aiyoh.
this Post Secret is a major lieutanent-colonel colonel cheebye lah.
not that it did anything wrong, but i am wondering what kind of mystical powers it has, for there is always some kind of universal truth to be learnt from it.
after not checking it out for some time, i loaded the page today and was happily scanning through the postcards when i suddenly came across this:
my immediate reaction was: aiyoh. where got so zhun one?
cos my sister and i had a mini-conversation/quarrel/argument about toilet seats yesterday when i went back home. not that i pee on toilet seats lah, hello - can give me more credibility than that or not?
but i think maybe i should set the context first before i begin my story.
home is a 3-room flat in Hougang Avenue 1, which i have resided in since 2004. i have been an Hougang boy all my life but that is another story for another time.
well, i don’t stay at home now, cos if i do, i would have to share a room with my sister which i think we both do not want cos we treasure our privacy and personal living space. plus although i love riding, i hate hate hate travelling, and after having experienced having to go to school from home during the earlier part of this year, my abhorrence of travelling has been doubly reinforced.
so i have been living on campus since i matriculated into NUS, thanks to my sister and my dad cos they have been funding my Uni + hostel fees + giving me about half my allowance each month. (the other half is earned through dubious means: prostituting my body and selling my time, or to be specific, working as an odd-job bangla on an ad hoc basis and tutoring kids. tee hee, don’tcha love it when words are twisted to give a different meaning to what was originally intended.)
anyway, to cut a long story short: my sister’s side of the argument yesterday was that: i should place the toilet seat down after i am done peeing since i don’t live at home much and it would be more convenient for her.
my point was: no, to me it is about parity and since i lift the seat up before i pee, then she should put the seat down before she pees. fair ma. if you know me i work on this sense of everything must be fair for everyone, like the way the market system works to ensure optimality of resource allocation yada yada yada.
so. there were a few examples cited by each person to back-up his/her stand, but my sister ultimately ended with: if i cannot remove myself from my principles and do the toilet seat thing as a mark of respect and courtesy towards her, since she has done so much for me, then so be it.
which actually made me feel quite bad. but i didn’t feel bad because of the ‘mark of respect and courtesy’ thing. i mean, please lah, hello: that is so last generation of parenting! haha Chair Chair you are indeed turning into our mother.
i felt bad because of the principles thing, because she was right: indeed i have very firm and rigid principles on certain issues. and this is something that i have been grappling with for some time, specifically, since i entered Uni i think.
once upon a time, when i was in Sec 2 and helping out in campfire preparations, i saw a Scout senior from Saint Gabriel’s who had graduated light up a cigarette and take a puff. it was a Marlboro Red, i remember, back in the days when cigarettes came in packs of 10 which cost less than $2.
but i was so horrified, i remember, that i pounced on him (not literally, of course) and started chastising him. he was a bit irritated with me but i think the next time he wanted to smoke, he did it somewhere else away from us kids.
a few years later, when my batch of Scouts were all seniors that had graduated, we took a walk out of Sarimbun Scout Camp alongside our seniors, proud that we had now joined their ranks in terms of age and seniority. plus we had one thing in common too: we had all picked up smoking, one way or another, so we all smoked then.
so as we sat on the jetty and whipped out our cigarettes and lit up to take a puff, i heard someone a distance away remark, “eh you cheebye! you smoke ah?”
i turned my head to look at who it was who had made the remark, as the same senior whom i had scolded years ago, scolded me then.
“kan ni na, that time scold me say i smoke then now you smoke also! somemore tell me you hate all smokers and say you will never smoke! fucker!”
i was inhaling then; it was a Gudang Garam, kretek cigarettes from Indonesia, i remember, because i was in my experimental ‘i-must-smoke-everything-that-looks-remotely-smokeable’ phase. so i remember the spicy-sweet taste of the smoke, as thick as the taste of irony in my mouth.
he was right you know. my principles had wavered and changed in such a relatively short span of time.
and my principles have been wavering and changing as i have been growing up too, because i have learnt time after time that some things will neither hold true nor constant all of the time, and i cannot expect things to be the way they were before, always.
mutability, dynamism, flexibility. a quote in Latin that i saw before on change suddenly hit me and i went to Google for it. here it is:
Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.
(The times are changing, and we change in them.)
– Lothair I, Holy Roman Emperor (795 – 855).
i don’t know where i read it from, but this is yet another example of how i can remember weird and useless things that do not have any relation to everyday life. but it will probably help me some time in the future, when i become famous, i guess. tee hee.
anyway, i was prepared to put the whole toilet seat issue at the back of my head actually, but the Post Secret postcard brought it back out into the open again.
so how? resolution, resolution, cos i need to go and work on my article. WTF right, SAF paying me money to blog? haha. let’s hope our bosses don’t ever find our blogs, eh Hailin? :)
so. i think this toilet seat issue is something i need to re-principalise. because i have to look into why i feel so passionately about it in the first place. perhaps it stems from this feeling that resides in me that contrasts very strongly with my love for women, that is: my feeling of being mistreated by women, hence the need for parity in our dealings.
i know definitely that part of it stems from the whole issue about me not staying at home, because my sister likes to harp on it and it is something that resonates within quite a bit, as you can also see that i am someone who needs to feel a very strong sense of belonging to whichever unit of society/organisation i am in, at that point in time.
ultimately, i think this is stupid, and i should stop being such a pussy. it’s just a goddamn toilet seat, and it really does not take much effort to put it back down after i am done. i won’t die if i acquiesce, because it was a stupid principle behind my resistance anyway, and acquiesance has absolutely no bearing on the ‘mark of respect/courtesy’ thing anyway.
it just has to do with a little bit of tolerance and a whole lotta love, i guess. and i have quite a bit of love for my family although they don’t really know it (but that’s cos they are stupid).
anyway, who cares if my sister is mean to me? i know she is generally not the most patient person in the world but she does her best. anyway, at the most next time when i become Prime Minister of Singpaore she just don’t get any Progress Package lor… hahahaha :)
