Tais-toi

Hair Treatment

2012-02-17T18:24:00.001+08:00

A few morningsago, I was woken by the sounds of excited chatter in the living room. Fromexperience, this usually means one of two things: either one or both of myflatmates had a successful second date, or there’s a new movie out starringRyan Gosling and he takes his shirt off.

I would have yelled out for Saffyand Amanda to keep the noise down, on account of the fact it was a Sundaymorning, but the air-con had dried up my vocal chords overnight and all I couldmanage was a raspy croak.

The girls were at the breakfasttable when I shuffled out of my bedroom. They turned bright shining eyes in mydirection.

“Oh. My. God!” Amanda saidimmediately. “Saffy is leaving her hair-dresser! She’s moving salons!”

So excited she was unable to speak, Saffy gasped.

For girls reading this, I probablydon’t need to explain to you why this would generate such excitement.

For perplexed guys, it’s like this.

Imagine you’re a devout Roman Catholic. You crossyourself every time Kurt and Blaine hold hands on ‘Glee’, and you hum a fewHail Marys whenever Callie and Arizona make out on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’.

And every Sunday, without fail, you faithfullyconfess all your sins to your priest. Let’s call him Father Anthony. You tellhim everything that’s troubling you, every nasty thought you had that weekabout everyone from your nagging mother to your horrible boss. You tell him howyou’re jealous that Jane in accounts is pregnant. How you stole some Post-Itpads from the office. You reveal you’ve had forbidden urges for a married man,specifically Christopher Lee (or if you’re a dyed in the wool SPG, HughJackman). You unburden all your sins, every uncharitable thought and act, past,present and future. You ask for absolution. But most of all, you ask for hispatient, listening ear.

Because you know he won’t judge you. He loves youas you are. And you love him. You trust him.

So, you do this every Sunday. Every. Single.Sunday. With the same man. Because you need this man. He knows the real you.

And if Father Anthony is away on holiday, andFather Joseph is the temp confessor, you feel kind of weird talking to him.Which you know is probably not kosher either, so you confess the weirdness toFather Joseph anyway.

That’s kind of the sick co-dependent relationshipwomen have with their hairdresser. They share secrets and shampoos. Hopes andhenna. Confidences and conditioner. Gossip and colour. It’s intense.

And in the case of Saffy and Amanda, theirrelationships with their hairdressers, Michael and Steffan respectively, is asclose as a gay man and a straight woman can get without actually going straightto hell.

So, you understand the fuss when Saffy announcedher decision to leave Michael, who’s done her hair for the last eight years,for Jake who works at another salon across town.

“I want to try a new hair-style,” Saffy explained,“but Michael thinks this is the one that suits me best but I’m bored with itbut I don’t want to upset him by telling him I’m bored with it but I’ve gotthis promotion coming up and I want to very subtly tell my boss that I’m allabout new ideas but without actually telling him explicitly hence the hint withthe new hair but I need to get it done without offending Michael which is whyI’ve made an appointment with Jake but Michael can’t know so am I making myselfclear?”

“Crystal!” Amanda said, sagely.

I’ll fast forward the rest of it: Saffy got snappynew bangs with Jake and also got her promotion and now she is wracked withguilt every time she looks into the mirror.

Everyone has complimented her on her fresh look,but whenever she steps out of the flat, she pulls her hair up in a bun andslaps on a cap and sunglasses.

“It will be a disaster if she accidentally bumpsinto Michael,” Amanda explained.

“So, she’ll go back to him?”

“Of course. A woman’s relationship with herhairdresser is sacred and eternal, you know. Marsha’s hairdresser saw herthrough four divorces and her fifth wedding! Besides, she has to. The stress ofhiding out from Michael is killing her!”

“But won’t Michael know she’s had her hair cut bysomeone else?”

“Yes and no. She’s going to tell him that she wason holiday and caught lice from one of the kids at the orphanage she wasvisiting, and she had to get her hair cut by the local hairdresser.”

I stared at Amanda.

“What?” she asked.

Pin Head

2012-02-12T19:42:00.002+08:00

It won’t comeas much of a surprise to regular readers of this column that there’s been a bitof a drama recently in the little flat I share with Saffy and Amanda. Inrestaurants and on the street, complete strangers come up to me and ask me howit’s possible that three people can generate so much angst and trouble in sucha confined space.

Invariably, my first response is torun away. “Imagine having to deal with this all the time!” I said to my bestfriend Karl after I was accosted in the cereal aisle of Cold Storage by apimply teenager carrying a Goyard bag. She wanted to know if Saffy and Amandawere real people.

“So, how? Got picture of Saffy’sboobs?” she asked, pressing close.

“Uhm,” I said, “you’re really closeinside my personal space.”

“Wah,” she replied, “real life, youalso very cheem, hor?”

“Where do kids get the money to buyGoyard!” Karl later wanted to know.

I stared at him. “I was justverbally assaulted by Single White Female and all you can talk about is heraccessories? Really? How do Madonna and Brad Pitt do this?””

My point is: my life is full ofdrama. None of which has anything to do with me. And it’s wearing me down.

The latest episode began on Saturdaymorning at the Standard Chartered bank’s ATM machine in Raffles Place. On herway to brunch at the Fullerton Hotel, Saffy suddenly realized that she was downto her last ten dollars which, as she later pointed out, won’t get you two cupcakes these days.

She inserted her card, in her headhumming the theme song to Hawaii Five-O, and her fingers began dropping ontothe keypad to tap in her PIN. The music stopped. As it were. Saffy blinked.Then frowned.

Meanwhile, across town, Amanda wasgetting her hair washed at the hairdresser when her handphone rang.

“Hello?”

“Oh. My. God!” Saffy announced.

“I’m getting my hair washed and Idon’t want to be electrocuted, so this had better be good.”

“To the day I die,” Saffy saidwithout missing a beat as she detoured into a parallel universe, “I will neverunderstand people who pay someone else good money to wash their hair when theycan just as easily do it at home in the shower. Why don’t you pay me to do it?”

“Is this what you rang me for?”

“Oh, my God, no, thank God youreminded me! I’m at the ATM and I’ve completely forgotten what my PIN is. Doyou know what it is?”

“Saffy, why would I know what yourPIN is?

“Because I once gave it to you forsafe keeping!”

“And I told you that I wasn’t yoursecretary, gave it back to you and told you to write it down somewhere safe!”

“Oh,” Saffy said. She paused as shemarshaled her thoughts. “So, did I ask Jason to keep it safe?”

“Again, I’m not your secretary!”

Needless to say, the drama ratchetedup several notches when after Saffy had mindlessly punched in random five digitnumbers three times, the machine sucked up her card and refused to give it backto her even after she kicked it a few times and yelled “No!” at it for tenminutes.

As she later complained, as ifmodern life wasn’t already complicated enough, you now basically needed to havethe memory capacity of a 50G hard-drive just to remember all your access codes.“I have a PIN for three bank accounts. I have user IDs, PINs and passwords formy online banking, Yahoo, three Gmail addresses, health insurance, Apple,PayPal, eBay, Amazon, New York Times, Singapore Airlines, British Airways,Qantas, Twitter, Facebook! It’s all too much! How am I supposed to remember itall?”

“Write it down somewhere,” Amandarepeated.

“I did that, but I lost the sheet ofpaper and now I’m petrified that someone’s found it and is wiping me out!Haven’t you heard of identity theft?”

Amanda said to me privately that theidentity thief would be really scraping the bottom of the barrel to stealSaffy’s identity. “She has a total of $100 in her bank account!”

I was impressed. “How do you know?”

“It was one of the random securityquestions the Stan Chart woman asked over the phone when Saffy had to prove heridentity because she couldn’t remember her NRIC number! Can you imagine notknowing your NRIC number in this country? You might as well not exist!”

I can’t help but wonder if Madonnaor Brad Pitt ever have this problem.

Home for the Holidays

2012-02-02T19:36:00.001+08:00

Apparently,Oscar Wilde once said that youth is wasted on the young. (I say ‘apparently’because I’m not sure I’m quoting him exactly and I can’t really check thisright now because my Internet is down and I also figure that this is a blog and if you can’t be sloppy with your fact checking here,where can you, are you with me on this, and also by the time the Internet isback up, I’ll probably be taking a nap, I really shouldn’t have had that extracup of coffee this morning.)

The other thing that is wasted onthe young is holidays. Really, when you come right down to it, what do six yearolds need a holiday for? They’re not working a nine-to-five slog. They don’thave to battle it out every morning and every evening on crowded trains. Theydon’t have to fight for a pay-rise. They don’t have to stress out over aPowerpoint presentation. They don’t have to balance their mortgage repayments,car loans, or deal with maid agencies.

