Sideview mirrors, checked. Rearview mirrors? Checked. Gas tank, water, etc? Checked, checked, checked.

"We're not going onto the freeway today, right?"

Right. Phew. At the rate I was going, I think it did all the Californians on the way to the beach on this warm Saturday a lot of good. But too bad for those off the highway, because there I was, making turns too wide and drifting into the middle of two lanes because I kept forgetting that these guys drive on the OTHER side of the road.

And let's not forget the SUV on my left that skidded in a puddle just as it was turning next to me. And the accident I passed just a few miles from home. And the realisation that my eyeballs aren't as coordinated as I thought they were. switching lanes and having to turn and look over my shoulders is a bitch.

And let's not forget, too, that I'm an adult learner here. Probably the only one in the tri-state area. A fact made extremely clear to me today as I got behind the wheel, and abruptly went around the bend.

The instructor had arrived at noon with his previous student, a blond, chatty sprite clad in very short denim shorts, and as she was driving home, with me in the backseat, I made the mistake of asking her age.

"Fifteen," she said, waiting for me to offer my age. I didn't. Mainly because I was recovering from how unexpected her reply was. I was guessing, maybe, nineteen.

And then it hit me. Like a collision with a four-tonner. She's half my age. As in... I'm TWICE her freakin' age! Wait a sec here! I've only used these comparisons in the context of dirty old men, and older women dating younger dudes. For example: "What the hell is he doing with her? She's twice his age!" Or "Eeeeee. That uncle checking me out is so gross! I'm like half his age!"

Nevermind that I said before that I didn't feel my age. TODAY I FELT LIKE AN AUNTY.

Reality? Checked.

Maybe that's why uncles are checking me out these days. I'm closer to their own age group.

this weekend, I got to be a teenager again.

Just for about 16 hours, spread over two days, a mere fleeting moment compared to the amount of time I will spend as an adult, I was enrolled among teenagers in a programme especially catered to teenagers. And shy of a few extra 10-plus years on them, I was entirely qualified to participate.

Yes. It was Teen Driving School. And not just any teen driving school, mind you. It was the Masterdrive Two-Day Skills Programme.

Nevermind that at twenty-ten years old, I had never got around to learning how to drive.

Nevermind that it's so unlikely in America for adults to NOT know how to drive that all driver ed programmes are classified as Teen Driving.

Nevermind that the two-day programme is catered specifically as a defensive course, crucial for all learning drivers to take in order to be well-prepared in the event of the need to avoid crashes and poor road conditions.

Nevermind that I was the only person among 27 students way above the age of 17.

Nevermind that the school was opened by a man who lost his own daughter in a car accident in 1986, 20 years ago.

Nevermind that I kicked ass in the skid-recovery segment and received a standing ovation from the coaches AND the owner himself.

Nevermind that I will be less of a hazard on the road once I get behind the wheel.

What matters is that I got to play teenager again, and FEEL like a teenager again. Who would have thought that being surrounded by pimply, obnoxious teens would make you feel like a 14-year-old again. Ha.

Starting to feel my age? WHAT RUBBISH.

been trolling the blogs of singaporeans on this oh-great-day and here's a question... how come we like to say "our nation" instead of "our country"? conjures up images of uniform (and uniformed) students reciting the pledge along with concepts of nation-building. Try along the lines of I love my nation, or it has been 41 years since our nation came into its own. Give it a shot and hear how it rolls out on your tongue. Kinda cheesy, no? like reading brochure. do we really talk like that? Ya. I think so.

a bit creepy.

WHAT IS UP with current handbag trends and why are people spending on them the cost of surgery or a year's food and medicine for children in countries plagued by war and famine?

Not that I'm against spending copious amounts of money on bags if you have more than enough moolah to go around. But who died and said you had to listen to the marketeers and brand gurus about what's good lookin and what isn't? I mean... if some kid without a label designed the fendi spybag, would you pay as much? ah HAH! Its the branding and marketeering at work!

I mean. seriously. a handbag defined by merriam webster online says its a bag held in the hand or hung from a shoulder strap and used for carrying small personal articles and money. Ya we all know that. But it doesn't say that you have to spend anywhere from $300 (wow! what a steal!) to $14,000 and up for it. But look at what chicks with less than Paris Hilton's expense account are carrying and striving to carry! Seeing the branded bags that women are toting around and getting all in a tizzy over, I'm inclined to think that the world's gone mad.

Especially also because since the beginning of the millenium, bags have just gone UGLY.

Is UGLY the new BEAUTIFUL?

I chalked the thousands-of-dollars Fendi spybag trend to the 9/11 episode, which has all these secret compartments and what not, to carry all covert forms of cosmetics and lethal concoctions of eau de parfum to be used against dangerous fashion terroristas, and perhaps that odd bottle of mace in case someone tried to run off with the bag that costs more than its contents.

