Raising Rockstar

Have assignment, will brb…

Urban legend (fine, some… Guy I Used To Know) has it, there is an old book somewhere out there, probably very limited print first edition, titled How To Avoid Being Abducted By Aliens. This book, as long-time readers of this blog (hi Mum!) might recall, is my proverbial Unicorn Quest – because the author was not trying to be funny.

Technology can do many wonderful things, but still we cannot go back in time. (For the moment. Awhlie ago the late great Stephen Hawking threw a party for time travellers – but in our time line no one has shown up because the party was announced the day after. It’s possible we won’t always remember no one showed up. Or that I wrote this. Or this blog post may no longer exist #TimeParadoxAndOtherNerdthings)

And so, as someone whose former life was in looking for (financial) opportunity preferably in weird places, I get fascinated by how technology colours everything. Demand and supply conditions coloured, magnified, by rapid developments in technology. So. Exciting. Kinda like when Singapore first made selling chewing gum illegal, making sticks of Wrigley’s the number one thoughtful, cool, inexpensive souvenir gift for all your colleagues who covered for your extended weekend in JB (Malaysia). But on steroids. Technology is like steroids for everything. But without kidney failure risk. Available for free to practically everyone. Thank you iTunes, for what you’ve done for vinyl records. No one plays them anymore, but –

Most of em probably ended up here -pic from EWtv.com

Yeah, his office. Alpha Corporate lawyer every guy wants to have beers with but secretly also hates for his guts, money, and …hair. -pic from utilitydesign.co.uk

Now that we’ve established that everyone hates lawyers (almost as much as they hate bankers), let’s get back to aliens… The elusive author of Aliens is someone who believed and wrote the book during the aliens-who-capture-people-for-purposes-unfathomable-to-human-imaginations era, also of the Men In Black parodies.

Agents K and J of MIB, checking for Alien News (no one else believes the Housewife In Small Town (who) Says Giant Alien Cockroach Ate Her Husband tabloid stories but the Men in Black know she’s telling the truth!) – pic from brandchannel.com

Think Michael Jackson issa alien. The weird maybe-dog in the corner pen where you volunteer at the local animal shelter…

…alien! -pic from allevents.in

(Yo animal lovers, SPCA needs funding for some blood tests… Though… secretly everyone hopes the.. thing they adopted turns out to be Genetically Engineered Alien Super Weapon Who’ll Go Surfing With Them…)

That something weird about one of your teachers from decades ago…. (Geography. For me it was Geography) SHISSA ALIEN. My Geography teacher was this really tall, powerfully built woman who sat uncannily straight in her chair all the time like her spine was steel-reinforced, and BOOMED at us as though in Humans 101: Chapter 1 – Talking To Juveniles she had been briefed that we all flop around on our desks after lunch…. Fine, they did their homework pretty well. 

Also, not forgetting – Elvis isn’t dead, he just went home.

But first he did our wedding in Vegas. And then also a tour in Taiwan.

(On an aside, 15 years ago, USD 750 in Vegas got you a real pastor to marry you, a time slot at Little White Chapel, a spin round the strip in a pink (or white) cadillac, some flowers from a fridge behind the counter… and Elvis in attendance. Don’t worry about music, Elvis brings along his own CD player. (What? I was at the time a new Christian of maybe 6 months and Kings was still “searching.” Our families’ attitudes re Elvis Wedding were Ok Very Cute Now Come Show Up To Your Real Family Wedding Banquets Please. We Commit To Not Serving Real Sharksfin. My grandma gets extra credit for supportively declaring Elvis “Very Handsome”.)

Here’s another real one that wasn’t so cute – Halloween 1938, the Colombia Broadcasting System radio network thought it would be a great idea to air an adapted chapter from H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel, War of the Worlds.

The part of the story where news broadcasts describe in detail how the aliens were attacking was however so realistic, it caused mass panic in the streets because listeners thought aliens really were taking over the world. 

“We didn’t KNOW mass panic was going to ensue because our radio show was too realistic!” (I believe the correct term is “happy problem?”) – Orson Welles, radio show narrator, being interviewed re the broadcast (pic from Wikipedia)

So yeah, I’m looking for that book. The one written by someone from that time, and as urban legend would have it, includes wisdoms like Never Stand Around In Cornfields which are basically Alien Spaceship Parking Lots.

This is from an express.co.uk article in 2015 where this lady saw a UFO and… maybe some little kids learned to make patterns with circles on an App.

DON’T scoff –

Y’all love Superman, right?

Baby Superman also landed in a cornfield – pic from Superman Super Site.com

S-o, there really be method to the madness, My Love For Self Help Alien Abduction Book Is Real. Until such time we find a Hello Aliens, This Is How To Take Over The World edition. (There is after all a Dear Demon, Here’s How To Steal A Soul – C.S.Lewis’ Screwtape Letters anyone? Uncle Demon writes to Nephew Demon with lotsa advice on how to lead a human to eternal damnation… Before Screwtape was the Divine Comedy (fine, WAYYYY before), which appears to be the most snoresome (long!) old Italian poem ever, until you realise the various levels of hell and punishments for indiscretions tell you a lot about the medieval belief system.)

Lemme do Self Help Alien Abduction Sequel: Guide To Aliens On How To Take Over The World. Here’s suggestion #1: Run for President of a powerful country and then knee-jerk tweet all kinds of incendiary remarks so the press corp don’t notice you cleared out office space in the big white building for human testing. W-ait.

President Trump potentially uncovering a plot to take over the White House. Why does he not look more proud? #conspiracytheories – pic from yahoo.co.uk

OMG It’s Really All Out There. Best place to test something out? Make a movie and see how people react. Go troll the fan fiction sites not just for ideas for your next storyline, but also how the Smartest Anonymous People In The World who are not driving taxis in Singapore spend countless hours of their free time picking apart, randomly creating, roaming closer to home than we know – government wants to know whether or not to tell the public they developed mutants/ bio warfare/ a singing sheep – see what people say about the movie. Its. Just. A Film! Who’d ever believe we were making something like that for real?  Ha Ha. Ha.. Ahem.

AND that was my way of intro-ing this post, this Let’s Get This Out Of The Way Before I Write Anything Else (when you read further you will understand why this is necessary) <snaps back into character> –

In honour of HN’s current Youtube obsession: Personality tests, Trivia tests, Can You Solve The Murder Mystery tests…. I present the How Good Is Your Rumour-dar Test. How many of these have you heard:

Rumour #1:

Rockstar is Special Needs. N-ot that we’ve ever heard him say 😀 , but I did have an underlying curiosity about Special Needs kids for some years. This is where it stems from – Rockstar has had a friend who is on the spectrum, ever since they first met, aged 4. Through the years, they’ve been in contact off and on. Now, we get told a lot by friend’s mum that her son gets “set off” fairly often, really loses it, gets in trouble… but in the 7 years Rockstar has been in contact with him, by now also including 2 camps that lasted for days, one of which an Outward Bound with canoeing and 4m jetty jump – a full-blown “episode” has not occurred around Rockstar. Why?

For years we assumed this is completely coincidental and just because the two boys knew each other quite well – until one day Rockstar met another SEN boy at an outside activity for the first time… and did something by reflex (switched chairs around) that diffused what was building up to be a huge “episode”. When asked, Rockstar said, “I think he has the same thing my other friend has. I know what they’re thinking before they blow because we think in the same way about some things.“ NOT true of every SEN kid Rockstar meets – couple years ago Rockstar also spent 4 days in a tech workshop with another friend diagnosed with Asperger’s (plus a bunch of non-SEN kids), and said his movements were “completely unpredictable” to him.

Back then it was a learning experience for Rockstar too, observing his SEN friends. He would come home some days saying things like “I think he tried to go without meds today”… Was he different the next day? and Rockstar might say, “Yeah today I think he took them…” Years ago another friend once walked into our home on playdate and said to me, “Don’t worry auntie, I took my meds before coming… I won’t break anything…” Kinda broke my heart a little there.

This is also a very different experience from non-SEN kids who can choose to be mean or not, for real. And the non-SEN grownups around them. All these differences are also powerful learning experiences for my own kids.

Kids with disabilities have something really important to teach all of us, it’s something that was even more powerfully illustrated to me way back before I ever had kids of my own – the second merger of my former career was arguably the most bloody, and it was during this time that the Big Big Boss of Acquiring Institution’s name began to surface, usually spoken with tones of awe and… tinged with fear. Dutch Boss of Fearsome Reputation somewhere out of the Netherlands had used his considerable resources to adopt an HIV-positive child from (I think) one of the African nations. He brought his adopted son/daughter home to live with his 2 or 3 privileged biological children in their family home. One of the bosses in Asia after a long night of entertaining had finally plucked up the courage to asked Scary Big Big Boss about the adoption, to which the man replied, “I want to teach my (biological) children something about life.” The family had had to completely change the way they lived – his adopted child had to undergo blood transfusions, there was medical equipment all over their home, and serious precautions had to be taken regarding any spillage of blood or other bodily fluids. This scary boss wanted his own privileged children to see that. And it cemented his fearsome reputation among all of us.

Rumour #2:

My blog is job-related. About 7 years ago that was kind of how it started – straight out of banking, I would otherwise never have blogged, let alone submitted it for a competition. For a significant amount of time I wrote daily market commentary distributed to HSBC Singapore’s corporate clients when I worked in Singapore, and then products/market commentaries at Dryden (owned by Prudential, then bought over by Fortis) and Standard Chartered private bank here, but a personal blog on parenting choices is SO not the same thing, particularly in HK.