So let’s just admit it. Children don’t needholidays. Because their whole lives arealready a holiday.

“That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?” Amanda askedthe other day.

“I’m with Jason on this,” Saffy said, her fabulousbosom vibrating with the social injustice of it all. “When you have to dealwith a horrible boss whose greatest pleasure in life is to make you redo theaudit report for the fifteenth time and then yells at you for spelling his namewrong, then we can talk aboutholidays!”

Amanda blinked. “You spelt your boss’s name wrong?How is that possible?”

Saffy puffed up. “How was I supposed to know whathis name is, let alone that he spells Elvin with two ‘y’s? I only ever call him Mr Tan!”

“Wait a minute, he spells his name E-L-V-Y-Y-N?”

“My point exactly! What is he, an elf from Lord ofthe Bloody Rings?”

“Speaking of which,” Amanda said, “have you seenOrlando Bloom’s girlfriend, Miranda Kerr, that Victoria’s Secret model? Can youbelieve that she’s just had a baby?”

“I wish I could walk around all day wearing just abikini, body glitter and big wings,” Saffy said wistfully.

As I later complained to Karl at lunch, it’s nowonder I seldom initiate a conversation in the little flat I share with Saffyand Amanda. Within thirty seconds, we’re invariably talking about a completelydifferent subject to the one we started out with.

“And within thirty seconds of the secondconversation, we’re talking about another topic altogether!” Even in myheightened state of discontent, I could hear a distinct whining note in myvoice.

“Calm down,” Karl said, his soothing voice somewhatmuffled by the burger he was chewing. “You sound like you need a holiday.”

And that was my point, I said, it’s adults who need holidays. Not kids.Kids, I said, should be sent to school and not be let out till they’re readyfor NS.

“Please don’t talk like this in public,” Karlbegged.

Meanwhile, Amanda says she’s reading a book called‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ which is, apparently, life-changing.

“It says that we need to make a paradigm shift inour lives,” she reported this morning. “We need to look at life as one longvacation that’s interrupted by work. Isn’t that a fabulous idea?”

Saffy looked up from her cereal. “How?”

“I don’t know. I’m just dipping in and out of it. Ihave the attention span of a walnut these days. I can’t seem to concentrate forvery long on any given topic.”

“You need a holiday!” I said, pleased that we wereback on track.

“I need to stop working and just sit under a palmtree on a beach for a year. And I also need to find a boyfriend.”

“None of which you’ll find holed up all day in anoffice,” I said, not daring to look at my watch to see how many seconds we hadleft for this topic.

“I can’t remember the last time I went on aholiday,” Saffy said as she stared up at the ceiling. “I’m so tired. Jason isright. It’s so unfair. Kids these days have, what, three months of holidays ayear? What do they need three months off for? We need it more. Not to mention, more deserving. I’m telling you,if it wasn’t for adults, there’d be nokids in the first place!”

“You sound just like your mother, Saff,” Amandasaid.

“Oh. My. God. Did I tell you what she said to methe other day? I was so angry I nearly reached out to choke her. She said…”

I sighed as I glanced at my watch. Thirty-oneseconds.

Talent Time

2012-01-25T15:45:00.001+08:00

Animals areseasonal creatures. Every winter, the birds head south for sunnier temperatures,while furrier land-bound creatures hole up in their little homes, try to staywarm and hibernate. Then, with the first hint of sunshine and spring, theystart to stir and stick their noses out into the air. The salmon struggleupstream to breed while the birds come home to roost.

In the little flat I share withSaffy and Amanda, the beginning of each year marks the opening season ofAmerican Idol and as Ryan Seacrest yells out “This is A-mer-icanIdol!”, you just know that life is going to be, once again, bright, harmoniousand fun again.

“I love this show!” Amanda said theother night as we settled in to watch the auditions aboard an aircraft carrierdocked in San Diego.

“There aren’t enough deludedtone-deaf people singing and behaving badly this year,” I noted with a seasonedcritical ear.

“I want to have Steven Tyler’sbaby!” Saffy mumbled through a mouthful of popcorn.

“You have a boyfriend, Saffy!”Amanda said from the other end of the couch, disapproval etched into everysyllable.

“I know that, but there’s no rulethat says you can’t have a boyfriend and still have Steven Tyler’s baby. He’ssuch a wrinkled old man, but there’s something so unbearably sexy about him!”Saffy’s bosom inflated with enthusiasm.

And that’s the thing about AmericanIdol: It encourages you to dream. It doesn’t matter if you’re a waitress, asingle mother, a mechanic, a coal miner, an unemployed kid, or a collegestudent – if you dream big, anything could happen. Even having a baby withSteven Tyler.

And especially if you’re JimCarrey’s daughter - who actually auditioned and was sent to Hollywood.

Amanda was shocked. “Jim Carrey’sdaughter is a waitress? Why is JimCarrey’s daughter a waitress?”

“Maybe she’s a high-class waitress?”Saffy offered as she peered into the depths of her bosom looking for a straypopcorn.

“Yes, but he’s worth bazillions.Would you be a waitress if your father was worth bazillions? I’d be at the spaall day! And this girl can sing, too,” Amanda added, in the dark, her facebathed with the flickering TV light. “You’d think her father with all hisconnections would pull a string or two to get a recording contract.”

“Yeah, like Priscilla Presley!” Saffysaid.

After a moment’s silence, Amandapointed out that Elvis was dead.

“You think his name didn’t opendoors? Really?” Saffy asked with her usual penetrating insight.

In a world where even someone like ParisHilton can release a studio album, it seemed to us very strange, not to mentionunfair, that Jim Carrey’s daughter had to go through the humiliating TVexperience of an audition just so she didn’t have to be a waitress for the restof her life.

“Well, at least she can sing. Shehas talent,” Saffy said. “I don’t have any talent. No, really, I don’t. I can’tcook, I can’t sing, I can’t dance, I can’t write. I have no hand-eyecoordination. Which means we can immediately rule out a career as MarthaStewart, Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, JK Rowling or Serena Williams!”

The idea depressed Saffy for days. “Amandacan live on her retirement loot as a lawyer and you,” she said, dejectedlylifting a nose in my direction, “you’re going to inherit from your parents, butwhat am I going to do? I have no talentfor anything!”

“Well, you’re a very capable HRmanager!” But even as I said those words, I knew how hollow they sounded.

“Everyone hates the HR manager!” Saffy said. “People see me walk down thecorridor and they tense up. The other day, this secretary told me that aftershe had a meeting with me, she couldn’t peefor six hours.”

Nothing we said could change hermind. Not even the prospect that her adoring boyfriend Bradley would one dayearn enough money to be able to support her in the lifestyle to which she’sbecome accustomed in her fantasy world.

“Oh, please. He’s an accountantwho’s in charge of payroll. Where’s the money going to come from?”

“He could embezzle?” Amanda saidhelpfully.

“Great. Thank you, Amanda. Now, I’mdating a potential con-man.”

“I’m just saying!”

Saffy’s eyebrows wrinkled. “Do you think Changiprison provides its inmates with spousal conjugal rights?”

“Aiyoh, why you like that, one?”Saffy’s best friend Sharyn exclaimed. “You got no talent, got no talent, lor. You’llhave beautiful children, lah!”

“Oh great. I’ll be the world’s most talentlessmother. And I’ll be poor. It’s no wonder my kids will be auditioning onAmerican Idol!”

“Or worse,” Sharyn added darkly, “Singapore Idol!”

Child Proof

2012-01-19T20:04:00.002+08:00

One of thehorrible things about Facebook – and yes, it’s not all good – is that it’sreally sneaky at telling you that you’re getting old. Well, it doesn’t exactlyspell it out for you, but you’d have to be in a terminal coma not to spot themessage.

The other day, my friend Mary postedsome holiday snaps of her family by the beach. “Wow,” I wrote to her, “how Jennahas grown! I still have a photo you sent me when she was born. Look at hernow!”

Mary replied that if it wasn’t forchildren, we wouldn’t really notice the passage of time.

Saffy snorted when I told her this.“Listen, if it wasn’t for children, Mary would still have her amazing figure! Iremember going to a beach party with her years ago and hating her for her gorgeous curves, and now,” she said, leaning incloser to my computer to look at Mary in a two-piece, “not so much. I tell you,children have so much to answer for.”

