Friday, January 28, 2005

PTA Mom

We watched Desperate Housewives on Monday. Dan's talked about it a little bit so I shan't. But there was one character that struck me, the full time mom who was a high powered lawyer and gave it up when the first of her 3 hyperactive kids plus baby came along. I felt for her because I get tired just running after my brother's kids for a day. And even more sorry for her when she couldn't even admit that full time motherhood wasn't all that it was cut out to be and had to live out the eternal myth of motherhood.

It's a scary notion, to give up your entire life for your brood and yesterday, I had a little peep into how easy it is to fall into that situation and realise only 18 years later that you never quite climbed out of it and reclaimed your life.

We leave next Wednesday and there are a whole lot of things that have to be done by then. Money to be changed and meds to be gotten. Meds because we're headed for sub-Artic temperatures that promise to drop further what with blizzard warnings for the days to come. Cards to be printed also because we're cheap and when you're trying to find presents that can be swopped with the other 160 participants at the events, things cannot get cheap enough. So we decided on calling cards, just like the American soldiers, Scarlet Pimpernel and the British aristocracy.

I volunteered to do the card and meds run yesterday. And while it might sound like 2 very simple things to do, it took 3 hours,just running to and from the printers and the pharmacy. It was during one of those runs when it suddenly occurred to me that that was the life of a PTA mom or a full-time mom. You spend your day, picking up the kids, sending them places, car pooling, PTA thingyinmagigs, running their errands for them and before you know it, the day's come to an end. And not realising that you haven't actually done anything for yourself. Often that realisation isn't had till the kids go off to college in an American context and in a more local context, get married.

It's a frightening notion that it is easy to forget yourself in the process of putting one's children ahead of everything else and not realising that you have your own needs that need to be fulfilled as well. And what is more frightening, is that to quite a large extent, that is expected of you. My mother in law made it quite clear to me even before I married her son that I should only consider going to grad school after the children have grown up. Yes, this was told to me BEFORE we got married, let alone had kids. And to actually desire one's own needs of fulfillment after children have come into the picture is often frowned upon and labelled as selfish. Of course, there are always idiots out there who make comments like "the child has taken my body for 9 months, now it's time I get it back... No breastfeeding for him/her!" or "I've had to endure swollen ankles, burgeoning weight and the 20 hours of labour, here, the kid's yours to look after..." Yes, there are those. I'm not advocating being selfish. If you want to be selfish, then don't even think about having unprotected sex, in my opinion. I'm just saying that sacrifice is expected and sometimes, that line between full on Jesus dying on the cross type of sacrifice and the sacrifice you make to actually grow up and become a loving, providing and responsible parent is so fine, you don't realise you've crossed it.

And the danger of that is possibly full on resentment when you are made to face what you gave up and where you could possibly be in life had you not given it all up lock, stock and barrel for the car seat, the ballet classes and the packed lunches. Even if there was no resentment, the feeling of having your concept of self so closely tied to being a mother and a provider that when that role disappears when the kid moves out, the empty nest syndrome strikes.

All this, I pondered while making my run for the kids yesterday. I'm happy to do it for them because they're good kids and they really need to have as much done for them now so that they don't fall apart from being tugged and pulled at from different directions. But when I think about kids who expect this from their parents, and parents who are willing to do everything for their kids, then I become a little bit fearful. Is this what awaits me when I have my own brat running around? Will I be considered heartless if I told said brat to take a bus home from school so that Mommy could have a bit of time to herself?

And to assuage my fears, while waiting for the pharamcist to come back from lunch so that he could sell me some Lomotil, I nipped into Ikea and bought myself a beautiful ballerina poster for no other reason than because I wanted it and it was for me and no one else.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 11:13

0 thoughts...

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Being the Grown Up

I hate having to deal with discipline cases. Two years or so ago, I had to deal with a girl who was drunk during a first period class from tepid Tiger Beer out of her water bottle. All I wanted to actually tell her was that drinking beer before lunch just isn't done, Tiger sucks and tepid beer- she had to be really desperate! Instead, I had to tell her it was against the law and school rules and she had to face the consequences of her action, her being underaged and all complicated matters further.

This morning, same thing. No drunk girl, I think that's a once in a career experience. A girl in my class missed three Math classes and when her tutor asked her for her medical excuse, she said I had it, which I didn't! And according to my records, she wasn't even absent. So that made her a liar, on 2 counts.

