mental abuse! And anyway,” my sister went on, “does anyone seriously think that an accountant makes any money these days? This is so incredibly depressing!”
That’s the thing about money: you can never have too much of it. And no matter how rich you are, you’re always haunted by the suspicion that you might be happier if you had just a little bit more. Invariably, too, it’s always the wealthy folk like my parents who say that it’s much better to live simple lives that are poor in material things, but rich in spiritual fulfilment.
To which Michelle replied that you can’t pay for a Gucci bag with spiritual fulfilment. “I’ve always thought that I was adopted. Now I know,” she announced on Facebook.
My flatmate Saffy doesn’t believe that my parents will leave us nothing.
“Your parents have been saying that for years. And anyway, what about all that real estate?” she asked. “Surely, an African orphan will have no need for an apartment in London?”
“Apparently, the rental from one month could feed an entire village for a year,” I said.
“If you ate beans for a year, maybe, but how fair is that on you, the villagers or the air quality above the village?” Saffy asked, clearly reliving the time she went on a bean diet and spent an entire week tortured by thunderous, foul smelling farts.
Amanda thinks that we should take out an injunction against our parents. “I’m sure giving all your money to someone else’s children has got to constitute some kind of child abuse,” she said firmly.
“I am not suing my parents!” I said. “How embarrassing would that be?”
“I wouldn’t rule out that option,” Michelle threatened by e-mail.
Meanwhile, my mother finally tracked down our brother Jack who is currently on a yoga retreat in Bhutan. Immediately after, he called me to say that he was so disturbed by the news that he sprained his ankle while doing a downward dog. “I know I’m supposed to be zen-like and all that crap, but seriously, I can’t help but feel a lot of resentment towards those poor orphaned kids.”
Then a few days ago, Mother called again and said that she and Father had been thinking it over and perhaps they’d been a little too hasty in their testamentary gifts. “Maybe we won’t give everything to the African orphans,” she said smoothly. “By the time we die, Madonna would probably have adopted them all, and I just read somewhere that she’s got more money than God, so they won’t be needing our money!”
“Maybe when your parents die, Madonna could adopt you!” Saffy suggested brightly. “You’d be an orphan and you’d be poor. You might have to spend a bit more time in the sun though.”
I’m almost at a point that I no longer care. I’ve gone from severe shock to anger to depression and now, I’m just about resigned to my fate of dying a poor, homeless writer. Saffy and Amanda say that I’ll always have a room with them. Even when I can no longer afford the rent. I don’t know whether to be relieved or even more depressed.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Displeasures of the table
Diets are strange things. It makes normally sensible people do things that if, properly fed, they would never dream of doing. Like drink wheatgrass juice, for instance. Which bright spark watched a cow slowly munch its way through a field and thought to himself, “Hmm, I wonder if I could turn this stuff into a drink and convince people to pay to drink it?”
Well, you know the answer to that one. These days, even your humble kopitiam drinks store sells wheatgrass juice when the much yummier sugar cane juice is ignored.
Which wouldn’t be so bad if the stuff actually tasted good. But it doesn’t. It just tastes as if someone grabbed a bunch of grass from some padang, mulched it up with some water and charged you $5 for a tiny shot.
“It’s really good for you!” Saffy said to me the other day at a hotel cafe as she tried to convince me to drink the stuff.
“I’m not drinking something that cows eat!” I said.
Saffy’s bosom heaved pneumatically. “Oh, it’s not that kind of grass, it’s a…it’s a special kind of grass from…from somewhere!” she said vaguely. “Drink it, it’s really good for you!”
“How is it good for me?” I asked belligerently.
“It’s very cleansing and detoxing!” she said, sounding very much like a commercial for a facial wash. “You know how cows poo all the time? It’s the exact same thing!”
I told her that she really needed to work on her sales pitch, got up and walked off.
Later that night at dinner, it was all Saffy could talk about.
“You are such a…such a man!” she said triumphantly, trotting out her worst insult. “It was just wheatgrass juice and you should have seen him run for the hills, Amanda! It’s no wonder men don’t give birth. We’d all be dead!” she added ominously.
“Are you sure that stuff works?” Amanda said, helping herself to a serving of beef rendang from our favourite hawker down the road. “It sure sounds like a complete scam!”
“It’s amazing,” Saffy insisted. “Next to fried beehoon, it’s the only thing that keeps me regular. And let me tell you that the results are spectacular!”
“Please, I’m eating!” I complained.
“But why are you drinking it?” Amanda asked.
“It’s my new diet!”
Amanda and I both rolled our eyes. Diets are to Saffy what oxygen is to the rest of it. But whereas most people cut out food items when they’re on a diet, Saffy draws emotional and physical sustenance from the fact that she’s ingesting only food of a certain kind.
Once she ate only steak but gave that up within a week when she realized that she couldn’t afford sirloin for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The Atkins Diet kept her fully occupied for two weeks until the exhausting job of keeping track of what she could and couldn’t eat, and in which portions, defeated even her singular focus.
And then there was the time she embarked on a diet that comprised entirely of cabbage soup and nothing else. She kept us all awake with her thunderous farts which, in turn, killed all the house plants.
“What’s different about this one, then?” I asked.
“It’s based on wheatgrass juice, lots of protein and plenty of vegetables! It’s amazing. I found it on the internet. I’ve lost two grams since I started!”
Amanda turned to me and said, “What’s amazing is that she could actually say that without the slightest sense of embarrassment.”
I snorted into my rice.
“So why,” Amanda went on, “if you’re trying to lose weight, are we having this nasi padang meal?”
“What! It’s beef ! Which is high in protein!”
“But there are no vegetables!”
Saffy looked surprised. “Sure there are,” she said. “It’s got chilli in it! What! Chillis are vegetables!”
And so, we’re now on day three of Saffy’s wheatgrass, protein and vegetable diet. She says she’s lost a hundred grams, though Amanda says that’s probably just from all the cardio activity from the number of times Saffy steps on and off the bathroom scales.
This morning, I walked into the kitchen and caught her spooning a big heap of sugar into her wheatgrass juice.
“What!” she said, immediately going on the offensive. “It’s too bitter. It actually tastes green! The sugar just takes the edge off it! It’s allowed. Sugar’s carbs and I’m allowed to have some carbs! You’re all so judgmental!”
Amanda is giving the whole thing a week, tops. “Seriously, I just wish people wouldn’t fall for these silly fad diets. The only way to lose weight is to have a regular herbal tea colonic irrigation!”
Well, you know the answer to that one. These days, even your humble kopitiam drinks store sells wheatgrass juice when the much yummier sugar cane juice is ignored.
Which wouldn’t be so bad if the stuff actually tasted good. But it doesn’t. It just tastes as if someone grabbed a bunch of grass from some padang, mulched it up with some water and charged you $5 for a tiny shot.
“It’s really good for you!” Saffy said to me the other day at a hotel cafe as she tried to convince me to drink the stuff.
“I’m not drinking something that cows eat!” I said.
Saffy’s bosom heaved pneumatically. “Oh, it’s not that kind of grass, it’s a…it’s a special kind of grass from…from somewhere!” she said vaguely. “Drink it, it’s really good for you!”
“How is it good for me?” I asked belligerently.
“It’s very cleansing and detoxing!” she said, sounding very much like a commercial for a facial wash. “You know how cows poo all the time? It’s the exact same thing!”
I told her that she really needed to work on her sales pitch, got up and walked off.
Later that night at dinner, it was all Saffy could talk about.
“You are such a…such a man!” she said triumphantly, trotting out her worst insult. “It was just wheatgrass juice and you should have seen him run for the hills, Amanda! It’s no wonder men don’t give birth. We’d all be dead!” she added ominously.
“Are you sure that stuff works?” Amanda said, helping herself to a serving of beef rendang from our favourite hawker down the road. “It sure sounds like a complete scam!”
“It’s amazing,” Saffy insisted. “Next to fried beehoon, it’s the only thing that keeps me regular. And let me tell you that the results are spectacular!”
“Please, I’m eating!” I complained.
“But why are you drinking it?” Amanda asked.
“It’s my new diet!”
Amanda and I both rolled our eyes. Diets are to Saffy what oxygen is to the rest of it. But whereas most people cut out food items when they’re on a diet, Saffy draws emotional and physical sustenance from the fact that she’s ingesting only food of a certain kind.
Once she ate only steak but gave that up within a week when she realized that she couldn’t afford sirloin for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The Atkins Diet kept her fully occupied for two weeks until the exhausting job of keeping track of what she could and couldn’t eat, and in which portions, defeated even her singular focus.
And then there was the time she embarked on a diet that comprised entirely of cabbage soup and nothing else. She kept us all awake with her thunderous farts which, in turn, killed all the house plants.
“What’s different about this one, then?” I asked.
“It’s based on wheatgrass juice, lots of protein and plenty of vegetables! It’s amazing. I found it on the internet. I’ve lost two grams since I started!”
Amanda turned to me and said, “What’s amazing is that she could actually say that without the slightest sense of embarrassment.”
I snorted into my rice.
“So why,” Amanda went on, “if you’re trying to lose weight, are we having this nasi padang meal?”
“What! It’s beef ! Which is high in protein!”
“But there are no vegetables!”
Saffy looked surprised. “Sure there are,” she said. “It’s got chilli in it! What! Chillis are vegetables!”
And so, we’re now on day three of Saffy’s wheatgrass, protein and vegetable diet. She says she’s lost a hundred grams, though Amanda says that’s probably just from all the cardio activity from the number of times Saffy steps on and off the bathroom scales.
This morning, I walked into the kitchen and caught her spooning a big heap of sugar into her wheatgrass juice.
“What!” she said, immediately going on the offensive. “It’s too bitter. It actually tastes green! The sugar just takes the edge off it! It’s allowed. Sugar’s carbs and I’m allowed to have some carbs! You’re all so judgmental!”
Amanda is giving the whole thing a week, tops. “Seriously, I just wish people wouldn’t fall for these silly fad diets. The only way to lose weight is to have a regular herbal tea colonic irrigation!”
Monday, August 09, 2010
Tea and Sympathy
My flatmate Amanda believes women who say that it’s much better to be single and single than to be married and unhappy are big fat liars.
“Those cannot be the only two options!” she insisted recently after coming home from a tearful afternoon tea where she comforted her friend Marlene who’s just broken up with her husband of two years.
Apparently, the news was unexpected (Marlene and Doug had just bought a new home and an ice-cream maker) and it was delivered between the finger sandwiches and the scones.
Turns out that Doug has been having a fling with the wife of his boss and a few nights ago, he declared to Marlene that he was leaving her for “Trudy”.
“He can’t leave me for someone named ‘Trudy’!” Marlene is said to have shouted in the middle of the Regent hotel. But Amanda said the kicker came when Marlene then vented that she wished she’d never met Doug and never gotten married.
“I’d rather have been single!” Marlene declared, to which Amanda automatically replied, “Choy, choy, choy!”
“No, seriously, at least I would have been happy!” Marlene sobbed into her smoked salmon sandwich. “No one deserves to hurt like this!”
The verdict haunted Amanda so much that after the tea, she headed straight to Chanel and bought herself a bag, but even that sacred activity didn’t cheer her up. So she tried again at Louis Vuitton. By the time she walked out of Diane von Furstenberg, she felt a little better, but by then, she was haunted by a new thought.
“I refuse to believe that she’s right!” she told us back at home, her feet drawn up around her on the bed.
“Does this come in another colour?” Saffy asked as she inspected her reflection in the mirror while clutching this season’s Chanel tote-bag.
“Not all men are scum. They just take a bit of finding, that’s all!” Amanda went on, hugging her pillow for moral support.
“I really like this leather, but I’m not sure about the chain.”
“Marlene is talking pure nonsense! I’ve seen plenty of happy relationships. Plenty! My parents! They’re happy. Now that they’re sleeping in separate bedrooms…” Amanda trailed off.
“I do like the fact that Chanel always has these little pockets in their bags, you can fit in all your lipsticks and handphones and...what? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Saffy sighed and turned away from the mirror to face Amanda.
“I’m listening! I can multi-task, you know!” she said and sat down by the bed. “Look, I happen to think Marlene is right.”
Amanda looked shocked. “She is not right! She’s a big fat liar!”
Saffy bosom shifted slowly and she looked at Amanda with unaccustomed softness. “You know how you always fantasized about what you were going to be when you grew up? I always knew I was going to be a movie star. Just knew it in my bones, just as I knew I was going to marry Johnny Depp.”
Amanda sat up. “Johnny Depp? Really? He’s so scruffy though.”
“Oh, he’s totally hot in a nerdy way!” Saffy’s bosom inflated with lust. “I can’t tell you how devastated I was when he got involved with that Vanessa cow and had kids with her. My point is I’ve recently had to come to terms with the fact that short of a meteor hitting Hollywood and wiping out everyone from Meryl Streep to Sylvester Stallone, I’m never going to be a movie star. Which means that I’m also never going to marry Johnny Depp!” Saffy concluded and sat back with deep satisfaction while stroking the Chanel bag in a way that Amanda later said was very creepy.
“What’s your point, Saf?” I asked after a long moment’s silence as Amanda and I struggled to connect the dots.
Saffy looked at us as if we were each a marble short of a full set. “My point is that not all our dreams will come true and the sooner we get it, the better. Marlene obviously got the point.”
“That Doug is a douche-bag?”
“No! That, chances are, we’re either going to be in an unhappy relationship with someone who will probably break our heart, or,” Saffy sucked in breath, “we’re going to be alone for the rest of our lives!”
“Choy!” Amanda yelled. “Those can’t be the only options!”
“You better get used to it, Amanda,” Saffy said as she got up from the bed and walked out still clutching the handbag. “You can’t pick and choose to suit yourself. Life isn’t like a Chanel store, you know.”
“Those cannot be the only two options!” she insisted recently after coming home from a tearful afternoon tea where she comforted her friend Marlene who’s just broken up with her husband of two years.
Apparently, the news was unexpected (Marlene and Doug had just bought a new home and an ice-cream maker) and it was delivered between the finger sandwiches and the scones.