In fact Southeast Asian blog advertising giant Nuffnang back when Kings had partnerships with them explored this to quite some extent – unlike in SEA, English language personal blogging here does not take off the way you might see elsewhere, as a “job”, because people are incredibly cynical, come from wayyyy too many different views and backgrounds, are horribly competitive, and just very, very critical and vocal about it in general – to the point that traditional risk-reward (for eg blogging for money or credit) no longer makes much sense. That’s why far fewer people keep it up here.

My hub back then maybe 8 years ago tried to build a blogging platform combined with Facebook-like functions (no, neither of us can write actual code, but Kings does have quant skills he chooses to neglect in favour of selling large quantities of property today because he always says that’s what makes money. Which is true.) and they needed a guinea pig blog they could slice and dice with impunity. That’s this blog. Ditto when we raised the traffic/readership at one point – it was to see if the original platform/servers could handle traffic. (Sometimes they couldn’t.) Without the requirement to raise traffic for testing, I simply didn’t/ wouldn’t. This blog has died, completely disappeared, been hacked at (and I don’t mean by my husband), and has survived the demise of its original platform and business ventures. This blog is an old friend.

My old friend keeps my mind from atrophying – gonna lose it if I don’t use it 🙂 There are parts of my former life, the action, the stimulation, that I really, really miss. Anyone is welcome to look for inspiration while I ramble about testing my own thoughts – that is still something positive. There’s always gonna be people who mean much worse than that stumbling upon it anyways. The pressure from knowing my words can and likely will be picked apart by anyone any time pushes me to think harder, crystallise what I read #realNassimTalebfan. 

Rumour #3:

I see a counsellor. Christian counsellor, fully trained and qualified in all the regular areas for counselling both grownups and children as well. This is predominantly from a few years ago, not too long after HN was born. If you went from a relatively high earning dual-income family to zero income, your husband quitting his investment banking job to take on a massive amount of personal financial risk (I had savings from my own banking job but had quit the market 2 years earlier) and see his lifelong dream to fruition shortly after you had a second child by emergency C-section (Rockstar was partial emergency C btw), I totally recommend you see a counsellor too. It’s the responsible thing to do. There should not be a stigma attached to this. They tell you to get the oxygen mask on yourself first, before you start trying to help any dependents on the plane.

(No reward without corresponding risk. We have much to be grateful for. Kings pretty much has his empire now…

Oh, what was my dream? A home to raise kids in… And lotsa stimulation. I hit my first small structured products team head position aged 29. Along the 12 years and 3 mergers – 2 of em ugly, the third not very pretty either, I’ve also been enclosed in small dealing rooms where I am the only female and some of my huge colleagues are just bellowing the most horrific things like angry bulls, when Compliance blocks their trades. (Interestingly, what earned them a severe dressing down was not that – it was once refusing to humour the lion dance lion during CNY season, because it messes up the “juju” of the place 😀

“Juju” is very important in dealing rooms (another reason I leaned even more heavily on my own Christian faith – because the seriously superstitious culture can make you seriously vulnerable otherwise) – Kings once got called back urgently at 3pm on a Sunday to remove a statue his team at a French investment bank known for technical expertise had put up “for fun.” It was a cheap replica of a Chinese Terracotta Soldier, purchased at Friday team lunch in Stanley market, and brought back to decorate their area of the large dealing room. An Asian (but non-Chinese) senior Sales from a completely unrelated team was returning from a business trip, dropping stuff off at the office before going home, when he clocked the statue facing where his team sat far across the room. He freaked out so badly that he dug up all the admin desk staff to locate the owners and change the position of the statue immediately. (Note that he would not touch the statue himself to simply turn it to face away, instead spending considerably more energy and “precious” time to find someone else to turn it.) That guy’s freak-out then freaked Kings own team out (even though they had simply purchased the thing from the market) so badly they put the statue somewhere on an abandoned hill and never went back there #potentialmoviescript

Who knows, “Don’t Mess With The ‘Juju'” could have had alien roots 🙂 I have a couple stories too – including one where a night trader called my beloved Brisbane then-boss practically hysterical that the wind chimes hanging in the dealing room for fengshui kept ringing late one night. He refused to ever work that shift again. Our boss said when he arrived next morning at 5 (as he is wont to do), the chimes were lying on the floor, having apparently rung so hard they came undone. My boss, half-Caucasian Aussie, completely re-arranged the dealing room following that incident. He told us, “It doesn’t matter what I think really happened – the night traders were so upset (no one would follow that seating arrangement anymore)”. When I remember that story I think: Even highly educated quant traders who are grownups sometimes still require certain quirks like this “validated” in order to function optimally. As for Brisbane boss’ dealing room – they didn’t have another incident after the re-arrangement. They never figured out what happened that night either.

So here’s to the many weird, wonderful – sometimes, wacky personalities who provided so many stimulating experiences in my former life. And – Joanna (on the first small team I headed and is a mum now too, I love her) AVERT YOUR EYES –

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This the other guy on our team. Well, the book he later published. (pic from amazon.com)

J gets really creeped out by this but it is a cute dog 🙂

How’s it goin’ these days, @sshole? Did I just see you at Starbucks? What school were you from, anyway?

I began downsizing on heavier positions after Rockstar was born (and then went to jump out a plane instead, to take the edge off. 12,000 feet. Kings was not pleased, so I am not supposed to do that again :D) What I mean by this is – HAD my kicks. Solid, for over a decade. I would have had very different priorities if I didn’t have kids (and boy are these two a helluva extreme sport anyway, as they grow up), but. Nurturing another mind, another… soul, is a terrible responsibility. Whatever I write now, do now, is first and foremost to keep my mind sharp.

Rumour #4:

I’m looking for a job. Have a part time job. They are aware of this blog. They also offered me more money than I felt I deserved, because an important albeit implicit part of the job is after-office-hours drinks, dinners and days-long overseas events. I cannot fulfil this requirement, and so I insist on paycuts. Being around when the kids get off school is very important to our current family dynamic. It doesn’t have to be that thing, it’s just ours. Rockstar at age almost-11 has also never had a birthday party in his life. He’s been away for up to a week at a time on at least 3 camps without missing us (loves adventure sports)… until the bus is pulling up home. But when he does come home, it’s very important to him for a parent to be there. It’s why even if we come home very late at night, he always stays up so he can see us walk in the door. Which brings us to –

Rumour #5:

Rockstar takes drugs. To get to sleep or whatever. (Get high? Get smart? What? Bradley Cooper did a movie about a smart pill sometime back..) Loud and clear: Rockstar. Takes. NOTHING. Not even non-drowsy Mannings cold meds if he can simply not take anything and let the cold blow over on its own.

While we’re on the subject though – some years ago, I hired a helper who had been through a couple maid shelters because of pending tribunal cases. (We once paid 3 times the usual processing fee thinking to give a helper a fresh start, and hoping to instil some sense of loyalty – this did not work out for us because the moment she was “free” she just really wanted to get a better job than as a helper.) But one thing she told me from being in the shelter stuck – medications. Pills. That she said the other maids there discussed – how to purchase the stuff from each other in Causeway Bay etc on their days off, when they’re coming back from leave they bring it in with them… so the kids under their care (I assume maybe also old folk) would nap or sleep better/longer. I have no idea if this is true, it’s only something my then-helper told me several times. I never thought to ask my other helpers because this was while I was still working very long hours.

Several years ago though, there was an actual reported case in the Malaysian papers of a “professional” nanny in Malaysia who was doing such a good job of taking care of 3 young kids and looking for more. The kids never fought nor bickered, hardly fussed, appeared to nap well…. until one parent noticed the behaviour of her kid appeared to be… somewhat altered. That’s when they realised Super Nanny was perpetually giving the kids cough medicine – the drowsy kind.

My two kids are pretty active. They sleep the absolute minimum acceptable for kids their age and some days drive me so batsh*t when they insist on bickering over ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that I want to pop them with one of those tranquilizer guns they use on African safari to tag the lions. And they’re my kids. Sigh OK for the record – I-do-not-shoot-my-children-with lion-tranquilizer-guns. I am so anal retentive about what these things do to developing livers and neurons that I went completely cold turkey on meds and alcohol for the duration of both pregnancies even after being told a little champagne is ok. This makes me feel justified somehow, in calling my kids annoyingly active @ssholes.  

Rumour #6:

I want a teaching job. Uh…. I JUST made a joke about drugging my own children with animal tranquilizers WHO is ever going to freaking hire me?? For real though, a year+ ago I wanted to get a teaching qualification for possible future use, someday if I don’t know what to do with myself after the kids are grown and well, I miss the kids. (MAYBE. Miss the kids. HN just booked me to take care of her future kids and my knee-jerk reaction was Are You Freaking Kidding Me, Like You Rats Weren’t Torture Enough. <calms down a bit> Ok but no promises. You might not even want kids. Think carefully. Can’t stuff ’em back in once they’re out…(“Unfortunately” though, HN doesn’t touch toys like dolls, but perpetually mothers live animals, her friends… So it’s not looking very good for me right now.. <cringe>))

For real though, to inspire creativity, I believe there is no substitute for the mental stimulation of another human mind pulling, “sparring,” with yours – Deep Blue, the computer program designed to play chess, beat then-World Champion Garry Kasparov at the game it was designed for – but apparently cannot beat a 4yr old at tic-tac-toe (I think that was from Life 3.0). It’s why I’m very supportive of my kids partnering others to study. Spar with. Game against. Say stupid things to. The randomness of where another human mind might take you is practically irreplaceable. If you have any kind of creative interest on the side, I think the chance to have so many randomly questioning minds around yours is invaluable for your own development.