There was a still pause as we bothlooked at the slide show of Mary’s children cavorting in the sand and the sea.In the background, Mary and her husband lay supine on a beach blanket, theireyes hidden behind sunglasses, their smiles, Saffy insisted, hiding a world ofregret.

When I was a kid, I remember thegrown-ups would always exclaim to my mother, “How the children have grown,Mei-ling!”

“Oh, they’re such useless lazylayabouts!” Mother would say modestly, her chest puffed up with pride. “Notlike your children!”

“Aiyoh, my children. They give mesuch a headache! I’m forever chauffeuring them about: Mabel to ballet class,Henry to piano and now Janette says she want to take up the violin! I’mexhausted, I tell you!”

Later that night at dinner, Mother complainedto Father, “I can’t stand that Jenny Chan! Always boasting about her childrenlike they were Noble Prize winners! Has she taken a good look at that Mabel ofher’s? She’s so fat I’m surprised she doesn’t break her toes every time shedoes a pirouette!”

Father fluttered his hands at her.“Ay, ay, ay! Don’t say such things about other people’s children!”

With parents like mine, is it anywonder that I grew up having such conflicted opinions about children? “They’reso noisy and grimy!” I once told Sharyn, a mother of five who has skin so thicka bullet would have trouble making a dent.

“Yah lor,” she said cheerfully. “Soungrateful, some more!”

A few days ago, I was at my deskworking on a story when the Skype phone rang.

“Hello, Go-Pa!” my god-daughter Minascreamed.

Her mother loomed in the background.“Mina, please don’t yell like that. It’s not how a lady behaves!”

“I want to speak to Go-Pa! Alone! Goaway!” yelled the love of my life.

As we spent the next half hourchatting about everything from spaghetti with Marmite to holiday plans, Icouldn’t shake the marvel at how fast Mina had grown.

The very first time I laid eyes onher, my god-daughter was a bundle of wrinkled skin and tiny fingers, allwrapped in white swaddling cloth. Her eyes were slits of skin, and her handslike tiny chicken feet. It was not a very interactive experience. I compensatedby going shopping and bought her a pair of Gucci baby shoes that she neverwore. As Amanda would point out, it was not a promising start to ourrelationship.

But came the day when, completely unable topronounce God-pa, she lisped out Go-pa. I was completely charmed. “She’s soadorable!” I told complete strangers. “She’s so bright and clever. I don’tusually like children, you know!”

And now six years later, here she was, larger thanlife on Skype, an animated chattering force of energy who, thanks to herdiligent Type A German father and Type A+ Chinese mother, could give you lip inequally fluent bursts of Mandarin, German and English.

“When are you coming to see me,Go-Pa?” she asked.

“I’ll come for Chinese New Year,OK?”

Her mother later told me that Minais so excited by my arrival that she asked if she could stay up to say hello. Idon’t think I know anyone who is so looking forward to seeing me that theywould give up their sleep to do so. I personally can’t think of anyone I would do that for.

But then again, that’s kids for you.They teach you how to recognize what’s important in life. And you’re gratefulfor the lesson, even if it means giving up your figure for them.

Bend it like Beckham

2012-01-15T00:26:00.002+08:00

There’s norhyme or reason for why some people are rabid fans of some celebrities. BarneyChen goes into a state of shock not dissimilar to a diabetic attack at the meremention of Madonna. To this day, he’s convinced that ‘Swept Away’ is amasterpiece that’s way up there with ‘Citizen Kane’.

Others like Sharyn think the sunrises and sets over Fann Wong. Which I suppose, technically, it does but then,as Saffy once so trenchantly observed, the same could be said for the dungbeetle. For her part, Saffy says she would hack off a leg if it meant that shecould spend a night having wild sex with Jude Law.

“How do you know it will be wild?”Amanda once asked.

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Are youcrazy? Of course, it will be wild! Why will it not be wild? Look at this!” sheinsisted, as she went onto Google Images on her laptop and typed in ‘Jude LawNude’. A series of grainy images filled the screen.

“Look at that body!” Saffy commanded. “How couldsex with this man be anything but wild?”

And then there’s the tricky subject of VictoriaBeckham. Talk about a woman who divides opinion. Amanda loathes her, butlargely on account of the fact that she thinks David Beckham made the biggestmistake of his life marrying Victoria. “It should’ve been me!” she said once, sounding,for all the world, like a Broadway musical.

Saffy, on the other hand, thinks Victoria Beckhamshould be sainted while she’s still alive. “She gives so much hope to the restof us. She married a god. She’s popped out twenty children and still has thebody of an 18 year old virgin. She’s got amazing clothes, amazing shoes. Shehangs out with Elton John. Seriously, she should run for prime minister!”

I bring all this up because I’m in London right nowand yesterday, I was having a breakfast meeting at Delauney, a fancy new restaurantin Covent Garden, when there was a noticeable drop in the level of the volumeof conversation. Like a herd of gazelles at the watering hole, we lifted ourcollective heads from our eggs Benedict and turned towards the entrance.

Like a tiger at night, a tall woman sheathed in thechicest black strode majestically down the aisle. As I later reported to Saffy,Victoria Beckham was immaculate. Everything about her was flawless - from thesheen on the hair, not a strand out of place, to the figure hugging dress andhigh heels, right down to the little black Chanel handbag. She looked likeshe’d just stepped off a runway.

“She must have been up since 3am to get ready tolook like that!” I said.

“That’s what you can achieve when you havebazillions in your bank account,” Saffy said with approval.

Meanwhile, scurrying up behind Victoria was herpersonal assistant, a dowdy woman wearing her harassment like a radiationcounter and overloaded with various bags and heavy coats. And behind her was the nanny carrying what everyoneassumed was the latest Beckham baby.

“Oh, God, I’m so jealous you got to see her!” Saffymoaned over Skype.

Amanda poked her head into thescreen. “Who cares about her? Did you see David? Was he there?”

“No, just her and her assistants.She was having a meeting with a guy in spectacles. With her baby on her lap.”

Saffy says that this is the waywomen should juggle their careers. With a personal assistant and a nanny. “I'd love tobe able to march into a restaurant and be trailed by people carrying all mycrap! And when the kid starts acting up, I hand him back to his nanny so that Ican continue to crunch numbers and seal the deal!”

Barney Chen wanted toknow if I’d taken pictures. “Oh my God, please tell me you took pictures! IADORE Victoria Beckham!” he texted.

I wrote back: “If theworld came to an end and there was space only for one more person on the spaceshuttle, who would it be – Victoria or Madonna?”

Almost immediately,his reply pinged back. “OMG, it’s like Sophie’s Choice! I can’t choose! I thinkI wld sacrifice myself n save both of them!!!!!”

Apparently, Saffytold Barney he was so dumb. “You’d never have to make the choice because you’dhave kicked Jason off the space shuttle first!”

Amanda reported thatBarney replied, “Oooh, that is so true!”

If I ever inheritVictoria Beckham’s millions, I know who will be following behind me andcarrying my crap when I walk into a restaurant for my meeting with Jude Law.

Cleaning Agent

2012-01-12T03:25:00.000+08:00

Oneof the perils of Chinese New Year is the dreadedfamily gathering where well meaning relatives hand over a lousy $10 ang pow inexchange for the pleasure of spending the next two hours publicly humiliatingyou either about your single marital status or, if you’re married, yourperplexing on-going infertility.

The other peril of Chinese New Yearis spring cleaning, that yearly ritual that begins one morning when you wakeup, look around your bedroom and realise that you have accumulated a lot ofjunk.

In the little flat I share withSaffy and Amanda, this year’s first round of drama began, as it so often does,with a television show.

One morning, stumbling out of bedand into the kitchen, Amanda found Saffy already up. Well, technically, she wasawake, but she was horizontal on the couch watching TV on the MacBook that was balancedon her tummy.

“It’s 7 am!” Amanda mumbled.

“I couldn’t sleep. I woke up from avery disturbing dream where I was married to my boss and he was making a moveon me after a dinner that I cooked for him while I was naked!”

As Amanda later said to me, you’dthink she’d have learnt by now never to talk to Saffy about anything. “Why arewe still living with her?” she asked, not for the first time.

It turned out that Saffy’s latestaddiction is an American reality TV programme called ‘Extreme Hoarding’. Everyweek, the cameras invade the homes of two extreme hoarders. We’re not talkingabout a few too many books here. It’s as if someone went to a city’s centralrubbish tip and thought to himself, “Hmm, this would be a perfect place tobuild a house!”

But rather than build the house on top of the piles of rotting, putridrubbish, this person builds aroundthe rubbish by picking a random pile and sticking a roof over it.