Turns out that Doug has been having a fling with the wife of his boss and a few nights ago, he declared to Marlene that he was leaving her for “Trudy”.
“He can’t leave me for someone named ‘Trudy’!” Marlene is said to have shouted in the middle of the Regent hotel. But Amanda said the kicker came when Marlene then vented that she wished she’d never met Doug and never gotten married.
“I’d rather have been single!” Marlene declared, to which Amanda automatically replied, “Choy, choy, choy!”
“No, seriously, at least I would have been happy!” Marlene sobbed into her smoked salmon sandwich. “No one deserves to hurt like this!”
The verdict haunted Amanda so much that after the tea, she headed straight to Chanel and bought herself a bag, but even that sacred activity didn’t cheer her up. So she tried again at Louis Vuitton. By the time she walked out of Diane von Furstenberg, she felt a little better, but by then, she was haunted by a new thought.
“I refuse to believe that she’s right!” she told us back at home, her feet drawn up around her on the bed.
“Does this come in another colour?” Saffy asked as she inspected her reflection in the mirror while clutching this season’s Chanel tote-bag.
“Not all men are scum. They just take a bit of finding, that’s all!” Amanda went on, hugging her pillow for moral support.
“I really like this leather, but I’m not sure about the chain.”
“Marlene is talking pure nonsense! I’ve seen plenty of happy relationships. Plenty! My parents! They’re happy. Now that they’re sleeping in separate bedrooms…” Amanda trailed off.
“I do like the fact that Chanel always has these little pockets in their bags, you can fit in all your lipsticks and handphones and...what? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Saffy sighed and turned away from the mirror to face Amanda.
“I’m listening! I can multi-task, you know!” she said and sat down by the bed. “Look, I happen to think Marlene is right.”
Amanda looked shocked. “She is not right! She’s a big fat liar!”
Saffy bosom shifted slowly and she looked at Amanda with unaccustomed softness. “You know how you always fantasized about what you were going to be when you grew up? I always knew I was going to be a movie star. Just knew it in my bones, just as I knew I was going to marry Johnny Depp.”
Amanda sat up. “Johnny Depp? Really? He’s so scruffy though.”
“Oh, he’s totally hot in a nerdy way!” Saffy’s bosom inflated with lust. “I can’t tell you how devastated I was when he got involved with that Vanessa cow and had kids with her. My point is I’ve recently had to come to terms with the fact that short of a meteor hitting Hollywood and wiping out everyone from Meryl Streep to Sylvester Stallone, I’m never going to be a movie star. Which means that I’m also never going to marry Johnny Depp!” Saffy concluded and sat back with deep satisfaction while stroking the Chanel bag in a way that Amanda later said was very creepy.
“What’s your point, Saf?” I asked after a long moment’s silence as Amanda and I struggled to connect the dots.
Saffy looked at us as if we were each a marble short of a full set. “My point is that not all our dreams will come true and the sooner we get it, the better. Marlene obviously got the point.”
“That Doug is a douche-bag?”
“No! That, chances are, we’re either going to be in an unhappy relationship with someone who will probably break our heart, or,” Saffy sucked in breath, “we’re going to be alone for the rest of our lives!”
“Choy!” Amanda yelled. “Those can’t be the only options!”
“You better get used to it, Amanda,” Saffy said as she got up from the bed and walked out still clutching the handbag. “You can’t pick and choose to suit yourself. Life isn’t like a Chanel store, you know.”
Monday, August 02, 2010
Shop Talk
If it’s one thing that gets up my goat, it’s shop assistants who think they’re God’s gift to humanity. And before the National Shop Assistants Guild gets all upset with me and sends me a long indignant letter – like this lady who got really riled with my recent story about vegetarians – let me quickly clarify that I’m talking about a select group of shop assistants.
I am not, for instance, talking about the nice folks at Isetan and Giordano. Or the lovely uncle down in my corner supermarket who always asks what I’ve been up to whenever he sees me. And to Saffy, he asks who she’s been up to, a question that never fails to send her into peals of hysterical laughter.
“He’s so cute!” she said once, to which Amanda said that ‘cute’ was not a word she would use to describe a 72-year old man whose habitual form of dress was a pair of dirty shorts and a Pagoda-brand singlet.
No, the shop assistants that I have an issue with are invariably dressed in head to toe black outfits from the designer shop that they work at. No names, of course, will be mentioned, but they know who they are.
“And they don’t even look good in those clothes!” Saffy huffed once, after being given the Look by one particularly rude assistant.
Do you know the Look? It’s that pitying glance that they give you when you walk into the shop. It’s a look that says, “I know you can’t afford anything in this shop, so I don’t think I want to serve you. Please don’t make eye-contact with me. I’m busy arranging the key-chains in this drawer.”
And while you walked in with every intention of buying something, you’re so disgusted with the Look that you decide to just torment them.
This pimply guy once followed me around the Gucci store, watching me with a beady eye as if I was a potential shop-lifter. Every time I touched something, he swooped in after me to rearrange and tidy up.
I fingered a shirt. “That’s made from cotton,” he told me in the kind of tone that, if this was a foreign language film, would also have said in subtitles, “Are you sure you’re in the right shop?”
I turned to him and focused on the pimple on his right cheek. “Yes, I know. But what sort of cotton is it?”
He hesitated, and you could tell that he knew he’d picked the wrong person to be rude to. “It’s 100% cotton!” he said finally.
“Yes, but is it Egyptian?”
By this time, even his pimple was turning red from embarrassment.
Then there was this one time I was getting a shirt made at this fancy shirt shop that my family has been going to for years. I’d grown sick of my wardrobe and decided to start the coming new year with new clothes. So there I was discussing fabric and collar styles with this auntie shop assistant when someone walked into the shop. She looked up, brightened and said to me, “Ah, excuse me, hor. I get my colleague to look after you. One of my important customer just come in!”
And with that, she scuttled off towards a fat American man, her Singlish accent suddenly turning into a Deep South drawl as she approached him. (And before the Fat American Men Association writes me an irate letter, let me just say that I’m not being derogatory. He was a man, he was American, and he was fat.)
Recently, Amanda was shopping for a bag at Bottega Venetta. She looked around for help. Six shop assistants milled around chatting about their lunch plans while Amanda tried to get someone’s attention. Finally, one reluctantly walked towards her.
“No more stock,” she said to Amanda’s question.
“Do you have the model X, then?” Amanda asked.
The assistant looked at her blankly.
“It’s from the new Autumn/Winter collection. It was just shown in Milan.”
As Amanda later said, it was clear as daylight that she knew more about the stock in the shop than the assistant did.
“I’m not sure,” the woman replied, looking really bored, and before Amanda could ask a follow up question, the assistant literally yelled across the floor, “Hey, you! Come serve customer! I have to go makan!"
Amanda walked out the store, her wallet still heavy with the $2000 that she had been itching to spend all afternoon. She called up her remisier and bought OUB shares instead.
This must be what they mean when they say it’s ‘Your Singapore’.
I am not, for instance, talking about the nice folks at Isetan and Giordano. Or the lovely uncle down in my corner supermarket who always asks what I’ve been up to whenever he sees me. And to Saffy, he asks who she’s been up to, a question that never fails to send her into peals of hysterical laughter.
“He’s so cute!” she said once, to which Amanda said that ‘cute’ was not a word she would use to describe a 72-year old man whose habitual form of dress was a pair of dirty shorts and a Pagoda-brand singlet.
No, the shop assistants that I have an issue with are invariably dressed in head to toe black outfits from the designer shop that they work at. No names, of course, will be mentioned, but they know who they are.
“And they don’t even look good in those clothes!” Saffy huffed once, after being given the Look by one particularly rude assistant.
Do you know the Look? It’s that pitying glance that they give you when you walk into the shop. It’s a look that says, “I know you can’t afford anything in this shop, so I don’t think I want to serve you. Please don’t make eye-contact with me. I’m busy arranging the key-chains in this drawer.”
And while you walked in with every intention of buying something, you’re so disgusted with the Look that you decide to just torment them.
This pimply guy once followed me around the Gucci store, watching me with a beady eye as if I was a potential shop-lifter. Every time I touched something, he swooped in after me to rearrange and tidy up.
I fingered a shirt. “That’s made from cotton,” he told me in the kind of tone that, if this was a foreign language film, would also have said in subtitles, “Are you sure you’re in the right shop?”
I turned to him and focused on the pimple on his right cheek. “Yes, I know. But what sort of cotton is it?”
He hesitated, and you could tell that he knew he’d picked the wrong person to be rude to. “It’s 100% cotton!” he said finally.
“Yes, but is it Egyptian?”
By this time, even his pimple was turning red from embarrassment.
Then there was this one time I was getting a shirt made at this fancy shirt shop that my family has been going to for years. I’d grown sick of my wardrobe and decided to start the coming new year with new clothes. So there I was discussing fabric and collar styles with this auntie shop assistant when someone walked into the shop. She looked up, brightened and said to me, “Ah, excuse me, hor. I get my colleague to look after you. One of my important customer just come in!”
And with that, she scuttled off towards a fat American man, her Singlish accent suddenly turning into a Deep South drawl as she approached him. (And before the Fat American Men Association writes me an irate letter, let me just say that I’m not being derogatory. He was a man, he was American, and he was fat.)
Recently, Amanda was shopping for a bag at Bottega Venetta. She looked around for help. Six shop assistants milled around chatting about their lunch plans while Amanda tried to get someone’s attention. Finally, one reluctantly walked towards her.
“No more stock,” she said to Amanda’s question.
“Do you have the model X, then?” Amanda asked.
The assistant looked at her blankly.
“It’s from the new Autumn/Winter collection. It was just shown in Milan.”
As Amanda later said, it was clear as daylight that she knew more about the stock in the shop than the assistant did.
“I’m not sure,” the woman replied, looking really bored, and before Amanda could ask a follow up question, the assistant literally yelled across the floor, “Hey, you! Come serve customer! I have to go makan!"
Amanda walked out the store, her wallet still heavy with the $2000 that she had been itching to spend all afternoon. She called up her remisier and bought OUB shares instead.
This must be what they mean when they say it’s ‘Your Singapore’.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Campaign Trail
My American friend Mark is on his way to Sydney and stopping over in Singapore. This is his first time and can I just say that it’s endlessly interesting seeing this town through his eyes. Things we’re so used to suddenly become brand new again.
For starters, he couldn’t get over the fact that are three Louis Vuitton boutiques all within a few minutes of each other.
“Why do you need so many?” he asked me as if I were personally responsible.
“Ask Amanda,” I said. “She knows all the staff and throws birthday parties for them.”
East Coast Parkway with its endless stretch of seafood restaurants threw him into a spin, as did the wet toilets everywhere he went. “It’s like someone had a shower in the sink!” he said when he emerged from the toilet at Toa Payoh interchange.
Which led Saffy to pipe up that she once saw a mother stand her 3-year old son on the edge of the sink in the public toilet at Cineleisure and loudly instruct him to pee into it.
“Shut up!” Mark said.
“I will if you sleep with me!” Saffy muttered. She later told her best friend Sharyn that she might need to carry a mop around with her if Mark stayed any longer.
“You need mop for what?” Sharyn asked, her eyes huge behind her Coke-bottle thick spectacles.
“I really need to be best friends with someone else,” Saffy told Amanda adding she now understood why there was white slavery. “I’d kidnap him in a second.”
A few nights ago, Mike came home and said he’d just spotted a poster on the MRT: “It’s not cool to pick your nose openly. It’s not cool to litter.”
“Seriously?” he said, his American sensibilities both bemused and mortified.
What is it about Singaporeans that we always seem to need someone to tell us what not to do? First, it was ‘don’t litter’. Then, it was ‘don’t spit’. After that, it was ‘don’t pee all over the toilet floor’. And now, ‘don’t pick your nose in public’.
Shouldn’t these things be self-explanatory? Why do we need to involve the government which, surely, must have better things to do with its time and expensively educated scholars? Like, I don’t know, govern the country.
My sister said to me recently this is why she’s stopped shaking hands when meeting new people. “Seriously, you just don’t know where their hands have been! If most people don’t wash their hands after visiting the loo, what makes you think they will when they’ve finished picking their nose? It’s a wonder the whole world isn’t dead from some foul plague!” she exclaimed, channelling her inner medieval-ness.
More to the point, how are people being brought up? What are the parents teaching their children? In what universe is it acceptable to pee all over the toilet floor? Because if we don’t do it at home, why is it suddenly acceptable to do it in public?
“I can’t even do a number two if I think someone can hear the splashes,” Saffy mumbled through a mouthful of spaghetti bolognaise. At which Amanda put down her fork and pushed her plate away. She glared at Saffy who looked up from her plate and said, “What?”
“Well, I think it’s a little strange,” Mark said. “What gets me is that there must be a lot of people picking their nose in public on the train if the government has to then launch a campaign to stop it.”
“Oh, it’s an epidemic!” Saffy said. “And it’s all on YouTube. You could be there all day! But you know what they should really do a campaign against, it’s people who clip their finger nails in public.”
Mark barked out a deep throated laugh and you could see Saffy shift uncomfortably in her seat. “Oh, they do not do that!” he said.
Automatically, Saffy’s ample bosom inflated. “It’s truly vile! I have seen mothers
give their children full on pedicures. And there was this one time I was nearly blinded when a sharp shrapnel ricocheted off the window and into my eye! I should have sued!”
“I really do pity the cleaners who have to clean the train at the end of the day,” I said.
“So what do you do when you see someone pick their nose? Are you supposed to report them?” Mark asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” Amanda said with a negligent toss of her shampoo ad hair. “I never take the MRT!”
Later that night, Saffy said to me that maybe there should be a social campaign against people like Amanda.
For starters, he couldn’t get over the fact that are three Louis Vuitton boutiques all within a few minutes of each other.
“Why do you need so many?” he asked me as if I were personally responsible.
“Ask Amanda,” I said. “She knows all the staff and throws birthday parties for them.”
East Coast Parkway with its endless stretch of seafood restaurants threw him into a spin, as did the wet toilets everywhere he went. “It’s like someone had a shower in the sink!” he said when he emerged from the toilet at Toa Payoh interchange.