I had initially budgeted that getting some teaching qualification would be a massive re-train that took me several long years. (THIS also seems to get conveniently left out wayy too often.) The particular qualification I was recommended required a host school first putting down on paper that they will be your mentor school, without which you cannot even apply to get into the program and start down this road. A large part of the study program was teaching full-time no-pay for a year as a trainee. (Probably more, if slowed down by the caring for my own kids when they’re home after school. And no I DON’T want to teach my own kids <MAJOR CRINGE> just not our family chemistry. Ever 😀 SOMEONE ELSE PLEASE TAKE THEM, I scream at them see them enough at home, thank you.) A-nyway, I considered it a very big ask on any potential host school and always thought it was a very long shot. I have only ever asked one school this, a year ago. 

Mostly, I wanted an excuse to meet professionals who were teachers, that was not in a NOW, WHAT CAN YOU DO FOR MY PRECIOUS AWESOME CHILD kind of way. A then-friend told me something that stuck – that there was “always” a distinction between whether you are a “staff”, or “a parent (who is not also a staff).” Professional work thing, I guess.

BUT… we can always hope that instead, it’s:

Secret Life!!! One of HN’s all-time favourite old collections about the double lives led by teachers. (pic from amazon.com)

The series also has teachers who practice magic and spend summer vacations on a trawler and in the aborigine rainforest. HN’s favourite however is Mad Basher Molly – sweet lovable teacher by day… one of the most hated professional wrestlers in garish stage makeup by night – on purpose. Molly and her best friend whose alter-ego is lovable crowd-pleasing Pretty Polly (huh.. I think Mad Basher is way more fun) put on a huge staged match each week with lotsa dramatic fake action.. after which they unwind with tea and a laugh and arrangements for more theatrics next week.

This is so much fun! I’m very fascinated by jobs. From all the way back when I once applied to be an air traffic controller (not… that different from where I ended up in a dealing room vocation that requires hedging stuff in pieces traded by different desks. You have to mind what the different desks in their different seating areas around the room are doing, sometimes also on the phone if the main desk for that currency is overseas..) Before college my dad once suggested a gap year as an air stewardess rather than backpacking because you’re k-ind of still “backpacking” but on a plane, and they teach you all kinds of interesting flight stuff. I got thru the first round at Singapore Airlines but then had to start a new study program and couldn’t pursue it.

Also once tried some kind of local stock photo job – that was to better understand what all the local gossip magazines my Chinese-literate colleagues kept buying back from HK and Taiwan to Singapore were about (BIG CAVEAT if you try this for the experience – some of em write seriously crazy stuff. What the agency texts you to show up wearing is a big indication – there was a “t-shirt and jeans” one where I held up an iPhone not-yet-available-for-general-sale, for a picture… and a few months later a waiter at Peak Lookout showed me where the local gossip magazine that bought the picture had captioned it, “Mum Fries iPhones.” I AM NOT KIDDING.

“Frying” is Cantonese slang for… trading? punting? When the iPhone first came out, people would queue for hours and buy like, five, so they could re-sell them higher (that’s apparently one way to “fry.” The phrase was taught to me by a local dealer I once sat next to… who previously worked between bank jobs as a HK taxi driver.)

It’s not just tech, there are many websites that allow you to buy/sell hard-to-find branded items – I replaced a Chanel brooch of great sentimental value (lost off my t-shirt when I rushed dying JD to a veterinary emergency room) through the website Buyma. The seller in Tokyo whom I contacted told me she eventually got another friend in London to pick it up. They don’t buy and hold this stuff – so no monetary risk, just legwork, and if you’re a mall-crawling kid on a weekend it’s so easy to window shop a few – sellers post a large variety of items and the price they want for (sourcing) it, and then go try and get it if you indicate interest. No commitment – one or two who didn’t have a friend in London simply cancelled my “order” saying “sorry cannot find”. My point being there are so many more interesting things to do with your cell phone than open chatrooms. 

It’s potentially quite good money, because in cities that have the branded-item cult, stuff sells out very, very fast – the markup is maybe 20-30% above retail – that’s about HKD 2000 gross a pop for say, sourcing one Chanel brooch. The fancy term for that is “arbitrage opportunity” – when you can sell higher or buy lower than what others are selling or buying for, thereby making a profit. But with branded goods instead of stocks, property or various other assets. Well technically two select Hermes bags require easily as much capital as your average equity linked deposit. (Chanel costume jewellery brooch is my recommendation if you want a branded item though – it dresses up anything, from cheap tees to coats and bags, to sweaters and hairbands – and it keeps resale value. If you keep the tags you might even re-sell at a profit. Just be sure to check the original listed price. Some people brazenly try their luck by posting seriously crazy high prices.)

That’s one thing the internet and PayPal and all manner of tech apps have done for the marketplace today. Instead of EasyBake nowadays, we have EasyApp Everything 🙂

How ’bout a Starbucks barrister job, there’s a mum from Taiwan killing time and chilling at one very occasionally. (But personally I’m scared of the elaborate order buttons in Chinese on the register 😀 Even in English is bad enough –

Rhett and Link do coffee orders, ladies and gents. Dads of 5 kids between them, former engineers, Link I believe had a “fulfilling” job at IBM….. until he discovered Youtube. Think what Youtube et al does for the secret lives of teachers. They could be… pretty good amateur musicians. Inna band. (Wasn’t Justin Beiber once a 12yr old Youtuber? Yuck. Nvm.) Cartoonists. Movie producers.<pause> W-ait. Are you sure your friendly neighbourhood teacher doesn’t already have a double life?

Rumour #7:

Rockstar is gay and within his chest beats the suppressed heart of a genuine Ballerino. And his parents, particularly Dad, are in denial when Son just wants to be himself and pirouette and leap gracefully across the stage like a gazelle. Just as nature really intended, for him.

<pause>

<crickets chirping>

Y-eah I got nuthin’. Just. Speechless.

pic from businessinsider.com.au

O-KAY folks, how many did you score out of 7 on our little Rumour-dar Test? Did we manage to entertain?

Here’s a bonus recommendation:

These guys do it better. (screen shot from Australian tv guide)

BUT I try to please. You guys play an important role keeping my mind on its toes (wait, what?) So this one’s extra –

Rumour #8:

I have Friends In High Places. This. Is. TRUE. Like, out of this world ok. Here’s a few (you have to watch the first intro to understand the second clip):

I especially like how the kid is the Seasoned Intelligence Specialist.

He gets into trouble like a regular kid. Kind of.

https://youtu.be/iOzbo8E9wHo

(Recognise Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Kid Intelligence Specialist) today? Got into Columbia University, and aside from a long list of notable acting roles also won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media and is now a dad of two boys.)

Epilogue: Been laying low most of last weekend and beyond because –

A precious grading call is not to be taken lightly. (Interestingly I just realised around her a lot of other girls were also taking this grading..)

First lesson as a Blue (omg the size difference – sometimes with her large personality (chilli padi in a wrapper of Crazy – she needs the extensive sports stimulation, challenging class lessons and the discipline of Taegeuk) I forget she’s still so little…)

What happens when HN ambushes me off the bus saying she’s arranged to meet a friend at her school Halloween BBQ… I had the tail end of stomach flu and wasn’t looking to dress and party, and so –

Katy Perry And Her Personal Assistant. She doesn’t know many songs other than Roar (animals!) but we both agreed if she did ‘Katy Perry In Roar’ everyone would just think she was Moana. So KP’s candy dress.

Wig – available anywhere, from Amazon to Pottinger Street. We always have a wig or two lying around. The rest are her clothes from several years ago, when she was about 4 and went thru That Tulle Skirt Phase all girls seem to experience.

This outfit no longer exists – close to the end of the evening the girls pulled the lollies out and ate them 😛

“If I’m going to be a pessimist, then I should just stop writing for young people because that’s too heavy a burden to put on young readers. …I get to meet with people who have waded through horrible things, and they get up every morning, and they try to do their best” – Deborah Ellis

Caveat (and spoiler alert): This is a story of a little girl’s family under the reign of the Taliban, and while highly acclaimed, it comes with parental warnings because of the themes. 

From Deborah Ellis, award-winning author, mental health worker, volunteer in Pakistani refugee camps, comes an eye-opener of a middle school book series. Ellis donates most of her book royalties to Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and UNICEF, among others.

Breadwinner The Movie, featuring heroine Parvana as voiced by Saara Chaudry (pic off Breadwinner official Facebook page)

Now, while I haven’t lived in Malaysia since Secondary School (went to university in Singapore under Singapore Ministry of Education study grant and worked there fulfilling the fairly simple bond requirements before following hub to HK), we still retain Malaysian passports. Malaysia is officially a Muslim country, seen by most of the Western world as moderate Muslim, and while our family is Christian and my parents Buddhist, I had a Muslim Secondary School best friend whom I’m still in touch with – and while still based in Malaysia, she would vent openly on Facebook about the Taliban’s extreme interpretations of Shariah Law.

While I grew up with taekwondo, my strong friend is the one who had her nose mashed into her face during a hockey match – and a few of us were rather disappointed she opted for her old nose back instead of getting Cindy Crawford’s. 😀 (I remember her laughingly protesting “it’s not me” and us going “Huh.. Got chance to have Supermodel Plastic Surgery also dun wan…”)

For real though, I went to a public Convent School (yes, that my Muslim friend and others like her also attended, some of ’em wearing headscarfs – and I later also visited her at her dorm in the International Islamic University – I wasn’t confident of getting the headscarf right having never tried it, and so I didn’t venture onto the main campus.)

