Is it possible that we’ve just reached the tenth season of “American Idol”? I can’t believe I’ve been watching this show for ten years now. Which if you stop to think about it for a bit, actually adds up to a whole lot of time.
Let’s see. Each season has about 42 episodes of an hour each. (And before anyone jumps down my throat, yes, I have factored in the fact that the bumper audition episodes at the beginning of the season kind of get evened out for the shorter elimination episodes.)
So that makes it a grand total of 420 hours of my life that I’ve spent sitting in front of the television, gripped by the human drama of big dreams, middling to awesome talent, shredded nerves and plenty of acid putdowns by Simon Cowell.
And 420 hours works out to nearly 18 days of non-stop television.
For which I have been paid…nothing. And that’s just one show. If I added up all the hours I’ve spent over a lifetime of watching TV, I could have learnt to speak fluent Eskimo, Swahili and Tagalog by now.
Meanwhile, Simon Cowell has made hundreds of millions of dollars, and I’m still living in a tiny flat with two girls and an increasingly neurotic dog.
And yet, somehow, none of this matters much as I settle down each Wednesday and Thursday night and that familiar theme song and flashy graphics slide across my screen and Ryan Seacrest says, “This is Aaaaa-MER-ican Idol!”
The auditions this year have been entertaining in a kind of bad comedy way. Simon isn’t around anymore, so the whole thing seems a bit tamer. I miss his foul temper, eye-rolling and exasperation.
But the upside is the fun of watching new judge Steve Tyler and wondering just how much plastic surgery he’s had.
“You think?” Saffy asked the other night as the man flirted madly with a girl half his age.
“Oh, totally!”Amanda said firmly. “Just look how tight the area around his eyes is.”
Saffy sighed. “He is such a dirty old lecher! I can’t believe this man produced that gorgeous Liv Tyler. And yet, I'm madly attracted to him. How is that possible?”
But the biggest surprise has been the other new judge, Jennifer Lopez. Until “American Idol” came along, I’d never really given the woman a second’s thought, but now, with each episode, I find myself unaccountably adoring her.
“You’ve never given J. Lo a second’s thought?” my best friend Karl said. He looked astonished. “Are you crazy? She has always rocked!”
“Well, what I mean is that I’ve never thought of her in a human kind of way. She’s always been this, you know, super glam unapproachable super star who appears on MTV and Gucci ads. But in the show, her fun side comes through.”
“She’s so sweet. I want to marry her!” Karl growled. “She’s the only reason I’m watching.”
And that was the word I was looking for: Sweet. The woman sits there, hair immaculately done, perfectly made up and wearing more money than some people make in a year, and somehow she comes across as…sweet.
And she does it so much better than Paula Abdul ever did. As Saffy puts it, Paula always had this scared look on her face which Amanda said was probably caused by an over-tight face lift before adding that it was clear that Jennifer Lopez was all natural.
“She’s authentic!” Amanda pronounced, sounding remarkably like Oprah.
“I’m sure it’s all an act,” Saffy said. “No one can look like that pretty and still be so nice!”
Amanda coughed discretely, but Saffy with her notoriously short attention span had already moved on.
“Can we also talk about how cute Ryan Seacrest is? I seriously don’t think he’s aged at all. I wish we could establish once and for all which team he bats on!”
“And how, having that information, is your life going to change?” Amanda demanded.
Saffy’s famous bosom inflated. “Well, at least if I know for sure he’s straight, then when I fantasize about him on cold lonely nights, I don’t get distracted by a sudden image of another man coming into the picture!”
Amanda pursed her lips. “Isn’t it odd how women don’t get all excited by the idea of two men together the way men get all hot under the collar about two women?”
Of course, that question now haunts us whenever Ryan Seacrest pops up on the screen to tell us about the AT+T and Cingular call charges when he wants America to vote.
The other night, as another tuneless contestant got onstage to sing, Saffy sighed, “We really need to get a life.”
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
Cooking the books
Until I moved out of home, I didn’t know how to cook. Could barely boil water, to be honest. I mean, in theory, I knew how to cook, but I never had the nerve to actually turn on the gas and start stirring.
It’s kind of like if you’ve seen someone like Spiderman leap across gaps in tall buildings a million times, you kind of know how it’s done, but that doesn’t mean if a gap ever presented itself, you’d have the nerve to actually jump it.
But then the day after I moved out – basically, moved countries to Singapore to be precise – I found myself standing alone in my brightly lit, new but empty kitchen and looked at my lonely pan and the tin of tomatoes next to it. I’d gone to Cold Storage, looked at the rows and rows of food and panicked. I grabbed the nearest thing to the checkout – in this case, the tin of organic tomatoes – and made a run for it.
And now, in that quiet kitchen, I had no idea what to do next.
Years later, when I recounted the story to my best friend Karl, he said the exact same thing happened to him on his first visit to a porn shop when he went to London to study, but in his case, he grabbed something that he later discovered only worked if he was a woman.
“That’s the first thing you did when you went to London?” I asked. “You went to a porn shop?”
“That’s what happens when you grow up in a strict family! You do crazy things.”
That was some time ago. These days, I’m a reasonably competent cook. The other day, I even surprised myself and made a soufflé omelette.
My two flatmates, on the other hand, are like stunted tadpoles in the kitchen. Saffy once nearly burnt our kitchen down because it was a complete surprise to her that you needed to put water into the rice cooker. Amanda, who is a lawyer and therefore makes more money than most small African nations, operates under the assumption that money can buy not just Prada, but also a three-course dinner, so why bother even stepping foot into a kitchen unless it’s to say hello (and goodnight) to the chef?
And then a few days ago, during a very boring telephone conference call in the office, Amanda was idly surfing the net when she came across Jamie Oliver’s TV programme on YouTube.
As she later told us, she put the conference call on mute and spent the next hour and half glued to “30 Minute Meals”.
“It’s insane! The man makes a three-course dinner in thirty minutes! It’s all done in real time, too! I know, because I didn’t believe it, curse of a lawyer, and I set the timer on to test it, and it was bang on thirty. Incredible. Not that I would ever do it myself,” she added.
“I used to think he was super cute, but he’s put on so much weight!” Saffy said, managing to derail yet another conversation. “No, it’s true! Why are you two looking at me like that?”
None of which prepared Amanda and me when we came home last night to find the kitchen in a state of pandemonium. Every single pot we own was on the stove or in the sink. A colander had spewed half its pasta onto the floor while something was burning in the oven.
And in the middle of it all was an increasingly hysterical Saffy shouting at her laptop. From the kitchen door, I could just see the small YouTube image of Jamie Oliver scuttling about the kitchen yakking on about how beautiful the smell of balsamic vinegar was. “No, no, no, no!” Saffy yelled. “You said to put the heat on ‘full whack’! Those were your exact words and…and…then you said I had to put the tarts in the oven, but you didn’t say I had to keep an eye on the sauce…and…sniff!…everything is burnt now!”
“What are you doing?” Amanda said, somewhat unnecessarily.
“Cooking one of Jamie Oliver’s freaking 30 minute meals!” Saffy screamed. “I started two hours ago and the sauce is burnt to charcoal and the dessert is disintegrating in the oven and I still haven’t got to the salad!”
We pulled Saffy out of the kitchen and sat her down on the sofa with a super strong gin and tonic. It took us an hour to clean up the mess and in the background, Saffy kept muttering, “It’s a good thing I never bought his stupid cookbook! I’d be at Borders right now demanding a full refund!”
It’s kind of like if you’ve seen someone like Spiderman leap across gaps in tall buildings a million times, you kind of know how it’s done, but that doesn’t mean if a gap ever presented itself, you’d have the nerve to actually jump it.
But then the day after I moved out – basically, moved countries to Singapore to be precise – I found myself standing alone in my brightly lit, new but empty kitchen and looked at my lonely pan and the tin of tomatoes next to it. I’d gone to Cold Storage, looked at the rows and rows of food and panicked. I grabbed the nearest thing to the checkout – in this case, the tin of organic tomatoes – and made a run for it.
And now, in that quiet kitchen, I had no idea what to do next.
Years later, when I recounted the story to my best friend Karl, he said the exact same thing happened to him on his first visit to a porn shop when he went to London to study, but in his case, he grabbed something that he later discovered only worked if he was a woman.
“That’s the first thing you did when you went to London?” I asked. “You went to a porn shop?”
“That’s what happens when you grow up in a strict family! You do crazy things.”
That was some time ago. These days, I’m a reasonably competent cook. The other day, I even surprised myself and made a soufflé omelette.
My two flatmates, on the other hand, are like stunted tadpoles in the kitchen. Saffy once nearly burnt our kitchen down because it was a complete surprise to her that you needed to put water into the rice cooker. Amanda, who is a lawyer and therefore makes more money than most small African nations, operates under the assumption that money can buy not just Prada, but also a three-course dinner, so why bother even stepping foot into a kitchen unless it’s to say hello (and goodnight) to the chef?
And then a few days ago, during a very boring telephone conference call in the office, Amanda was idly surfing the net when she came across Jamie Oliver’s TV programme on YouTube.
As she later told us, she put the conference call on mute and spent the next hour and half glued to “30 Minute Meals”.
“It’s insane! The man makes a three-course dinner in thirty minutes! It’s all done in real time, too! I know, because I didn’t believe it, curse of a lawyer, and I set the timer on to test it, and it was bang on thirty. Incredible. Not that I would ever do it myself,” she added.
“I used to think he was super cute, but he’s put on so much weight!” Saffy said, managing to derail yet another conversation. “No, it’s true! Why are you two looking at me like that?”
None of which prepared Amanda and me when we came home last night to find the kitchen in a state of pandemonium. Every single pot we own was on the stove or in the sink. A colander had spewed half its pasta onto the floor while something was burning in the oven.
And in the middle of it all was an increasingly hysterical Saffy shouting at her laptop. From the kitchen door, I could just see the small YouTube image of Jamie Oliver scuttling about the kitchen yakking on about how beautiful the smell of balsamic vinegar was. “No, no, no, no!” Saffy yelled. “You said to put the heat on ‘full whack’! Those were your exact words and…and…then you said I had to put the tarts in the oven, but you didn’t say I had to keep an eye on the sauce…and…sniff!…everything is burnt now!”
“What are you doing?” Amanda said, somewhat unnecessarily.
“Cooking one of Jamie Oliver’s freaking 30 minute meals!” Saffy screamed. “I started two hours ago and the sauce is burnt to charcoal and the dessert is disintegrating in the oven and I still haven’t got to the salad!”
We pulled Saffy out of the kitchen and sat her down on the sofa with a super strong gin and tonic. It took us an hour to clean up the mess and in the background, Saffy kept muttering, “It’s a good thing I never bought his stupid cookbook! I’d be at Borders right now demanding a full refund!”
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Law and Order
Growing up, I was so envious of other people’s mothers.
Paul Henshall’s mother used to bake him fresh chocolate chip cookies on Mondays and brownies on Thursdays. Walter Szymakowski’s glamorous mink-coated Polish mother would show up each afternoon in her BMW to collect him. And when David Cunningham got caught for shoplifting (a bar of chewing gum from our local newsagent), his mother sat him down and had a long heart to heart conversation with him.
It seemed to me that everywhere I turned, I encountered mothers who seemed so cool and understanding.
My mother, on the other hand, was a benign tyrant who saw nothing wrong with cracking the cane, all without pausing a moment in her daily mahjong session. And as my sister Michelle said when David Cunningham got nicked, if that had happened to one of us, Mother would have thrashed us to within an inch of our lives. And then Father would have taken over.
Once, when my brother Jack was getting a beating for failing his mid-term Maths exam, Mother said, over his bleating yelps, that the beating was hurting her more than it was him. “We only want the best for you, and the best will not happen if you fail exams!” she said. Michelle later said she could have sworn that while Mother was administering the beating, she was admiring her new 10-carat diamond ring that was our father’s 15th wedding anniversary present to her.
Years later, she would say it was an absolute miracle that the three of us grew up to be as normal and well-adjusted as we had. “Why, we could so easily have turned out to be homicidal maniacs! You read about this kind of thing all the time in the newspapers!”
There’s a new book out by Amy Chua, an American Yale law professor, called ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’. To save you from buying and reading the book, its basic message is that Asian kids do so much better in school and in life because of tough love, Chinese parent-style. No molly-coddling and excuses. Failure is met by punishment. “An A-minus is not a good grade!” she trumpets.
By various means of discipline and military supervision, Chua forced all her children to become top of their class in every subject, but relaxed her rules when it came to drama and gym. For instance, she once made her daughter practice a difficult piano piece for 10 hours without a bathroom break. Apparently, the kid ended up winning the piano competition and was forever grateful to her mother.
But then the kid would say that, wouldn’t she? I mean, if she had said what she was really thinking, which was probably: “Because my psycho Chinese mother forced me to learn how to play that bloody Bach sonata, I now have a life-threatening urinary tract infection”, can you imagine the domestic consequences?
Meanwhile, Western parents are apparently appalled by Professor Chua’s book. Some actually think it’s a literary prank. But here’s the thing, when I heard about the book, I thought, “What’s the big deal? That’s how my mother forced me to learn my multiplication tables”: Through a combination of abject terror (the cane), self-preservation (“You are not having dinner if you can’t recite the eight times table!”) and sheer repetitive boredom (seriously, after you said “eight times eight is sixty-four” for the fiftieth time, it’s not likely you’re ever going to forget it again in a real hurry).
This might also explain why I was able to carve out a reasonably successful career as a lawyer. Remembering the details of those numerous torturous law cases was never much of a problem for me.
As for Jack, he ended up being the youngest vice-president in the history of his bank. Turns out he actually likes numbers.
Meanwhile, Michelle, forced by Mother to learn French in school (“It’s the most stupid language!” she once screamed at Mother just before her exam on subjunctive tenses), has, to the envy of all her friends, only ever dated sexy gorgeous French men and she gets the best service every time she walks into Louis Vuitton in Paris.
Just the other day, I caught up with an old school friend on Facebook and, of course, I asked him whatever happened to our pals. “Well,” he wrote back, “Walter Szymakowski is a second rate drag queen in Sydney, David Cunningham is in gaol for embezzeling and Paul Henshall just had a stomach bypass after he got so fat he literally couldn’t fit through his front door! I don’t know what the hell happened to those guys!”
I do. They didn’t have a tyrannical Chinese mother like Amy Chua. We did.
Paul Henshall’s mother used to bake him fresh chocolate chip cookies on Mondays and brownies on Thursdays. Walter Szymakowski’s glamorous mink-coated Polish mother would show up each afternoon in her BMW to collect him. And when David Cunningham got caught for shoplifting (a bar of chewing gum from our local newsagent), his mother sat him down and had a long heart to heart conversation with him.