Which led Saffy to pipe up that she once saw a mother stand her 3-year old son on the edge of the sink in the public toilet at Cineleisure and loudly instruct him to pee into it.
“Shut up!” Mark said.
“I will if you sleep with me!” Saffy muttered. She later told her best friend Sharyn that she might need to carry a mop around with her if Mark stayed any longer.
“You need mop for what?” Sharyn asked, her eyes huge behind her Coke-bottle thick spectacles.
“I really need to be best friends with someone else,” Saffy told Amanda adding she now understood why there was white slavery. “I’d kidnap him in a second.”
A few nights ago, Mike came home and said he’d just spotted a poster on the MRT: “It’s not cool to pick your nose openly. It’s not cool to litter.”
“Seriously?” he said, his American sensibilities both bemused and mortified.
What is it about Singaporeans that we always seem to need someone to tell us what not to do? First, it was ‘don’t litter’. Then, it was ‘don’t spit’. After that, it was ‘don’t pee all over the toilet floor’. And now, ‘don’t pick your nose in public’.
Shouldn’t these things be self-explanatory? Why do we need to involve the government which, surely, must have better things to do with its time and expensively educated scholars? Like, I don’t know, govern the country.
My sister said to me recently this is why she’s stopped shaking hands when meeting new people. “Seriously, you just don’t know where their hands have been! If most people don’t wash their hands after visiting the loo, what makes you think they will when they’ve finished picking their nose? It’s a wonder the whole world isn’t dead from some foul plague!” she exclaimed, channelling her inner medieval-ness.
More to the point, how are people being brought up? What are the parents teaching their children? In what universe is it acceptable to pee all over the toilet floor? Because if we don’t do it at home, why is it suddenly acceptable to do it in public?
“I can’t even do a number two if I think someone can hear the splashes,” Saffy mumbled through a mouthful of spaghetti bolognaise. At which Amanda put down her fork and pushed her plate away. She glared at Saffy who looked up from her plate and said, “What?”
“Well, I think it’s a little strange,” Mark said. “What gets me is that there must be a lot of people picking their nose in public on the train if the government has to then launch a campaign to stop it.”
“Oh, it’s an epidemic!” Saffy said. “And it’s all on YouTube. You could be there all day! But you know what they should really do a campaign against, it’s people who clip their finger nails in public.”
Mark barked out a deep throated laugh and you could see Saffy shift uncomfortably in her seat. “Oh, they do not do that!” he said.
Automatically, Saffy’s ample bosom inflated. “It’s truly vile! I have seen mothers
give their children full on pedicures. And there was this one time I was nearly blinded when a sharp shrapnel ricocheted off the window and into my eye! I should have sued!”
“I really do pity the cleaners who have to clean the train at the end of the day,” I said.
“So what do you do when you see someone pick their nose? Are you supposed to report them?” Mark asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” Amanda said with a negligent toss of her shampoo ad hair. “I never take the MRT!”
Later that night, Saffy said to me that maybe there should be a social campaign against people like Amanda.
Monday, July 19, 2010
YouTube, Brutus?
The other day, someone asked me what I couldn’t live without.
I think he was being intellectually provocative or, at the very least, he was blind drunk. You know how you sometimes meet people like that at parties? They come up to you round about 1.30am, slightly wobbly on the feet, and eyes with that unfocused gaze that comes from having nursed, all night, a deeply intimate relationship with Jack Daniels on the rocks. They lean forward, happily unaware that they’re invading your private space and then, in a haze of alcoholic vapour, they ask you what your name is.
Well, anyway, this guy at Marina’s party leaned in and whispered, “What can’t you live without, mate?”
I replied instinctively, without thinking: “YouTube”.
Drunk Guy stared at me for a bit, then blinked red-flecked eyes. “Me, too, what?”
It was my turn to blink. Mentally, I replayed the last five seconds. “Oh, no, not, ‘You, too’. YouTube!”
“Yeah, what about me?”
Just then, I felt a vacuum being formed next to me as Saffy sidled up, her legendary bosom carving out its own air-currents as it advanced.
“Hello, who are you?” she asked as she peered at Drunk Guy with interest. “You’re cute. Are you single?”
Drunk Guy slowly moved his head towards Saffy’s bosom which was currently generating its own gravitational field.
“I was jushh talking to your friend,” he slurred, “and he was about to tell me what he…couldnn…couldn’t…live without.”
“Oh, I can’t live without bee-hoon,” Saffy said immediately, demonstrating, once again, her ability to effortlessly turn any subject to herself. “It keeps me regular!”
“He…” Drunk Guy said, pointing me, “said ‘Me, too’! Which duh-zhun make senshhh!”
“No, I said ‘YouTube’!”
“There he goshhhh again!”
The next morning, Saffy said to me that it was a scandal that I was allowed out of the house unattended. “You were at a party. A man approached you. He was cute and obviously drunk! Why were you wasting time talking to him? Why didn’t you immediately send him over to me?”
“More to the point,” said Amanda, “why would you say that you can’t live without YouTube? Could you be a bigger dork?”
I replied stoutly that it was pointless trying to express how life-changing YouTube is to two women who thought ‘Twilight’ was literature.
Have you forgotten the theme song to ‘Wonder Woman’? What does Zsa Zsa Gabor sound like? On the other side of the world and missed the floods along Orchard Road? Looking for a hard-to-find Jeff Lynn album? Want to know if getting a tattoo hurts? Want to relive the opening number for the 2009 Academy Awards? Or watch a TV programme from the 70s and HMV doesn’t stock it? Not sure how to cook an omelette?
It’s all on YouTube.
I’m telling you, every class on the planet should have compulsory YouTube lesson. Forget about textbooks or endless lectures about how you should never pop a pimple. Screen a YouTube clip of the world’s biggest pimple being popped and it’ll put you off fatty, fried food for the rest of your life.
Just the other day, Mel Gibson’s rant at his ex-girlfriend was all over the news. You could read the transcripts in the newspapers all you like, but nothing brings home Mel’s madness more clearly than a quick trip to YouTube.
“That’s just strange, Jason!” Saffy announced at the end of my defence. “Why is Mel Gibson’s rant interesting in any way?”
I sighed as I pulled out my laptop and called up YouTube.
“Here!” I said, getting up from the dining table and heading into the kitchen to make lunch while Saffy and Amanda watched. Or rather, listened.
And when it was all over, they played it again. And again.
“I can’t stop listening to this!” Amanda complained. “It’s so incredibly vile and degrading, but I can’t stop listening!”
“I told you!”
“Who knew Mel Gibson was like this in real life!” Saffy said, as she hit the play button for the tenth time.
“I always thought there was something a little deranged about him,” Amanda said, adding, “Ooh, look, they have Christian Bale and Alec Baldwin’s rants as well! How clever of YouTube!”
“I told you!”
From Alec Baldwin, they moved onto 30 Rock bloopers which then, thanks to YouTube’s intuitive indexing, led them to David Letterman’s interview with Tina Fey, then to Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch.
By the time midnight came around, they were still watching. When I reminded Saffy that Drunk Guy had called earlier, she said, without once taking her eyes off a commercial from the 80s, “Oh, who cares?”
I think he was being intellectually provocative or, at the very least, he was blind drunk. You know how you sometimes meet people like that at parties? They come up to you round about 1.30am, slightly wobbly on the feet, and eyes with that unfocused gaze that comes from having nursed, all night, a deeply intimate relationship with Jack Daniels on the rocks. They lean forward, happily unaware that they’re invading your private space and then, in a haze of alcoholic vapour, they ask you what your name is.
Well, anyway, this guy at Marina’s party leaned in and whispered, “What can’t you live without, mate?”
I replied instinctively, without thinking: “YouTube”.
Drunk Guy stared at me for a bit, then blinked red-flecked eyes. “Me, too, what?”
It was my turn to blink. Mentally, I replayed the last five seconds. “Oh, no, not, ‘You, too’. YouTube!”
“Yeah, what about me?”
Just then, I felt a vacuum being formed next to me as Saffy sidled up, her legendary bosom carving out its own air-currents as it advanced.
“Hello, who are you?” she asked as she peered at Drunk Guy with interest. “You’re cute. Are you single?”
Drunk Guy slowly moved his head towards Saffy’s bosom which was currently generating its own gravitational field.
“I was jushh talking to your friend,” he slurred, “and he was about to tell me what he…couldnn…couldn’t…live without.”
“Oh, I can’t live without bee-hoon,” Saffy said immediately, demonstrating, once again, her ability to effortlessly turn any subject to herself. “It keeps me regular!”
“He…” Drunk Guy said, pointing me, “said ‘Me, too’! Which duh-zhun make senshhh!”
“No, I said ‘YouTube’!”
“There he goshhhh again!”
The next morning, Saffy said to me that it was a scandal that I was allowed out of the house unattended. “You were at a party. A man approached you. He was cute and obviously drunk! Why were you wasting time talking to him? Why didn’t you immediately send him over to me?”
“More to the point,” said Amanda, “why would you say that you can’t live without YouTube? Could you be a bigger dork?”
I replied stoutly that it was pointless trying to express how life-changing YouTube is to two women who thought ‘Twilight’ was literature.
Have you forgotten the theme song to ‘Wonder Woman’? What does Zsa Zsa Gabor sound like? On the other side of the world and missed the floods along Orchard Road? Looking for a hard-to-find Jeff Lynn album? Want to know if getting a tattoo hurts? Want to relive the opening number for the 2009 Academy Awards? Or watch a TV programme from the 70s and HMV doesn’t stock it? Not sure how to cook an omelette?
It’s all on YouTube.
I’m telling you, every class on the planet should have compulsory YouTube lesson. Forget about textbooks or endless lectures about how you should never pop a pimple. Screen a YouTube clip of the world’s biggest pimple being popped and it’ll put you off fatty, fried food for the rest of your life.
Just the other day, Mel Gibson’s rant at his ex-girlfriend was all over the news. You could read the transcripts in the newspapers all you like, but nothing brings home Mel’s madness more clearly than a quick trip to YouTube.
“That’s just strange, Jason!” Saffy announced at the end of my defence. “Why is Mel Gibson’s rant interesting in any way?”
I sighed as I pulled out my laptop and called up YouTube.
“Here!” I said, getting up from the dining table and heading into the kitchen to make lunch while Saffy and Amanda watched. Or rather, listened.
And when it was all over, they played it again. And again.
“I can’t stop listening to this!” Amanda complained. “It’s so incredibly vile and degrading, but I can’t stop listening!”
“I told you!”
“Who knew Mel Gibson was like this in real life!” Saffy said, as she hit the play button for the tenth time.
“I always thought there was something a little deranged about him,” Amanda said, adding, “Ooh, look, they have Christian Bale and Alec Baldwin’s rants as well! How clever of YouTube!”
“I told you!”
From Alec Baldwin, they moved onto 30 Rock bloopers which then, thanks to YouTube’s intuitive indexing, led them to David Letterman’s interview with Tina Fey, then to Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch.
By the time midnight came around, they were still watching. When I reminded Saffy that Drunk Guy had called earlier, she said, without once taking her eyes off a commercial from the 80s, “Oh, who cares?”
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Blood Thirsty
When I was younger, I used to love watching scary movies. The scarier and gorier, the better. Nothing made my day more than settling down to a 90-minute scream fest in which all the pretty young things on screen were chopped, sliced and diced by Freddy Krueger. I always imagined that the horrible bullies at my school were the ones up there being tortured.
Needless to say, I watched ‘Scream’ and ‘Final Destination’ and all its sequels at least a dozen times each. But since no one I knew liked scary movies, invariably, I would go alone.
I loved the sensation of being scared witless, slowly slouching lower into my seat as the stupid girls on screen walked around the corridors of a dark deserted house in their bikinis while whispering, “Hello? Is anybody there?”
And when it was all over, and the credits rolled, still I would sit there, waiting for that last final thrill just in case there was extra surprise footage at the end. And usually, it would suddenly occur to me that I was the only one left in the cinema. Well, me and the cinema cleaner who was slowly sweeping up all the spilt popcorn.
And then I’d start wondering if the cleaner turned out to be a homicidal maniac, no one would hear me scream.
Then one day, I matured and grew up. I started watching the wave of Japanese and Korean horror ghost movies and brought my self-induced terror level up to a whole new dimension.
“You really are sick,” my flatmate Amanda said recently when I brought home a stack of DVDs I’d bought on sale at HMV. She picked through the titles. “Oh my God, ‘The Ring’?”
“The original version, not that stupid Naomi Watts thing that wasn’t even remotely scary!”
Later that night, I overheard her complaining to Saffy. “It must be a boy thing!”
“My brother’s exactly the same!” Saffy reported. “His all time favourite movie is ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’! It’s truly sick! And now, he’s addicted to ‘True Blood’!”
“Oooh, I hear that’s very good,” Amanda cooed.
“How can that be? It’s about vampires!” The air pressure dropped slightly from the force of Saffy’s puffed up bosom.
“But they’re cute vampires! And the werewolves are even hunkier!”
“Werewolves? Seriously, Amanda, who did you sleep with at Harvard to get that degree?”
There was a moment of wounded silence, but Amanda didn’t come top in her class, or end up the second highest fee-earner in her office by being soft, and it would take more than Saffy to inflict any long term damage.
“OK, where’s my iPhone?” Amanda murmured, rummaging in her bag. She whipped out her phone and slid her finger across the screen.
“Look at my screensaver!” she ordered and thrust the phone in front of Saffy who stared. And then stared some more.
“Good Lord, who is this guy?”
“It’s Alexander Skarsgard! He plays Eric Northman, a vampire in ‘True Blood’!”
“Oooh, he can scar me anytime!”
“I told you! And his father is Stellan! He was one of the fathers in ‘Mamma Mia’!”
You could practically see the exclamation marks hanging in the air.
“Oh, that’s not a good thing,” Saffy said doubtfully. “My mother always said that if you want to know what your boyfriend will look like in 30 years, take a look at his father.”