In one episode, the owner walkedfrom one end of his living room to the other on literally two feet of boxes,cartons, books, files, furniture and clothes. And because the bottom of hisstaircase was blocked by an entire wardrobe, he had to squeeze through a gapbetween the railing and ceiling to get upstairs. “My girlfriend died in thisroom because the paramedics couldn’t get their equipment through,” he told thecamera.

“Oh. My. God.” Saffy’s bosominflated with horror.

“Seriously, why are we watching thisat 9am on a Saturday morning?” Amanda asked. It had been two hours since she’dwoken up. She’d never made it to the kitchen.

“It’s horrible! It’s such anaddictive show!” she later told me, her retinas still haunted by the images ofall that trash, mouldy kitchens and rank toilets. “How do people live likethat?”

Meanwhile, in an extreme case oflife imitating art, Saffy has been on a major cleaning frenzy in preparation for Chinese New Year. “I’m not going to end up on that show!” sheannounced as she snapped on the cleaning gloves. The past few days have been ablur. It’s just not safe to walk past her room in case you’re hit byprojectiles comprising old out of shape bras, dusty magazines, dog-earedtextbooks from her numerous uncompleted night classes, dresses of varying sizesfrom her chequered dieting experiments, tattered Victoria’s Secret underwear,old bedsheets and assorted knick-knacks, including a shower of old Valentine’sDay cards.

Amanda says that if you ever need aninsight into someone’s life, ambitions and failed dreams, just go through theirrubbish.

“Why am I keeping this?” Saffymuttered, holding up a bundle of old pens, rusty paper clips and rubber bands.

“In case you need to make a run forit?” suggested Amanda, who’s been watching old episodes of ‘Prison Break’.

Saffy’s frenzied spring-cleaning hasspurred me to throw out a few things of my own. And here’s the thing: throwingout the first book that you know you’re never going to read is incrediblypainful. But by the fifth book and the eighth Giordano tee, you’re on your way.The sense of freedom is exhilarating and empowering.

“I feel like I’ve actually lost weight by throwing all this junk out!”Saffy said proudly yesterday morning as she hauled out another bag of oldclothes and shoes. Her voice echoed in the suddenly empty space of bare shelvesand hollow wardrobe. All night, the silence bothered her. She couldn’t sleep.At 3am, she got up, turned on her computer and bought some books from Amazon.

News Break

2012-01-04T18:14:00.001+08:00

When I wasgrowing up, the first thing my parents did in the morning was have a cup of pu-er tea (my father) and a glass of hotwater (my mother). The next thing they’d do was turn on the radio, specificallyto the BBC. My sister always jokes that the first words we recognized aschildren were ‘No!’, and ‘This is the BBC World Service’, the latter invariablyaccompanied by the chimes of Big Ben.

No one was allowed to say anythingduring the news broadcast as everyone listened intently to what had gone on inthe world while we’d been asleep. It occurred to me very early on that the newswas always bad. The BBC never ran stories about a lost dog being reunited withhis family. It was always something dramatic or depressing. If it wasn’t an oilcrisis, it was a plane blowing up. And if it wasn’t a disgraced prime ministerbeing found outside out a hotel room without his pants on (true story), it wassomeone famous dying. Or about to die.

But that was kind of it. When the news segmentended about five minutes later, that was it. Life returned to normal and peoplestarted chatting and gossiping about the day ahead. Unless you worked fromhome, you didn’t listen to the news again till later that evening – which wouldusually be a quick recap of what had happened that day.

Somewhere along the way though, thenews has taken on a life of it own. There’s so much of it. You now have entireTV and radio channels devoted to news. 24/7 news channels broadcasting nothingbut bad news all the time. It’s likea virus, multiplying faster than you can read it or hear it. They usually tellyou the same thing every 3 minutes, so that by the 18^th time in halfan hour that you’ve watched an entire village being sucked up by a landslide,you’re so immune to the horror, you find yourself sitting on the side of yourbed contentedly clipping your toe nails.

“It’s why I try to only ever readVogue,” Saffy said the other day. “In the world of Vogue, bad news is when youwear the wrong shoes with your outfit.”

Amanda grunted. “Yeah, you want tobring down the energy at a party? Talk about the financial crisis.”

Saffy’s bosom inflated to dangerousvolumes. “Oh my God, I’m so boredwith the financial crisis! Can we please talk about something else, already?”

“And don’t get me started on themagazines and newspapers,” Amanda went on. “It’s bad enough that you just mademe waste 15 minutes of my life ploughing through 25oo words telling me abouthow the European leaders can’t agree on the future of the Euro…”

“Care factor: zero!” Saffy announced.

“But don’t make me read,” Amandawent on, clearly gathering steam, “another three pages of commentary by a wholebunch of academics and experts about why the leaders can’t agree and what theythink will happen if this state of non-agreement continues for the next twomonths!”

Saffy cheered. “And then listen tomore of the same on the BB bloody C for the next five hours! Put on some disco!”

All of which explains why ourcollective new year’s resolution is to watch and read less news in 2012. Leaveit to Saffy to take it to the extreme of resolving not to watch or read any news this year.

“Har? Where got such thing, one?”Sharyn asked, her huge eyes unblinking behind her super thick spectacles.

“If it’s really important news,someone will tell me about it,” Saffy said serenely. “I’ll get everything elseI need from Vogue!”

Sharyn looked unconvinced. “Aiyoh,if tsunami hit Singapore, then how?”

Amanda sighed. “Sharyn, seriously.If there was a tsunami, we’d be too busy swimming for our lives to be readingabout it in a newspaper!”

“Exactly!” Saffy said. You couldtell from the faraway look in her eyes that she was mentally practising herbreast-stroke.

Later, Sharyn pulled me aside. “Ay,cannot like this, lah! How can you ignore the news?”

I told her that, for once, I waswith the girls on this one. “There’s just too much bad news out there, Sharyn.It’s depressing. And it’s time we stopped feeling guilty just because we didn’tknow that the Dow Jones and Hangseng have dropped another two points.”

I’d meant it as a joke, but Sharynspent the next half hour on the phone screaming at her remisier to sell all herBank of China shares.

“She’s too tense,” Saffy said. “Sheshould read more Vogue.”

Face Forward

2011-12-25T20:03:00.002+08:00

Has anyone seenthe latest Scream movie? The Wes Craven reboot of his hysterically intellectualand scary series? We watched it the other night. Scared us silly with all thatslashing, blood, and bulging eyes as one person after the other dropped deadamidst sharp violin notes and girls running around screaming from room to room.

And can I just say that the loudest screams in thelittle flat I share with Saffy and Amanda were reserved for Courtney Cox?

Amanda stared slack jawed at the screen. “Oh. My.God. What has Courtney Cox done to her face?”

“Has she had work done?” Saffy mumbled through amouthful of Garrett’s popcorn.

“Of course she has!” Amanda said knowledgeably overthe screams of a nubile wench being stabbed by the vicious man in black. “Lookat the odd angle of her eyes! And, look, she can’t even lift her brows! Oh,Courtney, if Monica Geller could see you now!”

For days, it was all the girls could talk about.

“Got plastic surgery, meh?” Sharyn asked overafternoon tea at the Regent.

“Oh my God, Sharyn,” Amanda said, “she looked likeshe was caught in a wind-tunnel! Her face was so tight!”

“So tight!” Saffy repeated through a mouthful ofchocolate éclair. “So tight that she never smiled. Did you notice that, Amanda?Courtney Cox never smiled through that whole movie.”

“She was pulled so tightly she probably would have farted if she’d smiled,” said Amanda,doing absolutely no credit to her expensive Swiss boarding school education.

It’s a sure sign that you’re getting old when everytime you get together with friends from school, you find yourself scrutinising(and silently judging) their faces for lines and then realize, to your mountinghorror, that if your friends are lookingwrinkled, then so must you.

My friend Jonathan recently emailed me and told me tolook up the website of the law firms that our friends were now partners at.

It wasn’t a pleasant exercise. I swear, if itwasn’t for their names, I wouldn’t have recognized anyone.

Guys whom I remembered to be fresh and handsomeback in law school now looked haggard with thinning hair, sagging jowls, andhuge bags under their eyes. Girls who once made professors stumble over theirlectures looked positively matronly, their eyes hidden behind ugly glasses,their gorgeous faces buried beneath a mask of three-dimensional make-up andtheir hair burdened with enough hair spray to withstand a cyclone.

“What happened to everyone?” I emailed Jonathan ina panic.

He wrote back: “Stress. Children. Mortgages. Officepolitics. Loans. Life.”