It seemed to me that everywhere I turned, I encountered mothers who seemed so cool and understanding.
My mother, on the other hand, was a benign tyrant who saw nothing wrong with cracking the cane, all without pausing a moment in her daily mahjong session. And as my sister Michelle said when David Cunningham got nicked, if that had happened to one of us, Mother would have thrashed us to within an inch of our lives. And then Father would have taken over.
Once, when my brother Jack was getting a beating for failing his mid-term Maths exam, Mother said, over his bleating yelps, that the beating was hurting her more than it was him. “We only want the best for you, and the best will not happen if you fail exams!” she said. Michelle later said she could have sworn that while Mother was administering the beating, she was admiring her new 10-carat diamond ring that was our father’s 15th wedding anniversary present to her.
Years later, she would say it was an absolute miracle that the three of us grew up to be as normal and well-adjusted as we had. “Why, we could so easily have turned out to be homicidal maniacs! You read about this kind of thing all the time in the newspapers!”
There’s a new book out by Amy Chua, an American Yale law professor, called ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’. To save you from buying and reading the book, its basic message is that Asian kids do so much better in school and in life because of tough love, Chinese parent-style. No molly-coddling and excuses. Failure is met by punishment. “An A-minus is not a good grade!” she trumpets.
By various means of discipline and military supervision, Chua forced all her children to become top of their class in every subject, but relaxed her rules when it came to drama and gym. For instance, she once made her daughter practice a difficult piano piece for 10 hours without a bathroom break. Apparently, the kid ended up winning the piano competition and was forever grateful to her mother.
But then the kid would say that, wouldn’t she? I mean, if she had said what she was really thinking, which was probably: “Because my psycho Chinese mother forced me to learn how to play that bloody Bach sonata, I now have a life-threatening urinary tract infection”, can you imagine the domestic consequences?
Meanwhile, Western parents are apparently appalled by Professor Chua’s book. Some actually think it’s a literary prank. But here’s the thing, when I heard about the book, I thought, “What’s the big deal? That’s how my mother forced me to learn my multiplication tables”: Through a combination of abject terror (the cane), self-preservation (“You are not having dinner if you can’t recite the eight times table!”) and sheer repetitive boredom (seriously, after you said “eight times eight is sixty-four” for the fiftieth time, it’s not likely you’re ever going to forget it again in a real hurry).
This might also explain why I was able to carve out a reasonably successful career as a lawyer. Remembering the details of those numerous torturous law cases was never much of a problem for me.
As for Jack, he ended up being the youngest vice-president in the history of his bank. Turns out he actually likes numbers.
Meanwhile, Michelle, forced by Mother to learn French in school (“It’s the most stupid language!” she once screamed at Mother just before her exam on subjunctive tenses), has, to the envy of all her friends, only ever dated sexy gorgeous French men and she gets the best service every time she walks into Louis Vuitton in Paris.
Just the other day, I caught up with an old school friend on Facebook and, of course, I asked him whatever happened to our pals. “Well,” he wrote back, “Walter Szymakowski is a second rate drag queen in Sydney, David Cunningham is in gaol for embezzeling and Paul Henshall just had a stomach bypass after he got so fat he literally couldn’t fit through his front door! I don’t know what the hell happened to those guys!”
I do. They didn’t have a tyrannical Chinese mother like Amy Chua. We did.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Second Chances
If you ever needed proof that men and women come from different planets, look no further than my friend Joanne.
A year ago, Joanne was happily engaged to Wen, a rising banker in an investment bank that couldn’t have been too badly hurt in the financial crisis because it was still giving out healthy bonuses – some of which ended up on Joanne’s neck in the form of sparkling diamonds.
“My God, he gave you Tiffany princess cut diamonds for your birthday?” Amanda said when she bumped into Joanne at the Ion.
“Aren’t they pretty?” Joanne said. “Eighteen carats, some more!”
“I hate her,” Saffy said that night. “How did she manage to hook such a smoking hot rich banker? Meanwhile, I’m still spending my Saturday nights dancing at St James with you two!”
As Amanda later said to me, she should have felt outraged at Saffy’s insult, but she just couldn’t find the energy to disagree. “It’s so depressing.”
You can imagine the frisson of excitement that swept through our little flat when a few months later, Joanne called Saffy and told her in ascending notes of hysteria that she and Wen had broken up.
“He was two-timing her with the sister of his brother’s best friend!” Saffy reported the minute she got off the phone with Joanne.
“At least it wasn’t with the mother of his brother’s best friend!” Amanda said with a pinch on her pretty face as she remembered the saga involving one of her ex-boyfriends.
“What gets me is why, if you were fooling around with someone else, you would even bother to give your girlfriend such expensive diamonds?” I asked.
“According to Wen, that other woman was just a mistake,” Saffy replied with the kind of authority that comes only after years of practicing relationship post-mortems, “and that Joanne was really the one he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. But Joanne isn’t buying it for a second because the day he gave her those diamonds, he’d just come back from a romantic weekend with the other woman in Bangkok! So clearly, the diamonds were a guilt buy!”
Amanda gasped. “Men!”
The following months followed the predictable course whenever girlfriends suffer a traumatic experience. It was an intense period of tears and maudlin dissections of the failed relationship as Joanne waded through the pain while Saffy and Amanda rose magnificently to the occasion as priestly confessors.
“So now, Joanne is looking at all the presents Wen’s given her over the years with suspicion,” Saffy said grimly. “She thinks they may all have been given right after he’d seen the other woman.”
“Assuming it’s the same woman!” Amanda added darkly.
A year has since passed and Joanne still bears the end of the relationship with stoic calm. Through mutual friends, she gets updates on Wen though Saffy and Amanda have tried to tempt her with other men. But no one was prepared by the recent bombshell delivered, by of all people, the woman Wen had cheated on Joanne with – the sister of Wen’s best friend.
Apparently, they’d bumped into one another in Gucci and the sister had suddenly burst into tears right next to the latest handbag collection.
Within an hour, I was getting text messages from Saffy and Amanda.
“OMG!” said Saffy’s message. “Guess wot?”
“OMG!” Amanda’s message pinged. “Wen is engaged to his sister’s best fren! He was cheating on the girl he cheated on Joanne with!!”
Needless to say, Joanne is devastated. “All this time, I was hoping he’d come to his senses and come back to me!” she wailed.
Saffy is impressed that while Joanne was pining for Wen, not only had he dumped the second woman, he’d met a third woman and convinced her, in less than half a year, to marry him.
“I cannot believe he moved on so quickly!” she said. “It’s only been a year since they broke up! How do you guys do it?”
“It’s like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie all over again!” Amanda said, a Hollywood parallel never far from her imagination.
“What about me?” Joanne shouted the other night during a speaker-call with Saffy and Amanda. “That bastard! I need a man, too! I need some loving! Do you know it’s been a year since I’ve been with anyone? I have needs!”
At which point, Saffy put the call on mute and turned to Amanda. “Seriously, I haven’t been with a man for two years, but do you see me making such a song and dance about it?”
“Some people can be so self-absorbed,” Amanda agreed.
“Hello?” Joanne’s static voice asked. “Are you girls still there?”
A year ago, Joanne was happily engaged to Wen, a rising banker in an investment bank that couldn’t have been too badly hurt in the financial crisis because it was still giving out healthy bonuses – some of which ended up on Joanne’s neck in the form of sparkling diamonds.
“My God, he gave you Tiffany princess cut diamonds for your birthday?” Amanda said when she bumped into Joanne at the Ion.
“Aren’t they pretty?” Joanne said. “Eighteen carats, some more!”
“I hate her,” Saffy said that night. “How did she manage to hook such a smoking hot rich banker? Meanwhile, I’m still spending my Saturday nights dancing at St James with you two!”
As Amanda later said to me, she should have felt outraged at Saffy’s insult, but she just couldn’t find the energy to disagree. “It’s so depressing.”
You can imagine the frisson of excitement that swept through our little flat when a few months later, Joanne called Saffy and told her in ascending notes of hysteria that she and Wen had broken up.
“He was two-timing her with the sister of his brother’s best friend!” Saffy reported the minute she got off the phone with Joanne.
“At least it wasn’t with the mother of his brother’s best friend!” Amanda said with a pinch on her pretty face as she remembered the saga involving one of her ex-boyfriends.
“What gets me is why, if you were fooling around with someone else, you would even bother to give your girlfriend such expensive diamonds?” I asked.
“According to Wen, that other woman was just a mistake,” Saffy replied with the kind of authority that comes only after years of practicing relationship post-mortems, “and that Joanne was really the one he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. But Joanne isn’t buying it for a second because the day he gave her those diamonds, he’d just come back from a romantic weekend with the other woman in Bangkok! So clearly, the diamonds were a guilt buy!”
Amanda gasped. “Men!”
The following months followed the predictable course whenever girlfriends suffer a traumatic experience. It was an intense period of tears and maudlin dissections of the failed relationship as Joanne waded through the pain while Saffy and Amanda rose magnificently to the occasion as priestly confessors.
“So now, Joanne is looking at all the presents Wen’s given her over the years with suspicion,” Saffy said grimly. “She thinks they may all have been given right after he’d seen the other woman.”
“Assuming it’s the same woman!” Amanda added darkly.
A year has since passed and Joanne still bears the end of the relationship with stoic calm. Through mutual friends, she gets updates on Wen though Saffy and Amanda have tried to tempt her with other men. But no one was prepared by the recent bombshell delivered, by of all people, the woman Wen had cheated on Joanne with – the sister of Wen’s best friend.
Apparently, they’d bumped into one another in Gucci and the sister had suddenly burst into tears right next to the latest handbag collection.
Within an hour, I was getting text messages from Saffy and Amanda.
“OMG!” said Saffy’s message. “Guess wot?”
“OMG!” Amanda’s message pinged. “Wen is engaged to his sister’s best fren! He was cheating on the girl he cheated on Joanne with!!”
Needless to say, Joanne is devastated. “All this time, I was hoping he’d come to his senses and come back to me!” she wailed.
Saffy is impressed that while Joanne was pining for Wen, not only had he dumped the second woman, he’d met a third woman and convinced her, in less than half a year, to marry him.
“I cannot believe he moved on so quickly!” she said. “It’s only been a year since they broke up! How do you guys do it?”
“It’s like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie all over again!” Amanda said, a Hollywood parallel never far from her imagination.
“What about me?” Joanne shouted the other night during a speaker-call with Saffy and Amanda. “That bastard! I need a man, too! I need some loving! Do you know it’s been a year since I’ve been with anyone? I have needs!”
At which point, Saffy put the call on mute and turned to Amanda. “Seriously, I haven’t been with a man for two years, but do you see me making such a song and dance about it?”
“Some people can be so self-absorbed,” Amanda agreed.
“Hello?” Joanne’s static voice asked. “Are you girls still there?”
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Weight Watching
As part of their new year’s resolutions, my flatmates Saffy and Amanda have embarked on a diet. I’m not exactly sure what this diet is called, but it involves a lot of carrots and celeries.
“Apparently, a celery stick has no calories at all!” Saffy said the other day as she crunched with great energy. “In fact, you burn up more calories just by chewing the stuff! It’s wonderful. All the top models do it!”
“But why are you trying to lose weight? You’re not fat!” I said.
As Saffy later posted on Facebook, it’s comments like this that illustrate the vast gulf between men and women: “When it comes to weight, you can never trust the opinion of a guy!”The post excited a lot of comments, the quality of which ranged from probing (“Yar, lor!” from Sharyn) to sublimely sexist (“Can u post before and after pix?” from Karl).
For women, the act of losing weight is a sacred event. They approach it with the kind of dedication and focused single-mindedness you rarely see outside of an episode of “America’s Next Top Model”. The actual loss of weight is an event that ranks way up there with a High Holy Holiday.
Amanda says the whole weight loss drama is all the fault of men.
“Do you think I’m starving myself just so that I can fit into a size one dress?” she asked rhetorically recently, while chewing slowly on a crusty, day old slice of bread with nothing on it. She’d read somewhere that chewing slowly helps trick the mind into thinking that it’s eating a lot, so you get full quickly on very little.
“No, I don’t,” she went on. “I starve myself so I can fit into a size one dress in the hope that some worthless guy will find me attractive enough to ask me out on a date. If my whole life wasn’t genetically coded to finding a man, marrying him and having children just so I can stop listening to my parents bitch and moan about how all their friends’ children are married with children, I would be eating corn chips for breakfast, I’d be the size of a tip truck and I’d be wearing sweat pants all day!”
The idea of Amanda in sweat pants occupied us for days. Saffy said that she didn’t even think Amanda had anything in her wardrobe that remotely resembled sweat pants. “It continually astonishes me that she has such a tough time landing a guy. I mean look at her!” she exclaimed, her magnificent bosom swelling with incredulity and added, staring at me accusingly, “You could lose a few kilos yourself, you know!”
Meanwhile, the dieting continues. Six times a day, before and after each meal, the girls weigh themselves and laboriously record the results on a clipboard.
“I’ve lost 20 grams!” Amanda said with great triumph the other day. “Another fifty grams, and I’ll officially be a size two!”
“It’s so unfair!” Saffy moaned. “I’ve gained half a kilo! How is that possible? I’ve just been eating celery sticks for days!”
Last night, we were watching a documentary on BBC about parasites and suddenly Saffy sat up on the couch.
“Oh! A tapeworm! That’s what I need, a tapeworm!”
From the corner of the room, my slumbering beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch lifted an eye and cocked his ear.
“What do you need a tapeworm for?” I asked.
“To lose weight, of course!” Saffy exclaimed. “If I ingest a tapeworm, it’ll basically sit in my digestive tracts and eat up all my food!”
Amanda frowned while I recoiled deeper into the couch. “You know,” she began, “you’ve come up with some really weird ideas, but this one is truly the grossest!”
“No, really, think about it! It just needs to hang around inside me for a week or so, and then I’ll just take a pill and flush it out!”
“Please don’t tell people I know you,” I begged.
But by now, Saffy was tripping happily in her parallel universe where she was as thin as Kate Moss and as popular with the boys as the new girl at a strip joint. “I wonder though where I would get a tapeworm! A hawker centre? No, the government would have been onto it like a tonne of bricks. They’re so disgustingly efficient, I can’t stand it.”
“Why don’t you try licking the sidewalk?” I said sarcastically.
Just then, Saffy looked up and turned towards Pooch. She had a gleam in her eyes.
Amanda and I said, at the same time, “Oh, you must be joking…”
“Apparently, a celery stick has no calories at all!” Saffy said the other day as she crunched with great energy. “In fact, you burn up more calories just by chewing the stuff! It’s wonderful. All the top models do it!”