In Sec School you got suspended for taking part in beauty pageants (we had one senior, the 6ft-tall-and-stunning-daughter of a prominent lawyer, who made I think nationwide finals AND really was. Suspended for two weeks. Being pretty wasn’t as cool as being… tough and smart (and pretty :D)). Getting a sports injury and coming to school with a cast was somehow the Epitome of Cool, ensuring you always had a couple solicitous friends with you at Break in case you needed help queueing to buy lunch. I was born a naturally sickly child who therefore found it necessary to hack her way through tournaments and once did a whole freaking year of drills under the hot sun as a Police Cadet just so she could shoot a real gun. Most Youth who try for the corps actually consider a career in the police force but me, I just wanted to get to shoot guns at the range. Don’t… ask. Imma lousy shot. (Very bad eyesight eventually corrected by lasik because glasses couldn’t.)

AND somewhere in there was my way of explaining why, when I came upon Breadwinner quite by chance, I jumped at the opportunity to let the kids watch it. (Also my way of saying, because of the curiosity of the many non-Malaysians around us trying to figure – don’t bother 🙂 Malaysians are so very, very diverse, even amongst ourselves we kinda have to tell each other outright as well. It’s called Rojak. Big, Confusing Mix of Stuff. Don’t always know all the ingredients, but it’s delish. So anyway just take (each of) us as we are .)

And Deborah Ellis truly deserves her accolade as someone who “tells stories about really terrible experiences in ways young people can understand…”

While Rockstar also watched it with interest, it was HN who was especially captivated with the story of little girl heroine Parvana and her best friend Shauzia. Parvana’s father is a former school teacher who resorts to hawking for a living when unrest closes the schools. When he is seized and imprisoned by a former student-turned-soldier (in the novels the reason given is he is “foreign educated”), Parvana’s family of mother, two girls and a toddler boy is left in dire straits – women cannot be seen in public without an adult male relative escort, nor can they buy things like food supplies from the stores. With their father gone and her older sister and mother unable to leave the house (her mother is beaten in the street for trying – it’s not graphic but the implications are clear, and my response to HN’s amazement was bullies use any excuse), Parvana steps up.

“When you’re a boy, you can go anywhere you like…”

Parvana cuts her hair short and masquerades as a boy (Mulan!) in order to move freely in public, earning money from odd jobs and buying the family’s food supplies. She soon befriends Shauzia who’s doing the same thing.

Parvana and Shauzia dressed as boys, deciding where to find their next jobs (pic from chicagoreader.com)

Thus, the little girls become the Breadwinners of their family. (Contrast the term “Breadwinner” with all its original criticised implications that “the man of the house” feeds the rest of the family, with the irony that in an extremely chauvinistic society where women cannot even buy groceries, these little girls now support the household.)

Parvana tries to sell her dress… (pic from jomec.co.uk)

Parvana selling her only pretty dress is another powerful image – any regret Parvana has over selling this dress she has never worn dissipates in the family’s need for immediate supplies, and her father’s words “Where would you wear it?”

No place for a dress, yet always a use for knowledge… Under her father’s tutelage, unlike many other women (and some men) in their world, Parvana can read and write, allowing her to offer letter reading and writing services.

One day a very old man buys her pretty dress. Recall that Parvana is still child-sized – and so when she tells the man “your daughter will love it,” his response is a thunderclap – “She is my wife.“

Indeed, Parvana’s mother’s way of solving the family’s problems (rather than let her younger daughter keep supporting them indefinitely dressed as a boy) is initially to write to a male cousin they have never met, offering Parvana’s older sister in marriage. When the man arrives early while Parvana is still out trying to rescue her father from the prison, he turns out to be a bully and aggressive, herding the older women and toddler boy into the car. Fattema, their mother who has lived long as an oppressed woman under this regime, nonetheless realises her mistake and bravely stands up to him, risking her own death. He finally decides she’s not worth the trouble, and family set off back home to meet Parvana.

It would be a gross misrepresentation to observe feminist and women’s rights advocate Ellis writes only of “bad, bullying men” who abuse positions of power…

Kind Razaq and bullying Idrees confront Parvana’s father – pic from frasesdecineparaelrecuerdo.blogspot.com

Parvana-as-a-boy has been teaching one of the prison guards to read and write, in the wake of his own grief at the loss of his loved ones. When the prison decides to purge all less able-bodied prisoners who cannot fight for the regime, the guard tries to save Parvana-as-a-boy’s “uncle”. When trouble ensues however, Parvana discloses her true identity to Razaq and begs him to save her crippled father.

pic from frasesdecineparaelrecuerdo.blogspot.com

Now, say you are an illiterate male prison guard in a world where women are not allowed to buy groceries or even be out without an adult male escort, let alone learn to read and write, charge money for it, AND teach YOU. You have the power to imprison other men, and punish both men and women for various “crimes”. What would you do, if you then found out the little boy tutoring you is actually a freakin’ girl who is breaking every single iron-enforced rule meant to “keep women in their place” and instil fear? How DARE This Girl Hurt My Pride?

Razaq tries even harder to retrieve Parvana’s ailing father, standing down another armed guard and taking a bullet to the shoulder for his trouble.

Parvana may be the obvious heroine. But without also people like Razaq, who rise above the “power” awarded them, instead performing countless unsung acts of selflessness that earn them real trouble and pain, Parvana’s story would have a different ending. While to be strong in the face of trials and tribulations is certainly to be commended, it is still easier to “choose” to try, when you do not have any other choice. To do the right thing when it is far easier (and painless!) to not, can be a much harder decision.

How many of us wondered how Razaq’s story would end? Next time you meet a “Razaq” help him take care of his darn shoulder. Because there are never enough Razaqs in the world. And we could really use more, without the already rare ones we have bleeding out. Thought for the week…

#91

So I might have mentioned we watched Crazy Rich Asians (HN shortens it to “Crazy Asians”), and potential mother-inlaw from-hell Michelle Yeoh finally indicates her approval of her son’s fiance by giving him her engagement ring to propose with – a ring her own husband had made for her because her own mother inlaw refused to let him propose with her ring, openly disapproving of (Michelle Yeoh herself) for decades… 

Actress Michelle Yeoh used her own ring for the movie – pics from People.com

HN: Mummy, when I get married do I get your ring like that?

Me: Well, based on that particular tradition, your brother’s fiance is supposed to get my ring. Bearing in mind there is good and bad to that, because if mother inlaw and fiance don’t share the same taste, the fiance might be stuck with something her mother inlaw likes, instead of getting to choose something she herself likes. And it’s a huge purchase commitment – <I finally stop because HN’s face is getting more and more skeptical> What?

HN: Are you sure my brudda’s ever getting married?

Rockstar (from laptop): <GIANT SNORT>

HN: A-nyway, what is your (engagement) ring like?

Me: It’s a colourless diamond. A lot of engagement rings I know of are diamonds –

HN: <UNIMPRESSED> My gems are better. They turn into animals.

Me: Y-eah sometimes grownups don’t make that much sense.

…Because I set off on a think about nature vs nurture last couple posts, and then stopped to smell the cupcakes and CDOs along the way… 

“President Bartlet: Did you know that Mozart’s father believed his son to be a miracle from God? He was so convinced of this, he forced young Wolfgang to play all over Europe. His father felt it was his duty, in a world where no on believes in miracles anymore, to show them God’s latest. 

Debbie Fiderer (President’s Personal Secretary): And how did young Wolfgang feel about being hauled about like a trained monkey?

President Bartlet: It pretty much screwed him up for life.”

– excerpt from West Wing, the multi-award winning drama I started off watching solely for work in order to flesh out my understanding of US markets and policy setting (derivatives were most commonly quoted in USD)… and which then kept me hooked for its idealistic undercurrent – an underlying theme is smart people with good intentions trying to run a very large country… The character of United States President Bartlet as created by writer Aaron Sorkin (my hero!) is also portrayed as a devout Catholic egghead Economics professor married to medical surgeon wife struggling to maintain her own career, and with whom he has 3 daughters… and yes, he struggles as a dad who has… issues with most of the men his daughters date and marry 🙂

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is probably one of the most well-known child prodigies in history, a highest-of-the-high achiever in an incredibly challenging field. Peak – How All Of Us Can Achieve Extraordinary Things, written by Ericsson & Pool, identifies music as the field which most demands technical excellence and gruelling practice alongside relatively limitless creative opportunity. (Hence the choice of Mozart, to talk about re giftedness.)

Young Wolfgang was described rather breathlessly in historic accounts as exhibiting the incredibly rare – only about 1 in 10,000 people has it – musical gift of “perfect pitch,” to the extent that he could identify notes from practically any instrument even when he wasn’t in the same room. 

As a child, Mozart picked out chords before the age of 4, toured the countryside performing from the age of 6, composed his first symphony at 8 (largely transcribed by dad Leopold, a fairly successful musician who largely gave up creating and performing in order to tutor his kids.) Sometimes Mozart, his older sister Nannerl, and their dad were on the road performing for over 3 years at a time. The tours were “often in primitive conditions,” and fraught with “near-fatal illnesses far from home”. Dad himself was not exempt from the life threatening risks of travel sicknesses, falling deathly ill at least once while on the road. They must have believed with every fibre of their being in what they saw as a calling to share their “blessing” with the world. 

“In a world where no one believes in miracles anymore”, I charge that

1. we just need to know where and how to look, and

2. even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s parents were judged. (Yup, parenting’s hard.)

While Mozart easily comes to mind when you think “gifted child”, as implied by Sorkin’s writings and my choice of excerpt above, “gifted” is a loaded, misleading word that implies wild, raw talent without much work. Besides, as someone who watched several friends’ struggles to get pregnant and/or adopt – and lemme tell you, every single one of their stories was something – having children is the blessing, the “miracle” we never see because of all the “other” problems and anxieties we create for ourselves in parenting. (We as a people do this to ourselves. Uh… why?)