Amanda sighed. “Who cares what he’s going to look like in 30 years? He’s hot now! In 30 years, you and I will be so nipped and tucked we won’t be able to smile without farting!”
Saffy later said to me that it always astonishes her whenever she remembers that Amanda had gone to a Swiss boarding school. “She can be so incredibly crude! I’m sure that kind of talk was never on the school curriculum!”
“So, you’re watching ‘True Blood’ now?” I asked.
“Well, I’m just about halfway through the first season DVD box-set,” Saffy said. “It’s all rather creepy and everyone seems to doing things only at night! And can I just say that there’s a lot of very unnatural sex going on?”
When she mentioned this to Sharyn, her best friend gaped at her. “Ay,” Sharyn said, her thick glasses fogging up. “My pastor say you shouldn’t watch these devil shows! You die while watching, you kena go to hell!”
“There are no such things as vampires, Sharyn!” Saffy said calmly as she tucked into her bee-hoon lunch. “And if there were, they ain’t never gonna be as drop dead gorgeous as Bill Compton and Eric Northman, lemme tell ya!”
“Why you talk so funny?” Sharyn demanded.
“I'm talking like the characters. God, I wish my life was an HBO show!”
Needless to say, I watched ‘Scream’ and ‘Final Destination’ and all its sequels at least a dozen times each. But since no one I knew liked scary movies, invariably, I would go alone.
I loved the sensation of being scared witless, slowly slouching lower into my seat as the stupid girls on screen walked around the corridors of a dark deserted house in their bikinis while whispering, “Hello? Is anybody there?”
And when it was all over, and the credits rolled, still I would sit there, waiting for that last final thrill just in case there was extra surprise footage at the end. And usually, it would suddenly occur to me that I was the only one left in the cinema. Well, me and the cinema cleaner who was slowly sweeping up all the spilt popcorn.
And then I’d start wondering if the cleaner turned out to be a homicidal maniac, no one would hear me scream.
Then one day, I matured and grew up. I started watching the wave of Japanese and Korean horror ghost movies and brought my self-induced terror level up to a whole new dimension.
“You really are sick,” my flatmate Amanda said recently when I brought home a stack of DVDs I’d bought on sale at HMV. She picked through the titles. “Oh my God, ‘The Ring’?”
“The original version, not that stupid Naomi Watts thing that wasn’t even remotely scary!”
Later that night, I overheard her complaining to Saffy. “It must be a boy thing!”
“My brother’s exactly the same!” Saffy reported. “His all time favourite movie is ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’! It’s truly sick! And now, he’s addicted to ‘True Blood’!”
“Oooh, I hear that’s very good,” Amanda cooed.
“How can that be? It’s about vampires!” The air pressure dropped slightly from the force of Saffy’s puffed up bosom.
“But they’re cute vampires! And the werewolves are even hunkier!”
“Werewolves? Seriously, Amanda, who did you sleep with at Harvard to get that degree?”
There was a moment of wounded silence, but Amanda didn’t come top in her class, or end up the second highest fee-earner in her office by being soft, and it would take more than Saffy to inflict any long term damage.
“OK, where’s my iPhone?” Amanda murmured, rummaging in her bag. She whipped out her phone and slid her finger across the screen.
“Look at my screensaver!” she ordered and thrust the phone in front of Saffy who stared. And then stared some more.
“Good Lord, who is this guy?”
“It’s Alexander Skarsgard! He plays Eric Northman, a vampire in ‘True Blood’!”
“Oooh, he can scar me anytime!”
“I told you! And his father is Stellan! He was one of the fathers in ‘Mamma Mia’!”
You could practically see the exclamation marks hanging in the air.
“Oh, that’s not a good thing,” Saffy said doubtfully. “My mother always said that if you want to know what your boyfriend will look like in 30 years, take a look at his father.”
Amanda sighed. “Who cares what he’s going to look like in 30 years? He’s hot now! In 30 years, you and I will be so nipped and tucked we won’t be able to smile without farting!”
Saffy later said to me that it always astonishes her whenever she remembers that Amanda had gone to a Swiss boarding school. “She can be so incredibly crude! I’m sure that kind of talk was never on the school curriculum!”
“So, you’re watching ‘True Blood’ now?” I asked.
“Well, I’m just about halfway through the first season DVD box-set,” Saffy said. “It’s all rather creepy and everyone seems to doing things only at night! And can I just say that there’s a lot of very unnatural sex going on?”
When she mentioned this to Sharyn, her best friend gaped at her. “Ay,” Sharyn said, her thick glasses fogging up. “My pastor say you shouldn’t watch these devil shows! You die while watching, you kena go to hell!”
“There are no such things as vampires, Sharyn!” Saffy said calmly as she tucked into her bee-hoon lunch. “And if there were, they ain’t never gonna be as drop dead gorgeous as Bill Compton and Eric Northman, lemme tell ya!”
“Why you talk so funny?” Sharyn demanded.
“I'm talking like the characters. God, I wish my life was an HBO show!”
Friday, July 02, 2010
Raining champion
They say that you could be on the world’s most beautiful island – surrounded by nothing but Tiffany-clear water and a sky the colour of crushed sapphires – but after a while, you’ll start to get jittery. Let those jitters fester a little longer and you begin to go mad. ‘Island fever’, they call it.
But imagine what happens when you’re stuck inside a tiny flat with two bad tempered women and a hyperactive dog that’s not been out for a walk all day because, outside, it’s like Noah’s Ark: the Sequel.
“Seriously, how can there be so much rain?” Saffy complained as she peered out the window, her words almost drowned out by the loud clatter of rain drops against the glass. “I need to get out of here! I’m so late for my bikini wax!”
“I seriously doubt if anyone is making any of their appointments today,” I said, and was rewarded with a filthy look.
“You men always have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
I opened my mouth to reply but spotted the cleverly laid trap just in time, and shut up.
Sensing the spike in hostile emotions, my beloved mongrel dog Pooch looked up from under the dining table and growled softly. For a moment, I wished that I had a Doberman who was trained to leap and attack, and ask questions later.
Saffy looked disappointed her ruse had failed. She immediately turned on Amanda who was sitting on the lounge fiddling with her iPhone. “That’s very sociable of you, Amanda, to just sit there and not contribute to the conversation!”
“I’m watching a YouTube link Sharyn just sent me. Look at this, Orchard Road is flooded!”
Her bad mood generated by her meteorological captivity temporarily forgotten, Saffy bounced onto the sofa to peer over Amanda’s shoulder. “Turn it up,” she ordered.
The shaky image panned around for a 180 degree view of a flooded Orchard Road. Then the camera settled on the Hermès store in Liat Tower. Muddy water lapped against the shop and a disembodied voice announced, “Hermès kena!”
Saffy dissolved into squeals of laughter and for days after, at oddly inappropriate moments, she would suddenly say, “Hermès kena!”
Amanda wondered aloud whether she should station herself outside the store. “This might just be the time to grab a Birkin bag as it floats out of the store!”
At 3pm, it was still raining heavily and to make matters worse, our ancient microwave oven decided to call it a day and stopped working with a sad little ‘ping’.
Amanda who was in the midst of warming up her leftover prawn noodles when this happened spent a good five minutes screaming profanities at the machine. Saffy was endlessly impressed. “This is what they teach you in Swiss boarding school!” she whispered to me.
When Amanda emerged from the kitchen, her hair was a little mussed up, and she had a deranged look in her eyes as she picked up her phone to dial.
“Hello?” she snapped. “Do you sell microwave ovens? You do? Great. What model? Uh huh…uh huh…How much?...uh huh…mmm…yes…OK, and when can you deliver…uhm, what ‘s your name? Catherine? Cat-ereen? I’m sorry, I can’t understand you! How do you spell that? Wait, let me get a pen and paper. OK, go ahead…T…A…S…Uh huh…uh huh…Seriously? That’s your name?”
Sensing a welcome bout of diverting drama, Saffy looked at me.
When Amanda clicked off her phone, it was clear that her bad mood had lifted. “You know, I was sure she said her name was Katerine, like the Russian, but she pronounced it in such an odd way I had to ask her to spell it out. And it’s Taserine!”
I frowned. “As in Listerine?”
“Or tangerine?” Saffy said. “I’m just amazed at the names that Singaporeans make up for themselves. It shows such creativity!”
“It’s not creative, it’s weird!” Amanda said. “If she was African-American, I’d understand it, but this girl could not have been more Singaporean!”
“Maybe she’s an African-American who’s lived here her whole life?” Saffy suggested.
“Actually, she sounds like a comic super-hero,” Amanda said. “She’s Wolverine’s sister and her hair turns into deadly whips!”
And that’s how we pulled ourselves out of our cranky moods, entertaining ourselves for the rest of the day with strange names.
By the time the rain finally stopped, we were laughing again. We threw open the windows and the soft smell of a freshly washed earth wafted in. Sharyn came over with a da-pao dinner and listened earnestly to Amanda’s story.
“Wah!” she said, her glasses fogging up. “Lucky she not call herself Vaseline! Then, really kena with boys!”
But imagine what happens when you’re stuck inside a tiny flat with two bad tempered women and a hyperactive dog that’s not been out for a walk all day because, outside, it’s like Noah’s Ark: the Sequel.
“Seriously, how can there be so much rain?” Saffy complained as she peered out the window, her words almost drowned out by the loud clatter of rain drops against the glass. “I need to get out of here! I’m so late for my bikini wax!”
“I seriously doubt if anyone is making any of their appointments today,” I said, and was rewarded with a filthy look.
“You men always have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
I opened my mouth to reply but spotted the cleverly laid trap just in time, and shut up.
Sensing the spike in hostile emotions, my beloved mongrel dog Pooch looked up from under the dining table and growled softly. For a moment, I wished that I had a Doberman who was trained to leap and attack, and ask questions later.
Saffy looked disappointed her ruse had failed. She immediately turned on Amanda who was sitting on the lounge fiddling with her iPhone. “That’s very sociable of you, Amanda, to just sit there and not contribute to the conversation!”
“I’m watching a YouTube link Sharyn just sent me. Look at this, Orchard Road is flooded!”
Her bad mood generated by her meteorological captivity temporarily forgotten, Saffy bounced onto the sofa to peer over Amanda’s shoulder. “Turn it up,” she ordered.
The shaky image panned around for a 180 degree view of a flooded Orchard Road. Then the camera settled on the Hermès store in Liat Tower. Muddy water lapped against the shop and a disembodied voice announced, “Hermès kena!”
Saffy dissolved into squeals of laughter and for days after, at oddly inappropriate moments, she would suddenly say, “Hermès kena!”
Amanda wondered aloud whether she should station herself outside the store. “This might just be the time to grab a Birkin bag as it floats out of the store!”
At 3pm, it was still raining heavily and to make matters worse, our ancient microwave oven decided to call it a day and stopped working with a sad little ‘ping’.
Amanda who was in the midst of warming up her leftover prawn noodles when this happened spent a good five minutes screaming profanities at the machine. Saffy was endlessly impressed. “This is what they teach you in Swiss boarding school!” she whispered to me.
When Amanda emerged from the kitchen, her hair was a little mussed up, and she had a deranged look in her eyes as she picked up her phone to dial.
“Hello?” she snapped. “Do you sell microwave ovens? You do? Great. What model? Uh huh…uh huh…How much?...uh huh…mmm…yes…OK, and when can you deliver…uhm, what ‘s your name? Catherine? Cat-ereen? I’m sorry, I can’t understand you! How do you spell that? Wait, let me get a pen and paper. OK, go ahead…T…A…S…Uh huh…uh huh…Seriously? That’s your name?”
Sensing a welcome bout of diverting drama, Saffy looked at me.
When Amanda clicked off her phone, it was clear that her bad mood had lifted. “You know, I was sure she said her name was Katerine, like the Russian, but she pronounced it in such an odd way I had to ask her to spell it out. And it’s Taserine!”
I frowned. “As in Listerine?”
“Or tangerine?” Saffy said. “I’m just amazed at the names that Singaporeans make up for themselves. It shows such creativity!”
“It’s not creative, it’s weird!” Amanda said. “If she was African-American, I’d understand it, but this girl could not have been more Singaporean!”
“Maybe she’s an African-American who’s lived here her whole life?” Saffy suggested.
“Actually, she sounds like a comic super-hero,” Amanda said. “She’s Wolverine’s sister and her hair turns into deadly whips!”
And that’s how we pulled ourselves out of our cranky moods, entertaining ourselves for the rest of the day with strange names.
By the time the rain finally stopped, we were laughing again. We threw open the windows and the soft smell of a freshly washed earth wafted in. Sharyn came over with a da-pao dinner and listened earnestly to Amanda’s story.
“Wah!” she said, her glasses fogging up. “Lucky she not call herself Vaseline! Then, really kena with boys!”
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Team player
OK, hands up all those who don’t care about the World Cup?
If you do care, I suggest you keep surfing, because there’s nothing for you here this week. And anyway, I’m sure you’ll be far too busy following the misfortunes of the English team to be reading this blog.
For those of you still reading, here’s my beef in a nutshell: I’m sorry, but I just don’t get the appeal of a bunch of guys running around a field chasing a little black and white ball.
And I certainly don’t know why you would get so excited about it. I read somewhere that back in the 1950s, when Brazil played Uruguay, and Uruguay won unexpectedly, some Brazilian fans were so distressed they literally jumped off the top of the stadium and killed themselves.
I seriously couldn’t imagine another game where this sort of thing happens. I was thinking the other day what would happen if Roger Federer didn’t win Wimbledon (well, the way he’s been going this year, he’ll probably have lost in the quarter-finals by the time you read this) and, for the life of me, I just couldn’t imagine anyone throwing themselves off the top of the stadium in howling anguish.
But when it comes to football, something strange happens to grown men and women. They get all giddy and excited like a diabetic who suddenly finds himself trapped in a Willy Wonka movie set.
The other day, I came home to find our cleaning lady, Ah Chuan screaming Hokkien vulgarities at our TV screen. From a safe distance at the door, I could just make out that Spain was playing Honduras. It turns out that the woman who’s been washing our underwear for years is a rabid Spanish fan. And watches TV when she should be cleaning.