“But why are you trying to lose weight? You’re not fat!” I said.
As Saffy later posted on Facebook, it’s comments like this that illustrate the vast gulf between men and women: “When it comes to weight, you can never trust the opinion of a guy!”The post excited a lot of comments, the quality of which ranged from probing (“Yar, lor!” from Sharyn) to sublimely sexist (“Can u post before and after pix?” from Karl).
For women, the act of losing weight is a sacred event. They approach it with the kind of dedication and focused single-mindedness you rarely see outside of an episode of “America’s Next Top Model”. The actual loss of weight is an event that ranks way up there with a High Holy Holiday.
Amanda says the whole weight loss drama is all the fault of men.
“Do you think I’m starving myself just so that I can fit into a size one dress?” she asked rhetorically recently, while chewing slowly on a crusty, day old slice of bread with nothing on it. She’d read somewhere that chewing slowly helps trick the mind into thinking that it’s eating a lot, so you get full quickly on very little.
“No, I don’t,” she went on. “I starve myself so I can fit into a size one dress in the hope that some worthless guy will find me attractive enough to ask me out on a date. If my whole life wasn’t genetically coded to finding a man, marrying him and having children just so I can stop listening to my parents bitch and moan about how all their friends’ children are married with children, I would be eating corn chips for breakfast, I’d be the size of a tip truck and I’d be wearing sweat pants all day!”
The idea of Amanda in sweat pants occupied us for days. Saffy said that she didn’t even think Amanda had anything in her wardrobe that remotely resembled sweat pants. “It continually astonishes me that she has such a tough time landing a guy. I mean look at her!” she exclaimed, her magnificent bosom swelling with incredulity and added, staring at me accusingly, “You could lose a few kilos yourself, you know!”
Meanwhile, the dieting continues. Six times a day, before and after each meal, the girls weigh themselves and laboriously record the results on a clipboard.
“I’ve lost 20 grams!” Amanda said with great triumph the other day. “Another fifty grams, and I’ll officially be a size two!”
“It’s so unfair!” Saffy moaned. “I’ve gained half a kilo! How is that possible? I’ve just been eating celery sticks for days!”
Last night, we were watching a documentary on BBC about parasites and suddenly Saffy sat up on the couch.
“Oh! A tapeworm! That’s what I need, a tapeworm!”
From the corner of the room, my slumbering beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch lifted an eye and cocked his ear.
“What do you need a tapeworm for?” I asked.
“To lose weight, of course!” Saffy exclaimed. “If I ingest a tapeworm, it’ll basically sit in my digestive tracts and eat up all my food!”
Amanda frowned while I recoiled deeper into the couch. “You know,” she began, “you’ve come up with some really weird ideas, but this one is truly the grossest!”
“No, really, think about it! It just needs to hang around inside me for a week or so, and then I’ll just take a pill and flush it out!”
“Please don’t tell people I know you,” I begged.
But by now, Saffy was tripping happily in her parallel universe where she was as thin as Kate Moss and as popular with the boys as the new girl at a strip joint. “I wonder though where I would get a tapeworm! A hawker centre? No, the government would have been onto it like a tonne of bricks. They’re so disgustingly efficient, I can’t stand it.”
“Why don’t you try licking the sidewalk?” I said sarcastically.
Just then, Saffy looked up and turned towards Pooch. She had a gleam in her eyes.
Amanda and I said, at the same time, “Oh, you must be joking…”
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
A Decent Proposal
My friend Janette recently embarked on a long distance relationship.
To hear her tell it, the whole thing is entirely uncharacteristic of her. “I don’t like surprises and long distance relationships are so risky, not to mention expensive!” she said recently over lunch, adding, “I like predictability and stability. It’s why I became a chartered accountant.”
Later, Saffy said it’s also why Janette has been single for so long. “Who dates chartered accountants?” she asked rhetorically, managing to both insult millions of otherwise inoffensive career number crunchers while completely side-stepping the fact that her own dating track-record has been far from earthshaking.
But back to my lunch.
Janette met Joshua at Zouk. “We were with different friends, and we were dancing on the dance floor and somehow he ended up stepping on my Jimmy Choo’s. It was so romantic!” she said. (“Who goes to Zouk these days, unless you’re a fetus?” Saffy asked.)
Amid the deafening thump-thump-thump of the music, Janette gave Joshua her phone number and went home that night to dream of their first kiss. The next day, he called, which, according to Saffy and Amanda, breaks every single rule of dating.
“You’re meant to wait at least three days!” Amanda said with disapproval in her voice.
“He was only in town for two days!” I pointed out.
“Then he should have called from Hong Kong. That shows he’s serious. If a guy calls you the very next day, it just means he wants only one thing from you, and it’s not going to be to borrow your ‘Mad Men’ box-set!”
Joshua asked Janette out for coffee. They did the usual exchange of CVs. He’s English, went to a posh boarding school and works in an American law firm in Hong Kong.
(“So, he’s filth!” Amanda said.
“That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?” I said.
“No, no. All caps. F-I-L-T-H. Failed in London, Try Hong Kong!"
“Janette says he’s a partner. And that he’s gorgeous.”
“So, why is he still single?” Saffy wanted to know. “He should have been snapped up by now by any number of Hong Kong SPGs. What’s wrong with him?”)
“We just clicked, you know?” Janette said as she picked delicately at her salad. “We like so many of the same things. He’s back in Singapore next week for work and we’ve been talking or texting every day. And the best part is that I’ve got that funny butterfly thing in my stomach every time I think about him. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve felt like that?”
That was six months ago. Since then, Janette has been heading up to Hong Kong every month, while Joshua pops down to Singapore every other weekend. A few days ago, on one of his visits, Janette threw a party at her home and finally introduced him to her friends.
The first thing Saffy said to us was: “Oh my God, she met him at Zouk? There are single straight guys that look like him at Zouk? Why are we not there more regularly?”
Amanda sighed into her gin and tonic. “Because every time we go, it’s just a bunch of post-high-school children. Maybe we leave too early?”
“It’s so unfair!” Saffy said as she sent a beady look beaming across Janette’s living room at Joshua who was cuddling Janette. You could tell Saffy was mentally inserting herself into his brawny tanned arms.
All of which has led me to conclude that dating is no different from playing the lottery. You could buy 4-D religiously every week for your whole life and have nothing to show for it except a pile of broken financial dreams. Then, one day, someone who’s never gambled in his life decides to try his luck on a single ticket and ends up winning $10m. None of it makes sense, and if you did try to make sense of it all, you’d probably go mad with anger and frustration.
A few days ago, Janette announced that she’s packing up and moving to Hong Kong.
You could practically hear Saffy’s scream across the island. “He’s proposed? Already?!”
“No, but Janette said it’s pretty clear that the relationship is going somewhere, so she might as well give it a go,” I said.
Janette’s news has fully occupied the girls’ attention for days now. A small part of them burns with jealousy, while a larger part is thrilled at the fairy tale romance quality of the relationship. As Amanda says, it’s proof that love can strike in the most unlikely of places and that there’s always hope. Just when you least expect it.
Which also explains why she and Saffy recently renewed their Zouk club membership.
To hear her tell it, the whole thing is entirely uncharacteristic of her. “I don’t like surprises and long distance relationships are so risky, not to mention expensive!” she said recently over lunch, adding, “I like predictability and stability. It’s why I became a chartered accountant.”
Later, Saffy said it’s also why Janette has been single for so long. “Who dates chartered accountants?” she asked rhetorically, managing to both insult millions of otherwise inoffensive career number crunchers while completely side-stepping the fact that her own dating track-record has been far from earthshaking.
But back to my lunch.
Janette met Joshua at Zouk. “We were with different friends, and we were dancing on the dance floor and somehow he ended up stepping on my Jimmy Choo’s. It was so romantic!” she said. (“Who goes to Zouk these days, unless you’re a fetus?” Saffy asked.)
Amid the deafening thump-thump-thump of the music, Janette gave Joshua her phone number and went home that night to dream of their first kiss. The next day, he called, which, according to Saffy and Amanda, breaks every single rule of dating.
“You’re meant to wait at least three days!” Amanda said with disapproval in her voice.
“He was only in town for two days!” I pointed out.
“Then he should have called from Hong Kong. That shows he’s serious. If a guy calls you the very next day, it just means he wants only one thing from you, and it’s not going to be to borrow your ‘Mad Men’ box-set!”
Joshua asked Janette out for coffee. They did the usual exchange of CVs. He’s English, went to a posh boarding school and works in an American law firm in Hong Kong.
(“So, he’s filth!” Amanda said.
“That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?” I said.
“No, no. All caps. F-I-L-T-H. Failed in London, Try Hong Kong!"
“Janette says he’s a partner. And that he’s gorgeous.”
“So, why is he still single?” Saffy wanted to know. “He should have been snapped up by now by any number of Hong Kong SPGs. What’s wrong with him?”)
“We just clicked, you know?” Janette said as she picked delicately at her salad. “We like so many of the same things. He’s back in Singapore next week for work and we’ve been talking or texting every day. And the best part is that I’ve got that funny butterfly thing in my stomach every time I think about him. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve felt like that?”
That was six months ago. Since then, Janette has been heading up to Hong Kong every month, while Joshua pops down to Singapore every other weekend. A few days ago, on one of his visits, Janette threw a party at her home and finally introduced him to her friends.
The first thing Saffy said to us was: “Oh my God, she met him at Zouk? There are single straight guys that look like him at Zouk? Why are we not there more regularly?”
Amanda sighed into her gin and tonic. “Because every time we go, it’s just a bunch of post-high-school children. Maybe we leave too early?”
“It’s so unfair!” Saffy said as she sent a beady look beaming across Janette’s living room at Joshua who was cuddling Janette. You could tell Saffy was mentally inserting herself into his brawny tanned arms.
All of which has led me to conclude that dating is no different from playing the lottery. You could buy 4-D religiously every week for your whole life and have nothing to show for it except a pile of broken financial dreams. Then, one day, someone who’s never gambled in his life decides to try his luck on a single ticket and ends up winning $10m. None of it makes sense, and if you did try to make sense of it all, you’d probably go mad with anger and frustration.
A few days ago, Janette announced that she’s packing up and moving to Hong Kong.
You could practically hear Saffy’s scream across the island. “He’s proposed? Already?!”
“No, but Janette said it’s pretty clear that the relationship is going somewhere, so she might as well give it a go,” I said.
Janette’s news has fully occupied the girls’ attention for days now. A small part of them burns with jealousy, while a larger part is thrilled at the fairy tale romance quality of the relationship. As Amanda says, it’s proof that love can strike in the most unlikely of places and that there’s always hope. Just when you least expect it.
Which also explains why she and Saffy recently renewed their Zouk club membership.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Snow Blight
Here I am in London.
Stuck.
In the middle of a freaking snow-storm that has turned the whole city into a pretty icing-sugar sprinkled landscape.
Which, translated from its Hallmark sentiments, means that the airports have all shut down.
“What do you mean you can’t leave London!” my flatmate Saffy shouted all the way from Singapore. “It’s just an itsy bitsy bit of snow! It’s barely four inches according to the newspapers!”
“Yeah, well, in this town, four inches is enough to shut everything down! And it’s so cold!” I moaned.
“How cold? Cold enough to wear mink?” Saffy asked, her tone of voice shifting from meteorological outrage to sartorial interest.
“It was minus four degrees last night. Thank God the heaters are working around here. Last year, when my sister was here, everything broke down, remember?”
Saffy says it continues to astonish her that anyone still thinks of the United Kingdom as a First World country. “Public transportation strikes. Students going on the rampage because they have to pay school fees. Airports closing because of a bit of snow. Seriously?”
“I was at Heathrow for hours on Saturday,” I reported, “and then they said all flights have been cancelled, so I had to lug my luggage all the way back from the airport to the flat. It took me five hours! There were no taxis at the airport express station so I then I had to wait for the bus and then the bus stopped a mile away from home because it couldn’t make it up the snow covered streets, so I had to drag everything through the cold! I was so traumatized by the time I got back!”
Even I could detect the ascending note of whining in my voice.
And through it all – the trauma of the crowds in Heathrow, the overstuffed trains packed with depressed passengers, the snail-paced crawl of the bus and the chilly one-mile trudge home on the slushy muddy footpaths – all I could think of was that this sort of thing would never happen in Singapore.
Say what you will about the place, especially if you’re a foreign media or a placard-waving dyed-in-the-wool libertarian protestor, but Singapore works. And if it doesn’t work, the government will find a way. Yes, the result is that the whole place can be a little sterile and safe, but really, give me sterile and safe any day as long as it comes with a fully functional, efficient piece of infrastructure.
My overseas friends, especially those in England, are always rabbiting on about how strict the Singapore government is. “Don’t they cane people for vandalizing cars?” one woman asked me at a dinner party the other day. She actually looked shocked.
When I replied that people who vandalise property should not only be caned, but that they should also be made to walk around in public naked for a month, she gave me a tight smile and turned away and didn’t speak to me for the rest of dinner.
“I would have pushed her face into her bowl of soup!” Saffy said when we Skyped the next day. “Why didn’t you do her some bodily harm?”
“I miss Changi airport,” I said wistfully. “Isn’t it just about the best airport in the world?"
“Totally,” Saffy said. “I was watching the Channel 5 news last night and they were showing the crowds and the piles of luggage at Heathrow and I said to Amanda that you’d never see this kind of nonsense in Changi.”
“Well, it is in the Tropics,” I pointed out.
“I don’t care,” Saffy said stubbornly. “Even if Changi was in the South Pole, things would still be working!”
Just then, Amanda’s face popped into view over Saffy’s shoulder.
“I think you’re going to be stuck there till after Boxing Day! Are you keeping warm?”
I said that I’d barely left the flat except for brief excursions to the supermarket for more food.
“I bet it’s really pretty though, what with the snow and everything,” Amanda said.
“I guess it is, but I’m just praying that the heating holds up. Otherwise, I’d rather just die.”
“Choy!” Saffy spat.
So, here I am, in the run-up to Christmas, snowed-in. Tens of thousands of passengers are stuck at Heathrow and there’s a severe weather warning about more snow and colder temperatures. I’d like to say it’s all a bit of an adventure, but I can’t.
And last night, I dreamt of grilled sting-ray and big plates of rojak.
Stuck.
In the middle of a freaking snow-storm that has turned the whole city into a pretty icing-sugar sprinkled landscape.
Which, translated from its Hallmark sentiments, means that the airports have all shut down.
“What do you mean you can’t leave London!” my flatmate Saffy shouted all the way from Singapore. “It’s just an itsy bitsy bit of snow! It’s barely four inches according to the newspapers!”
