I remember Emmy said something about clogged sinuses on her blog, something not very positive. Well, I'm having clogged sinuses now too. I feel so miserable. What's making me more miserable is the prospect of school, which starts next week. I'm a little dreadful of school, not least because once classes begin, it's madness from Day One. More importantly, I don't feel very smart nowadays, and feeling smart is really important if you want to start school on the right note.
Right now, I'm at Ground Zero, trying very hard to fight the cold of the air-con and trying to psych myself into thinking happy thoughts. Yeah, self-therapy. The last few days were pretty action-packed, with me providing much-appreciated assistance to my sister, who's preparing to move into her new flat in Jurong West. The target date of moving in was last weekend, but now, it's been pushed to this coming weekend. Well, I can't wait to use her new oven. : )
I've also been showing my relatives from China around Singapore, or trying to. I'm astonished at how little I know about Singapore and its sights and sounds. I mean, how often does the average Singaporean visit Little India?!! (not counting the Singaporean Indians) I only go there to eat and get my eyebrows plucked (and that was just once). More importantly, I really wonder about our 'multiracial' society, and its so-called 'cohesiveness.' At the ground level, I wonder if any Chinese/Malay/Indian/Other really knows very much about the other 'cultures.' How constructed our multicultural and multiracial 'reality' is!
Maybe everyone is too wrapped up in the other 'reality': the race to get ahead in our meritocratic society; the climb up the social ladder, no matter how 'classless' Singapore purportedly is. This reality is perhaps more salient to us than its constructed lesser counterpart. So in all the 'realities' that exist simultaneously in the Singaporean landscape, we're sadly neglecting the 'reality' that is our soul. Multiracialism? bah, I'm too busy to worry about that. Leave that to the government and the NDP celebrations.
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Am I more Singaporean or am I more Chinese? I think it doesn't matter. I'm a mixed-blood, with multiple identities (and no, I'm not suffering from dissociative identity disorder). Why do Singaporeans pursue a pure identity? There IS no 'pure' identity. I think cultures and societies are far too dynamic now to enable any talk about 'purity.' It is the same in Singapore. We should embrace our dynamism and the 'mish-mesh' that makes this country, and the ditch the purist CMIO model that is supposedly our society.
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