“Thank God Spain won!” I later told my flatmates. “For a really tense moment there, I thought she was going to throw her mop through the TV screen!”
“It just goes to show,” said Saffy, “that it’s the stillest waters that run the fastest.”
“I’m sure what you meant to say was…” Amanda began.
“I mean what I mean!” Saffy interrupted smoothly. “But I think I understand what the fuss is all about!”
Amanda looked surprised. “You do? Since when do you follow football?”
“I don’t! Well, at least, I didn’t until Barney Chen sent me a recent copy of Vanity Fair!” Saffy said, reaching into her handbag and pulling out said magazine.
On the cover was Ronaldo and some football player none of us had heard of. Both were wearing nothing except very skimpy underwear.
“Good Lord,” was all Amanda could say after a long moment of silence.
“And look at this guy!” Saffy said cheerfully, as she flipped the pages and stabbed a fingernail at a Cameroon player, her sharp index fingernail dragging a neat circle over his, shall we say, southern hemisphere.
Amanda pulled the magazine closer and peered. “Is that even real?” she asked.
“That’s what I asked Barney Chen, but he said that having played in a few team sports in his time, which knowing him I’m certain is code for something sexual, he’s 90 percent sure there’s been no air-brushing involved.”
“Seriously, someone should write a letter to Fido…” Amanda began.
“FIFA,” I said automatically, surprising even myself at the depth of my football knowledge.
“Whatever, and tell them that they need to have the whole game played in underwear! It’s a wonder that anyone would watch football when the players all wear those ugly baggy shorts. Put them into Armani underwear, I say, and the viewership numbers would skyrocket!” Amanda breathed deeply as she lingered over the assorted bulges on Ronaldo’s body.
And that was how the girls have, thanks to a multiple photo-spread in Vanity Fair, become fans of football.
Of course, the tension level in our little flat has escalated somewhat. When Ah Chuan found out that Saffy had become a fan of Cameroon, Saffy’s precious white satin underwear emerged from the washing machine stained a darker shade.
“Oh, silly me! I must have forgotten to separate the whites from the darks when I did the laundry,” Ah Chuan said in Hokkien, her entire body vibrating with innocence.
Saffy turned to Amanda. “What did she say?”
“She hates your guts,” Amanda translated.
Saffy turned to Ah Chuan and smiled weakly. “It’s OK! No worries! I was going to throw these panties out anyway!” she shouted, still laboring under the impression that Ah Chuan will understand English if you say it loudly enough.
That night, she slept with her door and windows locked.
If you do care, I suggest you keep surfing, because there’s nothing for you here this week. And anyway, I’m sure you’ll be far too busy following the misfortunes of the English team to be reading this blog.
For those of you still reading, here’s my beef in a nutshell: I’m sorry, but I just don’t get the appeal of a bunch of guys running around a field chasing a little black and white ball.
And I certainly don’t know why you would get so excited about it. I read somewhere that back in the 1950s, when Brazil played Uruguay, and Uruguay won unexpectedly, some Brazilian fans were so distressed they literally jumped off the top of the stadium and killed themselves.
I seriously couldn’t imagine another game where this sort of thing happens. I was thinking the other day what would happen if Roger Federer didn’t win Wimbledon (well, the way he’s been going this year, he’ll probably have lost in the quarter-finals by the time you read this) and, for the life of me, I just couldn’t imagine anyone throwing themselves off the top of the stadium in howling anguish.
But when it comes to football, something strange happens to grown men and women. They get all giddy and excited like a diabetic who suddenly finds himself trapped in a Willy Wonka movie set.
The other day, I came home to find our cleaning lady, Ah Chuan screaming Hokkien vulgarities at our TV screen. From a safe distance at the door, I could just make out that Spain was playing Honduras. It turns out that the woman who’s been washing our underwear for years is a rabid Spanish fan. And watches TV when she should be cleaning.
“Thank God Spain won!” I later told my flatmates. “For a really tense moment there, I thought she was going to throw her mop through the TV screen!”
“It just goes to show,” said Saffy, “that it’s the stillest waters that run the fastest.”
“I’m sure what you meant to say was…” Amanda began.
“I mean what I mean!” Saffy interrupted smoothly. “But I think I understand what the fuss is all about!”
Amanda looked surprised. “You do? Since when do you follow football?”
“I don’t! Well, at least, I didn’t until Barney Chen sent me a recent copy of Vanity Fair!” Saffy said, reaching into her handbag and pulling out said magazine.
On the cover was Ronaldo and some football player none of us had heard of. Both were wearing nothing except very skimpy underwear.
“Good Lord,” was all Amanda could say after a long moment of silence.
“And look at this guy!” Saffy said cheerfully, as she flipped the pages and stabbed a fingernail at a Cameroon player, her sharp index fingernail dragging a neat circle over his, shall we say, southern hemisphere.
Amanda pulled the magazine closer and peered. “Is that even real?” she asked.
“That’s what I asked Barney Chen, but he said that having played in a few team sports in his time, which knowing him I’m certain is code for something sexual, he’s 90 percent sure there’s been no air-brushing involved.”
“Seriously, someone should write a letter to Fido…” Amanda began.
“FIFA,” I said automatically, surprising even myself at the depth of my football knowledge.
“Whatever, and tell them that they need to have the whole game played in underwear! It’s a wonder that anyone would watch football when the players all wear those ugly baggy shorts. Put them into Armani underwear, I say, and the viewership numbers would skyrocket!” Amanda breathed deeply as she lingered over the assorted bulges on Ronaldo’s body.
And that was how the girls have, thanks to a multiple photo-spread in Vanity Fair, become fans of football.
Of course, the tension level in our little flat has escalated somewhat. When Ah Chuan found out that Saffy had become a fan of Cameroon, Saffy’s precious white satin underwear emerged from the washing machine stained a darker shade.
“Oh, silly me! I must have forgotten to separate the whites from the darks when I did the laundry,” Ah Chuan said in Hokkien, her entire body vibrating with innocence.
Saffy turned to Amanda. “What did she say?”
“She hates your guts,” Amanda translated.
Saffy turned to Ah Chuan and smiled weakly. “It’s OK! No worries! I was going to throw these panties out anyway!” she shouted, still laboring under the impression that Ah Chuan will understand English if you say it loudly enough.
That night, she slept with her door and windows locked.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
That's life!
When you’re growing up, a single day can sometimes feel like a year and at the end of the day, as you’re being tucked into bed, it’s hard to believe that you’d ever managed to pack in so much – playing, reading, chatting, napping, laughing, crying, poo’ing, eating at least five times and then playing some more.
Then, one day, just when you least expect it, you realize that you’re all grown up now, there’s so much to do, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to pack it all in.
“Seriously, I have a to-do list as long as my arm!” Amanda complained the other night. She walked in the door, carelessly kicked her Manolo Blahniks into the corner and collapsed onto the sofa. “I’ve been in meetings all day and I still have 40 unanswered emails to sort through. And it’s nearly midnight! Where did my day go?”
From the other end of the sofa, Saffy looked up from an old episode of ‘The Amazing Race’ that she’d recorded a few months ago. “I hate emails!” she said. “They’re like a venereal disease, you just can’t get rid of them! Whoever invented that damned thing should be shot! Oooh, is it just me or are those cowboys, Jet and Cord super-hot?” Saffy cooed, demonstrating, not for the first time, her complete inability to stay focused on anything longer than a commercial break.
“I’d marry them in a heart-beat!” Amanda said immediately. “Even it means I have to live on a dusty old ranch, lasso horses, milk cows and say ‘Hey, y’all!’ all day!”
“That could almost be the lyrics to your next hit country single, Amanda!” Saffy giggled.
But still, Amanda’s question – ‘Where did my day go?’ – haunted us. As I write this, it’s the middle of June. And I distinctly remember us just celebrating the new year. At this rate, Christmas will be arriving tomorrow.
“You know what will really irritate me?” Amanda asked the next day. “It’s if I wake up and suddenly, I’m 60!”
“That’s all you’re worried about?” Saffy piped up. “I have nightmares that I’m going to wake up 60 and find I’m still single!”
“Choy, choy, choy!” Amanda said hurriedly as they both knocked religiously on our wooden dining table.
Saffy’s formidable bosom shifted with all the slow motion majesty of a John Woo gun fight. “Really, when you come right down to it, what’s the point of all this?” she asked, waving her hands around. “Each morning, we wake up. Drag ourselves to work. Suffer the indignity of being yelled at by fat ugly bosses. Get stressed with 300 emails and stupid deadlines. Go home and get ready to do it all again the next day. Oh, and we also get to take home five dollars a month! For what?” she added with great dissatisfaction.
“And at the rate the years are slipping by, 60 isn’t that far away!” Amanda said, stubbornly returning to her original point.
“60 doesn’t bother me at all!” Saffy huffed, though Amanda later said that was a bit rich coming from someone who’s been 29 for the past five years. “What does bother me is that I’m still going to be single at that age. How depressing would that be?”
What would be more depressing, I ventured, would be you weren’t single, but that you were shacked up with some Hong Kong movie star who insisted that no one knew the two of you were dating. Like how nobody knew Ronald Cheng and Charlene Choi had gotten divorced, when the greater shock was that no one had known they were married in the first place.
“Oh, yeah, those two weirdos!” Saffy said. “I’ll never understand that. And don’t get me started about that whole Fann Wong and Christopher Lee fandango. Why bother being attached if no one knows about it? I mean, isn’t the whole point of a boyfriend is so all those smug married couples can stop judging you?”
“And pitying you!” Amanda added.
Saffy sighed. “Ugh, I hate the pitying.”
Meanwhile, the bigger issue of how fast time is passing remains unsolvable. If Saffy and Amanda don’t want to wake up one day 60 and single, I don’t want to wake up one day realizing that I’d not done half the things I’ve always wanted to do. Like bungee jump. Learn how to ride a horse. Play the piano. Take part in a Bollywood dance number. Save the world.
And all because I spent the greater part of my life chained to a stupid desk.
Then, one day, just when you least expect it, you realize that you’re all grown up now, there’s so much to do, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to pack it all in.
“Seriously, I have a to-do list as long as my arm!” Amanda complained the other night. She walked in the door, carelessly kicked her Manolo Blahniks into the corner and collapsed onto the sofa. “I’ve been in meetings all day and I still have 40 unanswered emails to sort through. And it’s nearly midnight! Where did my day go?”
From the other end of the sofa, Saffy looked up from an old episode of ‘The Amazing Race’ that she’d recorded a few months ago. “I hate emails!” she said. “They’re like a venereal disease, you just can’t get rid of them! Whoever invented that damned thing should be shot! Oooh, is it just me or are those cowboys, Jet and Cord super-hot?” Saffy cooed, demonstrating, not for the first time, her complete inability to stay focused on anything longer than a commercial break.
“I’d marry them in a heart-beat!” Amanda said immediately. “Even it means I have to live on a dusty old ranch, lasso horses, milk cows and say ‘Hey, y’all!’ all day!”
“That could almost be the lyrics to your next hit country single, Amanda!” Saffy giggled.
But still, Amanda’s question – ‘Where did my day go?’ – haunted us. As I write this, it’s the middle of June. And I distinctly remember us just celebrating the new year. At this rate, Christmas will be arriving tomorrow.
“You know what will really irritate me?” Amanda asked the next day. “It’s if I wake up and suddenly, I’m 60!”
“That’s all you’re worried about?” Saffy piped up. “I have nightmares that I’m going to wake up 60 and find I’m still single!”
“Choy, choy, choy!” Amanda said hurriedly as they both knocked religiously on our wooden dining table.
Saffy’s formidable bosom shifted with all the slow motion majesty of a John Woo gun fight. “Really, when you come right down to it, what’s the point of all this?” she asked, waving her hands around. “Each morning, we wake up. Drag ourselves to work. Suffer the indignity of being yelled at by fat ugly bosses. Get stressed with 300 emails and stupid deadlines. Go home and get ready to do it all again the next day. Oh, and we also get to take home five dollars a month! For what?” she added with great dissatisfaction.
“And at the rate the years are slipping by, 60 isn’t that far away!” Amanda said, stubbornly returning to her original point.
“60 doesn’t bother me at all!” Saffy huffed, though Amanda later said that was a bit rich coming from someone who’s been 29 for the past five years. “What does bother me is that I’m still going to be single at that age. How depressing would that be?”
What would be more depressing, I ventured, would be you weren’t single, but that you were shacked up with some Hong Kong movie star who insisted that no one knew the two of you were dating. Like how nobody knew Ronald Cheng and Charlene Choi had gotten divorced, when the greater shock was that no one had known they were married in the first place.
“Oh, yeah, those two weirdos!” Saffy said. “I’ll never understand that. And don’t get me started about that whole Fann Wong and Christopher Lee fandango. Why bother being attached if no one knows about it? I mean, isn’t the whole point of a boyfriend is so all those smug married couples can stop judging you?”
“And pitying you!” Amanda added.
Saffy sighed. “Ugh, I hate the pitying.”
Meanwhile, the bigger issue of how fast time is passing remains unsolvable. If Saffy and Amanda don’t want to wake up one day 60 and single, I don’t want to wake up one day realizing that I’d not done half the things I’ve always wanted to do. Like bungee jump. Learn how to ride a horse. Play the piano. Take part in a Bollywood dance number. Save the world.
And all because I spent the greater part of my life chained to a stupid desk.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Time after Time
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I love TV. I live and breathe TV, and if I could eat it, I would. Nothing says ‘home’ to me more than being able to kick off the shoes at the end of a long horrid day at the office, reach for the remote control, and settle back for an evening of great entertainment with a nice bowl of pasta for company.
Of course, there are some people who say that TV is trash, but there’s a good reason why I’m not friends with them. (And besides, I have one word to say to them: “Glee”.)
It’s fair to say that TV has been my life’s bedrock. It’s seen me through the good times, the bad times and all the boogy in between. Because no one told me life was going to be this way. My job was a joke, I was broke and my love life was DOA. It was like I was always stuck in second gear, when it hadn’t been my day, my week, my month or even my year. But through it all, TV has been there for me, through thick and thin. And at night, long after I’ve turned it off and gone to bed, I’ve heard it call my name, and it feels like home.