When I confronted her, I was annoyed because she couldn't lie to save her life. She remembered clearly she was absent on those specific dates, but then again, this wonderful ability to remember things didn't extend to what we actually did in class yesterday. When I told her that her Math teacher was concerned for her because she hadn't attended any of the follow up classes for those who didn'd do well in Math last year, she said it wasn't just her that missed those classes. Wrong answer again! And to further exacerbate my annoyance, she said it was no big deal that she had ONLY missed 3 classes in 2 weeks in response to my telling her that she was doing herself a disservice by not attending these classes.

Sigh.

What I'm most pissy about right now is the blatant way they skip classes and lie bold faced even when they know they've been caught out. When they apologise without meaning a word they say and have done so more because I was eating into their precious break period.

A colleague said we should just leave them be and let them fail. Ideally, that would work. But as grown ups with a sense of responsibility and supposed fairmindedness, we're supposed to give a damn even when they don't. Hmmm...

Ondine tossed this thought in at 10:07

2 thoughts...

Monday, January 24, 2005

A picture, painting a thousand words

We're just out of the long weekend and it feels slightly surreal to be in school once again. Especially when the long weekend didn't particularly feel like a restful one. It was filled with tuition, debate competition, the revelation that all my mysterious symptoms actually did add up to something- sinusitis...and over and above all that, my family deciding that this weekend was the weekend to embrace the time honoured tradition of taking those extremely artificial graduation photos at a studio where no one spoke English.

My brother who is a doctor, mercifully escaped the taking of said photos immediately after graduation because I was still in Melbourne at that time. You see, you can't take these photos with anyone left out, so they waited. Then within six months of me getting back from Melbourne, we announced we were getting married so once again, this issue of taking graduation photos got pushed to the backburner. What more, I had promised the parentals a family portrait during our wedding photo shoot.

But it's been about two years since we've done that one and my mother has been basically bugging my brother to actually get married so that she would have another opportunity to dress up--she has very quickly forgotten the stress that she had to go through for my wedding--so, seeing that a wedding isn't about to be in the works, she has had to campaign hard for this photo session, which in her opinion comes second to a wedding thingyinmagig. We've tried hard to delay it, our favourite excuse being that the brother who was the centre of this whole shebang was on call most of the time, backed up with the constant travelling and the huge amounts of marking that plagues the two teachers in the fold. But this time, it wasn't going to be enough. She was determined and she went ahead and booked the studio before annoucing to us how we were going to spend Sunday afternoon.

Dutifully, we all turn up, even the children who were actually quite well behaved during the shoot. As usual, and something we often repress and block out of our memories after, we are posed like dolls. A head a little more to the left, tilted... a hand 2 inches further up your husband's arm, a shoulder slightly more opened so that more of the handsome gentleman's body can be seen, a chin that needs to be raised slighly, but oh! Not too much otherwise it gives off the look of being too stressed... a smile, with too much teeth, too artificial..no! Don't grin! Another smile, too smile, not enough teeth, show Uncle your beautiful teeth!!

Yes, all this done in Chinese, mostly directed at the two children who don't have enough knowledge of Chinese even when you put them together to understand squat.

By the end of it, the famous Ngpatience was beginning to show it's true colours. Beth was beginning to whine and act up, the Big University Student (that's what my bro was called) was sweating under his robes and a full suit, my other brother was cussing under his breath for all the false starts that occurred because just before the gormless photographer yelled "3!", he'd discover that the children were staring somewhere else or picking at the clothes, shoes, hair, nose etc.

All in all, it was a very painful 2 hours of my life, made even more miserable by the fact that my eye was blurry from the sinus infection discharge and I desperately needed to take of my contact lenses. So, my Big University Student brother and I confronted my mother after that and made her swear, no more photos, regardless of marriage, the conferring of a PhD, twins, triplets...nothing!

Of course, she didn't listen because while we were changing to our non-party clothes, she said sotto voce, that it was such a headache with 2 children, what more when I had children!!! Did she not hear us confronting her just now??? To make matters worse, she later remembered that she had wanted both my Big University Brother and I to be in our grad gowns and wondered if that oculd be arranged. In all the indignance I could channel into my slowly disappearing voice, I hollered "OVER MY DEAD BODY!", to which she just cackled and walked away.