“Yeah, well, in this town, four inches is enough to shut everything down! And it’s so cold!” I moaned.
“How cold? Cold enough to wear mink?” Saffy asked, her tone of voice shifting from meteorological outrage to sartorial interest.
“It was minus four degrees last night. Thank God the heaters are working around here. Last year, when my sister was here, everything broke down, remember?”
Saffy says it continues to astonish her that anyone still thinks of the United Kingdom as a First World country. “Public transportation strikes. Students going on the rampage because they have to pay school fees. Airports closing because of a bit of snow. Seriously?”
“I was at Heathrow for hours on Saturday,” I reported, “and then they said all flights have been cancelled, so I had to lug my luggage all the way back from the airport to the flat. It took me five hours! There were no taxis at the airport express station so I then I had to wait for the bus and then the bus stopped a mile away from home because it couldn’t make it up the snow covered streets, so I had to drag everything through the cold! I was so traumatized by the time I got back!”
Even I could detect the ascending note of whining in my voice.
And through it all – the trauma of the crowds in Heathrow, the overstuffed trains packed with depressed passengers, the snail-paced crawl of the bus and the chilly one-mile trudge home on the slushy muddy footpaths – all I could think of was that this sort of thing would never happen in Singapore.
Say what you will about the place, especially if you’re a foreign media or a placard-waving dyed-in-the-wool libertarian protestor, but Singapore works. And if it doesn’t work, the government will find a way. Yes, the result is that the whole place can be a little sterile and safe, but really, give me sterile and safe any day as long as it comes with a fully functional, efficient piece of infrastructure.
My overseas friends, especially those in England, are always rabbiting on about how strict the Singapore government is. “Don’t they cane people for vandalizing cars?” one woman asked me at a dinner party the other day. She actually looked shocked.
When I replied that people who vandalise property should not only be caned, but that they should also be made to walk around in public naked for a month, she gave me a tight smile and turned away and didn’t speak to me for the rest of dinner.
“I would have pushed her face into her bowl of soup!” Saffy said when we Skyped the next day. “Why didn’t you do her some bodily harm?”
“I miss Changi airport,” I said wistfully. “Isn’t it just about the best airport in the world?"
“Totally,” Saffy said. “I was watching the Channel 5 news last night and they were showing the crowds and the piles of luggage at Heathrow and I said to Amanda that you’d never see this kind of nonsense in Changi.”
“Well, it is in the Tropics,” I pointed out.
“I don’t care,” Saffy said stubbornly. “Even if Changi was in the South Pole, things would still be working!”
Just then, Amanda’s face popped into view over Saffy’s shoulder.
“I think you’re going to be stuck there till after Boxing Day! Are you keeping warm?”
I said that I’d barely left the flat except for brief excursions to the supermarket for more food.
“I bet it’s really pretty though, what with the snow and everything,” Amanda said.
“I guess it is, but I’m just praying that the heating holds up. Otherwise, I’d rather just die.”
“Choy!” Saffy spat.
So, here I am, in the run-up to Christmas, snowed-in. Tens of thousands of passengers are stuck at Heathrow and there’s a severe weather warning about more snow and colder temperatures. I’d like to say it’s all a bit of an adventure, but I can’t.
And last night, I dreamt of grilled sting-ray and big plates of rojak.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Split Personalities
So, I hear that Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson are calling it a day on their two year old marriage. Which, as some joker on the Internet pointed out, is making a lot of men and women out there extremely happy.
In the little flat that I share with Saffy and Amanda, the news has been greeted with the kind of shock that you would normally associate with, say, Oprah knocking on your front door.
“They were such a beautiful couple,” Amanda sighed the other day while flipping the pages of her latest copy of US Weekly. “So beautiful.”
“That body!” Saffy moaned.
Amanda looked up. “Whose body?”
Saffy’s eyes widened. “Ryan’s, course! Those abs of his! Oh. My. God. I would give my left little toe to be able to run my fingers all over that body!”
“Oh, I thought maybe you were talking about Scarlett’s. I loved her in that skin tight leotard in ‘Ironman 2’! They seemed so happy on the red carpet,” Amanda said, her fingers lovingly tracing, on the magazine, Scarlett’s outfit at the Oscars. “Who knew they were having problems?”
“So sad,” Saffy said, her head shaking.
As I later told Barney Chen, they could not have been sadder if their own father had been caught on TV entertaining a hooker in a Geylang brothel. “It’s not as if they’re bosom buddies with Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson!” I said. “In fact, they didn’t even know who Ryan Reynolds was until they watched ‘Blade Trinity’!”
“Ooooh, I loved that movie!” Barney Chen crooned. “All those half-naked men running around with blades and guns! It was so stupid, it was fabulous!”
“Well, now Saffy has those pictures of Ryan Reynolds tied up in chains in that dungeon as her screensaver on her phone and laptop. She’s even started up a scrapbook. What is she, twelve?”
“Who can blame her!”
It’s a little strange how celebrity obsessed we’ve all become. Slavishly, we follow every step and mis-step of people we don’t know and whom we will never meet. Thanks to Twitter, we now know exactly what Ashton Kutcher is up to at any given time. We know what TV show Oprah is watching tonight. Thanks to Gawker.com, we know who Angelina Jolie was having dinner with two days ago.
Over time, we become so connected and attached to them that when something tragic happens to them, it’s almost like a death in our own family. When Heath Ledger passed away, Saffy sat in her room and sobbed, while Amanda and Barney had a sleep-over and watched all his movies in one sitting; though Amanda later said that Barney insisted they watch ‘Brokeback Mountain’ twice.
And now, the untimely divorce of Ryan and Scarlett. Saffy says this sort of thing always happens in threes, and is now scouring Gawker for clues as to who the next two couples heading for Splitsville will be.
Over lunch, Sharyn said maybe it would be a Mediacorp couple and began speculating. She didn’t get very far because Saffy interrupted her with a look of death and said, “We’re talking about genuine celebrities, Sharyn! Like Brad and Angelina. Or Johnny and Vanessa. People with real money and star power! We don’t care about local artiste couples who are so cheapskate that they get their weddings sponsored!”
“Wah, like that, one, ah!” Sharyn said and took a sip of her sugar-cane juice. Later, on Facebook, she posted just one word: “Cheem.”
The other day, Amanda said that it’s a wonder that people in Hollywood get married in the first place. “It’s bad enough trying to date in the first place,” she said as she got ready for dinner with Peter, an oncologist she’d met online.
“Can you imagine having to do it all with the whole world watching as well? And then you go and give all those interviews to Vanity Fair saying how fulfilled you are and how you’ve found your soul mate and the next thing you know, you read about your husband’s affairs on Perez Hilton and you’re giving interviews to Larry King on CNN about how unhappy you really were in your marriage! It’s so tragic! I’m not sure I should be wearing this dress. It’s not showing enough cleavage. Get out of my room, Jason, I need to change!”
Saffy piped up and said it just goes to show that marriage is all a waste of time. “If two beautiful people like Ryan and Scarlett with all their looks and money can’t make it work, what hope do the rest of us have?”
You couldn’t help but notice how Amanda just stood in front of the mirror and stared at her reflection.
In the little flat that I share with Saffy and Amanda, the news has been greeted with the kind of shock that you would normally associate with, say, Oprah knocking on your front door.
“They were such a beautiful couple,” Amanda sighed the other day while flipping the pages of her latest copy of US Weekly. “So beautiful.”
“That body!” Saffy moaned.
Amanda looked up. “Whose body?”
Saffy’s eyes widened. “Ryan’s, course! Those abs of his! Oh. My. God. I would give my left little toe to be able to run my fingers all over that body!”
“Oh, I thought maybe you were talking about Scarlett’s. I loved her in that skin tight leotard in ‘Ironman 2’! They seemed so happy on the red carpet,” Amanda said, her fingers lovingly tracing, on the magazine, Scarlett’s outfit at the Oscars. “Who knew they were having problems?”
“So sad,” Saffy said, her head shaking.
As I later told Barney Chen, they could not have been sadder if their own father had been caught on TV entertaining a hooker in a Geylang brothel. “It’s not as if they’re bosom buddies with Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson!” I said. “In fact, they didn’t even know who Ryan Reynolds was until they watched ‘Blade Trinity’!”
“Ooooh, I loved that movie!” Barney Chen crooned. “All those half-naked men running around with blades and guns! It was so stupid, it was fabulous!”
“Well, now Saffy has those pictures of Ryan Reynolds tied up in chains in that dungeon as her screensaver on her phone and laptop. She’s even started up a scrapbook. What is she, twelve?”
“Who can blame her!”
It’s a little strange how celebrity obsessed we’ve all become. Slavishly, we follow every step and mis-step of people we don’t know and whom we will never meet. Thanks to Twitter, we now know exactly what Ashton Kutcher is up to at any given time. We know what TV show Oprah is watching tonight. Thanks to Gawker.com, we know who Angelina Jolie was having dinner with two days ago.
Over time, we become so connected and attached to them that when something tragic happens to them, it’s almost like a death in our own family. When Heath Ledger passed away, Saffy sat in her room and sobbed, while Amanda and Barney had a sleep-over and watched all his movies in one sitting; though Amanda later said that Barney insisted they watch ‘Brokeback Mountain’ twice.
And now, the untimely divorce of Ryan and Scarlett. Saffy says this sort of thing always happens in threes, and is now scouring Gawker for clues as to who the next two couples heading for Splitsville will be.
Over lunch, Sharyn said maybe it would be a Mediacorp couple and began speculating. She didn’t get very far because Saffy interrupted her with a look of death and said, “We’re talking about genuine celebrities, Sharyn! Like Brad and Angelina. Or Johnny and Vanessa. People with real money and star power! We don’t care about local artiste couples who are so cheapskate that they get their weddings sponsored!”
“Wah, like that, one, ah!” Sharyn said and took a sip of her sugar-cane juice. Later, on Facebook, she posted just one word: “Cheem.”
The other day, Amanda said that it’s a wonder that people in Hollywood get married in the first place. “It’s bad enough trying to date in the first place,” she said as she got ready for dinner with Peter, an oncologist she’d met online.
“Can you imagine having to do it all with the whole world watching as well? And then you go and give all those interviews to Vanity Fair saying how fulfilled you are and how you’ve found your soul mate and the next thing you know, you read about your husband’s affairs on Perez Hilton and you’re giving interviews to Larry King on CNN about how unhappy you really were in your marriage! It’s so tragic! I’m not sure I should be wearing this dress. It’s not showing enough cleavage. Get out of my room, Jason, I need to change!”
Saffy piped up and said it just goes to show that marriage is all a waste of time. “If two beautiful people like Ryan and Scarlett with all their looks and money can’t make it work, what hope do the rest of us have?”
You couldn’t help but notice how Amanda just stood in front of the mirror and stared at her reflection.
Friday, December 03, 2010
Covert Operations
Regular readers of this column may remember that, for the longest time, I held out from getting onto Facebook. Between email and the handphone, it already took up entire days just to keep in touch with the people I really wanted to be friends with.
“I don’t need 150 friends!” I remember telling our cleaning lady, Ah Chuan. Later, I discovered not only did the woman who washed my underwear and brushed our toilets have 520 friends on Facebook, she was also a genius with Photoshop.
With little prompting, she’d taken down a fridge picture of me, Saffy and Amanda that was taken at some party, digitally moved us to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and given us all amazing face-lifts.
For a couple of weeks, she used that photo as her Facebook profile. Which made us all feel very special until one day we discovered that she’d replaced us with a picture of another family she cleaned for. This time, she’d digitally relocated that family to the base of the Taj Mahal, right next to Princess Diana.
“Shouldn’t she be working for Pixar or something?” Saffy wondered as she marvelled at how good she looked without puffy eye-bags. She promptly accepted Ah Chuan’s invitation to be Facebook friends and then spent the next week complaining: “It’s all in Chinese! I can’t read Chinese! Why am I Facebook friends with her?”
“What if she’s saying something very uncomplimentary about us and our cleanliness?” Amanda asked, ever alert to the possibility of a lawsuit, even if it involved someone whom, judging by the ferociously efficient way in which she can chop up an entire chicken in fifteen seconds, we are all convinced has intimate ties to the Hong Kong triads.
My best friend Karl said the more important question was not why we were Facebook friends with someone who only wrote in Chinese, but rather why we were Facebook friends with our cleaning lady in the first place.
“That’s so elitist of you!" Saffy huffed. "She’s a human being. Barely. Why can’t we be Facebook friends?”(“But why would you?” Karl asked me by text message.)
“And anyway, she’s already seen all my underwear,” Saffy added, “and when you’ve seen all my underwear, there’s not a lot that I can be private about anymore.”
But still, Amanda’s question lingered and we wondered. Could our cleaning lady actually be making fun of us right in front of our backs, as Saffy very succinctly put it.
So one day, under the pretext of inviting our friend Sharyn over for afternoon tea, we sat her down with a laptop and instructed her to translate Ah Chuan’s Chinese posts on Facebook.
“Nothing, what,” Sharyn said after a while. “She go shopping with her daughter at Tampines. She fetch her grand-daughter from day care. She looking forward to Chinese New Year. She post a YouTube video of Jay Chou. And Aaron Kwok. And a scene from ‘Lust Caution’. Wah, she very ham-sup, one, your Ah Chuan. Here, she say she clean your flat and play with Bu Zher. Ay, who is Bu Zher, hah?”
For a few wild seconds, we entertained images of Ah Chuan having a wild torrid sex with some illegal construction worker from Guangdong on our sofa before it dawned on us that Bu Zher was, in fact, the transliteration of my beloved adopted mongrel dog, Pooch.
“Is that what’s happening, Poochie?” Amanda crooned to the dog who lifted his head from beneath the dining table where he’d been napping. “Do you play with Auntie Ah Chuan?”
“I think we should install a nanny-cam in this flat,” Saffy decided. “Goodness knows what that woman gets up to here when we’re not around!”
“Aiyoh, you people, ah!” Sharyn sighed. “Got nothing better to do, is it? Orredi waste so much time on Facebook, now must spy on the maid, some more!
It’s funny what happens when you spend enough time scrolling through a person’s Facebook wall. An image begins to form and quite often, it’s not the same one you have of the person you know. Somehow, it feels more real and unguarded. Because the Ah Chuan standing in the rain at a bus stop in Toa Payoh waiting to collect her grand-child was not the same woman who so efficiently, and fiercely cleaned our flat every week, and who screamed as us when we left unwashed bowls in the sink.
“That doesn’t mean she’s not still a very scary woman,” Saffy said.
No, it didn’t, but I made a mental note to ask Ah Chuan, the next time she came to clean, to take Pooch out for a walk. Just the two of them.