It was Amitai Etzioni who said “Education, particularly character formation, is the essential family task.” Raise a headcase, risk causing pain and ruining the lives of other human beings. Ask anyone who has a dysfunctional human in their lives. This is why I take voyeuristic delight in spoiling our pets 😛

This is one of ’em “re-arranging” Rockstar’s hair, and the other trying to take apart HN’s Lego pieces. Wow did these two get bold in a hurry – now we have two feathered @ssholes flapping about the house, chirping their lungs out when we try to hold a conversation.

Anyway. I believe what practically any parent can do with their child can be special (look at my kids turning birds into brats! Someday, I just know NASA’s gonna wanna talk to us!) and well, if as a society we’re going to prize the crazy “perfect pitch” level of performance excellence (well, some of us), then books like Peak talk about how it’s more achievable to erm, “normal people” than we previously thought. Or really, that “gifted” boils down to technique and gruelling hard work.

If you saw the whole picture, the cost-benefit though, you m-ight not still want your child to have that kind of “gift”. Or you might. <shrugs> Best part of being a parent today is we have more choices than ever before I guess…

(Btw tangent alert – I found some old pics of Rockstar in his last short haircut 😀 –

The hairstory (sorry) is, we have a longer-running… “social adventure” going, about books and covers and misconceptions, and in outspoken HK it’s especially entertaining. When Rockstar was a toddler I’d shave his head, and both Chinese and Caucasian women would ask me, “Are you his mother?” (Apparently when shaven he looks “very Chinese” …while I don’t :D)

With HN, no one asks if I’m her mother, but people look at her and then ask me, “Are you Phillippino/ Burmese/ Eurasian?” (I’m Malaysian Straits-born Chinese and her dad is Malaysian Chinese; neither of us is even literate in Chinese, though my hub can certainly speak it better than I can.) At work, I would get “Those are definitely not fully Chinese features. Someone in your ancestry messed around” (uh.. I. Said. Straits-born Chinese.) …And then in Kings’ case people just speak to him in Putonghua without asking 😀

(No, none of this ever offends us, we find it hilarious. Rockstar recently responded to a girl who politely introduced herself to him at Orientation, “I’m Rockstar, and I’m actually a boy.” So now he the transgender  dude haha. (I told him to enjoy the jokes and that porcelain skin while he can, because puberty’s gonna kick in soon 🙂 ). Another time when Rockstar asked a new friend (who of course had never seen him pre-long hair) “Were you so obviously avoiding the word ‘gay’ around me in the beginning because you weren’t sure if I was?” to which the friend replied, “Yeah mate, in case – I dunno, ya might be.” That was quite nice, right?)

So now we’ve gotten a few kicks out of it, it seemed a good time to share – firstly, let’s get it out of the way – No question. Like. An. Arrow. ‘Kay? The reason Kings and I were particularly supportive of Rockstar’s hair un-style choice for almost 2 years (bearing in mind that’s a lotta camps and activity groups and therefore, I trust, sufficient anonymity) is because of this – at one point Rockstar was one of very few boys…somewhere, who talked to this other boy. This friend of Rockstar’s is an incredibly good ballet dancer and gymnast.

Now, however much the world is changing, still we have some of “those” stereotypes. Just look at say, the status of most girl footballers in professional soccer, and what boy professional models are to the world of fashion. I’ve had one male friend who took his ballet semi-pro, and he said the boy-girl ratio in ballet is so heavily skewed that the few boys who stick with it are hugely in demand. They also need to be physically strong and have good control, because they have to be able to lift the girl dancers and well, not kill drop them… So anyway, this boy who was an accomplished dancer got on very well with many girls…… and Rockstar. 🙂

So when the kids came of age and started learning about gay, trans etc etc and more boys started cutting their long hair, we asked Rockstar if he would like his old cut back, maybe nix some chatter, to which he said “Uh, I talk to (this friend) because he’s a really nice person. I don’t need to cut my hair for it just so people don’t talk – they know it’s not true, they’re just being jerks about it, and I’m always going to talk to him anyway. He’s nice <end of inspirational background music :D> even if… sometimes I don’t have much to say about… bracelets. Or fashion. AND this is why I don’t talk much to <mild yuck face> girls.“

After that, Kings never questioned his son having the longest hair in our family (:D) Ironically, two years ago when Rockstar had that little “tough guy” cut above, he wasn’t so tough on the inside – and that was why I made sure to get him a “fierce” cut.  When he was much younger he’d get upset if people remarked how tiny he was for eg. So it was a personal milestone that he’s gotten to a point where it doesn’t bother him what other kids might say about his hair, size… or perceived orientation. (Not… to be confused with nixing hygiene. He is allowed to go longer between cuts as long as it’s not breaking any rules, but I draw the line at him looking like a homeless person 😀 )

(On a further aside, “cross-dressing” can save you real money – I wear a US Size 8 shoe, quite common in the women’s department – which means the good stuff sells out much faster and without many further reductions… but I have my pick of the most fabulous sneakers and boots at 10-20% original price in the men’s department. Can we say Dolce!)

End of tangent, back to original point – how peak performance of the “gifted” sort (“nature”) is more achievable than we thought (“nurture” trumps “nature”) but it might come at a price you may choose not to pay, at least in full… You might prefer… “moderately gifted” at the end of this 😉

One of my old friends, now relocated to Singapore for many years, struggled with tumours and eventually decided to adopt. Both she and her husband are in the hi-risk category due to family history of serious illness on both sides – and their adopted daughter is blessedly not. They are relative eggheads, formerly trained as quants in the bank, but obviously their adopted daughter does not share those genes either. This the thing –absolutely delighted at finally having a child, mum stayed home, and the new parents poured many, many hours into reading and talking to her, cooking with her etc…. Their daughter and Rockstar are just 6 weeks apart in age, and while Rockstar is no slouch today, back when they were toddlers and I worked long hours thinking he was in good hands, our friends’ adopted daughter was developmentally far ahead of him in terms of speech, literacy, etc.

I have another mum friend who went to Yale, but eventually shelved plans of becoming an English Professor in favour of raising her daughter (they relocated at the time to DC – Mum of Cherub, you getting this? HN still has your stuffed anteater baby gift 🙂 ) – in the 1.5 years she was one of our neighbours in Bel-air, the family never got round to setting up the tv. (No live-in helper either, just a regular cleaner… also a large Portuguese water dog who occasionally snuck a swim off the Waterfront Park pier if you weren’t watching, AND a baby who so wasn’t sleeping through the night that they were consulting sleep therapists…) What she did bemoan, besides Keeper’s unplanned dips in the ocean, was their 100 cardboard boxes of books that had to remain in storage while the family moved around. (Yes. 100 boxes of books. Not 100 books.) We haven’t seen them in awhile, from being half a world away, but I’m willing to bet that “Cherub” today can almost take Tina Fey.

I say this to remind myself as much as anyone – when did we come to expect that “this” didn’t take a helluva lotta “work”? RAISING LITTLE PEOPLE IS A HELLUVA LOTTA WORK. Next time you pass some little kid going batshit on the floor in public because the parent said “no more candy,” respect that parent ok… It’s much harder to Keep To The ‘No’ in the face of Squalling Snot-covered Wildcat than smile and look all put together because little kid is drugged to the eyeballs with screens and sugar..

I have one of my former RMs to thank, for helping me stick it out: “Listen – my son once insisted I buy him this huge toy one weekend in the mall. When I said no, he completely lost it and started bawling loudly. I told him if he didn’t stop we were going home immediately. I was back then the branch manager of (the bank in that same mall). When he didn’t stop, I wrestled him kicking and screaming through that whole mall to the taxi stand. I even had to stuff him in, flailing limbs and all. Dyou have any idea how hard I was praying that none of my staff saw me that day? You just really, really cannot cave when they do that.”

How hard you work depends heavily on how you approach and execute the hand you are dealt – but make no bones about it, everyone, even young Wolfgang, worked. In fact, experts concluded that as a child he probably worked way harder at music lessons than much older kids did today. Also, that their dad, in keeping with the thinking of the time, focussed greatly on educating his son over his daughter, though Nannerl did also exhibit talent and did also perform for an audience. This of course implies that with the right kind and amount of work, Mozart’s “gift” is not quite as much a gene lottery as we might otherwise believe – plus, he was trained differently than his sister. 

There are also quite a few highly accomplished musicians in history who don’t have perfect pitch. And re this particular “gift,” the following correlations are even more interesting: 1) the only people who seem to have been “born” with perfect pitch also all received extensive music training very early in their life, and 2) the people who have perfect pitch are much more likely to also speak a “tonal language.” (NOT to be confused with being born Asian or African, simply whether they speak the languages.)

More than the final product, the ability to learn and achieve excellence in a chosen field is a “gift”… Chess masters and London cabbies (who must take The Knowledge, a test requiring years-long preparation of 25,000 routes as reported in the NYTimes) perform similar feats when they commit numerous strategies and city routes to memory.

Love this Black Cabs On The Brain illustration in the NYT

How you practice, what you get out of a set number of hours, also greatly determines your results – musicians who used “mental representation”, ie had a rough idea of what a piece should sound like before attempting it, produced markedly quicker results with the same amount of practice.

Now that we’ve established that some relatively amazing “gifts” are achievable with lots of hard work and can be magnified with the right learning technique, here’s the “catch”…

Mozart was also known for an at times baffling scatological humour which some psychologists attributed to numerous psychiatric conditions. Intuitively, it makes sense – while incredibly advanced in music, he was developmentally behind in social and other aspects because well, however bright, he was still human. A child, when he began the kind of career many adults dream of – he was performing for royalty from the age of 7. There are only so many hours in a day. There are limits to what the most capable humans can achieve – and the whole fuss over “gifted” can distract from the fact this is a child. If you devote practically every waking hour to one aspect of development, it’s going to be at the expense of others. Wild talent alone cannot long survive without also resilience. Strength of character. Street smarts.