I asked Dan what the attraction was to these oversized, tasteless, oft-gold gilded family portraits. His parents have two of those, hunking big ones hanging in their lving and dining rooms for all to admire, gawk or generally stare slack jawed at the enormousness of it all. He said it was a matter of family pride and to remember the pride that comes with seeing your offspring, don a motar board, a gown that would be put to much more use and fun if we could prance around like Batman and the scroll. I thought that was why we had commencement and that was bad enough (but another story for another time), but apparently no, it has to be eternally etched and possibly blown up to 150R. I guess it's not enough to be able to say that my son's a judge, a doctor, a teacher or was conferred first class honours. It's much better to have the cap and gown, even if it was from a shoddy university in the boondocks. The visual, more powerful... If a picture paints a thousand words...

Yup, no doubt.

But then again, it's all fine and good to bitch and rant about the stupidity of these apparently time honoured traditions. Everyone says we grow up to be our parents and I do worry that growing up to be like them would among other things make me desire for the same sort of gross represenation of familial pride. I hope when my kids graduate from college, I'd go to the commencement, take some photos on a beautiful lawn and be done with it then and there. We thought that was what Big University Student brother's commencement going to be, running around on South Lawn at uni, taking the most natural and candid of photos. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough. It wasn't serious enough, solemn enough, BIG enough for my parents to remind them that their son now had an M.B.B.S behind his name.

Incidentally, this rant was a thousand words long.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 08:34

1 thoughts...

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Misery Update

So I wasn't imagining the being sick. By the time I left school yesterday, going down the stairs hurt my hips, my knees and my ankles. When I stuck the thermometer into my mouth, it showed that I could fry an egg on my forehead and I passed out to Dan watching Fahrenheit 9/11. I told Dan a couple of days ago that I don't usually sleep in the afternoon and when I do, it usually means I'm pretty ill and I passed out for 3 hours yesterday afternoon and 2 hours this afternoon, waking up only because Dan coughed and I didn't know he was home. In my hazy state, I was trying to figure out whether there was an intruder coughing in my house.

The fever's not as bad today but I have few other symptoms. I have an itchy throat but that's it. It's strange because I usually get the works. Sore throat, running nose, cough...but this time's different. And usually my cold cycle is a six month one so this is an aberration of sorts.

The good thing is I could just get it out of the way for Calgary, I mean, I did get sick in Stuttgart and I don't particularly want to fall ill in Calgary. But seeing how this is so close to my last bout of being sick, I'm not even certain this guarantees anything.

Sigh, the fickleness that is the body's immune system.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 17:00

0 thoughts...

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Miserable

It really sucks when
1. You find a red ink stain on your beige coloured jacket
2. Your eyes are sore and you need to wear glasses to school
3. You think you've been locked out of the staff room because you can't find your key card.
4. Your neck and shoulders ache and your elbows feel brittle
5. You need to pee all the time from all the water you're drinking.
6. You have class from 11 to 3 pm in a row.
7. You have a throat that feels like it's swollen twice the size.
8. Your eyelids are heavy and all you really want to do is sleep and you can't. See Sucky point 6
9. You have a sensitive scalp/top of your head and it feels like you're ripping skill when you scratch your head.
10. Your wrists feel like they're ready to drop right off while typing this.

All in all, it really sucks to be getting sick now. Again! And just when we were debating the merits of actually getting a flu jab. This is God's sense of humour. I'm sure of it.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 11:05

1 thoughts...

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Poor Writing

Someone died yesterday. Hmmm, no shit. Anyway, I didn't know him but I know and have worked with his wife. His wife is the grand dame of debate in Singapore. Very well respected and revered. Anyway, his death was featured in today's newspapers. A side column but nonetheless, there was attention. However, the attention was all wrong. The article talked about Mrs C. Her achievements and the awards she had won. But really, that has absolutely nothing to do with her loss or the accident that brought about the death. What is the point of actually telling us that she won some teacher's award last year? Does it make her any more or less likely to mourn her husband's death? And the article also reported her reluctance to speak to the press, citing her not being ready to talk about her husband's death. What cockanadan (a word I made up to emphasise the ridiculousness of some things that couldn't be encapsulated by simple idiocy)school of journalism did she go to that she never learnt not to ask stupid questions?? Or for that matter, how did she become smart enough to become a press scholar without learning tact, subtlety, empathy and sympathy?

Someone muttered that perhaps she did start of with these qualities but the years of writing for our only national broadsheet has sunk her to unbelievable lows completely unrivalled by our dimmest of students who incidentally, I teach.