Engineering genius? perhaps. And I've always been a fan of Fendi. But look at the bag and tell me it doesn't remind you of a nightmare you had as a child. Or of wrinkly testicles... in an array of colours that resemble diarrhetic brown and shades of vomit green. I mean... SERIOUSLY.











(But having said that, the Fendi mink spy bag is gorgeous, esp since it doesn't look like the handles have thorny whiskers and the body has creepy ringworm markings, so it doesn't really count in the ugly line-up. Still, at $9,500?)

And then a friend mentioned the Chloe Paddington bag (is that, like, one bag or all her bags?), which i'm told "everybody is carrying". And then another friend chimed in on its absolute fabulousness (is that even a word?) and another said its a "must have" and I'm thinking... maybe this handbag designer is worth checking out. After all, a must-have is a must-have, right?













(black croc skin number is US$13,000, according to one website.)

I confess, i like these better than the spybag (excluding the mink), even if its still too busy for my tastes. But the padlock? Ok. maybe I'm not so informed about this designer, or schooled in the subtleties of name-association and branding, but I'm a sucker for nitpicking the obvious and I couldn't help but wonder if the PADlock is supposed to be a play on the designer's name PADdington, which would be somewhat tragic for the lack of subtlety. Regardless, it is a NICE padlock, even though the practicality of it is questionable. Does it work or is it purely for ornamental purposes? or deterrence? And if it does serve some security purpose, why break the padlock when u can cut through the base? Because you'd destroy the bag and devalue it? Urm, ok. So people would steal the bag for the bag and not the contents? AHHHHH.

That's why some people call it "investment." I remember when I was packing up to move from Asia to the States, the moving company had advised us to itemise any branded bags under the category of "prized possessions". That's what bags are today and that's why people spend this kind of money on them. Its art. Art that you carry around and worry about whether you've spilled that drop of wine on or if your makeup leaked onto the monogrammed interior. Art that you can appreciate not because people will stop and gawk at it, impressed at your choice of accessory and representation of your lifestyle, but because you know its a personal and private reflection of your finer tastes. *cough*

And unless, again, you've got more than enough cash to spend guiltlessly, I suppose that thinking of it as art and investment diminishes the guilt of spending $10k on a bag. And you don't have to worry about waking up one day and finding out that, horror of horrors, your multi-thousand-dollar bag is so hideous it frightens your child, and the brand and bragging rights can no longer make up for it. Because art doesn't always have to be beautiful. Much of it is ugly and raw and sensationally grotesque. Like Damian Hurst's.

The hopeful side of me, however, is contemplating the possibility that people are starting to see the merits of paying good money for function over form, seeing how Fugly (fucking-ugly, for the less informed) is the new Rage, and that these bags do seem to serve more than the simple function of carrying the odd wallet or random cellphone or occasional loose change. Who knows what's next? We've already got the spybag. How about the SWATbag? or the AMDbag? Bring it on, I say. Before you know it, luxury handbags will be able to stop the world's evil, leap buildings in a single bound, and defuse nuclear bombs without the risk of chipping a nail.

Maybe ladies are getting smarter, learning to spend their expendable cash on something that boasts efficiency over aesthetics. Dare I hope its a reflection of today's climate of practicality and common sense as women drive the evolution of retail therapy forward in a direction that would fascilitate the betterment of the global community. Dare I hope that fashion and common sense are finally, and definitively, one. Dare I hope its one small step for the fashion world, and one big leap for shoppers everywhere.

Dare I hope I'm not smoking too much crack.

What obsolete skill am I?

You are 'French'. In the nineteenth century, it was the international language of diplomacy. It is a 'beautiful' language, meaning that it is really just a low-fidelity copy of Latin. You know the importance of communicating 'diplomatically', which for you means both being polite and friendly when necessary and using sophisticated, vicious sarcasm when appropriate. Your life is guided by either existentialism or nihilism, depending on the weather. You have a certain appreciation for the finer things in life, which is a diplomatic way of saying that you are a disgusting hedonist. Your problem is that French has been obsolete for a long time.

Take the quiz and have a go and tell me what yours is.

I think I might be climbing out of my 2-month-long bipolar-disorderly behavior. The massive move from Singapore, with an administrative stopover in France, and then to the States has worn me out and now, slightly over two months since we've arrived, the clouds are starting to clear a little... and funnily enough... on the first night it began to rain in Southern California.

Being stuck at home while the man brings home the bacon has been leaving pock marks of guilt on my conscience... I wasn't brought up to believe that things came this easy. Proof of self-worth has always been about that exactly... proving yourself. Trying to come to terms with not contributing significantly to some level of the greater good was like being force-fed humble pie as a main course and a scoop of humiliation as dessert. Or so I believed.