And then a few days ago, I was trawling through HMV’s TV section, looking at all the discounted box sets and lovingly flashing back to all those wonderful TV shows of my past, now conveniently collected in one ready to view marathon. Recent favourites like Lost, CSI, House, Grey’s Anatomy, Arrested Development, Desperate Housewives, Friends and Entourage led to golden oldies like Dr Who, To the Manor Born, Keeping Up Appearances, Six Million Dollar Man and, yes, even Baywatch.
And in the midst of this homey nostalgia, it suddenly occurred to me that, in my life, I’ve watched a lot of TV.
“And let’s not count all those shows that I’ve watched in private, but would never admit in public to loving,” I later said that night to my flatmates.
“Such as?” Amanda said, ever ready to assume the road of cross-examiner.
“Well, such as American Idol, Brothers and Sisters and Ugly Betty!”
“So, what’s your point?” Saffy asked.
“It all adds up to a lot of time!” I exclaimed.
Saffy frowned. “I’m not following.”
“Look, take one show, say Lost. Each season has about 23 episodes. Make it 20 for easy maths. Each episode is 40 minutes. And the damned thing went for 6 years. So, what’s that…20 times 40, that’s uhm…”
There was a brief silence as the three of us screwed up our faces, cast our eyes up towards the ceiling and counted, fingers twitching and mouths moving soundlessly.
“4800 minutes!” I said finally, just as Amanda had admitted defeat and whipped out her phone. “And if you divide that by 60 minutes, that makes, uhm…”
“80 hours,” Amanda said.
“80 hours!” I repeated in horror.
“That’s not so bad, is it?” Saffy said. “That’s only three days in your life. I’m sure you can spare three days!”
“Saffy, that’s just one show! What about all those other shows? What about Friends? That went for ten years!”
“But that’s only 20 minutes long!” Saffy said, ever the optimist.
“Or,” said Amanda, her fingers dashing across her phone, “67 hours, assuming 20 episodes per season.”
By now, even Saffy was looking troubled, the vast accounting of her life suddenly turning into a flickering montage of TV theme songs and silly plots.
“You see what I mean?”I said. “Imagine me having this dawning realization in the middle of HMV, surrounded by all those box sets!”
“It’s like a Harry Potter moment!” Saffy said, her bosom inflating. “All your life captured in digital code!”
“How much of my life have I spent watching TV?” I asked in despair. “At least the cast of Friends each earned $1m per episode. What do I have to show for it? My God, I could have learnt a second language! I could be speaking fluent Greek by now!”
That gave everyone some pause as they thought about what they could have done with all the time they’d otherwise spent following the convoluted plots of Alias.
“I might have made partner,” Amanda said.
“And I’m sure I would have found a husband,” Saffy murmured, the weight of her immense tragedy causing her to slouch forward in the sofa where her hand automatically found the TV remote control. She clicked on the TV and instantly, our faces were bathed in the flickering light of a commercial.
Of course, there are some people who say that TV is trash, but there’s a good reason why I’m not friends with them. (And besides, I have one word to say to them: “Glee”.)
It’s fair to say that TV has been my life’s bedrock. It’s seen me through the good times, the bad times and all the boogy in between. Because no one told me life was going to be this way. My job was a joke, I was broke and my love life was DOA. It was like I was always stuck in second gear, when it hadn’t been my day, my week, my month or even my year. But through it all, TV has been there for me, through thick and thin. And at night, long after I’ve turned it off and gone to bed, I’ve heard it call my name, and it feels like home.
And then a few days ago, I was trawling through HMV’s TV section, looking at all the discounted box sets and lovingly flashing back to all those wonderful TV shows of my past, now conveniently collected in one ready to view marathon. Recent favourites like Lost, CSI, House, Grey’s Anatomy, Arrested Development, Desperate Housewives, Friends and Entourage led to golden oldies like Dr Who, To the Manor Born, Keeping Up Appearances, Six Million Dollar Man and, yes, even Baywatch.
And in the midst of this homey nostalgia, it suddenly occurred to me that, in my life, I’ve watched a lot of TV.
“And let’s not count all those shows that I’ve watched in private, but would never admit in public to loving,” I later said that night to my flatmates.
“Such as?” Amanda said, ever ready to assume the road of cross-examiner.
“Well, such as American Idol, Brothers and Sisters and Ugly Betty!”
“So, what’s your point?” Saffy asked.
“It all adds up to a lot of time!” I exclaimed.
Saffy frowned. “I’m not following.”
“Look, take one show, say Lost. Each season has about 23 episodes. Make it 20 for easy maths. Each episode is 40 minutes. And the damned thing went for 6 years. So, what’s that…20 times 40, that’s uhm…”
There was a brief silence as the three of us screwed up our faces, cast our eyes up towards the ceiling and counted, fingers twitching and mouths moving soundlessly.
“4800 minutes!” I said finally, just as Amanda had admitted defeat and whipped out her phone. “And if you divide that by 60 minutes, that makes, uhm…”
“80 hours,” Amanda said.
“80 hours!” I repeated in horror.
“That’s not so bad, is it?” Saffy said. “That’s only three days in your life. I’m sure you can spare three days!”
“Saffy, that’s just one show! What about all those other shows? What about Friends? That went for ten years!”
“But that’s only 20 minutes long!” Saffy said, ever the optimist.
“Or,” said Amanda, her fingers dashing across her phone, “67 hours, assuming 20 episodes per season.”
By now, even Saffy was looking troubled, the vast accounting of her life suddenly turning into a flickering montage of TV theme songs and silly plots.
“You see what I mean?”I said. “Imagine me having this dawning realization in the middle of HMV, surrounded by all those box sets!”
“It’s like a Harry Potter moment!” Saffy said, her bosom inflating. “All your life captured in digital code!”
“How much of my life have I spent watching TV?” I asked in despair. “At least the cast of Friends each earned $1m per episode. What do I have to show for it? My God, I could have learnt a second language! I could be speaking fluent Greek by now!”
That gave everyone some pause as they thought about what they could have done with all the time they’d otherwise spent following the convoluted plots of Alias.
“I might have made partner,” Amanda said.
“And I’m sure I would have found a husband,” Saffy murmured, the weight of her immense tragedy causing her to slouch forward in the sofa where her hand automatically found the TV remote control. She clicked on the TV and instantly, our faces were bathed in the flickering light of a commercial.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Work it out
When I was a young impressionable kid growing up, I watched my father come down to breakfast every morning dressed in a crisp white shirt and tie. He’d sit and eat his soft boiled eggs drizzled with soya sauce, sip his black coffee while reading the newspapers and then pop into the study to fill his briefcase with important looking files and books before heading out the door.
“Where’s Papa going?” I remember asking the maid once.
“He’s going to the office!” Connie replied with all the enthusiasm of a condo security guard on a slow night.
“What for?”
She shrugged. “I think he does something important. I don’t know.”
A thought occurred to me. “What’s an office?”
“It’s a place where Sir make money so he can afford to buy your mother diamonds and feed you three!”
I, of course, found the whole idea so intriguing that I went to Mother and reported the conversation. “That’s really rich coming from someone who eats an entire loaf of bread a day!” Mother said stiffly.
But years later – right through school and then university – I dreamt of the day when I would get to work in an office and do mysterious things like my father. To me, the whole idea of working in an office was the same as growing up.
I couldn’t wait to grow up.
And then came the day when I actually walked into an office for my first day at work as a junior legal clerk. I sat at my desk staring around the tiny space. On one side was a tiny grimy window that looked out into another building. Next to it was a grubby desk on which sat a clunky pre-Apple computer with a keyboard with grey keys. A filing cabinet and a dying pot plant sat next to another wall, and overhead was a flickering fluorescent lamp.
I was profoundly moved by the moment. This was the mythical office of my childhood. This was the source of Mother’s diamonds and Connie’s daily loaf of bread. This was what it meant to be grown up.
I think the novelty lasted all of one hour. The secretary came in with a pile of dusty old files that I was actually meant to read and do something about. The phone started ringing and then my boss started screaming about something to someone and he kept using a word rhyming with ‘fire-truck’ repeatedly. The whole office, I soon realized, lived in a state of unrelenting paranoia and fear. And before long, the flickering fluorescent light lent the whole place the atmosphere of an asylum where the craziest person in the joint was the warden.
At the end of the day, I went home in a stunned daze, sat down on the sofa and called my sister. “I can’t believe this is what I’ve been working towards my whole life!”
“You always did live in La La Land!” my sister announced with all the sympathy of the school yard bully. “At least you get an office! I work in an open plan space with a bunch of Neanderthals who spend half the day telling fart jokes and the other half staring at my boobs. I hate my life!”
I’ve long since left my first office – even though, some nights, I still dream of my terrible boss screaming at me. The other two law firms I went to weren’t that much better. My third boss had an even nastier temper than the first and, by then, I realized that being a lawyer is just not like Ally McBeal or The Practice at all. There is not a trace of glamour about it. In fact, if you ask me, it’s more like being the victim on CSI.
The other day, Saffy said that if she has to work in an office for the rest of her life, she’d rather kill herself. “This whole commuting to work and staring at the stupid computer screen from 9 to 6 crap is just so incredibly inhumane!” she declared, her ample bosom heaving with force.
“You guys are weird! I love working!” Amanda piped up. “It gives me such a buzz to go into the office each day!”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re really weird, Amanda,” Saffy declared as she hoisted her handbag and headed for the door. She later sent me a text message: “I wonder what it must b like 2 live in A’s world. Earning all dat money wld give me a huge buzz too!”
I just want to go back in time and give my younger self this message: “Don't be an idiot. Being a lawyer sucks big time. Take up golf.”
“Where’s Papa going?” I remember asking the maid once.
“He’s going to the office!” Connie replied with all the enthusiasm of a condo security guard on a slow night.
“What for?”
She shrugged. “I think he does something important. I don’t know.”
A thought occurred to me. “What’s an office?”
“It’s a place where Sir make money so he can afford to buy your mother diamonds and feed you three!”
I, of course, found the whole idea so intriguing that I went to Mother and reported the conversation. “That’s really rich coming from someone who eats an entire loaf of bread a day!” Mother said stiffly.
But years later – right through school and then university – I dreamt of the day when I would get to work in an office and do mysterious things like my father. To me, the whole idea of working in an office was the same as growing up.
I couldn’t wait to grow up.
And then came the day when I actually walked into an office for my first day at work as a junior legal clerk. I sat at my desk staring around the tiny space. On one side was a tiny grimy window that looked out into another building. Next to it was a grubby desk on which sat a clunky pre-Apple computer with a keyboard with grey keys. A filing cabinet and a dying pot plant sat next to another wall, and overhead was a flickering fluorescent lamp.
I was profoundly moved by the moment. This was the mythical office of my childhood. This was the source of Mother’s diamonds and Connie’s daily loaf of bread. This was what it meant to be grown up.
I think the novelty lasted all of one hour. The secretary came in with a pile of dusty old files that I was actually meant to read and do something about. The phone started ringing and then my boss started screaming about something to someone and he kept using a word rhyming with ‘fire-truck’ repeatedly. The whole office, I soon realized, lived in a state of unrelenting paranoia and fear. And before long, the flickering fluorescent light lent the whole place the atmosphere of an asylum where the craziest person in the joint was the warden.
At the end of the day, I went home in a stunned daze, sat down on the sofa and called my sister. “I can’t believe this is what I’ve been working towards my whole life!”
“You always did live in La La Land!” my sister announced with all the sympathy of the school yard bully. “At least you get an office! I work in an open plan space with a bunch of Neanderthals who spend half the day telling fart jokes and the other half staring at my boobs. I hate my life!”
I’ve long since left my first office – even though, some nights, I still dream of my terrible boss screaming at me. The other two law firms I went to weren’t that much better. My third boss had an even nastier temper than the first and, by then, I realized that being a lawyer is just not like Ally McBeal or The Practice at all. There is not a trace of glamour about it. In fact, if you ask me, it’s more like being the victim on CSI.
The other day, Saffy said that if she has to work in an office for the rest of her life, she’d rather kill herself. “This whole commuting to work and staring at the stupid computer screen from 9 to 6 crap is just so incredibly inhumane!” she declared, her ample bosom heaving with force.
“You guys are weird! I love working!” Amanda piped up. “It gives me such a buzz to go into the office each day!”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re really weird, Amanda,” Saffy declared as she hoisted her handbag and headed for the door. She later sent me a text message: “I wonder what it must b like 2 live in A’s world. Earning all dat money wld give me a huge buzz too!”
I just want to go back in time and give my younger self this message: “Don't be an idiot. Being a lawyer sucks big time. Take up golf.”
Friday, May 28, 2010
Baby Talk
It’s taken me a long time to realize this, but it’s only clear to me now that the idea of children means different things to different people.
For me, children have always been kind of like a flowering shrub: Pretty to look at, but I don’t spend too much time lingering. It’s just another flowering shrub. Move on. Plenty of those around.
I just don’t get it when people hover over the pram of a complete stranger’s baby and coo, making mushy gushy noises like someone with a very bad cold.
I tried doing that once to a friend who came into the office with her new baby. Dutifully, I bent over the pram and went, “Awww, she’s so cute!”, to which the mother icily said, “It’s a boy!”
“How was I to know it was a boy?” I later complained to Sharyn who rolled her eyes.
“Aiyoh! How you not know? Nine months she tell us in the office is a boy and when she had her going away party, we all sign a card that said ‘Good luck, Son-shine!’ and you still doh-no! How like that?” she pleaded, her worried eyes huge behind her Coke-bottle thick spectacles.
But my bigger point is that as I bent over the child and cooed, I felt nothing except a mild case of disinterest. Like I said, another flowering shrub.
And then there are people like Amanda who go into hormonal spasms at the merest hint of a baby within 20 metres. She’ll stop and gaze at the child with such penetrating wistfulness that, eventually, the parent will get all uncomfortable and push the pram off hurriedly in the other direction.