It was such a depressing thought. It later occurredto me that they don’t tell you about this in school. No one does. It’s like adirty secret. No teacher or responsible adult ever said to us, “Right, afterall these exams and after you graduate and get a job, you’re going to immediatelyage 30 years and it’s not going to be pretty!” I suppose if they did, no onewould ever bother wasting their lives at school. They’d all be at the beachhaving a party and getting drunk.

I recently spent an hour holding a mirror to myface in the bathroom looking for the devastating aging I saw so clearly in myfriends.

“Should we fix an appointment to see Woffles Wu?” Iasked Saffy.

“Good luck getting an appointment with him!” she said, never looking up fromher latest copy of Prestige magazine. “He’s always going somewhere fun and givinglectures, or he’s traveling down memory lane back to Disco Singapore. Do youthink he’s happily married? One of my life ambitions is to marry a plasticsurgeon. Can you imagine that? Free face lifts and tummy tucks for life! Thinkof all the money I’d save! You and Amanda will get friend’s discounts, ofcourse,” Saffy said magnanimously from the comfortable heights of her paralleluniverse. “Oh my God, have you seen this issue of Prestige? I’m halfway throughit and I’ve not seen a single person who hasn’t had plastic surgery. Everyone’sbeen tugged, peeled and stapled! I tell you, if I ever looked like this, I’dnever leave the house!”

“So what would be the point of getting married toWoffles Wu?” I asked.

“Oh, Woffles would never do shoddy work like this!” said the future Mrs Saffy Wuloyally. She snapped shut the magazine and struggled out of the couch. “Allthis talk of tummy tucks is making me hungry. What’s for lunch? I wonder ifWoffles does Botox for tummies. Can you imagine it? Eat all you want and stillbe able to fit into a bikini without being mistaken for a beached whale! He’dbe richer than God!”

Daze of our lives

2011-12-16T17:21:00.002+08:00

The other nightat a dinner party, someone turned to Saffy and asked her what she would do ifshe knew she had only one day left to live.

Now, if you were to ask most peoplethat question, I’ll bet the mood will turn philosophical and wistful. Perhapsthey’ll smile and say something naff like “I’d go hang-gliding”, or “I’d spendit with my dog”.

Saffy’s eyes widened and her famousbosom inflated to maximum capacity. “Why? What’s going to happen? What do youknow? Oh my God, are you staring at my BREASTS AGAIN?” Conversation at thetable came to a complete standstill as every head swiveled around in herdirection.

The poor guy who asked the questionturned bright pink, and started sputtering, “Yes, uh, no! I mean I was, but I’m not...”

Amanda later said it was one of those questionsthat you can’t just say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to: kind of like “Have you stoppedabusing your wife and children?” And with everyone alternately looking at himand peering sideways at Saffy’s breasts, her dinner companion – Amanda’s verydistinguished professor of law, as it turned out – found himself completelyunable to explain himself.

Saffy was unrepentant. “What astupid question to ask me! What would I do if I knew I only had one day left tolive? Well, for one thing, I wouldn’t have been sitting next to that Dodo atthat boring dinner!”

The air turned icy. “It was my birthday dinner, Saffy,” Amanda said,her lips tight.

“And thank you very much for sittingme next to Professor Dumbo-bore!” Saffysaid, completely unmoved.

Still, the question fully occupiedmy attention for days. People are always talking about their bucket list –things they want to do, or plan to do if they ever found the time, money oropportunity.

Barney Chen said he’d be spendinghis last day at the gym. “Because I’m going to have an open casket at myfuneral,” he said and added shyly, “I’m going to wear a super tight t-shirt andI want people to say, as they pass my coffin, ‘Man, he looked good for hisage.’”

Amanda raised an eyebrow. “In thatcase, you might as well be topless! Or nude!”You could tell by Barney’s distant stare that he’d not thought of thissartorial alternative.

Sharyn says she would leave herchildren. “Cannot tahan ah, I tell you! Morning wake up, they’re screaming.Night time, still screaming. My mudder, hor, she say, ‘Who ask you get married?’Aiyoh, why I don’t listen to her?”

Meanwhile, mymother says it might be fun to be in a threesome, a sentiment that shocked mysister so much she was unable to speak for two days. “What sort of a thing isthat to say to your children?” Michelle demanded when she regained partial controlof her vocal chords. “I can’t even imagine her doing it with Daddy, never mind with a third party! It’s not wonder mytherapist says I have issues! When your mother talks like this in public, howcould you not have issues?” shecroaked.

Personally, I’ll be booking myself onto a firstclass trip to New York on a Singapore Airlines A380 plane. The idea of beingwaited on hand and foot, in a nice comfy bed with fluffy white linen, just meand a glass of champagne for 17 hours just seems incredibly blissful. No emailaccess, no phone calls, and hopefully, no screaming baby in the next cabin todisturb my KrisWorld entertainment. I would die happy.

When I told Saffy and Amanda my earthly exit plan,it was met with complete silence.

“What?” I said eventually.

“I cannot believe…” Saffy began.

“That you would spend your last day without us!”Amanda finished.

“Do you have any idea how hurtful that is?”

“But I’ll already be spending my second last day with you!” I protested.

“That’s such a typical male thing to say. That’sjust the sort of thing you would say when your mistress discovers you in bedwith your wife!” Saffy huffed.

I told her that made no sense at all.

“Well, it does to me!” Amanda snapped. “I guessthat’s settled then, Saffy. You and I will be spending our last day together.

Saffy looked a little embarrassed. “Well, uhm, Iwas thinking that maybe I might get married to Brad!” she began and then wenton in a rush. “We marry in the afternoon, have a party and then later thatnight, I die in his arms! It would be soromantic!”

Amanda says she’s always known that she would diealone.

Will and Grace

2011-12-09T01:02:00.001+08:00

People tend togo a little funny when you tell them you’re doing up your will.

“Oh dear, everything is ok, isn’tit?” they lean in and ask anxiously, their eyes bright with sympathy.

“I’m dying!” Saffy once said dramatically. By the time Sharyn had stoppedcrying hysterically, Saffy added, “Well, I’m not dying immediately, but it’s going to happen eventually!”

“Choy!” Sharyn shouted. “Where gotsuch thing, one, tell people you’re dying? Aiyoh, give me heart attack, ah, Itell you!”

“All the more reason to do yourwill, in that case!” Saffy said triumphantly.

Ever practical, Amanda can’tunderstand what the fuss is all about. “Everyone should get their will done up.These days, you never know. You could step out of a restaurant and get run overby a bus!”

“And imagine if you’d been trying tolose weight and all you had for lunch was a salad!” Saffy added with a shiverof horror.

The other day, my friend Jeremyposted on Facebook an article about this 30 something year old woman in Londonwho was discovered in her flat three years after she’d died. Apparently, the TVwas still on and no one had smelt her decomposing body because the windows ofher flat opened over a rubbish tip, so no one could tell. By the time thelandlord broke down the door to demand his three years of back rent, the woman,still sitting in her sofa in her living room, had become a skeleton.

The fate of the poor woman fullyoccupied our attention for days. Saffy couldn’t understand how in three years noone even bothered to find out what had happened to their friend. “I mean, lookat this picture of her! She’s so pretty! Three years is a long time not to catchup with someone! What was wrong with her friends?”

It didn’t take a genius to guessfrom Saffy’s hunted eyes that she was thinking that if someone so pretty couldbe completely overlooked for three years, how much longer would it take to discover the skeleton of someone who wasconsiderably less pretty?

“I hope she at least had a will!”Amanda said.

“If she was three years behind inher rent, I really doubt she had much money to start with!” Saffy said,completely forgetting that the woman had been very much dead during those three years.

Later that afternoon, Barney Chendropped by for coffee and was brought up to date with the issue currentlyobsessing us. “This is why I have a morning buddy!” he growled in his bassbaritone.

Amanda hesitated. “Uhm…is that likea…uhm…a friend with benefits?”

“No, that’s a fu…”

I coughed loudly.

“A morning buddy,” Barney said witha smirk, “is when you’re single and you live alone and this person calls youevery morning just to check that you’re still alive. My morning buddy is mymother! She calls me every morning at 7.30. Her morning buddy is her sister, myAuntie Ming and I’m Auntie Ming’s morningbuddy. It’s a closed loop system,” he said with satisfaction.

Amanda later said at least a morningbuddy was one thing we didn’t need right now. “God, imagine living alone andthen dying and no one knows…”

“Or cares,” Saffy added darkly.