The guilt manifested itself as tantrums and borderline agoraphobia. It didn't help that I was resentful I wasn't in a city with a decent subway system. I hadn't realized how much I wanted this place to be New York, or London, or a major city... ANY major city. And being someone who has successfully avoided the need to own or drive a vehicle her entire life, being in california severely limited my mobility and independence. So i kept myelf indoors where I was safely tucked in the womb of reluctant domesticity. Here I can bitch and moan and gripe about how sucky it is being a housewife. I felt I had the right to bitch. After all, it wasn't MY fault I'm in a stupid place where there was no stupid subway system. And nevermind that I had encouraged the move, a point I conveniently forgot in my haste to be a bitch about it.

So after moving into the new crib, and still trying to settle in, my husband's friends intervened. A wife of a friend has bullied me with kindness into taking up step aerobics at the Y. And body conditioning. And pilates. And pa kua kickboxing, or whatever that is. So we made our trip to the Y early this morning for our first step aerobics class. Well, MY first step aerobics class.

And it would be the first of many firsts to come within the next 2 hours.

Two things struck me about the Y.

1.) It was full of housewives.

2.) It was even fuller of old people. Very VERY old people. They were everywhere... on the bicycle thingies, on the butt presses, in front of the counter, behind the counter, in the pool, by the pool, in the classes. One very VERY old lady even had her own beefy personal trainer. I'd never seen anything like it before. And I mean the following in a purely observational way, but there was this one very VERY old, skinny lady in a wetsuit who resembled a skeleton with big hair in a, well, wetsuit.

Then after registering, we went into the locker room and saw the entire posse in there... housewives and old wives… NAKED.

Like bare-assed, birthday-suited, bare-naked old ladies. Like... low-hangers and pubes all. I mean... woah. And you gotta say it like Keanu does in Speed. WOAH. I'd never seen so much pubic hair in one place at a time. I think I blushed and my friend did an almost subtle about-turn and whispered to me "are there no private showers here?"

I turned back to look as nonchalantly as I could and was rewarded with an absolute mature-audiences-only full frontal of wetsuit lady. It was like something completely out of a movie. If there were private showers behind that communal, I wasn't about to venture through the scene from what could have been a Grumpy Old Girls Gone Wild movie set to find out. So we decided we’d skip the shower part and head straight home after our weekly workouts.

The episode somehow made something click in what's left of my brain after the past two months of virtual non-use. Here I was feeling sorry for myself that a part of my life was over, but being surrounded by women between 35 and 75 years of age was a jarring wake-up call that helped put things in perspective. Suddenly, I didn’t want to be the brat anymore. Enough is enough. My husband deserves better from me.

Maybe it was the notion of mortality. Or the realization that there should be no guilt if my husband takes pride in being able to provide for me, while I make the best of it. Or maybe it was the embarrassment that even wetsuit lady could out step-aerobic me. Or the sudden surge of competitiveness spurred on by the housewives bragging about their children being in the club’s swim team. So what if I can’t step-aerobic? Put me in a pool and I can outswim them AND their kids any day. As long as the pool’s heated, of course.

So from kicking off the week by making a complete uncoordinated ass of myself in front of no less than 60 people, I think I might be step-aerobicking my way, albeit clumsily, out of the doldrums.

Go, me.

So Ethan came with my husband and I to pick out some wine for dinner at another friend's place and we popped into a major grocery store. We got the wine and the smokes and proceeded to the check-out lane where Ethan, who was before us in the line, got carded.

Seeing that, I proceeded to dig out my passport from my bag. After all, Eth was 33 years old... a good few years older than me. So surely I wouldn't stand a chance with the ridiculously rigid legal age laws for alcohol and nicotine purchases here, right?

Wrong. When it came my turn, I waited for the cashier to ask for it. And I waited... and waited... and as she proceeded to scan the smokes and pass them on to the bagger, I lost my cool and flashed my opened passport with the picture page and practically climbed over the counter and knocked her out with the thing. I could have left an imprint of my face on her forehead. And she would have deserved it too.

What was she thinking? Not carding me when she carded a 33-year-old! HOW DARE THAT WOMAN!

i passed my basic theory. Just by the hair on my chinny chin chin. So now I'm one more step closer to freedom and mobility, although I worry I'm not as enthusiastic as I should be. After all, I HAVE managed to avoid the need to drive for all of my life, choosing to live in cities with working subway systems... until now.

The upside is we get to look for cars, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed on a mini cooper.

Next step... signing up for driving classes, with a qualified instructor and not my husband (friends have cautioned that that's a sure-fire way to ruin a relationship), and in a car where said instructor can immediately cut in should I mount a curb or run a light or just freeze in fear.

my hands are clammy just at the thought. ack.