Sweet Child O’ Mine

This Guns N’ Roses classic has definitely blasted around the music room on campus, I probably vibed along during some frenzied after-parties of performances and jam sessions. Yet, during a game I thought I’d be a master at (guessing a song within 10 seconds) at our company Chinese New Year celebrations – I sadly didn’t know the title.  It’s really not the material they covered during my Hindustani classes but a shame, nonetheless. Yusheng Lohei, the CNY practice of tossing up a salad of good fortune, didn’t work immediately either - a lucky draw ticket I swapped away ended up being a winning ticket.  It’s been two years and I still get conditional probability sums wrong.  Oh well.

Last week has been abysmal and we are barely a month into the year. Despite having been in this country and job for 9 months now, I am starting over in many ways at work and outside of it. Maybe getting back to reading books, about self-sufficient warrior women (Samira and Samir by Siba Shakib and Sita by Amish) made me realize that I shouldn’t be breaking down just because I had to walk in the rain after getting a cab to avoid exactly that. The driver uncle, a born and bred local, was chatty about appams and chai until he realized the diversions in Little India for Thaipusam meant we are going around in circles and his amicability immediately dropped. Everyone just wants to get to their warm homes at the end of a rainy day.  

Or maybe the movie, Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, that won the heart of my generation across India, hit a sensitive spot. What am I doing, looking for joy from a little screen in my hand, when there is a beautiful impeccably planned country right around me – people to meet that I had been putting off, things to do that I had been too lazy to get out of bed for, sights to see that just needed a tiny bit of planning. And of course, things about myself that I need to improve on – especially the impulse to buy a book, a plant, a painting, or even a $15 haircut as soon as I spot one. For someone who learnt what targeted marketing is 10 years ago, it still works pretty well on me.

Or maybe it’s just age catching up this spring. 25 is when your brain fully develops, pre-frontal cortex and what not. That’s definitely an average, a generalisation. Some 10-year-olds have better diplomatic skills than I do, and some 70-year-olds still shock the world with their lack of common sense. One thing is for sure – I have lost the ability to adjust. That’s what Indian relatives say when justifying arranged marriages at a young age – as you grow older, you form a stronger sense of self identity; of what you like and what you can’t be bothered to put up with. You become pickier as you know your own worth, as well as the worth of comfortable solitude versus forced companionship. Is it really a bad thing though? Of course, there is a certain youthful excitement in growing up together, yet I’d choose becoming fully functional adults yourself and then growing old together.

If you’d been reading for a while, you’d remember my morning glory plant. Sadly, leaving a plant out and letting Singapore weather decide its fate is not how you keep it alive. We start again, with a money plant (of course) and a rubber fig, tiny attempt no. 2 at balcony garden. I miss being a sweet child, lazing around on the grass under the beautiful thriving garden at my grandma’s and having no cares apart from making shapes and faces out of the passing clouds. I miss jamming to songs I didn’t know the words to with my music club. I wish we could stop getting older and wiser, a feeling that was underlined after spending an afternoon with my friends’ adorable 9-month-old. What a life.

PS: Yes, I'm still not over this movie and the Oscars snub.