Go read some of his other writings. If you couldn’t help flinching, you’re not alone – former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is on record as flat out refusing to accept it – it was “inconceivable,”  she said, that a man who wrote “such exquisite and elegant music” could be so foul-mouthed.

We cherish, elevate, maybe even idolise some forms of creative genius without truly recognising it sometimes comes at a very high price.

Possibly Mozart didn’t even think it was that foul, it wasn’t like he had much of a social life with which to develop people skills. I think a good sense of humour is underrated – in order to make people laugh, you have to be able to understand them enough to know what they would find funny. That requires some people skill, and I first noticed that back in university when one of my close friends who has serious quant skills – he wasn’t just getting As in engineering math classes he was scoring 100% – declared what he really would be proud of someday was being able to do standup. Think about it – you’d need to be up to date on current affairs, you’d have to read your audience… people do not all laugh at the same thing, you’d have to figure very quickly from watching other comedians etc what would make these guys laugh. At graduation, that guy became the first Asian valedictorian to speak at Illinois Institute of Technology. I hope he killed it… 🙂

Some accounts portray Mozart as emotionally fragile. Preyed upon. Also, many of those letters the family had likely expected to remain relatively private. Which would bring me to another “price” of fame and genius. Nothing is going to stay private if you’re famous and a genius. People gonna auction off your… fake eyelashes and what-not. (Think I made that up? Fran Drescher, who played The Nanny, was encouraged to do just that for charity – and she The Nanny not The Wolfgang..) And – this being a nod to all the buzz over Judge Kavanaugh’s US Supreme Court confirmation – Brett Kavanaugh may be 53 years old, but they interviewed his buddies from when he was 17 and got stinking drunk a lot in the dorm. (Oh, you thought you could make some bad choices as a teen and it wouldn’t come back to bite you way, WAY harder than two little chunky lovebirds from the SPCA?)

In Richard Dawkins’ original Selfish Gene, he writes how genes are innately selfish in order to perpetuate themselves and well, this leads also to selfish human behaviour. Examples of husbands “wired to cheat” because it perpetuates their genes etc were met with indignation and uproar. Yet that isn’t the whole story – “ultra-selfish” genes work against the interests of the rest of the genome. BUT –

“Selfishness” yet recognises the need for cooperation, for mutual survival. (I still haven’t figured why the people who got so upset about Dawkins’ “cheating husband” analogy re selfish genes didn’t then consider that the selfish husband would then lose the chance to enhance his genes with those of an intelligent wife who ain’t putting up with no nonsense from him. Evolved and “selfish” genes are surely not stupid ones 😀 or they’d be extinct soon/ already. They who think everyone else can’t do the math and only they can don’t sound like the next step up the evolutionary ladder, do they?

No matter how “strong” a “creative genius,” a person stills needs people skills and teamwork. A “gene” that hasn’t recognised the need for symbiosis, learned to identify good partners or team mates, or “give and take,” to attract the best partners, is still “weaker,” for all it exhibits immense individual ability. If a “selfish” gene recognises the need for mutual cooperation, the next step is picking the best to cooperate with so they both go the furthest. So how come we don’t hear more about people striving to be the best partner? Team mate? To burn a bridge on one tiny little project is just stupid near-sighted, and a terrible waste. Why would anyone ever do it? (On the other hand, they’re doing everyone else a favour by stuffing them in one immediate project for instant gratification – because there are so many more to come and everyone now knows not to work with them.) There are always. Many more projects to come. Because life is an endurance race…

Yes, “Black Spiderman” is out! (pic from IMDB)

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT:

Venom is an alien life form who, depending on your point of view, is either “selfish gene”, or “ultra-selfish gene” – lucky for his human host…

Venom decides (selfishly and partially at the detriment of his own kind – I say partially because it doesn’t say that his own kind is going extinct from not eating all the humans) that he likes Earth the way it is. He chooses not to overrun it by alerting the rest of the aliens to come over, which would completely destroy what it currently is (pic from NoMoreMutants Tumblr)

This is not “Venom.” This is “Riot,” in another human host, the scientist in charge of the whole program. Human scientist is also either “selfish” or “ultra-selfish” depending how you look at it, because for some reason he’s fine with Riot bringing the alien horde over to overrun Earth, he has become so consumed by his fascination with the aliens, their potential to cure cancer… but also the power they offer… that he forgets the cost: that many more people will die, who are not chosen as hosts. (pic from MovieWeb)

In fact, it’s also iffy whether the hosts eventually survive long term, though the aliens do appear to be able to cure cancer – hence Venom and his own host’s constant debate over their “symbiotic” vs “parasitic” relationship. Moral of the story is: If you do not have the discipline to check your own ambition, if you prize success at the cost of everything else, it is an easily exploitable ‘weakness’ or flaw that’s gonna eat you up. In this particular case, quite literally 😛

Quick update..

HN’s Annual Kids Club Graduation at the end of Y1…

They got kids’ Bibles, which some of em opened up to try and read immediately, and an activity workbook…

And then we got home, let the birds out (something else I never thought I’d type), and at dinner time…….

Seeing that, Professor Higgins?

By all accounts HN is just VERY LOUD. BIG movements. Lots of energy. Practically lived in a helmet as a toddler until her coordination got good enough because she perpetually insisted on climbing everywhere. Somehow though, it doesn’t seem to bother our animals very much – 

That is Sans, the much shyer of the two birds, trying to get her attention and rubbing his beak in the folds of her sleeve while she was carrying a bag of seed with Peach picking her favourites out of it.

Remember when we adopted the birds from the SPCA in Wan Chai several months ago and the trainer was managing our expectations about them ever being tame enough to be let out because they had grown up flapping in a large cage full of birds without much interaction with humans?

Proof our younger child issa alien. (For real though, she goes quiet for awhile so I check on her and she’s walking about with a bag of seed… and the two birds on the four layers of socks she’s got on her arms. Y’know, cos not too long ago Savage Peach was still biting hard enough to draw blood through one thick sock (we’ve all been bitten, especially Rockstar, but I’m the only one who’s actually bled so far).

Peach hardly bites hard now, but we’re still not taking chances… I keep finding mismatched socks around the apartment and I know what the kids have been using them for…!

“If you’re too honest and say what you really think, it will ruin your career.”

-said to high-flying CIA analyst (real CIA, not tv CIA) Carmen Medina in the 90s by a well-meaning senior colleague.

Medina sincerely believed that information-sharing between departments at the CIA needed to be revolutionised: To cut down the risk of information leaks, the CIA at the time limited itself to paper printouts. Because of this, crucial information didn’t get shared quickly enough – an admittedly “undesirable” but mostly “acceptable” default status quo back then. Carmen Medina wanted to use an internet platform so information could be shared more effectively, real-time. She was shot down many, many, many times, even by people she counted professionally as “friends”.

In 2005 CIA analysts Sean Dennehy and Don Burke created Intellipedia (like Wikipedia, but for the intelligence community and closed to the general public) and contacted Medina for senior level support – in the 10 years or so since she first championed this particular cause, she had simmered down to a much more selective broaching of the topic……. while industriously plodding on, rising within the ranks of the CIA, earning respect and credibility through other achievements.

Took her 10 years. Almost Rockstar’s entire lifetime. That’s how long she kept at it despite being repeatedly and severely discouraged. 

Yet “The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists” should NOT be confused with Rules-busting crazy risk-taking. 

Derivatives guru Satyajit Das, who wrote Traders, Guns and Money (some of the reactions to erm, “unfair layoffs due to mergers et al” are the stuff of Reality TV producers’ dreams) and conducted some of the trainings I considered myself privileged to have a chance to attend, used to call “safe” principal protected derivatives investments “slow death”, as opposed to the “fast death” of non-principal protected creations. (I did both, in Singapore and HK, but personally prefer “NOT dying from “fast death,” ie using the riskiest classification of assets to then create safer stuff, instead of v.versa).. What fascinated me so much was how much variety and opportunity there was, and it also changes irrevocably the way you look at everything. The balance of “give and take” given current market conditions.  All irrevocably linked to probability. Everyone trades, hedges, creates, based on the premise of the likelihood a particular risk event will happen, the likelihood you will get a return…

Case in point: I can create for you a product that fully protects your principal investment with a bank of your choice…. AND you’ll still get 1000% return. (This may be hypothetical, but did you know Weather Derivatives were a real thing? And that David Bowie securitised the rights to his songs decades ago? Bowie Bonds: How David Bowie Securitised His Royalties And Predicted The Future. James is not the only Bond and Securitisations are not really bonds but as I tell the kids in general, You Make It, You Get To Name It.)

But back to hypothetical 100% principal protected 1000% return investment – if the relationship between risk and return is irrevocable, where’s the catch?

I put your money in a bank of your choice. Fixed Deposit. With the interest earned, I go buy a couple lottery tickets <shrugs>. DON’T scream at me, probability is the point, and therefore the catch. The hotter the return, the lower the likelihood you’re gonna get it. So says No Free Lunch Mum. You cannot “cheat” the system but you can certainly find much better fit. I liken the skill of putting together investment products that actually make sense to… say, making sushi. With a super sharp knife. Now, I’m no true sushi connoisseur, but I have a deep respect for what goes into making it… It illustrates how being scared of using knives that are sufficiently sharp and potentially toxic ingredients like pufferfish gets you lousy food or worse, can make you deathly sick. With the right skill and tools however, you can create art, nourishment, out of something potentially deathly toxic. The lesson in the need for humility and training and research over a quick fix is a powerful one.