“I don’t need 150 friends!” I remember telling our cleaning lady, Ah Chuan. Later, I discovered not only did the woman who washed my underwear and brushed our toilets have 520 friends on Facebook, she was also a genius with Photoshop.
With little prompting, she’d taken down a fridge picture of me, Saffy and Amanda that was taken at some party, digitally moved us to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and given us all amazing face-lifts.
For a couple of weeks, she used that photo as her Facebook profile. Which made us all feel very special until one day we discovered that she’d replaced us with a picture of another family she cleaned for. This time, she’d digitally relocated that family to the base of the Taj Mahal, right next to Princess Diana.
“Shouldn’t she be working for Pixar or something?” Saffy wondered as she marvelled at how good she looked without puffy eye-bags. She promptly accepted Ah Chuan’s invitation to be Facebook friends and then spent the next week complaining: “It’s all in Chinese! I can’t read Chinese! Why am I Facebook friends with her?”
“What if she’s saying something very uncomplimentary about us and our cleanliness?” Amanda asked, ever alert to the possibility of a lawsuit, even if it involved someone whom, judging by the ferociously efficient way in which she can chop up an entire chicken in fifteen seconds, we are all convinced has intimate ties to the Hong Kong triads.
My best friend Karl said the more important question was not why we were Facebook friends with someone who only wrote in Chinese, but rather why we were Facebook friends with our cleaning lady in the first place.
“That’s so elitist of you!" Saffy huffed. "She’s a human being. Barely. Why can’t we be Facebook friends?”(“But why would you?” Karl asked me by text message.)
“And anyway, she’s already seen all my underwear,” Saffy added, “and when you’ve seen all my underwear, there’s not a lot that I can be private about anymore.”
But still, Amanda’s question lingered and we wondered. Could our cleaning lady actually be making fun of us right in front of our backs, as Saffy very succinctly put it.
So one day, under the pretext of inviting our friend Sharyn over for afternoon tea, we sat her down with a laptop and instructed her to translate Ah Chuan’s Chinese posts on Facebook.
“Nothing, what,” Sharyn said after a while. “She go shopping with her daughter at Tampines. She fetch her grand-daughter from day care. She looking forward to Chinese New Year. She post a YouTube video of Jay Chou. And Aaron Kwok. And a scene from ‘Lust Caution’. Wah, she very ham-sup, one, your Ah Chuan. Here, she say she clean your flat and play with Bu Zher. Ay, who is Bu Zher, hah?”
For a few wild seconds, we entertained images of Ah Chuan having a wild torrid sex with some illegal construction worker from Guangdong on our sofa before it dawned on us that Bu Zher was, in fact, the transliteration of my beloved adopted mongrel dog, Pooch.
“Is that what’s happening, Poochie?” Amanda crooned to the dog who lifted his head from beneath the dining table where he’d been napping. “Do you play with Auntie Ah Chuan?”
“I think we should install a nanny-cam in this flat,” Saffy decided. “Goodness knows what that woman gets up to here when we’re not around!”
“Aiyoh, you people, ah!” Sharyn sighed. “Got nothing better to do, is it? Orredi waste so much time on Facebook, now must spy on the maid, some more!
It’s funny what happens when you spend enough time scrolling through a person’s Facebook wall. An image begins to form and quite often, it’s not the same one you have of the person you know. Somehow, it feels more real and unguarded. Because the Ah Chuan standing in the rain at a bus stop in Toa Payoh waiting to collect her grand-child was not the same woman who so efficiently, and fiercely cleaned our flat every week, and who screamed as us when we left unwashed bowls in the sink.
“That doesn’t mean she’s not still a very scary woman,” Saffy said.
No, it didn’t, but I made a mental note to ask Ah Chuan, the next time she came to clean, to take Pooch out for a walk. Just the two of them.
Friday, November 26, 2010
(No) Thank you for the music!
A few nights ago, we went to Zouk. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was a feeble, subconscious attempt to recapture the glory of our youth, when we thought nothing of showing up at midnight and danced till 2.30, and then went out for supper at that corner bah kut teh joint on the corner of River Valley and Mohamed Sultan Road.
These days, it’s a real struggle to even keep my eyes open at 10pm and the idea of actually getting dressed at 11.30pm to go out filled me with dread.
“Oh, don’t be such an old uncle!” Saffy said even as she lay on her bed, eyes closed while clawing weakly at the side of the bed in an attempt to get up. “I’m just taking a disco nap! That’s allowed!”
“Why are we going?” I asked from the comfortable depths of the sofa.
“Because we always spend our Friday nights at home and it’s not normal!” Amanda said crisply as she emerged from her room resplendent in a cute little Miu Miu dress and trailing a scent of Dior. “We need to have some fun and out there,” she said, pointing a red-lacquered finger through the lounge room window, “out there is ‘fun’! So, quit complaining, get up and get dressed!”
As Saffy later shouted to me in the dark caverns of Zouk, our entire bodies vibrating with the heavy bass thumping out of the hidden woofers, it’s a wonder Amanda never found a career in the army. “She’s so incredibly bossy! Oh my God, could this music be any louder?”
And right at that moment, I couldn’t help but wonder why I had left the cool comforts of my flat and the companionable warmth of my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch to spend precious sleep time in the dark with a swarm of very enthusiastic but slightly smelly, barely post-pubescent children who clearly were high on something. Because I simply did not understand the music that club was playing.
The music I grew up with had melody. Some had catchy riffs. Some had great lyrics. Some had great orchestrations. Some had it all. And each sounded different. Unique. But most of all, the music made sense.
That night, all I heard – or rather, all I felt, since the music was so loud it completely bypassed my auditory canals and went straight for my nerve endings – was thump, thump, thump, chika, chika, thump, thump...And all around me, people were swaying, their arms enthusiastically pumping the air, eyes closed as they fell into a relentless beat that just never stopped. Days later, I could still feel the thump in the soles of my feet. And that’s all I remembered of the music. Not a single lyric. Not a single melody. Just that thump, thump, chika, chika, thump, thump…
“When did you turn into such an old man?” Barney Chen said after listening to me complain about the state of today’s music. He passed me his iPod and ear-pieces. “Here, listen to this and tell me it’s not a great song!”
So I sat there for three or four minutes listening to someone blather what sounded like “Ra-ra-wa-ah-hiya, wa-ha-ro-ma-ha-ha”.
“Oh my God, you didn’t like that?” Barney gasped, his hand clutching his barrel-chest. “That’s Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’! It’s my private national anthem!”
“But it makes no sense!” I said.
“What do you mean it makes no sense? ‘I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything as long as it’s free!’ It’s fabulous!”
“That doesn’t mean anything!”I bleated. “How do you want someone’s ‘ugly’? And why would you want anyone’s disease in the first place?”
“Oh excuse me,” Barney Chen huffed, “and the lyrics to ‘MacArthur Park’ make so much sense, do they? ‘Someone left the cake out in the rain, I don’t think that I can’t take it, cause I took so long to bake it and I’ll never have that recipe again, oh no!’” Barney belted out the chorus, completely oblivious to the looks the rest of Starbucks was giving him. And when he finished, he turned to me and said, “Seriously?”
I paused. “I thought that was one of your favourite songs?”
Barney blushed. “It is. But only the Donna Summer version! My point is that you just have to go with the flow. So the modern music doesn’t make sense to you, but who says it has to?
That night, I went onto YouTube and called up Lady Gaga. As Saffy walked past my open door, she heard me mutter, “‘I want your leather studded kiss in the sand!’ Really?”
These days, it’s a real struggle to even keep my eyes open at 10pm and the idea of actually getting dressed at 11.30pm to go out filled me with dread.
“Oh, don’t be such an old uncle!” Saffy said even as she lay on her bed, eyes closed while clawing weakly at the side of the bed in an attempt to get up. “I’m just taking a disco nap! That’s allowed!”
“Why are we going?” I asked from the comfortable depths of the sofa.
“Because we always spend our Friday nights at home and it’s not normal!” Amanda said crisply as she emerged from her room resplendent in a cute little Miu Miu dress and trailing a scent of Dior. “We need to have some fun and out there,” she said, pointing a red-lacquered finger through the lounge room window, “out there is ‘fun’! So, quit complaining, get up and get dressed!”
As Saffy later shouted to me in the dark caverns of Zouk, our entire bodies vibrating with the heavy bass thumping out of the hidden woofers, it’s a wonder Amanda never found a career in the army. “She’s so incredibly bossy! Oh my God, could this music be any louder?”
And right at that moment, I couldn’t help but wonder why I had left the cool comforts of my flat and the companionable warmth of my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch to spend precious sleep time in the dark with a swarm of very enthusiastic but slightly smelly, barely post-pubescent children who clearly were high on something. Because I simply did not understand the music that club was playing.
The music I grew up with had melody. Some had catchy riffs. Some had great lyrics. Some had great orchestrations. Some had it all. And each sounded different. Unique. But most of all, the music made sense.
That night, all I heard – or rather, all I felt, since the music was so loud it completely bypassed my auditory canals and went straight for my nerve endings – was thump, thump, thump, chika, chika, thump, thump...And all around me, people were swaying, their arms enthusiastically pumping the air, eyes closed as they fell into a relentless beat that just never stopped. Days later, I could still feel the thump in the soles of my feet. And that’s all I remembered of the music. Not a single lyric. Not a single melody. Just that thump, thump, chika, chika, thump, thump…
“When did you turn into such an old man?” Barney Chen said after listening to me complain about the state of today’s music. He passed me his iPod and ear-pieces. “Here, listen to this and tell me it’s not a great song!”
So I sat there for three or four minutes listening to someone blather what sounded like “Ra-ra-wa-ah-hiya, wa-ha-ro-ma-ha-ha”.
“Oh my God, you didn’t like that?” Barney gasped, his hand clutching his barrel-chest. “That’s Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’! It’s my private national anthem!”
“But it makes no sense!” I said.
“What do you mean it makes no sense? ‘I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything as long as it’s free!’ It’s fabulous!”
“That doesn’t mean anything!”I bleated. “How do you want someone’s ‘ugly’? And why would you want anyone’s disease in the first place?”
“Oh excuse me,” Barney Chen huffed, “and the lyrics to ‘MacArthur Park’ make so much sense, do they? ‘Someone left the cake out in the rain, I don’t think that I can’t take it, cause I took so long to bake it and I’ll never have that recipe again, oh no!’” Barney belted out the chorus, completely oblivious to the looks the rest of Starbucks was giving him. And when he finished, he turned to me and said, “Seriously?”
I paused. “I thought that was one of your favourite songs?”
Barney blushed. “It is. But only the Donna Summer version! My point is that you just have to go with the flow. So the modern music doesn’t make sense to you, but who says it has to?
That night, I went onto YouTube and called up Lady Gaga. As Saffy walked past my open door, she heard me mutter, “‘I want your leather studded kiss in the sand!’ Really?”
Monday, November 22, 2010
It's a Mystery!
There are so many mysteries in life. What happens when we die? Why do diets never work? Why does one woman look smoking hot in a dress, but another look like the cleaning lady with a bad hair day in the exact same dress? Why do people still use the phrase “exact same” when it’s so clearly bad grammar? How do planes stay up in the air? The list is endless.
But in Singapore, the categories of mysteries take on a whole other dimension. Maybe it’s the tropical air that makes everything feel a little bit more surreal.
1. Why do people, who would never dream of missing a plane, think it’s acceptable to show up an hour late for a wedding?
2. While dressed in short-sleeved polo knits and jeans?
3. How has David Gan made so much money just from cutting hair that he can afford to give, on a regular basis, five-figure presents to his friends?
4. Why is he not friends with me?
5. Why is it impossible to read any article about David Gan without him telling you how much something costs?
6. Why are so many Singaporeans so scared of dogs? Even if they’re little poodles?
7. Eriche, Jacelyn, Pearlyn, Concept, Pamelyn, Mindee, Ericson, Messiah… Where do people come up with their names?
8. Has anyone watched a Singaporean play recently that didn’t have a gay theme or involve some degree of cross-dressing?
9. Why do people still insist on calling the smoke from the forest fires in Indonesia and Malaysia, ‘the haze’? It’s smelly, foul, stinky smoke.
10. Why do the TCS artistes never seem to pay for their own wedding? If you can’t afford to pay for your own wedding dress/jewellery/suit/wedding venue/make-up artist/hair-dresser/honeymoon, why are you getting married in the first place?
11. Artist, ok. Actor, ok. Thespian, ok. But what the hell is an ‘artiste’?
12. Why do people continue to murder people and smuggle drugs and then complain when they get handed the death penalty?
13. How on earth did Singapore end up with such a super-dooper efficient infrastructure while the rest of the world increasingly operates like a Third World sweat shop?
14. (Question from Saffy) Is the Prime Minister wearing the same cardigan every time he appears on Question Time?
15. (Question from Amanda) If so, what label is it?
16. (Question from Barney Chen) Does the Prime Minister work out?
17. (Question from Amanda) If so, where?
18. In what way do questions 14 to 17 qualify as ‘Singaporean mysteries’?
19. Why don’t bus drivers know if, say, Rochor Road is on their route?
20. Why do people on the bus always force you to climb over them to get to the window seat? Why can’t they just move in?
21. Why don’t people smile more at the hawker centre? All that amazing cheap food on offer and everyone still looks like they’re in the middle of a typhoid epidemic.
22. Why is it that once you’ve flown on Singapore Airlines, every other plane just feels like a smelly, medieval dump?
23. Why don’t motorists indicate when they’re changing lanes?
24. Or stop at zebra crossings?
25. And why do they persist in believing that an amber or red light is an all clear to speed up?
26. Why can’t the rest of the world’s airports look, feel, and run like Changi?
27. Why are men still carrying their girlfriends’ handbags in public?
28. Or is their girlfriend actually not a girl?
29. How do hair-washers wash your hair while you’re sitting upright without dripping water and shampoo all over your clothes?
30. Why do so many people not flush the public toilets?
31. Why do public toilets always seem so wet? Where is all that water splashing from?
32. Why do Chinese weddings feel so dull while Malay and Indian weddings seem so much more festive?
33. How does Fann Wong still look so freakishly young after all these years?
34. Why, with all his good looks and charm, does Christopher Lee continue to insist on dressing like a homeless street bum with really bad hair?
35. Why aren’t there more Lee Kuan Yews in this world?
36. Why do people still think that a phone message is an amusing piece of paper that’s meant to be ignored?
37. And despite all this, why – after even just a few days away and the plane finally touches down at Changi – does it always feel like you’ve come home?
But in Singapore, the categories of mysteries take on a whole other dimension. Maybe it’s the tropical air that makes everything feel a little bit more surreal.