A few days ago, my mother rang andannounced that she and my father were redoing their wills. “Would you like usto leave you anything specific, Jason, dear?” Mother asked in the same kind oftone you use to ask someone if they would like another slice of cake.

“I don’t want any of thesilverware!” I said firmly. “Or any of the dusty Persian rugs.”

Saffy popped her head in my room. “Tellher you’ll take the cash!” she hissed.

I cupped a hand over the speaker andyelled, “Stop listening to my private conversations!”

“God, that’s so rude!” she said asshe flounced off. “See if I’m going to discover you in the morning!”

Meanwhile, my mother was stillrabbiting on who she was going to leave her precious bed linen and vintageBalenciagas to. “It’ll be all wasted on your sister. She only wears Zara!”

Michelle later said she couldn’tthink of anything more ghoulish than inheriting your parents’ bed linen. “Justthe possibility that those might have been the very sheets you were conceived on! Oh my God, can you imaginethe ick factor?”

Saffy says that even if she made awill, she’d have nothing to leave anyone, anyway, so what was the point? But tobe on the safe side, she’s now sleeping with her bedroom door wide open. “Checkin on me each morning!”

What a dump

2011-12-01T01:53:00.001+08:00

You know you’regetting older when you go to a restaurant and the first thing you comment on ishow dim the lighting is.

“It’s so dark in here! How am Isupposed to read the menu?” Amanda demanded the other night.

Right on cue, a waiter emerged outof the gloom. “Would you like a torchlight, ma’am?” he asked and was rewardedwith the Look of Death.

“How dare you?” Saffy hissed onbehalf of Amanda who had been rendered speechless by the waiter’s appallinglack of discretion. “You can’t go around calling people ‘ma’am’! What is this, the Victorian age? Listen, we’re young enoughto be your sister!”

By the time everyone had calmed downand a new waiter was found to take our order, Saffy was soon complaining thateven with the torchlight, she couldn’t read the menu.

“Seriously, could this font be anysmaller? What am I, an ant?”

I sighed. Clearly, this was going tobe an evening of rhetorical questions.

The next morning at breakfast, itwas all the girls could talk about.

“My God, the acoustics in thatrestaurant were vile!” Saffy exclaimed, her bosom inflating with effort beneathher super tight tube top. “I’m still deaf from having to shout the wholeevening!”

“Tell it! And can I just say howmuch I hate all that fiddly food that’s been touched by a hundred hands? Nexttime, we’re eating in a cze char joint. I’ve had it with these fancy schmancydumps.”

“Speaking of which…” Saffy began.

“Shut up, Saffy!” Amandainterrupted. From bitter experience, it’s never a good thing to get Saffystarted on anything to do with gastro-intestinal topics. But our flatmate wasmade of sterner stuff because she ploughed on.

“No, really, it’s important.Sharyn’s got hemo-whatsits!” she said in a triumphant rush before anyone couldstop her.

Amanda paused, her spoonful ofcereal halfway to her open mouth.

I looked up from my Blackberry.

“It’s that thing when your bumhurts! You know, hemo-whatsit!” Saffy said, as if the sheer act of repetitionwould make things clearer. She looked expectantly between Amanda and me.

Amanda looked at me. “I’m afraid toask.”

“I’m not even going to,” I said.

After a lot of gruesome graphicexplanations, all of it patently unsuitable to listen to while eatingbreakfast, it turned out that Sharyn had a severe case of hemorrhoids.

Amanda’s nose wrinkled. “Oh my God,I thought that sort of thing only happened to grandmothers!”

“She’s going to have an operation toremove it!” Saffy said helpfully, but it was clear from her expression that shehad no idea what ‘it’ actually was.

“So what exactly is a hemorrhoid?” Amanda asked. “And, more importantly, howdo we not get it?”

“I thought it’s when you cutyourself and then bleed to death,” Saffy said. “Or am I thinking of a hemogoblin?”

“Phil-liac!”Amanda said.

“Who’s Phil?” Saffy asked.

That afternoon, we showed up at thehospital to visit Sharyn just before she went in for her operation.

“Aiyoh, you, ah!” she sighed. Shewas wearing an ugly shower-cap and an even uglier blue hospital gown thatAmanda later said did nothing for her figure. “A hammer-roid is when the vein in your bot-bot swell up so it’s hard for you to bang-sai!”

A fat silence walked into the roomand made itself comfortable. Amanda blinked, while Saffy frowned. I looked upat the ceiling and stared hard at the light fixtures.

“I did not understand a word youjust said,” Amanda said eventually.

Sharyn sighed again. She reached forthe pen and paper beside her bed and started sketching. Saffy and Amanda leanedin. Both started screaming round about the same time.

Later, back in the flat, Saffy saidthat she’d not seen anything so horrific since ‘Alien v Predator’.

“Really, talk about gross!” shesaid, her breasts heaving pneumatically.

Amanda shivered delicately. “Theidea of someone anywhere near my thingy with a scalpel…I’m not going to be ableto poo for days.”

“Can you imagine what this is goingto do for my constipation?” Saffy wondered to the world at large.

As the girls hyperventilated, itoccurred to me that if you wanted clear evidence that you’re getting older,it’s when you start visiting your friends in hospital just before they gettheir hemorrhoids removed. From there, it’s a slow slippery slope towardscataracts, face-lifts and hip replacements. And from there, it’s just a short shuffle to bedpans and respirators.

That evening, when I called mymother to say hello, she said she and my father were getting ready to go skiingin Aspen. “You only die once, darling!”

Dateline

2011-11-30T02:14:00.001+08:00

I don’t knowwhy people make such a big deal about New Year’s Eve. If I had to pick my topthree depressing events, top of the list would be December 31. (Followed by mybirthday and my impending disinheritance.)

There’s something uncomfortablyfinal about the end of the year. With the end of a great book, you can alwaysgo back and re-read the best bits. With a movie, you rent the DVD. But with NewYear’s Eve, it’s right there in your face. It’s the end of the year. It’s gone.You can’t get it back. There’s no rewind button.

Taking stock of the year past doesn’t really do itfor me, because there’s always so much that was undone, so many things unsaid.

“God, you’re depressing,” myflatmate Amanda said to me the other day as I was moping about the flat feelingvery sorry for myself. “Don’t come to the party if you’re going to be sofunereal!”

“Well, I can’t very well not go to aNew Year’s Eve party if the alternative is for me to sit alone at home! That’seven more depressing!”

Amanda sniffed and turned back toher horoscopes in 8DAYS. “Well, I just hope you don’t bring down the mood ofthe party like you did last year when you started telling people about how theyneeded to get their wills made because you never know when you might get runover by a bus!”

“Well, it’s true!” I said stoutly.

“Maybe it is, but it’s not the sortof thing you say to the host’s 80-year old mother!”

“Excuse me, but did she not die twodays later and left no will? And isn’t the entire family now squabbling overher estate? If she’d listened to me, everyone would now be happily enjoyingtheir squillions.”

“Squillions? Who has got squillions?Is he single? Is he straight? What’s going on? What did I miss?” Saffy saidsitting down on the sofa.

“Jason’s in a funk about Charlotte’sNew Year’s Eve party.”

“Well, if it makes you feel better,”Saffy said as she reached for the TV remote control, “I hear that Charlottejust got a nose job.”

Amanda lowered her magazine.

“Turns out she wants to welcome inthe new year with Fann Wong’s nose!”

“How do you know this and I don’t?”Amanda demanded.

“It’s a gift. Well, actually, youknow Jane? Margaret Ho’s sister? Well, she works as a receptionist in theplastic surgeon’s office that Charlotte goes to. She told Margaret, who toldSharyn, who told me.”

“Oh, I love Fann Wong’s nose,” Amanda said.

“I do too, but I can’t afford evento get a mole removed at the moment,so my new year’s resolution is to marry rich!”

“Aren’t you dating Bradley?” Iasked.

“Yes, I am, and I adore him, but there’sno rule that says I can’t marry someone rich while keeping Bradley on the sideas my mistress. Really, it’s a win-win situation.” Saffy’s ample bosom liftedwith satisfaction.

“Well, my resolution for 2012 is tomake partner even if I have to sleep with old Mr Wong to do it,” said Amanda.

“Oh my God, that’s disgusting. Isn’the like 105 years old?”

“He’s 55! You need to work on yourageism, Saffy. What’s your resolution, Jason?”

The question haunts me still. Everyyear, on January 1, I set myself a goal. Three hundred and sixty four dayslater, it’s always unfulfilled. One year, I decided that I would learn French.To this day, I can only say, “Voici l’hotel!” which is French for “Here is thehotel!” It’s not a very useful phrase, and you can see how it only adds to mygeneral low slump.