And I must clarify, that some of these kids are rather dim witted. This morning, I had to kick myself hard to not look amazed when one of these kids that I tutor asked in all earnestness why beheading wasn't used more as a tool for euthanasia. His logic, it's painless (like Euthanasia) and it costs less. Seriously. Something really has to be said about the apparent lack of brain cells that plagues this generation. It's cool to seem radical and to cause sensation.

Compare this to the simple obituary of Mrs C's husband. Loving Husband, Son and a Great Guy... Come say bye to him...

Terse, but it didn't require much more and even though I didn't know the man, I knew all the important bits.

How's that for a lesson in writing?

Ondine tossed this thought in at 13:55

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Thursday, January 13, 2005

Control Freak

I've come to realise over the last couple of days that there really isn't a point of planning things. I've always liked knowing where I was headed and when I was going to get there. Dan's a little different. He adopts a more come what may attitude and we'll deal with it as it comes. Me, I can't leave anything up to chance. I've tried to keep my life in control as much as I possibly could.

But then, it's hit me that it takes very little to side track what one may consider the best laid plans. And there's no telling when or how it will go back on track again. Some may argue that perhaps all this is in line with what the higher power has in store even if it doesn't coincide with what I had in store.

It frustrates me to be so helpless and on some level it angers me greatly as well. I've done nothing wrong, in fact, I've done all I can correct, but yet it doesn't make a damn difference to this eventual outcome. All I can do now is wait and see if the situation rights itself and waiting really isn't one of my strong suits. I like here, I like now.

Dan thinks that perhaps this will be a lesson of patience for me. Perhaps, it will be. But that lesson I guess will come later. Right now, I don't want to bother anymore. Regardless of whether I have any control over this situation, I'm not supposed to let the effort lag and I can't bring myself to try anymore. Part of me questions the point of it all. Why bother? Why try? What's the use?

All I want to do is throw my hands up in frustration and helplessness and yell at the sky.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 16:28

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Frantic

KW and I came to the realization that just adding one extra lesson per class to our workload seems to fill up our timetable very quickly. I'm hardly at my desk anymore and I'm in class, on average for 2 to 3 periods at a stretch. My back hates my new timetable and I'm always hungry because I teach through breakfast and by the time I can eat, it's brunch. The good thing is I'm mostly done by early afternoon.

The year's off to a really fast running start. I decided that today, I'm going home straight after school before debate training starts. I think my house is beginning to feel neglected. Every night, we're back so late. If it's not debate training, it's track training and the earliest we're back is 9. The past nights has been, get into the house, take a shower and crawl into bed and then rinse and repeat the next day.

It promises to be like that all the way to Calgary. So, I'm just going to have to bear with it. Thankfully, the marking hasn't come in yet or I'd be a tad hysterical by now.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 11:34

0 thoughts...

Welcome to the Family

Yet another member of the family to join the fold. Clap clap clap.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 11:04

1 thoughts...

Monday, January 10, 2005

Too Little Too Late

I met some of my classes today. One new, one old. I must say, teaching a class of 12 is SO much easier than teaching 25 which was so much easier than teaching 40 so it's all relative but even then...

Anyway, I've given up one of my classes from last year to take on these 12 kids (they're half a class- we split the class to give them closer attention) and I've been fielding messages from wailful woeful kids from the class I gave up the entire morning.

It's strange because I had such a hard time with them last year. They were uncooperative, selfish and unwilling to share what they knew with the rest of the class, almost as if they feared that if they did share, they would be the ones to lose out. At the same time, they were apathetic, passive and unable to come up with an original thought even if their lives depended on it. The only thing they were concerned with was their REAL subjects- Go figure. They were the quintessential stereotype of their generation, self-centred, result oriented and figured the world owed them a favour.

They're not all like that, but in general, that was the class profile and I must admit, I wasn't mourning the loss of them and I figured they wouldn't be either because I gave them a hard time for them being who they were. But apparently, I was wrong. They want to petition my return, they hate the new tutor, they berated my leaving them and accused the system of being unfair.

I was slightly amazed that this occured, but that was the softie side of me. The more mean (yet another borrowed 17 year old mainstay adjective)part of me basically yelled out that it really was a case of regretting only on hindsight. Had they been more cooperative and a nicer, more teachable bunch, I might have decided to give up another class instead. But they dug the grave with their shovels and I wasn't about to help them get out of it. They'll still land on their feet and do ok when the exams come about.