1. Why do people, who would never dream of missing a plane, think it’s acceptable to show up an hour late for a wedding?
2. While dressed in short-sleeved polo knits and jeans?
3. How has David Gan made so much money just from cutting hair that he can afford to give, on a regular basis, five-figure presents to his friends?
4. Why is he not friends with me?
5. Why is it impossible to read any article about David Gan without him telling you how much something costs?
6. Why are so many Singaporeans so scared of dogs? Even if they’re little poodles?
7. Eriche, Jacelyn, Pearlyn, Concept, Pamelyn, Mindee, Ericson, Messiah… Where do people come up with their names?
8. Has anyone watched a Singaporean play recently that didn’t have a gay theme or involve some degree of cross-dressing?
9. Why do people still insist on calling the smoke from the forest fires in Indonesia and Malaysia, ‘the haze’? It’s smelly, foul, stinky smoke.
10. Why do the TCS artistes never seem to pay for their own wedding? If you can’t afford to pay for your own wedding dress/jewellery/suit/wedding venue/make-up artist/hair-dresser/honeymoon, why are you getting married in the first place?
11. Artist, ok. Actor, ok. Thespian, ok. But what the hell is an ‘artiste’?
12. Why do people continue to murder people and smuggle drugs and then complain when they get handed the death penalty?
13. How on earth did Singapore end up with such a super-dooper efficient infrastructure while the rest of the world increasingly operates like a Third World sweat shop?
14. (Question from Saffy) Is the Prime Minister wearing the same cardigan every time he appears on Question Time?
15. (Question from Amanda) If so, what label is it?
16. (Question from Barney Chen) Does the Prime Minister work out?
17. (Question from Amanda) If so, where?
18. In what way do questions 14 to 17 qualify as ‘Singaporean mysteries’?
19. Why don’t bus drivers know if, say, Rochor Road is on their route?
20. Why do people on the bus always force you to climb over them to get to the window seat? Why can’t they just move in?
21. Why don’t people smile more at the hawker centre? All that amazing cheap food on offer and everyone still looks like they’re in the middle of a typhoid epidemic.
22. Why is it that once you’ve flown on Singapore Airlines, every other plane just feels like a smelly, medieval dump?
23. Why don’t motorists indicate when they’re changing lanes?
24. Or stop at zebra crossings?
25. And why do they persist in believing that an amber or red light is an all clear to speed up?
26. Why can’t the rest of the world’s airports look, feel, and run like Changi?
27. Why are men still carrying their girlfriends’ handbags in public?
28. Or is their girlfriend actually not a girl?
29. How do hair-washers wash your hair while you’re sitting upright without dripping water and shampoo all over your clothes?
30. Why do so many people not flush the public toilets?
31. Why do public toilets always seem so wet? Where is all that water splashing from?
32. Why do Chinese weddings feel so dull while Malay and Indian weddings seem so much more festive?
33. How does Fann Wong still look so freakishly young after all these years?
34. Why, with all his good looks and charm, does Christopher Lee continue to insist on dressing like a homeless street bum with really bad hair?
35. Why aren’t there more Lee Kuan Yews in this world?
36. Why do people still think that a phone message is an amusing piece of paper that’s meant to be ignored?
37. And despite all this, why – after even just a few days away and the plane finally touches down at Changi – does it always feel like you’ve come home?
Wedded Bliss
One of the things that I will simply never be able to get used to in Singapore is the wedding dinner. Really, they are just plain weird.
Wedding dinners to me are supposed to be a celebration when close friends and family come together to rejoice at a couple’s union (which, hopefully, will be long lived, but that’s another story).
It begins with the ceremony where everyone gathers in church or by the beach. The bride shows up in glowing white (although I’ve been to a few where the mother of the groom will whisper in a penetrating voice that the bride simply has no business wearing white, ‘If you know what I mean!’, but that too is another story). During the exchange of vows, the groom will get misty-eyed, the bride’s mother will cry and all the guys in the church are wondering who that hot bridesmaid is, while the women are wondering who the slut is.
Then it’s off to the wedding dinner, where the champagne flows freely, hilarious speeches and toasts are made, and everybody dances the night away and, as happened at one wedding I attended, the groom was found making out with that hot bridesmaid behind the stage.
Meanwhile, this is what happens when two Singaporeans get married. There is a signature session at the ROM which next to nobody attends. Then the bride goes home to her parents’ home and the groom to his (there is a quick meeting later at the HDB lawyers) and everyone forgets about the whole thing until a year later, an invitation arrives in the mail announcing a dinner at the Shangri-la ballroom.
Now about this dinner…I love the fact that by the time you’re into the main course, people are still arriving, oblivious to the fact that they are over an hour late. And completely unapologetic about it all.
“Ah, I overslept, lah!” one guest announced at a recent wedding when he and his date showed up during the second yum-sing. He immediately began handing out his business cards.
“It’s 9.30 – uh, Eriche!” my flatmate, Saffy blurted out, reading the card carefully. “Are you working the nightshift or something?
The man looked at her blankly. “No. I was having a nap.”
Saffy stared at the man. “Till 9.30 p.m.?”
The girl laughed. “No, lah! We had to go to my parents’ house first for dinner!”
“But I don’t get it!” Saffy said later, with considerable agitation, as she forced me to accompany her to the bathroom. “This is a wedding dinner! Why would you have dinner somewhere else when you’re already invited to a dinner? Why? Why?” she muttered as she disappeared into the ladies.
When she eventually emerged twenty minutes later, she was still venting, “And what sort of a name is Eriche anyway? Is that like a pretentious version of Eric?”
By the time we got back to our table, the speeches had begun. Not that you would have known since no one was paying the best man the least bit of attention. The table next to us was being regaled to a dirty joke, while people got up and walked around chatting on their phone. Years later, people would be surprised to learn that the best man had delivered a speech at all. “Got, meh?” I imagine them asking.
After a while, our other flatmate, Amanda simply gave up shushing people and whipped out her handphone to start messaging her current boyfriend.
“If you can’t beat them, join them!” she said with a shrug to Saffy’s exasperated glare.
“How come there’s never any dancing at these weddings?” Saffy complained. “I want to dance!”
“This is so boring!” I moaned, picking at my roast duck. “Can we go?”
“They’re still speaking!” Saffy exclaimed, her ample chest heaving with agitation.
“Saf, people are already leaving!”
“But dinner is not even over yet! Where’s everyone going?”
“Probably to get supper,” Amanda said crisply, deliberately turning away from the dirty old man seated next to her who’d been giving her looks all evening.
As if on cue, Eriche and his girlfriend got up to leave, their party favours safely tucked away in the girl’s handbag. “Udderwise, stuck in traffic, lah!” he said cheerfully.
Later in the cab, Saffy swore that she would never get used to Singaporean weddings. “No games. No music. No cute, single, straight men. No dancing. No fun,” she recited, ticking items off on her fingers. “I might as well have stayed at home in bed.”
“I can’t believe that we just collectively spent $300 on that wedding dinner,” Amanda said. “We could have had such a great time at Morton’s!”
There was a brief silence in the cab. Then Saffy piped up quietly, “You gave a $100 ang pow? I gave $70. And I thought that was too much!”
Wedding dinners to me are supposed to be a celebration when close friends and family come together to rejoice at a couple’s union (which, hopefully, will be long lived, but that’s another story).
It begins with the ceremony where everyone gathers in church or by the beach. The bride shows up in glowing white (although I’ve been to a few where the mother of the groom will whisper in a penetrating voice that the bride simply has no business wearing white, ‘If you know what I mean!’, but that too is another story). During the exchange of vows, the groom will get misty-eyed, the bride’s mother will cry and all the guys in the church are wondering who that hot bridesmaid is, while the women are wondering who the slut is.
Then it’s off to the wedding dinner, where the champagne flows freely, hilarious speeches and toasts are made, and everybody dances the night away and, as happened at one wedding I attended, the groom was found making out with that hot bridesmaid behind the stage.
Meanwhile, this is what happens when two Singaporeans get married. There is a signature session at the ROM which next to nobody attends. Then the bride goes home to her parents’ home and the groom to his (there is a quick meeting later at the HDB lawyers) and everyone forgets about the whole thing until a year later, an invitation arrives in the mail announcing a dinner at the Shangri-la ballroom.
Now about this dinner…I love the fact that by the time you’re into the main course, people are still arriving, oblivious to the fact that they are over an hour late. And completely unapologetic about it all.
“Ah, I overslept, lah!” one guest announced at a recent wedding when he and his date showed up during the second yum-sing. He immediately began handing out his business cards.
“It’s 9.30 – uh, Eriche!” my flatmate, Saffy blurted out, reading the card carefully. “Are you working the nightshift or something?
The man looked at her blankly. “No. I was having a nap.”
Saffy stared at the man. “Till 9.30 p.m.?”
The girl laughed. “No, lah! We had to go to my parents’ house first for dinner!”
“But I don’t get it!” Saffy said later, with considerable agitation, as she forced me to accompany her to the bathroom. “This is a wedding dinner! Why would you have dinner somewhere else when you’re already invited to a dinner? Why? Why?” she muttered as she disappeared into the ladies.
When she eventually emerged twenty minutes later, she was still venting, “And what sort of a name is Eriche anyway? Is that like a pretentious version of Eric?”
By the time we got back to our table, the speeches had begun. Not that you would have known since no one was paying the best man the least bit of attention. The table next to us was being regaled to a dirty joke, while people got up and walked around chatting on their phone. Years later, people would be surprised to learn that the best man had delivered a speech at all. “Got, meh?” I imagine them asking.
After a while, our other flatmate, Amanda simply gave up shushing people and whipped out her handphone to start messaging her current boyfriend.
“If you can’t beat them, join them!” she said with a shrug to Saffy’s exasperated glare.
“How come there’s never any dancing at these weddings?” Saffy complained. “I want to dance!”
“This is so boring!” I moaned, picking at my roast duck. “Can we go?”
“They’re still speaking!” Saffy exclaimed, her ample chest heaving with agitation.
“Saf, people are already leaving!”
“But dinner is not even over yet! Where’s everyone going?”
“Probably to get supper,” Amanda said crisply, deliberately turning away from the dirty old man seated next to her who’d been giving her looks all evening.
As if on cue, Eriche and his girlfriend got up to leave, their party favours safely tucked away in the girl’s handbag. “Udderwise, stuck in traffic, lah!” he said cheerfully.
Later in the cab, Saffy swore that she would never get used to Singaporean weddings. “No games. No music. No cute, single, straight men. No dancing. No fun,” she recited, ticking items off on her fingers. “I might as well have stayed at home in bed.”
“I can’t believe that we just collectively spent $300 on that wedding dinner,” Amanda said. “We could have had such a great time at Morton’s!”
There was a brief silence in the cab. Then Saffy piped up quietly, “You gave a $100 ang pow? I gave $70. And I thought that was too much!”
Monday, November 15, 2010
Present Tense
When I was younger – and for those of you who are still young, that means in the years that began with a “19” – I loved Christmas. It was such fun to wake up on Christmas Day with the full expectation that the day ahead would involve nothing but opening up lot of lovely presents.
Of course, I can’t now remember most of those presents, though my sister likes to say that probably the most memorable of all was the one Auntie Pei-ling gave her good for nothing husband, Uncle Charlie: a pretty gift-wrapped box that contained the divorce papers. Leave it to my mother to point out that when you give someone a present like that, it kind of kills the buzz of a well-planned Christmas party.
Not that it kept Uncle Charlie down for long. By the time the next Christmas rolled around, he was happily married to his secretary who, despite Auntie Pei-ling telling everyone she was young enough to be his daughter, was a fifty-five year old woman with strong thighs, three grown children and the sweetest temper. And when, ten years later, Uncle Charlie suffered a major stroke while watching the season finale of “Bay Watch”, Auntie Nellie nursed him tenderly right through to the end.
As it turned out, the divorce papers were the best present Uncle Charlie ever got.
My point is, when you grow up with such high gift giving standards, it’s pretty difficult for anything else to match up. For starters, each year, it becomes more of a chore to come up with a great present. Nothing says ‘painful’ more than having to battle the crowds on Orchard Road in the weeks leading up to Christmas, waiting in line for someone to serve you, to pay and to get your presents wrapped. And then having to line up for the taxis and deal with the traffic jams. Or, line up for the MRT and deal with the crowds who insist on standing right at the entrance.
Worse is going through all that effort and then getting in return some crappy gift from someone who, clearly, has put no thought and zero effort into the present. And over the years, I’ve received some clunkers for presents. It infuriates me.
Of course, there will be some people who say it’s the act of giving that’s important, not so much what you get. I try not to be friends with people like that.
Which leads me to conclude that Christmas is really the time when you find out how little most people know you. Or, worse, how little they like you.
Why, for instance, would a supposedly good friend give another supposedly good friend a box of Pokka chocolate biscuits and a cheap jar of jam from your void deck supermarket? Or a crappy glass plate shaped like a leaf to which is Scotch-taped a tiny bag of peanuts? Or a pair of Marks and Spencer socks? (These are all examples of actual Christmas presents I have received over the years and you’d better believe me when I say that I remember clearly who gave me what and if I’ve deleted their numbers from my phone and firewalled their emails, there’s a reason why.)
“Did you sleep with her boyfriend or something?” Saffy asked last year when Amanda held up a Hello Kitty pencil sharpener that she’s received from her supposedly good friend, Mandy. Amanda rummaged through the gift wrapper, thinking that there was, perhaps, something smaller and precious that had come with the sharpener. Like a Tiffany’s voucher, or something.
“Isn’t this a rather insulting gift?” Amanda asked finally when it was clear that, apart from a little gift card that read ‘Happy X’Mas! Mandy, X’, that was all she was getting from a girl to whom she’d once lent a Versace mini-dress and Manolo Blahnik pumps. (To those of you who are novices at this kind of thing, lending someone your Versace and Manolos is way up there with donating a kidney.)
“She needs to be pushed down some stairs,” Saffy said firmly.
“It’s not very nice, is it?” Amanda said doubtfully, still holding onto the faint hope that a more ‘real’ present was on its way.
“I never liked her,” Saffy continued. “She and that horrible fake American accent of hers. The last I checked, the closest she’s ever been to America is her box set of ‘Beverly Hills 90210’ and you were the one who gave it to her for Christmas, Amanda! Next year, you should take out a hit on her!”
That’s the festive spirit we should all aspire to.
Of course, I can’t now remember most of those presents, though my sister likes to say that probably the most memorable of all was the one Auntie Pei-ling gave her good for nothing husband, Uncle Charlie: a pretty gift-wrapped box that contained the divorce papers. Leave it to my mother to point out that when you give someone a present like that, it kind of kills the buzz of a well-planned Christmas party.