Going to Charlotte’s party willprobably only make things worst. Because here is a woman who is so organizedthat she’s already achieved her new year’s resolution of having Fann Wong’snose. She never has to do another thing for the rest of the year because it’sall done.

Amanda says that’s cheating, butSaffy later said that Amanda would say something like that. “She’s such a TypeA personality, it’s sickening.”

So, here I am a few weeks away fromCharlotte’s party and trying to ignore the fact that the end of 2011 is loomingand the only thing of note that I’ve accomplished all year has been to file mytax return on time.

“I feel like I’ve wasted my wholeyear,” I said miserably to Saffy last night as we sat on the sofa watching anold episode of ‘True Blood’.

Saffy reached over and patted myleg, and over the screams of someone having his throat ripped out, she said, “You’llalways have me to waste your years with.”

Mummy Dearest

2011-11-17T02:34:00.001+08:00

A few days ago,I woke up feeling poorly. The head hurt, my stomach was gripped with cramps andafter two mouthfuls of breakfast cereal, I was running to the loo.

“Seriously, are you going to be long?”Saffy called from outside the door. “I really need to shower and put my faceon.”

“Go away, I’m sick!” I moaned.

I heard Saffy trudge off towards theother smaller bathroom. “Jason’s sick,” her distant voice reported to Amanda.“I hope he’s not going to pass it to me!”

I spent the rest of the day at home,mostly holed up in bed and feeling very sorry for myself. Eventually, itoccurred to me that I needed to eat something, so I dragged myself to thekitchen.

The fridge yielded two slices ofweek-old pepperoni pizza which turned my stomach just looking at it, a tub oforganic yoghurt, two bottles of champagne, three mouldy apples and half achocolate cake from the birthday party we threw Sharyn.

I looked into the pantry and foundassorted mixed nuts, packets of dried shrimp and dried abalone, and three barsof Hershey’s.

If I was the sort, this would be thepart where I burst into tears. But I was made of sterner stuff, so I picked upthe phone.

My mother was surprised to hear fromme. “Who died?” she asked immediately. “I’m not ready for bad news, I’m aboutto get a seaweed wrap!”

“Mummy, I’m sick!”

And just like that, I was six yearsold again. Mother might have been thousands of miles away in another country,but somehow, I understood that if I told her that I wasn’t well, she would makethings better.

I guess it’s true what they say about children.They never really grow up. When the chips are down, it’s always your mother yougo back to for comfort and solace. When my cousin Mark’s bimbo wife left himfor an alcoholic mechanic, he was so devastated, he moved back home with hisparents. By the second month, his mother was desperately trying to set him upwith anyone who remotely resembled a woman with two functioning breasts, justto get him out of their lives.

“He’s driving us crazy!” AuntieSook-ling hissed to her sister, my mother. “Children are not supposed to moveback in once they’ve left home!”

“I don’t know why I ever left!” Marktold me. “I feel so safe again. Like no one will dare hurt me.”

I told my mother who told AuntieSook-ling. “Well, I’m about to hurthim! You know how small our house is. Jonathan and I can’t even be, you know, intimate!” To which my mother replied,firmly, that this constituted too much information.

“What’s the matter?” Mother nowasked.

“I think I have a stomach bug. Musthave picked it up on the bus or something. Everyone was coughing and sneezing!”

“Well, are you resting? Yes, I’llhave lavender oil to go with my wrap, thank you! Sorry, Jason dear. Do you havefood? You need to eat something clear and light. Like congee.”

“I don’t know how to make congee.” Iwas aware of a pathetic whiny tone creeping into my voice.

Mother sighed. “Sorry, I’m justgoing to be a minute longer. It’s my son. Jason? Listen, do you have a pen andpaper? It’s really easy. You take half a cup of rice…yes, raw rice…and then you add five cups of water…Yes, you add thatmuch, really, I do wish you’d stop interrupting, my seaweed is drying up!”

It took Sharyn a good five minutesbefore she could stop laughing. “Aiyoh, make congee, must also call yourmother! You men are so useless, one! Why, ah? I hope my Charlie don’t becomelike you!” At the edge of my bed, she patted my lap with uncharacteristicaffection.

“You’re not supposed to be mean tome, Sharyn! I’m sick!” I mumbled as I slurped some of my congee. I wasn’t atall sure that I’d made it right, but it tasted real fine.

Saffy, who is currently Not Speakingto her mother, stood outside my bedroom and sniffed. “You are such a baby! The wayyou’re going on, you’d think you had the plague or something!”

But I didn’t care. That night, justbefore I turned off the lights, I slipped Mother’s recipe for plain congee intomy journal, next to a birthday card she’d given me when I was ten. Inside she’dwritten, “I will always be your friend, love Mummy.” The ‘always’ wasunderlined three times.

Feel the wonder

2011-11-12T17:35:00.001+08:00

In the littleflat that I share with Saffy and Amanda, the news that the new Wonder Woman TVshow has been cancelled before the pilot even aired has been greeted by thekind of anguish you normally get when a child’s ice-cream cone plops to the ground.

“This is ridiculous!” Saffy moanedthe other day. “They make the most stupid shows all the time. Stupid ghosthouses and stupid fairy tales come to life, but they won’t make more of thiskick-ass material? Seriously?” She hit replay on the YouTube clip for thefifteenth time that morning. It was a leaked montage of highlights from theshow. In another room, Amanda was on her laptop searching for more footage.

The clip is only a couple of minuteslong, but it’s a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been. Wonder Womanleaps over cars. She hurls her magic glowing lasso at the bad guys and pullsthem off their feet. She looks majorly pissed as she hurtling towards anotherguy who’s shooting bullets at her which she blocks with her magic bracelets.There she is in her invisible plane. There she is kicking aside a ten-footcontainer with one star-spangled leg.

“She’s always beating up guys!”Saffy marveled. “I so love this show!”

And overlaying the whole montage isthe Wonder Woman theme song – a fast beat, thumping melodic hook. “Change theirminds and change the world!” Saffy croaked throatily.

“How can this be?” she muttered, hitting the replaybutton again. “This has got to be a mistake! Look at this! Look how fabulousthis is?” she said, pointing to the sequence where Wonder Woman glides upthrough the air, her long tresses stylishly whipping around her.

When news first broke that JossWhedon, the creator of ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’, was making a movie about theirfavourite Amazonian princess, Saffy and Amanda thought they’d died and gone toheaven. And when that project was cancelled, Saffy went out and bought the DVDof the original Lynda Carter series and watched it with Amanda for a month ofweekends.

“Seriously, can we go out tonight?”I remember asking as I stood next to the TV. “Watching a 70s show on anotherFriday night is really, really sad! Hello?”

On the couch, Saffy and Amanda sat in their PJs,sharing a box of popcorn. On screen, the bespectacled Diana Prince twirledprettily and exploded in a flash into Wonder Woman. A quick check that hergolden tiara was on straight, she dashed off to fight the Nazis.

“She is so amazing,” Amanda toldSaffy.

“Oh, totally! I want to be her.Jason, get out of the way, you’re casting a shadow on the invisible plane.”

The girls perked up slightly whenHollywood announced it was making a new TV series instead. And just as quickly,they went into mourning when the pilot was cancelled.

“Why are they toying with ouremotions like this?” Amanda wondered the other day on the crowded train towork.

“It’s ridiculous,” Saffy agreed.“It’s like being trapped inside a scene from ‘Truman’! God, why is this trainso crowded? I hate this commute. I hate my job. I want to be a crime fighter.”

“Wouldn’t it be amazing if we couldjust spin around, explode and have changed into any outfit we want?”

Saffy gave the matter some thought.“I don’t think I’d be spinning for very long. I have so few outfits to wear.And when we spin into our new outfits, would they be dry-cleaned too?”

“I wish I could deflect bullets withmy magic bracelets, too,” said Amanda, killer corporate lawyer and Harvardgraduate.

“And let me tell you,” Saffymurmured as she moved her face out of someone’s armpits, “there are a fewpeople on this train that I wouldn’t mind magic lasso-ing down a steep flightof steps. Don’t they shower in the morning?”

Amanda says her obsession withWonder Woman is all about empowerment. That, and a smoking hot outfit andglittering accessories. “She doesn’t take crap from anyone,” she said recently.She added, with a rueful smile: “And if anyone tries, she’ll kick their ass!Such a great role model!”

“Aiyah, you or-ready like that,what!” Sharyn said, owlishly. “You don’t take crap from udder people oh-so. Allthe men in the office run away from you. Singapore men scared of power womenlike you, you know. Why you think you are still single?”