So, even though I didn't tell them that, they have to in essence, get over it. Maybe one or two will figure it out but I doubt many would because another thing I learnt about 17 year olds recently, they don't reflect very much. Everything is face value. Even my leaving them.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 14:45

0 thoughts...

Sunday, January 09, 2005

Quality Control

I was in a fuschia sweater yesterday with a stylish M embossed on it. W asked me what it stood for. My one word reply... Mango and he nodded knowingly and said something along the lines of it being the favourite fruit of many women in Singapore. Well, yes. Singapore career women are split along the lines of Mango and Zara. Me, I'm a Mango girl. I don't particularly like Zara stuff and they don't fit well. But my Mango wardrobe comes in two big consignments of sorts. The Mid year sale and the year end sale. Through the year, I stay away because I'm unwilling to pay full price for any of the clothes there.

So, to satisfy that shopping queen in me, through the year, I pick up cheap stuff from a variety of local fashion stores. Their salesgirls don't speak good English and their sense of dressing is horrific- imagine kitten heels with ankle length lace socks if you will but their line of work clothes are half the price of full price Mango clothes and they do have a nice variety.

But I have come to the conclusion that while I have had Mango knit tops especially developing holes where the seams meet, it is often after many washes and well, lack of delicate care on my part, you are indeed paying for some sort of quality. I bought a pretty sun dress from one of these No Speak Engrish stores a few months back and the first time I put it on and took it off, I heard a loud split where the zip was. The side seam where the zip was attached to had split and split badly, as had the other side seam! So, huffing and puffing, I sent it back to the store and demanded that they fix it for me. Fix it they did. But when I threw it into the wash after I brought it home, the bit where the strap was attached to the dress was torn after the wash and this, had nothing to do with non delicate care.

Lesson learnt. You get what you pay for and I know austerity is good, but not at the cost of quality. This is especially when I fall in love with the dress of poor quality and feel extra cheated when it falls apart even before I get to acquaint myself fully with it. I'm going to try to mend it, but I don't know how much more it can withstand seeing that it's actually falling apart even when it hasn't really be worn.

It just goes to show, there's never a substitute. There's a poorer cousin, but it's settling and when you settle, it really is second best.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 15:11

0 thoughts...

Friday, January 07, 2005

Term 1 Week 1

We're done with week 1 and it was a crazy week. Usually, the first week of the year is a slow easing into the routine and allowing your body to recover from the shock of the 6 am alarm. But not this week and not this month.

Things done in the first week.
1. Run around trying to put together a resource package for teaching the idea of history.
2. Two full afternoons of "How to be a Mentor" course
3. Debate training
4. Track and Field training
5. 3 department meetings.
6. 1 staff meeting that was an hour and a half long followed by the aforementioned course for the next 3 hours
7. 1 department luncheon
8. Borrowing a tutu, digging up pointe shoes that haven't been used since Melbourne days- they've turned a strange shiny shade of orangish gold from it's original peachy pink.
9. Use everything in 8. to be a famous person in history from the twentieth century that only girls in the audience knew. Actually, it would be hard to keep surprise off my face if a boy actually knew who Margot Fonteyn was. Even some of the male tutors kept referring to her as Margaret Fonteyn. It was fun though. R insisted that I enter to some music so it was off to the music department to find some familiar ballet music. I came back with Waltz of the Flowers from the Sleeping Beauty but didn't have time to hear the music and create steps for it. I had to settle for R humming a few bars of it and marking it out backstage. Totally improv and out of synch. The minute I finished it and heard the entire bar of music, I knew what I could have done. Oh well. Thinking on your feet kinesthetically.

It was the one thing out of all nine that I enjoyed immensely even though my toes protested even more than they did when I did the quarter marathon. 2 toe nails totally bruised from the running, one nail shedding its former appearance and regrowing, with another that has about a quarter of it left- that was the total damage of the months and months of long distance running. Then, 3 minutes of prancing around the stage on pointe causes one bruised one to start bleeding without my knowledge and caking round the nail. All sounding more dramatic than it actually was.

What I realised though is that I really miss ballet. I miss the music. I miss the beauty of it. Running's good in a different way. It's more raw effort and you feel like you're going to collapse from all of it. Ballet, it's more controlled, especially when you need to make it look pretty, light and dainty. In that way it's harder because you can't show how painful it is or how exhausted you are and strangely, I miss all that. I can't pick it up now. Not in the next two months at least. We'll see when I come back from Calgary but I think it'll be more wistful thinking then ever finding another opportunity for a long while yet to get into those pointe shoes again.