Now, instead of just lottery tickets for a potential upside on your principal protected investment (“lo-risk”), let’s throw in a pink stuffed unicorn.

While the West was not won this way, it must be how they discovered barter trade. 🙂 

(Last carnival season HN won the one thing he wanted and somehow couldn’t get – that little black dragon – at a darts throwing stall; Rockstar won so many other prizes including the giant pink monstrosity in the preceding pic that now takes up prime real estate in their room…but not this one)

(Fine, it has wings. Alicorn.) Figured if I threw an Alicorn in, no one could possibly still take me seriously and accuse me of a mis-sell. Yet there be method to the madness, in the illustration of how the landscape for derivatives investments completely changed following the financial crisis.

See, there were people who were irresponsibly represented to, and therefore needed and deserved help. There were people who selfishly thought about their own bonuses and deliberately sold rubbish that they knew to be rubbish. BUT. There were also the gamblers who deliberately took on excessive risk in the name of greed, lost their return fair and square….. and then tried to masquerade as the people who were taken advantage of. Those are the absolute worst, because they sow distrust and a loss of faith in the existence of honourable choices, robbing others with real needs of the limited resources available, causing institutions to have to withhold aid to ascertain whether the need (and complaint) is legitimate. There was so much energy put into avoiding being accused of a mis-sell (as opposed to creating new and better products) that in the end no one had that much time to create financial products anymore, and so they went into tech, the arts, cupcakes. You are familiar with the Sift chain among others, right? By a former investment banker, I believe.. (Hairy scary CDOs whose perpetrators creators everyone wants to squish indiscriminately… or cupcakes? This is hard.)

Goodbye Rant, Hello Pink Stuffed Animal… You can improve your odds of throwing a hoop over a bottle neck to win a prize, with practice (remember when it seemed like every other person at last year’s AIA European Carnival was bobbing about with one of these things as long as you were willing to wait through the crush of people playing it?) if you go for the pink stuffed animal… but you can’t increase your chances of winning the lottery unless you buy more tickets. More risk, more return and vice versa. A “safe” investment product only gives you so much. And if the bank you chose to place your deposit with isn’t as sound as you thought, you took on risk without knowing, for an un-commensurate low return. “Hi-risk” products that everyone on the face of it “knows will kill you” are way more honest – they tell you We Know This Is Junk. THIS Is Therefore The Return We Are Willing To Pay You For That Risk… The relatively big return allows you a lot more “meat” in the structure to buy cheap protection, move things around (tranche-ing), thereby reducing the original risk.

According to Grant, creativity and successful entrepreneurism has less correlation to taking huge un-prudent risks as common idea might have about the stereotype. In other words – no excuses all you budding entrepreneurs, you can follow da rules jus’ fine 😀 questioning a default status quo is not an excuse for rebellion, and rebellion does not necessarily a creative genius make. There are perfectly creative geniuses who are not rebels. In fact, Grant says you’re more likely to go wild, be creative in your ideas, if you are relatively secure in other areas of your life. T.S Eliot wrote The Wastelands while keeping his bank job in London, a position he remained in for 3 more years.  (Somewhere in there is a snark at what he must think of banking, but anyways… :D)

Adam Grant’s students at Wharton who created the USD 1.75bio pre-IPO Warby Parker (more below) all secured good internships in the early days in case their hugely-unconventional-at-the-time online store selling prescription eyewear didn’t work out. They took 1.5 years before even launching it, and they told everyone what they were working on (readily available on Youtube in a much lesser-watched clip where Co-CEO Blumenthal talks about what he learned from starting up WP). When asked why they would do that, what if someone “steals” their idea, Blumenthal’s response just makes the whole relatively zzz-worthy clip worth watching: “We’re not the smartest guys on the planet. If someone else didn’t launch it yet, the market probably wasn’t ready before…” “You’re always going to have other people working on similar concepts, and it comes down to execution…” Ironically, the “smartest students” on paper, Adam Grant quotes William Deresiewicz, “become the most excellent sheep.” The more you prize achievement, the more you fear failure. If you are too scared of messing up and “looking bad”, at some point you’re not going to try. What happens to all of us as a people, a society, when everyone doesn’t try? People who cry wolf – about mis-sells and what-not – increase the stakes people stop trying to create in the financial markets and… open more bakeries. (Though no contest, Warby Parker is such a simple non-rocket scientist idea..)

Q: Are you afraid of the big optical companies?

“No, we’re more afraid of 4 guys, just like us, sitting in a dorm room somewhere…..”

Speaking of executions... WPs “killer app” was to ask WHY a particular default position existed to begin with. Regarding lens pricing in a pair of glasses, there was inexplicably no real reason other than a monopoly – (When they say in the video above that the markup on a pair of prescription glasses is 10-12 times, did you initially register “10-12%” like I did? And then realise 10-12 times is a 1000-1200% markup?). The massive pricing difference didn’t take the “smartest guys on the planet,” it took one guy feeling the pain to his wallet from leaving a pair of glasses on a plane, and another guy doing social work for Vision Spring which provides glasses to the underprivileged (who doesn’t even need glasses himself) to connect the dots.

Adam Grant’s interview of entrepreneur Larry Page is another interesting one – Page, together with business partner Brin, were once incredibly reluctant to drop out of Stamford to pursue their “killer idea”, explaining how they had felt they were not yet sufficiently established (humility!) to properly execute. They happily went about college life building things like printers out of Legos.. Said “killer idea” they eventually launched, enriched by college experiences and numerous seemingly “meaningless” little projects along the way, was……….. Google. 

(eBay is another one that started as a hobby until Pierre Omidyar had the epiphany that his hobby was netting him more than his real job.)

I’ve got (a much more meh) one myself – as a young adult I felt my parents “forced” an Accounting major at the Singapore Nanyang Technological University on me and I swung between resentment and despair at not knowing what to do with it. I wanted to study Economics. Law. English Literature – was forbidden from becoming a teacher btw – my mother was a public High School English teacher her entire working life, a job she refused to leave… or couldn’t bring herself to. I don’t think she herself can really tell you which it was. She was out to “save the world” a lot. Sometimes my mix tapes disappeared when she had no time to shop for a personal gift for one of her hardworking students (when I say “hardworking” I don’t mean “top student.” I mean “showed up for free after-school tuition and could barely keep his/her eyes open from manning night market stall for parents until after midnight before getting home to do schoolwork.”) Lucky for her I was a pretty good kid except for a couple little pockets of rebellion… BUT.

I was angry at my parents for years  about the degree (never the disappearing mix tapes haha). Yet it was that degree (plus the unusual combination of an otherwise very “un-accountant-like” personality) that landed me on my first structured products team in OUB (Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians in pic below is btw a great grandson of founding director of a then-similar Singaporean local bank OCBC), inputting and very occasionally translating hundreds of financial statements off the Bloomberg into a proprietary software for evaluating corporate bonds in their own securitisation portfolio – one that was created – not by a long-in-the-tooth rocket scientist, but by a couple barely-30s (nonetheless strong students), one of whom was also a Commando Officer during Singapore National Service.

Kevin Kwan, Crazy Rich Asians (pic from US Harpers Bazaar…

…in an article that also features Heart Evangelista, Phillippino superstar, in haute couture)

But back to the then-30-somethings who created the first Singapore securitisation – they opened textbooks, consulted college professors (and yes several experienced quants) and created what was at the time and to the best of my knowledge still is one of the most popular and successful local securitisations in Singapore. By now it would’ve been running almost 2 decades with no issues. (Not everything blew up; you only read about the ones that do because everyone’s too busy carrying on running the ones that don’t blow up to do press I guess..) Thing is, derivatives, computer coding… 5, 10 years is a lifetime in their development. They require a fresh, relatively young eye. Yet without also the wisdom of decades-old experience that can recall similarities and correlations from past market mistakes, the new creations are that much riskier. In other words, young and old need each other. (Yeah never said it was easy.)

In the case of Medina and the CIA, the devastating consequences of a potential information leak outweighed the benefits of timely information until the information and technological landscape changed drastically – Yuval Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century writes, “Those who own the data own the future.” (Not to mention they also better figured out how to execute Medina’s original idea – can you imagine what the rash and imprudent might do with that data and ownership of the future..)

The other hidden lesson about execution was that Medina’s delivery was lacking in her earlier years – she failed to convince, because she “spoke like everyone had to agree with her,” without acknowledging the limitations of her own ideas. Just an aside that whether an idea lives or dies is uncomfortably more dependent on mode of delivery than we might otherwise expect.

I do however concede the seemingly similar successes of college dropouts like Steve Jobs. In the same way there are many ways to get through a wall. You can barrel through like a bull in a china shop, or you can figure out the weak spots and apply selective pressure… OR you can go work out the wave frequencies to break down the thing in some engineering class and along the way find other uses for resonance. Whichever best suits your personality. (And think I made the wave frequency thing up? It’s from Can Resonance Destroy Anything and you need to read the 30-odd comments beyond the physicist’s initial “nope”, some of which ends in the sinking of Atlantis.