Amanda blinked. Clearly, she’d notlooked her life in that light before. This evening, she replaced the Wonder WomanDVD, settled into the couch and proceeded to weep her way through ‘Eat PrayLove’.

“Oh, dear,” Saffy said.

Pee Shoot

2011-11-10T01:41:00.000+08:00

A few days ago, my flatmate Amanda woke up with amind-bendingly awful toothache. “It’s like someone has reached into my mouthand is tugging at one of my dental nerves, twirling it around his fingers! Oh,God, I want to die!” she moaned withuncustomary drama. An emergency session with Dr Hoe, our kindly family dentist,revealed an abscess in the back molar.

“He-th th-o adorable!” Amanda mumbled through amouthful of blood-soaked bandages. “I would marry him in a heartbeat if he wathn’t th-o old.”

Saffy was scandalized. “Anna Nicole Smith! He’sjust 52!”

“He might a-thwell be th-eventy-two!”

Later, when the bandages were all removed, Amandasaid it’s no joke having a toothache. “It sounds so, like whatever, atoothache! There is nothing achyabout a toothache. It’s bloody painful! I swear it’s the worst feeling in theworld!”

Leave it to Saffy to pipe up from the couch to saythat a toothache certainly wasn’t the worst feeling in the world. “I’ll tellyou what the worst feeling in the world is,” she said, pleased that theattention of the room was once again focused on her. “It’s needing to pee andthere’s not a toilet in sight!”

“Oooh, that’s a good one!” I said.

“Oh, yah, hor, dat one worse than your toothache!”said Sharyn, her glasses fogging up with excitement. Amanda didn’t look pleasedthat her thunder was being stolen so blatantly and so suddenly. “Dat time, hor,I was on the bus and I need to pee but kena traffic jam on the PIE!”

“What happened?” I asked.

“What to do? Must hold in, lah! By the time we getto Orchard Road, I was cross-eye! But I thought, hor, if I wet myself, cannotbe help. Wah, jalat, boy, hold in for so long! Worse than giving birth, I tellyou!”

Which somehow led Saffy to recall the time she signedup for a seaweed-wrap in a fancy spa. By the time the therapist had appliedvarious ointments and lotions, and then finished tucking her up between layersof cling-foil and thick towels, she needed to pee really badly.

“I guess I could have asked the therapist to unwrapme,” Saffy reflected, “but I felt so bad for her. She’d spent so much timewrapping me up, you know? She was Japanese and you know how much they love to wrap stuff. So I thoughtI’d hold it in. I swear to God, it was the most stressful 30 minutes in thehistory of spa treatments. At one stage, I seriously considered peeing insidethe wrap and passing it all off as sweat!”

There’s something unbearably primal about the needto pee: This gradual build up of pressure in the bladder and – if you’retrapped on a bus or in a queue for Faye Wong concert tickets – rising panicthat if you don’t find a toilet soon, you’re literally going to pee in yourpants. Strange, too, that there’s no actual English word for it.

And I’ll never forget the time I was watching‘Titanic’ – which, if memory serves, was a ten hour, fifteen minute movie – andat about the two-hour mark, all that sea sloshing about had pushed my bladdercapacity to a dangerous maximum. But every time I wanted to get up from my seatto go to the loo, something exciting would happen. In the end, I just had togo. Which is how I missed the actual sinking of the ship, and why a few nightslater, I sat through the whole movie all over again. But this time, I didn’tdrink anything for the five hours leading up to the opening credits. It’s alsowhy, for hours after the movie, I suffered from a blinding dehydration migraine.

“But you know what the best feeling in the worldis?” Saffy asked. “It’s that split second when you’re in the loo, and you knowyou’re in a safe and secure environment, your knickers are off, and then youjust…let…go! That feeling of relief that just washes over you.”

“Yah, yah, better than sex!” Sharyn said withunusual excitement.

“Ohmygod, you’re so right!” Saffy said, herimpressive bosom rising to the occasion in sisterly solidarity. “Way better!You know, if you could bottle that feeling, you’d make a fortune. I’d call mine‘Release, by Saffy’!”

By the defeated look on Amanda’s face, you couldtell that there was no way she could now regain the upper ground in the wholetoothache conversation.

“And with my first million,” Saffy went on, “I’dbuy a portable loo. It’ll go everywhere I go! Even on the bus! How fab wouldthat be?”

A Clean Sweep

2011-11-01T02:29:00.002+08:00

A few weeks ago, our cleaning lady Ah Chuanannounced that she was taking annual leave.

“I’mgoing to China to see my ancestral village!” she screamed at Amanda who didn’teven look up from her magazine as she stuck up her hand with a thumbs up andsaid, “You go, girl!”

Shelater told us that she had no idea what Ah Chuan had said on account of thefact that she was wearing her ear-plugs at the time.

“Ialways wear ear-plugs when she comes to clean,” she told Sharyn. “It’s the onlyway to get through the morning without going deaf!”

“Thenhow you know what she say?” Sharyn asked.

Amandabrightened. “Oh, my new iPhone 4S recorded it. Somehow, Siri managed totranslate what Ah Luan was yelling at me! I still don’t know how thathappened.”

Anyway,the long and short of it is that the apartment I share with Saffy and Amandahasn’t been cleaned in two weeks. And it’s not looking or smelling pretty.

“Iswear something has died in the bathroom!” Saffy complained a few days ago asshe emerged in a cloud of steam.

“It’sprobably my virginity!” Barney Chen growled from the depths of the sofa wherehe was idly flipping through the latest edition of Men’s Health.

Saffystared at Barney for a moment, her towel wrapped tightly around her suffocatingbosom. She opened her mouth to say something and then immediately shut it. “Youreally never can tell with that boy,” she said to us later as shehalf-heartedly patted a sofa cushion.

“Whatare you doing?” Amanda asked.

Saffystraightened up, a little out of breath. She looked surprised. “What does itlook like I’m doing? I’m dusting!”

“You’repatting the cushion. All you’re doing is puffing the dust up in the air whereit’ll resettle onto the couch and on other surfaces!”

Saffybristled. “Excuse me, but who died and made you the housekeeper?”

Fromexperience, Amanda sidestepped the challenge and changed tracks. “The toilet isjust revolting! Jason, I do wish you’d aim properly. And put the toilet seatdown when you’re done!”

Istiffened and told her that she should be directing her complaint at Bradley. “He’s the one who needs lessons inaiming!”

Amandaturned to Saffy who had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I’ve tried!” she said earnestly. “Really, I have.But you know what new boyfriends can be like? It takes a long time tohouse-train them! Look how long it took us with Jason!”

“Excuseme!” I said icily.

“Listen,”Amanda said urgently, “my parents did not send me to Harvard so that I couldclean up a guy’s pee off the toilet seat.”
“And not your boyfriend, somemore!” Sharyn piped up. The comment earned her a filthy look from Saffy.

Meanwhile,we’ve tried dividing up the house chores with mixed results. Saffy’s idea ofcleaning the floor involves moving a damp mop in wide circles around furniture.

“Why aren’t you cleaning under the sofa?” Amanda cried.

Saffy looked genuinely surprised. “Butwhy would you?”

Of course, I was assigned the bathroom,but when I was done, the whole room sparkled. Still, that hasn’t stopped Saffy fromcomplaining that taking a shower now is like bathing in bleach. “How manybottles did you use?” she complained last night. “The fumes are so strong I canalmost feel my skin stripping right off me!”

The kitchen has been a bit of a disasterthough. Apparently, not only did Amanda’s parents not send her to Harvard towipe up after her flatmate’s boyfriend’s missed aim, they also never taught herhow to rinse a dish after washing it.

“But it’s fine, it’s organic dishwashing liquid!” sheprotested after Saffy and I started coughing up bubbles during dinner. “Itwon’t kill you!”

Saffy complained to Sharyn that not onlyis she being burned alive by bleach fumes every time she takes a shower, she isnow also being poisoned by dishwashing liquid every time she eats. “It’s all Ah Chuan’s fault!” shefumed. “Why does she need to see her ancestral village, anyway? It’s not as ifanyone knows her there!”

“Wah liau, go home to China also cannot,ah?” Sharyn asked.

But Saffy isn’t letting go of this bone.“I swear, if I die, I’m so coming back to haunt that woman! It’s completelyirresponsible of her to leave us to clean up after ourselves. If we could doit, we wouldn’t need to hire her in the first place, would we?”

Amanda says that sometimes it shocks herhow much sense Saffy can make.