My sister says that she could never bring a child into a world as whacked out as this one is. “This is not a safe world,” she said the other day when I told her I was going to write about children for my next column. “You’d have to be criminally negligent to have children in a world that thinks it’s ok to blow up cars and eat whales.”
“So you don’t want kids. Interesting,” I said, as I scribbled into my notebook.
“No, I didn’t say I didn’t want kids,” Michelle said. “I want kids so badly, I sometimes think I could just die from the sheer unhappiness of it all. But I think I’d be so worried for its future, I’d be one of those anal-retentive mothers who has a nervous breakdown when her child fails her Chinese exam!”
“Interesting!” I repeated, scribbling harder.
My mother on the other hand firmly believes that her children were put on this earth to look after her and our father when they get old. “Why else would you have children?” she would tell her table of mahjong-kakis who, as one, would nod solemnly.
“Do you think,” she once asked in a voice that could penetrate steel, “that I endured three years of morning sickness, got all out of shape, and had three epidurals on top of a total of 28 hours of eye-popping labour pain just for fun?”
I remember my father leaning over the dining table and whispering to me, “Do not answer that question! Don’t even look her in the eye!”
Meanwhile, Saffy, never one for toning down her drama-meter, once had to sit down and blow into a paper bag when she made the mistake of walking through the Forum. “All these baby clothes!” she wailed as she puffed hysterically.
By the time she pulled herself together, an interested crowd of Sunday shoppers had gathered around her.
“Ay, what’s wrong, hah?” someone asked.
“Doh-no, I think she lost her baby!”
“Aiyoh, really ah? Where’s my Sharon, ah? Girl? Where are you!”
Later, as she recovered her composure at Starbucks, Saffy said that being in such proximity to all those baby clothes made her realize that her biological clock was ticking very loudly.
“It’s deafening! Can you hear it?” she asked Amanda who actually stopped sipping her latte and listened.
“I think I’m hearing my own clock,” Amanda concluded sadly. She looked down at her bag of children’s outfits that she’d bought while Saffy was having her breakdown in front of Mommy’s Lil’ Sweetheart. “Did I really just buy all these kids’ clothes? I don’t have kids! Is that sad? I don’t even have a boyfriend! What’s wrong with me?”
“I don’t think that’s sad at all,” Saffy said stoutly. “What’s sad is that I actually think just being inside Forum has made me lactate! My bra feels wet! Here, feel this! No seriously, Jason, feel it! Hey, where are you going?”
For me, children have always been kind of like a flowering shrub: Pretty to look at, but I don’t spend too much time lingering. It’s just another flowering shrub. Move on. Plenty of those around.
I just don’t get it when people hover over the pram of a complete stranger’s baby and coo, making mushy gushy noises like someone with a very bad cold.
I tried doing that once to a friend who came into the office with her new baby. Dutifully, I bent over the pram and went, “Awww, she’s so cute!”, to which the mother icily said, “It’s a boy!”
“How was I to know it was a boy?” I later complained to Sharyn who rolled her eyes.
“Aiyoh! How you not know? Nine months she tell us in the office is a boy and when she had her going away party, we all sign a card that said ‘Good luck, Son-shine!’ and you still doh-no! How like that?” she pleaded, her worried eyes huge behind her Coke-bottle thick spectacles.
But my bigger point is that as I bent over the child and cooed, I felt nothing except a mild case of disinterest. Like I said, another flowering shrub.
And then there are people like Amanda who go into hormonal spasms at the merest hint of a baby within 20 metres. She’ll stop and gaze at the child with such penetrating wistfulness that, eventually, the parent will get all uncomfortable and push the pram off hurriedly in the other direction.
My sister says that she could never bring a child into a world as whacked out as this one is. “This is not a safe world,” she said the other day when I told her I was going to write about children for my next column. “You’d have to be criminally negligent to have children in a world that thinks it’s ok to blow up cars and eat whales.”
“So you don’t want kids. Interesting,” I said, as I scribbled into my notebook.
“No, I didn’t say I didn’t want kids,” Michelle said. “I want kids so badly, I sometimes think I could just die from the sheer unhappiness of it all. But I think I’d be so worried for its future, I’d be one of those anal-retentive mothers who has a nervous breakdown when her child fails her Chinese exam!”
“Interesting!” I repeated, scribbling harder.
My mother on the other hand firmly believes that her children were put on this earth to look after her and our father when they get old. “Why else would you have children?” she would tell her table of mahjong-kakis who, as one, would nod solemnly.
“Do you think,” she once asked in a voice that could penetrate steel, “that I endured three years of morning sickness, got all out of shape, and had three epidurals on top of a total of 28 hours of eye-popping labour pain just for fun?”
I remember my father leaning over the dining table and whispering to me, “Do not answer that question! Don’t even look her in the eye!”
Meanwhile, Saffy, never one for toning down her drama-meter, once had to sit down and blow into a paper bag when she made the mistake of walking through the Forum. “All these baby clothes!” she wailed as she puffed hysterically.
By the time she pulled herself together, an interested crowd of Sunday shoppers had gathered around her.
“Ay, what’s wrong, hah?” someone asked.
“Doh-no, I think she lost her baby!”
“Aiyoh, really ah? Where’s my Sharon, ah? Girl? Where are you!”
Later, as she recovered her composure at Starbucks, Saffy said that being in such proximity to all those baby clothes made her realize that her biological clock was ticking very loudly.
“It’s deafening! Can you hear it?” she asked Amanda who actually stopped sipping her latte and listened.
“I think I’m hearing my own clock,” Amanda concluded sadly. She looked down at her bag of children’s outfits that she’d bought while Saffy was having her breakdown in front of Mommy’s Lil’ Sweetheart. “Did I really just buy all these kids’ clothes? I don’t have kids! Is that sad? I don’t even have a boyfriend! What’s wrong with me?”
“I don’t think that’s sad at all,” Saffy said stoutly. “What’s sad is that I actually think just being inside Forum has made me lactate! My bra feels wet! Here, feel this! No seriously, Jason, feel it! Hey, where are you going?”
Friday, May 21, 2010
Mother Dearest
My sister has never had an easy relationship with our mother. Father likes to say that Michelle was born literally screaming at Mother. “And she’s not stopped screaming since,” he said recently with the doting, indulgent smile of a father who’s never fallen out of love with that wrinkled bundle of squawking, pooping mess he first cradled in his arms.
When she was 15, Michelle got into a great row with Mother over a pair of diamond ear-rings.
“Why can’t I wear them to Dionne’s birthday party?” she yelled.
“Because unless you’re the Queen of England, you do not wear Van Cleef and Arpel ten-carat flawless diamonds to a fifteen-year old’s birthday party!” Mother said in that maddeningly serene way of her’s.
Upstairs in our bedroom, my brother Jack turned to me and said seriously, “You know, I stopped understanding that sentence after ‘England’!”
“You’re so mean!” Michelle’s scream reverberated through the house. “I’m moving out as soon as I’m 18!”
“Be my guest,” Mother said calmly. “I’m sure these diamonds would look much better on your brothers’ wives anyway!”
Michelle, who’s always had the instincts of a barracuda, promptly shut up. She dropped the subject and showed up at Dionne’s birthday party in a pretty pink Target frock paired with cheap costume jewellery. But for years, she always brought up the Diamond Incident as an example of Mother’s uncaring feelings for her.
“Oh my God, is she still going on about those stupid Rip Van Winkle diamonds?” Jack cried the other day all the way from Rio where’s he hiding from another of Mother’s mad match-making schemes.
“Van Cleef and Arpel,” I said automatically. “And I’ve always wondered if Mother still has them or if she’s given them to the Mother Teresa’s nuns like she was always threatening to do.”
“It would just be so typical of her if she has,” Michelle said when I spoke to her. “I always believed she would have been much happier if she’d had three sons!”
And there it was. The unspoken fear that haunts us all at some stage of our relationship with our parents – that suspicion that we were, in fact, not wanted. For how else did you explain the careless words, the unthinking glances of disapproval and quick silences between half meant words?
More than Jack or I ever did, Michelle has struggled the most in her ongoing love-hate relationship with Mother. If it wasn’t Mother’s critique about Michelle’s hair (“Darling, do you really think purple is an appropriate colour for hair?”), it was about her sense of dress (“Darling, why are you always wearing black?”); make-up (“Darling, less is more!”); boyfriends (“Those are a lot of tattoos, dear!”); and grades (“How do you fail in Chinese? It’s your mother tongue!”).
Of course, looking back on it now, you can see so clearly where Mother was coming from but I suppose when you’re dealing with a rebellious 18, you just can’t win as a parent. You just learn to tread a little more carefully which, in turn, is interpreted as uncaring. But there’s very little you can do about the accumulating pile of little wounds which never really heal.
I remember Mother once wondering which of her three children she’d come to stay with when she got old.
“Why would you want to stay with us?” Michelle immediately asked.
“Well, you can’t expect me to stay in an old folks home!”
“What are we, life insurance policies?” Michelle murmured to me later.
“Yes, if you want her to leave you those diamonds,” I said, wise beyond my nineteen years.
Of course, one of the things about growing up is that you slowly, and belatedly, come to realise that things are never quite as black and white as they once were when you were a child shouting for your mother’s attention; that the wall we build up to keep from getting hurt might also be what’s keeping us from being loved.
“Was I a handful when I was a kid?” Michelle suddenly asked the other day on Skype.
“Define ‘handful’.”
There was a hesitation. Then: “Was I really mean to Mother?” A pause. “I think I was. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I behaved as a child.”
And just like that, a piece of brick in that high wall came loose. It couldn’t have been an easy admission to make. After a lifetime of fighting, what would Michelle’s busy heart now do with itself? Which is not to say that she’s ready to let go of a lifetime of hurt, tears and anger. There’s still the issue of the diamonds.
But it’s a good start.
When she was 15, Michelle got into a great row with Mother over a pair of diamond ear-rings.
“Why can’t I wear them to Dionne’s birthday party?” she yelled.
“Because unless you’re the Queen of England, you do not wear Van Cleef and Arpel ten-carat flawless diamonds to a fifteen-year old’s birthday party!” Mother said in that maddeningly serene way of her’s.
Upstairs in our bedroom, my brother Jack turned to me and said seriously, “You know, I stopped understanding that sentence after ‘England’!”
“You’re so mean!” Michelle’s scream reverberated through the house. “I’m moving out as soon as I’m 18!”
“Be my guest,” Mother said calmly. “I’m sure these diamonds would look much better on your brothers’ wives anyway!”
Michelle, who’s always had the instincts of a barracuda, promptly shut up. She dropped the subject and showed up at Dionne’s birthday party in a pretty pink Target frock paired with cheap costume jewellery. But for years, she always brought up the Diamond Incident as an example of Mother’s uncaring feelings for her.
“Oh my God, is she still going on about those stupid Rip Van Winkle diamonds?” Jack cried the other day all the way from Rio where’s he hiding from another of Mother’s mad match-making schemes.
“Van Cleef and Arpel,” I said automatically. “And I’ve always wondered if Mother still has them or if she’s given them to the Mother Teresa’s nuns like she was always threatening to do.”
“It would just be so typical of her if she has,” Michelle said when I spoke to her. “I always believed she would have been much happier if she’d had three sons!”
And there it was. The unspoken fear that haunts us all at some stage of our relationship with our parents – that suspicion that we were, in fact, not wanted. For how else did you explain the careless words, the unthinking glances of disapproval and quick silences between half meant words?
More than Jack or I ever did, Michelle has struggled the most in her ongoing love-hate relationship with Mother. If it wasn’t Mother’s critique about Michelle’s hair (“Darling, do you really think purple is an appropriate colour for hair?”), it was about her sense of dress (“Darling, why are you always wearing black?”); make-up (“Darling, less is more!”); boyfriends (“Those are a lot of tattoos, dear!”); and grades (“How do you fail in Chinese? It’s your mother tongue!”).
Of course, looking back on it now, you can see so clearly where Mother was coming from but I suppose when you’re dealing with a rebellious 18, you just can’t win as a parent. You just learn to tread a little more carefully which, in turn, is interpreted as uncaring. But there’s very little you can do about the accumulating pile of little wounds which never really heal.
I remember Mother once wondering which of her three children she’d come to stay with when she got old.
“Why would you want to stay with us?” Michelle immediately asked.
“Well, you can’t expect me to stay in an old folks home!”
“What are we, life insurance policies?” Michelle murmured to me later.
“Yes, if you want her to leave you those diamonds,” I said, wise beyond my nineteen years.
Of course, one of the things about growing up is that you slowly, and belatedly, come to realise that things are never quite as black and white as they once were when you were a child shouting for your mother’s attention; that the wall we build up to keep from getting hurt might also be what’s keeping us from being loved.
“Was I a handful when I was a kid?” Michelle suddenly asked the other day on Skype.
“Define ‘handful’.”
There was a hesitation. Then: “Was I really mean to Mother?” A pause. “I think I was. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I behaved as a child.”
And just like that, a piece of brick in that high wall came loose. It couldn’t have been an easy admission to make. After a lifetime of fighting, what would Michelle’s busy heart now do with itself? Which is not to say that she’s ready to let go of a lifetime of hurt, tears and anger. There’s still the issue of the diamonds.
But it’s a good start.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Happily Never After
One of the rituals of growing up is the bedtime fairy tale. Cinderella, Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Princess and the Pea, Hansel and Gretel…All miniature stories where the hero, after battling a bunch of evil stepmothers, giants and nasty witches, triumphs and heads off into the sunset.
My sister Michelle especially loved the fairy tales where the princess marries the prince and lives happily ever after. “One day,” she told me very seriously when she was eight, “one day, I’m going to marry Prince Charming! And then he’s going to lock Mummy up in a dark prison!”
To which our mother, who’s always had the sensitive hearing of a bat, shouted from the kitchen, “Not if I get to him first!” Not surprisingly, Michelle would grow up blaming Mother for all her social inadequacies. “If I die a lonely spinster, it will be all her fault!”