The sad thing is, the longer I wait, the more I miss it but the less likely I'm going to be able to do it. I guess, it's time to stop dreaming about being the Sugar Plum Fairy or the Swan Queen.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 15:31

0 thoughts...

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Of Superheroes and Mere Mortals

Over dinner last night, we got into a discussion about how superheroes never got married. The ones that were married were married to other superheroes or were married before they became superheroes. But superheroes never seem to be able to stay married to mere mortals. Like Superman and Lois Lane. They got married but it crashed and burned and apparently she died. So that's depressing. And Bat Man just had a string of women.

The reason they don't marry, the conclusion we came to anyway, was that they couldn't save humanity as well as have to upkeep those marriage vows. Plus, what wife wouldn't feel a tad neglected by her husband when he drops everything he's doing everytime that Bat Signal came on. And she would spend the nights worrying that the Joker, Mr Freeze or Lex Luther or even Kryptonite got the better of her husband.

It is also often is the plot of many superhero stories. Save your love and let humanity die or save humanity but the Missus meets a painful and horrific death. So, to make it easier, they never marry. They often have women around, to heighten the sexual tension but often not many marriages. Even James Bond, only got married once in the 60's and I think she died too.

So the conclusion is that in reality, one can't do both. One can't be a superhero or do superhero things and be a good husband or wife at the same time. And it's sad that often one has to choose. The choice then is usually not the choice of the superhero himself but actually by a collective majority that harps on domestic obligation. The outcome then is a reluctant person, donning normal clothes and a normal job instead of being out there being where he is needed most of all. In the movies, it is always portrayed by an unsatisfied, unfulfilled character who finds some outlet to vent. Unfortunately, it's never as innocent in real life and it can be a recipe of disaster in itself.

And that, never bodes well for the mere mortal and unfortunately, that's what we all are.

Ondine tossed this thought in at 10:13

7 thoughts...

Saturday, January 01, 2005

Enter the New Year

Bummer.

The whole rigmarole begins anew tomorrow. I'm not looking forward to it. Like my kids, my work isn't complete. I reiterate, teachers make the worst students.

Usually the staff conference on the last day of the year serves as a timely reminder of things to come and the culmination of it being the last day of 2004, it being held at the Jurong Bird Park which is as boondocks as it comes. And usually these things last about an hour and a half followed by a brunch spread. Then we go home and prepare for the New Year. This time, because it was in the Bird Park and had to pay for the conference room for half a day, our conference ran that long with Bird Park related games like walking round the bird park and come back with a thought or a metaphor that could encapsulate the "vision" of the organisation. As a result, a whole lot of bird brain jokes that go along the line of "birds of a feather flock together" or a more original one like "each teacher is like a feather and it takes a whole lot of feathers to keep the bird (school) warm".

I spent a lot of time looking at the flamingoes since we were at the Flamingo room and I can tell you for a fact, they're not pink! Everyone was commenting on how "luk sek"* they were. Apparently, they need shrimp to get that pink pigmentation and I guess the Bird Park can't feed shrimp to all the hundreds of flamingoes they have. And, like in every big group, there would be one that was out of place and in this case, it was a pelican that seemed to have gotten lost in the lake of flamingoes. So, for the entire morning, it just paddled up and down and looked intensely lost, wondering about the strange birds with really thin legs that didn't seem to do very much.

Out of sheer boredom, we decided to come up with a list of things that flamingoes must do and think of the whole day.

7 am- wake up since the early bird catches the worm
8 am- dig around for food.
9 am- wonder about the strange people who are encased in this glass enclosure that faces them.
10 am- decide whether to stand on the left or the right leg
11 am- right leg it is!

And the next morning, the same thing goes through their head except they decide - Left leg!

And the following morning, "Look mom! No legs!"

So, it was a productive time for us even though it followed a major wig out about the year to come. According to Dan, I do it every year, but it doesn't feel that way, perhaps because I forget that I wig out.

Anyway, the resolution for the year...To try and get through this year as painlessly as possible and remember that it's just 2 years more to a new life.




*luk sek- lack of colour, washed out...

Ondine tossed this thought in at 23:28

0 thoughts...

" Far in the stillness, a cat languishes loudly"