Not that it kept Uncle Charlie down for long. By the time the next Christmas rolled around, he was happily married to his secretary who, despite Auntie Pei-ling telling everyone she was young enough to be his daughter, was a fifty-five year old woman with strong thighs, three grown children and the sweetest temper. And when, ten years later, Uncle Charlie suffered a major stroke while watching the season finale of “Bay Watch”, Auntie Nellie nursed him tenderly right through to the end.
As it turned out, the divorce papers were the best present Uncle Charlie ever got.
My point is, when you grow up with such high gift giving standards, it’s pretty difficult for anything else to match up. For starters, each year, it becomes more of a chore to come up with a great present. Nothing says ‘painful’ more than having to battle the crowds on Orchard Road in the weeks leading up to Christmas, waiting in line for someone to serve you, to pay and to get your presents wrapped. And then having to line up for the taxis and deal with the traffic jams. Or, line up for the MRT and deal with the crowds who insist on standing right at the entrance.
Worse is going through all that effort and then getting in return some crappy gift from someone who, clearly, has put no thought and zero effort into the present. And over the years, I’ve received some clunkers for presents. It infuriates me.
Of course, there will be some people who say it’s the act of giving that’s important, not so much what you get. I try not to be friends with people like that.
Which leads me to conclude that Christmas is really the time when you find out how little most people know you. Or, worse, how little they like you.
Why, for instance, would a supposedly good friend give another supposedly good friend a box of Pokka chocolate biscuits and a cheap jar of jam from your void deck supermarket? Or a crappy glass plate shaped like a leaf to which is Scotch-taped a tiny bag of peanuts? Or a pair of Marks and Spencer socks? (These are all examples of actual Christmas presents I have received over the years and you’d better believe me when I say that I remember clearly who gave me what and if I’ve deleted their numbers from my phone and firewalled their emails, there’s a reason why.)
“Did you sleep with her boyfriend or something?” Saffy asked last year when Amanda held up a Hello Kitty pencil sharpener that she’s received from her supposedly good friend, Mandy. Amanda rummaged through the gift wrapper, thinking that there was, perhaps, something smaller and precious that had come with the sharpener. Like a Tiffany’s voucher, or something.
“Isn’t this a rather insulting gift?” Amanda asked finally when it was clear that, apart from a little gift card that read ‘Happy X’Mas! Mandy, X’, that was all she was getting from a girl to whom she’d once lent a Versace mini-dress and Manolo Blahnik pumps. (To those of you who are novices at this kind of thing, lending someone your Versace and Manolos is way up there with donating a kidney.)
“She needs to be pushed down some stairs,” Saffy said firmly.
“It’s not very nice, is it?” Amanda said doubtfully, still holding onto the faint hope that a more ‘real’ present was on its way.
“I never liked her,” Saffy continued. “She and that horrible fake American accent of hers. The last I checked, the closest she’s ever been to America is her box set of ‘Beverly Hills 90210’ and you were the one who gave it to her for Christmas, Amanda! Next year, you should take out a hit on her!”
That’s the festive spirit we should all aspire to.
Monday, November 08, 2010
Promises, promises
New Year’s Resolutions are tricky things. For one thing, you don’t want to be too ambitious. I remember there was a period of three years when I said I was going to get a six pack stomach. And for another two years, I swore I would move out away from my terrible flatmates Saffy and Amanda and get a flat of my own. And of course, none of that ever happened.
You also don’t want to be too lazy with your resolutions because otherwise, there’s no sense of challenge. (The upside is that, at the end of the year, when you catalogue what you’ve actually achieved and discover that you’ve no ticks against the boxes, the resulting shame isn’t quite as crippling as it might otherwise be if you’d been too ambitious in the first place. I don’t, for instance, lose any sleep over the fact that I’ve never rearranged my bookshelf alphabetically by author.)
No. The trick is to come up with a list that is not only realistic, but that’s also achievable and which will, should you actually accomplish the resolution, be endlessly admired by all your friends and enemies.
So, the other day, I held an early poll for 2011 resolutions and this is what came in.
Jason’s Resolutions
1. Not lose my temper when people don’t stand on the left of escalators.
2. Not lose my temper when parents pull their children away from Pooch while telling them that if they don’t behave, ‘The dog will bite you!’.
3. Not lose my temper when people don’t return my phone messages or emails.
4. Not lose my temper whenever a taxi-driver asks me ‘Which way you want to go?’
5. Not lose my temper.
Saffy’s Resolutions
1. Lose 5 kg by Valentine’s Day.
2. Meet a guy by the French Open.
3. Get married by Wimbledon.
4. Have a child by the US Open.
5. Or adopt one from Africa.
6. Preferably from the same village where Madonna shops for her loved ones.
7. Get into Amanda’s will by New Year’s Eve.
Sharyn’s Resolutions
1. Win 4D.
2. Upgrade to landed property.
3. Upgrade car to at least Lexus.
4. Ask for 15% increment.
5. Get skin whitened.
6. Maybe get divorced.
Amanda’s Resolutions
1. Take a ride on the MRT.
2. Attain size 2.
3. Meet Miuccia Prada and become her BFF.
4. Meet the Prime Minister.
5. Fall in love. (Maybe the Prime Minister!! Or Jude Law!)
6. Get married.
7. Move out of this pokey flat.
Karl’s Resolutions
1. Have an affair. (Maybe with Amanda.)
2. Make a move on Saffy. (If it doesn’t work with Amanda.)
3. Think about getting a divorce from Marsha (depending on my finances at the time).
Barney’s Resolutions
1. Achieve zero percent body fat.
2. Exercise more and look like David Beckham in the Armani underwear ads.
3. Or get liposuction, whichever is more convenient.
4. Go to a Faye Wong concert.
5. Stalk Fann Wong.
6. Meet Alan Wu.
7. Seduce him and make him leave his wife.
You also don’t want to be too lazy with your resolutions because otherwise, there’s no sense of challenge. (The upside is that, at the end of the year, when you catalogue what you’ve actually achieved and discover that you’ve no ticks against the boxes, the resulting shame isn’t quite as crippling as it might otherwise be if you’d been too ambitious in the first place. I don’t, for instance, lose any sleep over the fact that I’ve never rearranged my bookshelf alphabetically by author.)
No. The trick is to come up with a list that is not only realistic, but that’s also achievable and which will, should you actually accomplish the resolution, be endlessly admired by all your friends and enemies.
So, the other day, I held an early poll for 2011 resolutions and this is what came in.
Jason’s Resolutions
1. Not lose my temper when people don’t stand on the left of escalators.
2. Not lose my temper when parents pull their children away from Pooch while telling them that if they don’t behave, ‘The dog will bite you!’.
3. Not lose my temper when people don’t return my phone messages or emails.
4. Not lose my temper whenever a taxi-driver asks me ‘Which way you want to go?’
5. Not lose my temper.
Saffy’s Resolutions
1. Lose 5 kg by Valentine’s Day.
2. Meet a guy by the French Open.
3. Get married by Wimbledon.
4. Have a child by the US Open.
5. Or adopt one from Africa.
6. Preferably from the same village where Madonna shops for her loved ones.
7. Get into Amanda’s will by New Year’s Eve.
Sharyn’s Resolutions
1. Win 4D.
2. Upgrade to landed property.
3. Upgrade car to at least Lexus.
4. Ask for 15% increment.
5. Get skin whitened.
6. Maybe get divorced.
Amanda’s Resolutions
1. Take a ride on the MRT.
2. Attain size 2.
3. Meet Miuccia Prada and become her BFF.
4. Meet the Prime Minister.
5. Fall in love. (Maybe the Prime Minister!! Or Jude Law!)
6. Get married.
7. Move out of this pokey flat.
Karl’s Resolutions
1. Have an affair. (Maybe with Amanda.)
2. Make a move on Saffy. (If it doesn’t work with Amanda.)
3. Think about getting a divorce from Marsha (depending on my finances at the time).
Barney’s Resolutions
1. Achieve zero percent body fat.
2. Exercise more and look like David Beckham in the Armani underwear ads.
3. Or get liposuction, whichever is more convenient.
4. Go to a Faye Wong concert.
5. Stalk Fann Wong.
6. Meet Alan Wu.
7. Seduce him and make him leave his wife.
Monday, November 01, 2010
Mail Disorder
The other day, everyone I knew received an email blast from the same person. This is what he wrote (typos and all):
From: Valentin [vmika@yormail.ru]
Subject: Letter from Russia
Hello,
My name is Valentin, I am a student and I write you from little Russian city. I found several addresses on Internet and I decided to send you this letter. Our local library give free Internet access for students.
I live with my mother, she cannot see since many years and I take care of her. My father left our family when I was a child.
I work very hard every day, but because of deep financial crisis my salary is very little and not even enough for the things of primary necessity.
Because of extremally hot weather during this summer most of the potatoes and vegetables get withered in our garden. A lot of forests burned. We were forced to spend all our small savings to buy something to eat for the comign winter to avoid starvation.
Electricity and gas is very expensive in our region and we can not afford to heat our home anymore.
The only way to heat our home in winter is to use portable oven which heat with burning wood. We have wood savings in our shed and this oven would heat our home all the winter, at no cost to us.
Unfortunately, we can not buy such oven as our local market, because the value of it 8,300 rubles, and is a great amount for us (the equivalent of 197 Euro).
I decided to appeal to you and I hope you can help us. If you own any old portable oven and if not using anymore, I'll be very grateful if you can donate it for us and organize transport of this oven to us (we live 200 km from Moscow). These ovens are different, usually made of cast iron and weigh about 100kg.
Please let me know if you can help and I will write you our home address.
If you need, I can send medical documents about the disease of my mother.
I send you best wishes from Russia,
Valentin and my mother.
PS: Please apologize for the mistakes in this letter, I translated this letter with the help of computer-translator and dictionary. Thank you.
To my surprise, it turned out that quite a lot of my friends had plenty of free time on their hands and, without any thought of internet hygiene, had replied to Valentin.
To: Valetin
From: Sharyn
Dear Valentin
We don’t use oven in Singapore. It is too hot. We have haze now from fire in Malaysia and Indonesia. I also work very hard but after CPF and MediSave, not much left. If you have any old air con unit that you are not using anymore, can you donate to me? My air con in my bedroom spoil already. Thank you.
Sharyn
To: Valentin
From: Barney Cheng
Dear Valentin
How old are you and do you have a picture you can send me of yourself? Here is a picture of me taken at a recent stag night. And yes, those are real muscles. Nothing has been Photo-shopped. Interested to know more?
Barney
To: Valentin
From: Amanda
This is the eighth e-mail you’ve written to me and each time you want something different. The last time, your mother had cancer and needed $5000 to go to America for medical treatment. And now, she’s cold and starving and needs an oven. If you can afford the time and energy to keep sending this sort of harassing emails, I think you can find a second job so you that you can also afford to feed your family. Please STOP writing to me! I am a lawyer and I know people.
To:Pacnet
From: Amanda
Fw: Letter from Russia
Listen, how is it that your firewall is letting this kind of harassing emails get through to your customers? I would be very grateful if you would ramp up my firewall protection. Please call me to discuss.
Yours faithfully
Amanda
To: Valentin
From: Karl
Dear Valetin,
Clearly, you have mistaken me for someone who cares.
Bo Chap
To: Valentin
From: Jason
If it’s cold in Russia, you should move countries. The south of Spain is lovely all year round, even in winter. Or, have you considered a new life in Darwin? It’s always warm there and a little humid, but I’m sure it’ll do your mother’s lungs a world of good.
I wish you all the very best.
JH
To Valentin:
From: Saffy
Hello. You sound nice. Are you single? Are you on Skype?
From: Valentin [vmika@yormail.ru]
Subject: Letter from Russia
Hello,
My name is Valentin, I am a student and I write you from little Russian city. I found several addresses on Internet and I decided to send you this letter. Our local library give free Internet access for students.
I live with my mother, she cannot see since many years and I take care of her. My father left our family when I was a child.
I work very hard every day, but because of deep financial crisis my salary is very little and not even enough for the things of primary necessity.
Because of extremally hot weather during this summer most of the potatoes and vegetables get withered in our garden. A lot of forests burned. We were forced to spend all our small savings to buy something to eat for the comign winter to avoid starvation.
Electricity and gas is very expensive in our region and we can not afford to heat our home anymore.
The only way to heat our home in winter is to use portable oven which heat with burning wood. We have wood savings in our shed and this oven would heat our home all the winter, at no cost to us.
Unfortunately, we can not buy such oven as our local market, because the value of it 8,300 rubles, and is a great amount for us (the equivalent of 197 Euro).
I decided to appeal to you and I hope you can help us. If you own any old portable oven and if not using anymore, I'll be very grateful if you can donate it for us and organize transport of this oven to us (we live 200 km from Moscow). These ovens are different, usually made of cast iron and weigh about 100kg.
Please let me know if you can help and I will write you our home address.
If you need, I can send medical documents about the disease of my mother.
I send you best wishes from Russia,
Valentin and my mother.
PS: Please apologize for the mistakes in this letter, I translated this letter with the help of computer-translator and dictionary. Thank you.
To my surprise, it turned out that quite a lot of my friends had plenty of free time on their hands and, without any thought of internet hygiene, had replied to Valentin.
To: Valetin
From: Sharyn
Dear Valentin
We don’t use oven in Singapore. It is too hot. We have haze now from fire in Malaysia and Indonesia. I also work very hard but after CPF and MediSave, not much left. If you have any old air con unit that you are not using anymore, can you donate to me? My air con in my bedroom spoil already. Thank you.
Sharyn
To: Valentin
From: Barney Cheng
Dear Valentin
How old are you and do you have a picture you can send me of yourself? Here is a picture of me taken at a recent stag night. And yes, those are real muscles. Nothing has been Photo-shopped. Interested to know more?
Barney
To: Valentin
From: Amanda
This is the eighth e-mail you’ve written to me and each time you want something different. The last time, your mother had cancer and needed $5000 to go to America for medical treatment. And now, she’s cold and starving and needs an oven. If you can afford the time and energy to keep sending this sort of harassing emails, I think you can find a second job so you that you can also afford to feed your family. Please STOP writing to me! I am a lawyer and I know people.
To:Pacnet
From: Amanda
Fw: Letter from Russia
Listen, how is it that your firewall is letting this kind of harassing emails get through to your customers? I would be very grateful if you would ramp up my firewall protection. Please call me to discuss.
Yours faithfully
Amanda
To: Valentin
From: Karl
Dear Valetin,
Clearly, you have mistaken me for someone who cares.