But the one thing fairy tales never really tell you is just what exactly happens after the “happily ever after” bit. Did Snow White get bored of her sex life with the Prince and have an affair with one of the dwarves? (This would be the cue for my mother to tell you about the live sex floor show she once saw in Amsterdam featuring a transvestite Snow White and seven real life dwarves.) Did Sleeping Beauty turn out to be a nagging shrew and divorce her good for nothing Prince?
For some reason, all these questions raced around my head as I listened to our friend Lynette sob on our couch. Her husband Tim, it seemed, was having an affair with his secretary.
What made the revelation all the more shocking was we’d always thought Lynette and Tim were the golden couple. They were the ones we all aspired to be one day. They were high-school sweethearts. Married when they were 24. Three children by the time they were 28. He, a devastatingly handsome and successful lawyer. She, a gorgeous high flying banker.
“I want to have children with that man,” Saffy drunkenly told everyone at her table at Tim’s wedding. “Heck, pour me another gin and tonic, and I’d have children with that woman, too!”
“They’re going to have such beautiful children,” Amanda predicted without a single note of jealousy in her voice.
Which is why news of Tim’s affair struck not just Lynette, but it wounded my flatmates. For here was absolute proof that landing the man of your dreams was no guarantee that the happily ever after glow was going to last forever.
For days, it was all the girls could talk about. What Saffy couldn’t understand was why Tim would cheat in the first place.
“Doesn’t he know how horrible the dating scene is?” she asked. “What are the odds of finding someone who likes you back?”
“Six trillion to one!” said Amanda, who’s actually done the maths.
“It’s the jackpot!” Saffy sang like some gospel choir. “And he wants to give all that up? For what?”
“It just goes to show that you never can tell,” Amanda said.
“Men are stupid!” Saffy decided.
Of course, what worried the girls more was the fact that if two such perfectly matched people as Lynette and Tim couldn’t make it work, what hope was there for singletons like them? And more importantly, what was the point of all the dates they’d been subjecting themselves to, if the end result was an unhappy marriage?
“I’d be better off speaking French!” Saffy declared.
“Learning French, you mean,” Amanda said. She was rewarded with a Look.
“My point,” Saffy said with stiff dignity, “is that we might as well all just stop dating. It’s pointless. I don’t want to torture myself every Friday night, primping, waxing, exfoliating, getting dressed and going on a date only to have it all end up in a divorce court!”
“Oh, they’re not getting divorced,” I piped up. “They’re getting marriage counseling. Tim told me at lunch.”
Both heads swiveled around in my direction. “You’re having lunch with that cheating prick?” Saffy asked, her bosom heaving.
“Hey, there are two sides to this, you know,” I said stoutly.
“That’s such a cop-out! You don’t go have an affair just because you have marriage problems!” Amanda said.
“That’s so typical of you men, always sticking together even when you’re clearly in the wrong,” Saffy sniffed.
The latest is that Lynette is making Tim get a blood test to check for any nasty sexually transmitted diseases, but Amanda says he should also be taking an IQ test. Meanwhile, Saffy has signed up for French lessons. “Je suis not taking any chances,” she told the bewildered woman at Alliance Francaise.
My sister Michelle especially loved the fairy tales where the princess marries the prince and lives happily ever after. “One day,” she told me very seriously when she was eight, “one day, I’m going to marry Prince Charming! And then he’s going to lock Mummy up in a dark prison!”
To which our mother, who’s always had the sensitive hearing of a bat, shouted from the kitchen, “Not if I get to him first!” Not surprisingly, Michelle would grow up blaming Mother for all her social inadequacies. “If I die a lonely spinster, it will be all her fault!”
But the one thing fairy tales never really tell you is just what exactly happens after the “happily ever after” bit. Did Snow White get bored of her sex life with the Prince and have an affair with one of the dwarves? (This would be the cue for my mother to tell you about the live sex floor show she once saw in Amsterdam featuring a transvestite Snow White and seven real life dwarves.) Did Sleeping Beauty turn out to be a nagging shrew and divorce her good for nothing Prince?
For some reason, all these questions raced around my head as I listened to our friend Lynette sob on our couch. Her husband Tim, it seemed, was having an affair with his secretary.
What made the revelation all the more shocking was we’d always thought Lynette and Tim were the golden couple. They were the ones we all aspired to be one day. They were high-school sweethearts. Married when they were 24. Three children by the time they were 28. He, a devastatingly handsome and successful lawyer. She, a gorgeous high flying banker.
“I want to have children with that man,” Saffy drunkenly told everyone at her table at Tim’s wedding. “Heck, pour me another gin and tonic, and I’d have children with that woman, too!”
“They’re going to have such beautiful children,” Amanda predicted without a single note of jealousy in her voice.
Which is why news of Tim’s affair struck not just Lynette, but it wounded my flatmates. For here was absolute proof that landing the man of your dreams was no guarantee that the happily ever after glow was going to last forever.
For days, it was all the girls could talk about. What Saffy couldn’t understand was why Tim would cheat in the first place.
“Doesn’t he know how horrible the dating scene is?” she asked. “What are the odds of finding someone who likes you back?”
“Six trillion to one!” said Amanda, who’s actually done the maths.
“It’s the jackpot!” Saffy sang like some gospel choir. “And he wants to give all that up? For what?”
“It just goes to show that you never can tell,” Amanda said.
“Men are stupid!” Saffy decided.
Of course, what worried the girls more was the fact that if two such perfectly matched people as Lynette and Tim couldn’t make it work, what hope was there for singletons like them? And more importantly, what was the point of all the dates they’d been subjecting themselves to, if the end result was an unhappy marriage?
“I’d be better off speaking French!” Saffy declared.
“Learning French, you mean,” Amanda said. She was rewarded with a Look.
“My point,” Saffy said with stiff dignity, “is that we might as well all just stop dating. It’s pointless. I don’t want to torture myself every Friday night, primping, waxing, exfoliating, getting dressed and going on a date only to have it all end up in a divorce court!”
“Oh, they’re not getting divorced,” I piped up. “They’re getting marriage counseling. Tim told me at lunch.”
Both heads swiveled around in my direction. “You’re having lunch with that cheating prick?” Saffy asked, her bosom heaving.
“Hey, there are two sides to this, you know,” I said stoutly.
“That’s such a cop-out! You don’t go have an affair just because you have marriage problems!” Amanda said.
“That’s so typical of you men, always sticking together even when you’re clearly in the wrong,” Saffy sniffed.
The latest is that Lynette is making Tim get a blood test to check for any nasty sexually transmitted diseases, but Amanda says he should also be taking an IQ test. Meanwhile, Saffy has signed up for French lessons. “Je suis not taking any chances,” she told the bewildered woman at Alliance Francaise.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Vege Might
A few months ago at dinner, Saffy looked up from her bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and announced that she was going to become a vegetarian.
Her statement was greeted with the kind of scepticism that must have greeted Jesus when he said he was going out for a stroll on the sea.
“Why?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t last a week,” Amanda predicted.
“I love how supportive you are!” Saffy said stiffly.
“No, really, why?” I asked.
Saffy’s bosom shifted slowly as she thought. “Well, I read somewhere that eating beef is really bad for the environment. Apparently they fart a lot and all that gas is choking us to death!”
Amanda later said that if Saffy had been involved with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, that movie would have sunk under the weight of her sloppy research.
“Not eating beef isn’t going to save the planet!” she sniffed with all the disdain that a Harvard law degree can generate. To which Saffy replied that if Amanda had to kill a cow to get her hamburger, she’d be a vegetarian too.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” Amanda exclaimed. “What about vegetables?”
Saffy blinked. “What about them?”
“Well, you’re killing a carrot when you uproot it! Does that mean you can’t eat vegetables too?”
Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Vegetables don’t have feelings!”
Amanda snorted. “Just because they don’t moo or cluck or bleat doesn’t mean vegetables don’t feel things. It’s probably more traumatic to rip an onion from the ground than it is to put a bullet between a cow’s eyes!”
As I later said to Karl, if that horrific image didn’t make me want to become a vegetarian myself, I didn’t know what would.
As it was, Saffy said she didn’t care what anyone thought. She was going to give vegetarianism a go. And so, the next night, she struggled home from Cold Storage with bags of broccoli, spinach, tofu and tins of beans.
“Beans?” Amanda whispered to me. “She’ll be farting the whole night!”
I looked at all the food spread out over the kitchen counter. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Saf?” I asked. “Going cold turkey, pardon the expression, may not be the wisest thing to do, you know.”
“I’m doing this for the cows,” Saffy said.
“But it doesn’t make sense! Whether you eat them or not, they’re still going to be around and farting into the atmosphere.”
“Only if we keep breeding them for food! If we stop eating them, then they’ll all die off naturally and we’ll have a cow-free world!”
“So, you’d rather they went extinct?”
Saffy shrugged. “Better them than me!”
For days, her strange but oddly compelling logic haunted me and for a brief moment, I too flirted with the idea of making a vegan-burger a lifestyle choice. But by then, Saffy had turned into a raving lunatic.
Her body, so used to its daily infusion of char-siew, beef rendang, chicken tikka and sop kambing, and now so suddenly deprived, began turning on her. She trembled and became grumpier by the day and her eyes took on a glazed sheen whenever the perfume of fried chicken wings from our neighbour Lydia Kumarasamy’s kitchen wafted in through our window. She even began looking at the food bowl of Pooch, my beloved adopted mongrel dog, in a way that made him so nervous that he would gulp down his dinner of minced beef and rice with both eyes cocked in her direction.
“You’re giving that dog indigestion!” Amanda said one day.
“I think I’m hallucinating,” Saffy murmured. “Pooch keeps transforming into a hot dog!”
Which got us all so concerned that I took Pooch with me everywhere, even into the toilet. “I’m not letting him out of my sight!” I reported to Karl.
And of course, Amanda and I began eating our meals in hawker centres. We didn’t know what would happen if we ever unwrapped a packet of chicken rice in front of Saffy.
The breaking point occurred when Saffy was aimlessly flipping TV channels and suddenly, Nigella Lawson came on. “Now, I love spring!” Nigella chirruped in her provocatively posh English accent. “And for me, nothing says spring more than a juicy roast leg of lamb!”
Hypnotised, Saffy watched Nigella stuff the leg with garlic and herbs and by the time it emerged from the oven, brown and sizzling, she was dialing McDonalds.
“I told you it wouldn’t last,” Amanda said smugly. But I’m not taking any chances.
My bedroom door is still locked while Pooch is tucked in with me in bed.
Her statement was greeted with the kind of scepticism that must have greeted Jesus when he said he was going out for a stroll on the sea.
“Why?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t last a week,” Amanda predicted.
“I love how supportive you are!” Saffy said stiffly.
“No, really, why?” I asked.
Saffy’s bosom shifted slowly as she thought. “Well, I read somewhere that eating beef is really bad for the environment. Apparently they fart a lot and all that gas is choking us to death!”
Amanda later said that if Saffy had been involved with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, that movie would have sunk under the weight of her sloppy research.
“Not eating beef isn’t going to save the planet!” she sniffed with all the disdain that a Harvard law degree can generate. To which Saffy replied that if Amanda had to kill a cow to get her hamburger, she’d be a vegetarian too.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” Amanda exclaimed. “What about vegetables?”
Saffy blinked. “What about them?”
“Well, you’re killing a carrot when you uproot it! Does that mean you can’t eat vegetables too?”
Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Vegetables don’t have feelings!”
Amanda snorted. “Just because they don’t moo or cluck or bleat doesn’t mean vegetables don’t feel things. It’s probably more traumatic to rip an onion from the ground than it is to put a bullet between a cow’s eyes!”
As I later said to Karl, if that horrific image didn’t make me want to become a vegetarian myself, I didn’t know what would.
As it was, Saffy said she didn’t care what anyone thought. She was going to give vegetarianism a go. And so, the next night, she struggled home from Cold Storage with bags of broccoli, spinach, tofu and tins of beans.
“Beans?” Amanda whispered to me. “She’ll be farting the whole night!”
I looked at all the food spread out over the kitchen counter. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Saf?” I asked. “Going cold turkey, pardon the expression, may not be the wisest thing to do, you know.”
“I’m doing this for the cows,” Saffy said.
“But it doesn’t make sense! Whether you eat them or not, they’re still going to be around and farting into the atmosphere.”
“Only if we keep breeding them for food! If we stop eating them, then they’ll all die off naturally and we’ll have a cow-free world!”
“So, you’d rather they went extinct?”
Saffy shrugged. “Better them than me!”
For days, her strange but oddly compelling logic haunted me and for a brief moment, I too flirted with the idea of making a vegan-burger a lifestyle choice. But by then, Saffy had turned into a raving lunatic.
Her body, so used to its daily infusion of char-siew, beef rendang, chicken tikka and sop kambing, and now so suddenly deprived, began turning on her. She trembled and became grumpier by the day and her eyes took on a glazed sheen whenever the perfume of fried chicken wings from our neighbour Lydia Kumarasamy’s kitchen wafted in through our window. She even began looking at the food bowl of Pooch, my beloved adopted mongrel dog, in a way that made him so nervous that he would gulp down his dinner of minced beef and rice with both eyes cocked in her direction.
“You’re giving that dog indigestion!” Amanda said one day.
“I think I’m hallucinating,” Saffy murmured. “Pooch keeps transforming into a hot dog!”
Which got us all so concerned that I took Pooch with me everywhere, even into the toilet. “I’m not letting him out of my sight!” I reported to Karl.
And of course, Amanda and I began eating our meals in hawker centres. We didn’t know what would happen if we ever unwrapped a packet of chicken rice in front of Saffy.
The breaking point occurred when Saffy was aimlessly flipping TV channels and suddenly, Nigella Lawson came on. “Now, I love spring!” Nigella chirruped in her provocatively posh English accent. “And for me, nothing says spring more than a juicy roast leg of lamb!”
Hypnotised, Saffy watched Nigella stuff the leg with garlic and herbs and by the time it emerged from the oven, brown and sizzling, she was dialing McDonalds.
“I told you it wouldn’t last,” Amanda said smugly. But I’m not taking any chances.
My bedroom door is still locked while Pooch is tucked in with me in bed.
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