Bo Chap
To: Valentin
From: Jason
If it’s cold in Russia, you should move countries. The south of Spain is lovely all year round, even in winter. Or, have you considered a new life in Darwin? It’s always warm there and a little humid, but I’m sure it’ll do your mother’s lungs a world of good.
I wish you all the very best.
JH
To Valentin:
From: Saffy
Hello. You sound nice. Are you single? Are you on Skype?
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Year today, gone tomorrow
I don’t know about you, but it frightens me that 2010 is almost at an end. It’s like I’m stuck in one of those horrible dreams where I suddenly realise I have a very important exam to sit in the next half hour and I haven’t studied and I just know I’m going to fail.
And in this case, I’m haunted by the suspicion that I’m meant to have done something this year, but I can’t for the life work out what it is and time is running out.
It’s freaking me out, especially when I know that somewhere out there, someone is getting ready to put up the Christmas decorations on Orchard Road.
So, here’s the other thing – why is the Christmas build-up in Singapore so freaking long? While the rest of the world is still working its way through Thanksgiving and Guy Fawkes and assorted pagan worship, the streets of Singapore are festooned with fairy lights, fake snow, plastic reindeer and Christmas trees. In November. For those of us already traumatised by the rapidly depleting year, this is not comforting.
I remember I started 2010 with such high hopes and expectations. I was going to make an effort to brush up my French. It’s telling that the only phrase I’ve learnt all year is “Je m’en fou!” which, in polite conversation, roughly translates to “I don’t give a crap!”
I was going to go to the gym more often, and I’ve been only once.
Leave it to Saffy to see the brighter side of laziness. “Well, seeing as in 2009 you went to the gym zero times, going once in 2010 is essentially a 100% improvement! So, well done!” Her bosom, already straining beneath a tight tee-shirt that read “My eyes aren’t down here!”, heaved with approval.
“But I don’t think I’ve done anything of importance all year!” I said. “I said I wanted to do more charity work and I haven’t. I was going to call my mother more often and I haven’t!”
“Well, who can blame you considering that she’s basically disinherited you and your siblings!” Saffy exclaimed. “I wouldn’t talk to my mother either, not that she has any money to disinherit me from in the first place.”
“But don’t you feel that the year has just slipped by too quickly? It’s like I’ve been sleepwalking since January and suddenly I wake up and it’s Christmas!”
My Auntie Wai-ling says it gets worse as you get older. “One day, you’re going to wake up and find you’re drooling in a wheelchair like your Auntie Ching-ling! And then you’ll really wonder what the hell happened!”
She invited me to lunch and told me all about her recent horror mah-jong session. “One minute, Ching was winning like mad, then she dropped one of the tiles, bent down to get it back, and because she’d been sitting at the table for five straight hours, all the blood suddenly rushed to her head and she collapsed with a stroke. Aiyoh, such bad luck, I tell you!” Auntie Wai-ling crooned in horror. “When we were young, where got scared of such things? I think I’m going to sign up for yo-gah classes. I can’t touch my toes to save my life, but I need to start doing something!”
Amanda says she wishes she’d saved her money instead of buying another Birkin bag. “If I had bought Aussie dollars, I’d be sitting on a tidy profit now! I’m so stupid!”
So, I’ve started to write down my resolutions for 2011, but even before the ink is dry, the list already reeks of doom and failure. Because many of the resolutions look very familiar. Every year, I promise myself to go to more museums. To be nicer to people. To spend more time with my aging parents. To read more books and go to less boozy parties.
Then I look at my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch who spends his days flat on his back, all four furry paws stuck up in the air, dreaming sweet doggy dreams of his poodle girlfriend and chasing our neighbour Mrs Kumarasamy’s evil black Persian. His days revolve around hanging out with me, having a good old hearty poo a few times a day and a nice dinner. It’s all so simple. He wouldn’t know a new year’s resolution if he peed on it. And yet, he’s content and happy.
“Are you seriously going to base your life on that dog?” Amanda asked. “He licks his own balls!”
Saffy says if she could ever lick her own balls, it would definitely count as a very good year.
And in this case, I’m haunted by the suspicion that I’m meant to have done something this year, but I can’t for the life work out what it is and time is running out.
It’s freaking me out, especially when I know that somewhere out there, someone is getting ready to put up the Christmas decorations on Orchard Road.
So, here’s the other thing – why is the Christmas build-up in Singapore so freaking long? While the rest of the world is still working its way through Thanksgiving and Guy Fawkes and assorted pagan worship, the streets of Singapore are festooned with fairy lights, fake snow, plastic reindeer and Christmas trees. In November. For those of us already traumatised by the rapidly depleting year, this is not comforting.
I remember I started 2010 with such high hopes and expectations. I was going to make an effort to brush up my French. It’s telling that the only phrase I’ve learnt all year is “Je m’en fou!” which, in polite conversation, roughly translates to “I don’t give a crap!”
I was going to go to the gym more often, and I’ve been only once.
Leave it to Saffy to see the brighter side of laziness. “Well, seeing as in 2009 you went to the gym zero times, going once in 2010 is essentially a 100% improvement! So, well done!” Her bosom, already straining beneath a tight tee-shirt that read “My eyes aren’t down here!”, heaved with approval.
“But I don’t think I’ve done anything of importance all year!” I said. “I said I wanted to do more charity work and I haven’t. I was going to call my mother more often and I haven’t!”
“Well, who can blame you considering that she’s basically disinherited you and your siblings!” Saffy exclaimed. “I wouldn’t talk to my mother either, not that she has any money to disinherit me from in the first place.”
“But don’t you feel that the year has just slipped by too quickly? It’s like I’ve been sleepwalking since January and suddenly I wake up and it’s Christmas!”
My Auntie Wai-ling says it gets worse as you get older. “One day, you’re going to wake up and find you’re drooling in a wheelchair like your Auntie Ching-ling! And then you’ll really wonder what the hell happened!”
She invited me to lunch and told me all about her recent horror mah-jong session. “One minute, Ching was winning like mad, then she dropped one of the tiles, bent down to get it back, and because she’d been sitting at the table for five straight hours, all the blood suddenly rushed to her head and she collapsed with a stroke. Aiyoh, such bad luck, I tell you!” Auntie Wai-ling crooned in horror. “When we were young, where got scared of such things? I think I’m going to sign up for yo-gah classes. I can’t touch my toes to save my life, but I need to start doing something!”
Amanda says she wishes she’d saved her money instead of buying another Birkin bag. “If I had bought Aussie dollars, I’d be sitting on a tidy profit now! I’m so stupid!”
So, I’ve started to write down my resolutions for 2011, but even before the ink is dry, the list already reeks of doom and failure. Because many of the resolutions look very familiar. Every year, I promise myself to go to more museums. To be nicer to people. To spend more time with my aging parents. To read more books and go to less boozy parties.
Then I look at my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch who spends his days flat on his back, all four furry paws stuck up in the air, dreaming sweet doggy dreams of his poodle girlfriend and chasing our neighbour Mrs Kumarasamy’s evil black Persian. His days revolve around hanging out with me, having a good old hearty poo a few times a day and a nice dinner. It’s all so simple. He wouldn’t know a new year’s resolution if he peed on it. And yet, he’s content and happy.
“Are you seriously going to base your life on that dog?” Amanda asked. “He licks his own balls!”
Saffy says if she could ever lick her own balls, it would definitely count as a very good year.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Update
Hmmm, according to Blogspot, I had 4000 page views last month, but only 41 followers. Something is not right with these numbers!
Sign up, you lazy bums!
Sign up, you lazy bums!
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Deal Breaker
So our friend Jessie is getting married at the Ritz-Carlton. Her thick glossy invitation arrived in the post a while back and while the nuptials may be filling the Chan-Wong households (and the Ritz-Carlton’s finance department) with immense joy and celebration, in the little flat that I share with my two flatmates and my beloved adopted mongrel Pooch, it’s causing a great deal of angst.
“Someone needs to tell me how that fat midget is getting married before me!” Amanda vented recently.
Saffy coughed. “Please don’t use that term in public, Amanda. It’s seriously offensive!”
“I know it is. It’s a huge insult to all the fat midgets out there!” Amanda snapped.
For those of you who came in late, Jessie is a lovely, perfectly charming Peranakan chick. She’s a highly successful lawyer in a big glossy Raffles Place firm. She’s smart. Gets on with everyone. Always stops and donates to those annoying kids jangling their tins along Orchard Road on a Saturday morning. She’s always been very pleasant to me when I bump into her at a party. Guys like her. More importantly, their mothers like her.
Her only defect, if you could even call it that, is that she comes up to the level of my armpits, even when perched in her trademark Manolo Blahniks. She’s also on the plump side on account of the fact that her father is an amazing cook and who can go on a diet when there’s a sensational chicken buah keluak waiting for you for dinner every night? But I wouldn’t call her fat. Which technically does not make her a fat midget, but you don’t get too hung up on technicalities when you’re angry about the fact that everyone in the world seems to be getting married. Except you.
“I don’t think I can bear going to another wedding!” Amanda sighed. She’d calmed down a little after the initial shock. “This will be the seventh wedding I’ve been to this year, and all the brides are younger than I am! What is wrong with this picture?”
“How much do we have to give, do you think? For the ang pow, I mean,” Saffy piped up, demonstrating once again her ability to completely derail any conversation. She picked up her phone and called her best friend, Sharyn.
“It’s at the Ritz-Carlton…In Singapore…Uh huh…Shut. Up. $150! Are you insane?...Well, I was thinking more along the lines of $100!...Well, what if I don’t want to eat sharks fin goop or rubbery abalone? That stuff is so revolting anyway! Can I give less if I cut out some dishes from my dinner?...Hey, don’t you dare call me cheapskate! I’m not the one who asked for a discount at Giordano! Seriously, Sharyn, you are asking for two tight slaps!”
As Amanda later told me, it’s always a source of amazement to her that Saffy has any friends at all, let alone someone so incredibly loyal as Sharyn.
But for days, all the girls could talk about was how expensive wedding dinner ang pows have become.
“I remember when it was $80!” Amanda said.
“I remember when I went on a date!” Saffy sighed tragically, her bosom heaving in sympathy.
“Could you please stay on track for just one conversation?” Amanda snapped.
Meanwhile, my mother thinks the whole idea of giving money at weddings is so incredibly tacky. “If you can’t afford to have a wedding at a fancy hotel in the first place, then hold it at home!” she once told my sister Michelle whose first assignment in her Accounting 100 course was to create a wedding cost spread sheet. “It’s like inviting people to your housewarming party and then expecting them to cough up for the mortgage repayments! Your father’s parents gave me a Tiffany necklace and matching ear-rings when we got married. Now, that’s classy!”
Later, Michelle said to me that she’d much rather have cash. “If you compound the interest on the capital investment for those blood diamonds, by the time you’re 65, you’d be sitting on a very nice nest egg!”
Our brother Jack said recently this was exactly the kind of reasoning that has led to Michelle still being single.
Which still doesn’t take the sting out of handing over $150 to two people you don’t really have good wishes for. “If the three of us go, surely that doesn’t mean we each have to pay $150?” Saffy said the other day. “Why can’t we do a three for two deal or something? I mean, Borders does it all the time!”
Sharyn Facebooked me and said she’s seriously reassessing her friends list.
“Someone needs to tell me how that fat midget is getting married before me!” Amanda vented recently.
Saffy coughed. “Please don’t use that term in public, Amanda. It’s seriously offensive!”
“I know it is. It’s a huge insult to all the fat midgets out there!” Amanda snapped.
For those of you who came in late, Jessie is a lovely, perfectly charming Peranakan chick. She’s a highly successful lawyer in a big glossy Raffles Place firm. She’s smart. Gets on with everyone. Always stops and donates to those annoying kids jangling their tins along Orchard Road on a Saturday morning. She’s always been very pleasant to me when I bump into her at a party. Guys like her. More importantly, their mothers like her.
Her only defect, if you could even call it that, is that she comes up to the level of my armpits, even when perched in her trademark Manolo Blahniks. She’s also on the plump side on account of the fact that her father is an amazing cook and who can go on a diet when there’s a sensational chicken buah keluak waiting for you for dinner every night? But I wouldn’t call her fat. Which technically does not make her a fat midget, but you don’t get too hung up on technicalities when you’re angry about the fact that everyone in the world seems to be getting married. Except you.
“I don’t think I can bear going to another wedding!” Amanda sighed. She’d calmed down a little after the initial shock. “This will be the seventh wedding I’ve been to this year, and all the brides are younger than I am! What is wrong with this picture?”
“How much do we have to give, do you think? For the ang pow, I mean,” Saffy piped up, demonstrating once again her ability to completely derail any conversation. She picked up her phone and called her best friend, Sharyn.
“It’s at the Ritz-Carlton…In Singapore…Uh huh…Shut. Up. $150! Are you insane?...Well, I was thinking more along the lines of $100!...Well, what if I don’t want to eat sharks fin goop or rubbery abalone? That stuff is so revolting anyway! Can I give less if I cut out some dishes from my dinner?...Hey, don’t you dare call me cheapskate! I’m not the one who asked for a discount at Giordano! Seriously, Sharyn, you are asking for two tight slaps!”
As Amanda later told me, it’s always a source of amazement to her that Saffy has any friends at all, let alone someone so incredibly loyal as Sharyn.
But for days, all the girls could talk about was how expensive wedding dinner ang pows have become.
“I remember when it was $80!” Amanda said.
“I remember when I went on a date!” Saffy sighed tragically, her bosom heaving in sympathy.
“Could you please stay on track for just one conversation?” Amanda snapped.
Meanwhile, my mother thinks the whole idea of giving money at weddings is so incredibly tacky. “If you can’t afford to have a wedding at a fancy hotel in the first place, then hold it at home!” she once told my sister Michelle whose first assignment in her Accounting 100 course was to create a wedding cost spread sheet. “It’s like inviting people to your housewarming party and then expecting them to cough up for the mortgage repayments! Your father’s parents gave me a Tiffany necklace and matching ear-rings when we got married. Now, that’s classy!”
Later, Michelle said to me that she’d much rather have cash. “If you compound the interest on the capital investment for those blood diamonds, by the time you’re 65, you’d be sitting on a very nice nest egg!”
Our brother Jack said recently this was exactly the kind of reasoning that has led to Michelle still being single.
Which still doesn’t take the sting out of handing over $150 to two people you don’t really have good wishes for. “If the three of us go, surely that doesn’t mean we each have to pay $150?” Saffy said the other day. “Why can’t we do a three for two deal or something? I mean, Borders does it all the time!”
Sharyn Facebooked me and said she’s seriously reassessing her friends list.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Old Age Benefits
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.
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.
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!”
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