Oh look. Someone else decided Atlantis should look vaguely like underwater Vegas complete with karaoke-ing Kraken (Hotel Transylvania 3 pic from Youtube.com) HT3 btw, is fast approaching USD 500mio at the box office worldwide. (Derivatives investments what? CDO who? 😀 )

Yes really. You know I’m not mad enough to make all this up by myself, right?) But back to the wall. If you discover Atlantis along the way, you might prefer to do that. (HT3 was directed by cartoonist Genndy Tartakovsky, also a film grad from Columbia College Chicago, and Michael McCullen, formerly of private high school Indian Springs, Alabama.) If you want to barrel through the wall though, you better have a VERY HIGH PAIN THRESHOLD. Otherwise, go to college 😀

Blumenthal of Warby Parker I believe was working with Vision Spring while still in college, and it was how he found inspiration when he doesn’t even need glasses haha

Next up: Correlations between birth order, parenting, professional mentors, and… Originality.

Some Guy Who Follows Baseball (and isn’t me) found a significant correlation between birth order and risk taking – as proxied by “base stealing” – in Baseball, players have a chance at scoring extra points for their team by “stealing bases”. Sliding into the base to “steal” it often risks heavy collision. Pain. A much higher chance of injury. The act of stealing a base is therefore considered an indication of the propensity to take risk, because a player only increases his team’s chances of gaining points by about 3%, for which he must risk pain and a possible benching. In other words, the risk-reward is such that you probably wouldn’t do it with those odds unless it’s in your personality. (Or pain threshold going through a wall) And it turns out that part of personality is related to birth order (also age gap) and the differences between how elder vs younger siblings are parented…

Identifying some 400 siblings who play the sport professionally, researchers adjusted for genetic similarities (“nature” – say, how much natural “ball prowess” the player likely had), noting also the slight edge older siblings appeared to have in ball control….. but the statistic that stood out was in base stealing. Risk appetite. Younger siblings “stole bases” a whopping 10.6 times more often, and were 3.2 times more likely to succeed at it as well. Oh, and it apparently holds true regardless of age or era – 80 year old younger siblings still had a higher propensity for risk than 25 year old eldest children. 

In other words, bring on the pressure – how you parent really matters. Samuel and Pearl Olliner, sociologists and education researchers, made it their life’s work to study the correlation between non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, others who just stood by…. and how they were parented as kids. When interviewed, Holocaust Rescuers recounted in common the word “explained,” in the way in which they were disciplined as children.

So too the level of creativity – according to psychologist Teresa Amabile, parents of highly creative children set “one less rule”: Where “normal” kids might average about 6 specific rules covering homework, bedtimes etc, the parents of creative kids had a habit of emphasizing the value behind the rule (implying they leave “wiggle room” in how the child chooses to comply..)

Now, I’m not sure as a parent I want my kids to literally risk their lives to save anyone else’s child (come on let’s be honest)… lose a few fingers, maybe <shrugs>. They have 10, after all. 😀 (And lotsa hair.) 

ps: Speaking of which, we keep getting asked re HN having short hair and Rockstar relatively long hair. For HN, it was a lesson in going for a particular look and practicality (not needing to spend time drying or tying it).. you cannot “care too much” about how you look, ie how erm, pretty or not, if you are going for a particular purpose that requires you chop it all off…. and the flip side for Rockstar (his current style is… not style. Ugh. It’s just a compromise between not having to cut it too often and not having to tie it up; if he could live in just one look/outfit he would [insert eyeroll] think of all the closet space I would’ve saved).. And no he’s not queer 😀 but it’s true he likes computers way more than girls right now. He says computers are easier to understand haha).

*Elephant in the room, fine I’ll say something quickly about Crazy Rich Asians, besides the obvious fact that it’s awesome… Obviously there is a powerful push toward smart, strong young women nowadays, so I will point out that CRA is full of smart, strong women… who know when to selectively yield as well. AND to choose partners differently than before. It’s getting easier and easier to be a “strong, outspoken woman” as society becomes increasingly supportive, in a way it wasn’t in the past generations or even just a decade or two prior. However CRA highlights the role of women in the whole family – not just as daughters, but also sisters, wives, mothers, daughters-and-mothers-inlaw. No, it’s not all comfortable to think about, because we are all…. human and therefore selfish…

“Mother inlaw” Michelle Yeoh is also Cambridge-educated daughter-inlaw who gives up her own career to run her husband’s business, allows her son to be taken care of by a mother-inlaw who openly never approves of her and blames her for anything that goes wrong in the family… As the potential MIL to the fiance of her beloved only child whom she has waited with after-school snacks for each day, will she do unto her precious son’s fiance, as has been done unto her for decades? (pic from TED blog)

In raising “strong daughters,” or really, “strong children,” we might perhaps overlook the fact that if (and ONLY IF) they also choose to be spouses and parents, they have to also learn to yield selectively or to seek compromise. It’s easier to be the winner all the time than the (selective) yielder, to be sure.

Heartthrob Pierre Png deliberately cast as the hardworking hunky husband who cannot get over his wife’s “perfect-ness” and family wealth, thereby cheating on her and even hoping she publicly loses her poise and composure when she finds out (pic from Galerie Magazine)

CRA highlights a particular kind of “strong woman,” and to lesser extent “strong man” – because while our society traditionally rewards the rich, the super-busy, the high-achieving, it is the humble who hold the family together. Besides the main storyline of high-achieving women learning when to yield and cooperate (it’s after all much harder to shelf ambition than to not have any to begin with haha) Pierre Png’s role is as an average-achieving hardworking son-inlaw marrying a “strong woman” – high-achieving top student from a powerful rich family (“strong woman” for a time hides her family’s wealth seeking to make her husband feel better about himself – how many “strong” men would feel the need to do that? 🙂 ) only to chafe at being the lesser-moneyed partner in his marriage… and dropping the ball spectacularly is a powerful visual.

And when his “strong” wife finally owns her family’s Crazy Riches and tells him off for not being able to accept it, it is a quiet and surprising nod to the oft-overlooked ability of more moderate-achieving husbands to remain supportive in marriage and family alongside “stronger” partners as well.

Lotsa stuff got done in the last couple weeks, and we seem to be perpetually tidying up after, so this is a quick Excuses Post catchup post…

The vandals look familiar. 

After our helper completed her contract, we cleared out her old room, and then the kids wanted to go to town spray painting the walls before a contractor eventually cleans out our rental. They also felt it was something they could do in their PJs. The… kids. Not the contractor.

This HN dabbing at the Malaysian Consulate office when Rockstar was getting his passport renewed

Took a cue from fellow proud Malaysians who selfie at this sign when they’re doing their immigration stuff… Independence (Merdeka) Day celebrations this year were something else, what with the recent election, shops initially ran out of flags back home, stuff like that

Oh look, giant ball pool free-for-all:

(As always, anyone doesn’t like their kid in this, just say the word and it’s gone. I assumed this party was ok to shout out re the Wellcome Paradise (no relation to the supermarket chain) in KITEC, a place we would otherwise never have known existed, because they had photographers for a magazine article during the party and were informing guests… The place was cleared out for Birthday Boy, but when open to the public they quickly hit full capacity on weekends. Or… what they consider full capacity, when it’s too crowded they limit entry. Which is pretty cool.)

The ball pool – or should I say ball room – and many climbing areas are pretty lavish – grownups find themselves knee deep in plastic balls, and older kids were “surfing” along the surface, building forts, etc… It’s like, the only public ball pool I’m comfy letting the kids in right now because I’m usually germ-freaky with them things (how d’you clean that many balls?!) – to the point we used to have our own at home, an idea I got from another mum who regularly moves her son’s mattress off the bed frame and fills it with their own plastic balls…. not too long ago we passed another family transporting two large sacks of balls on a trolley to place in storage.. no room in their apartment…

This place is fussy about cleanliness though, there’s always attendants with hand gels at the entrance making sure everyone washes their hands repeatedly in and out, they’re strict about shoes being kept well away…

Oh and someone left a child up here. Might be one of mine..

Ok next up – For The First Time In Many Years Our Front Door Is Now Locked (even as everyone goes You Haven’t Been Locking Your Door?!) Nope, not even when we worked 13 hour days, because for a couple years we had neighbours’ kids coming in for a dog fix after school (they’ve now left for college in the States). Plus, we had another neighbour whose son lost his little car ride one day. Now, Bel-air has 4 apartment developments with thousands of units, plus 2 housing developments to boot. This Singaporean-British family lost the plastic pedal car at the main chaotic clubhouse playroom accessible to all those families……. and on point of principle the mum sat down to check the CCTV tapes. Took 2 hours of recalling the footage based on the time they were at the playroom, and they traced the car from camera to camera all the way from the communal clubhouse to the exact apartment unit  another child had simply ridden it home to (yes across a busy main road!) whereupon security knocked on the door and asked for the car back. (Now there’s another parenting adventure, but anyways.)

That little CSI drama happened some years ago, but here’s another one that happened maybe last month at the Cyberport cinema – on playdate and buried under a tonne of snacks, I deliberately left my heavy bag of groceries outside in the waiting area, meaning to come back for it after everyone was settled to the movie. So I come outside and it’s gone, and in true HK fashion* I don’t think Darn! There Go My Groceries, I walk up to the cinema attendants and say, “I think you might have put a bag of groceries in your Lost and Found a little too soon, can I have it back please?”

*People keep warning us stuff does get stolen in HK, but we don’t encounter much petty theft where we live.. The level of gossip however.. I never mentioned why this bothers me that much – it’s because of the waste. If that amount of energy had been used positively, to help someone or do something constructive, even for themselves… but no, it’s not like that energy was ever used to help anyone. I am mildly obsessive compulsive about energy wastage, and whenever I think about that, and see the amount of energy expended to NOT help, it’s disappointing.

Then I go back in to watch the movie. Halfway through in the darkened cinema, I see a text from my mum friend sitting on the other end of the row of kids – Btw, (she’s) Got My Groceries. So I hurry out to tell the cinema attendants so they don’t keep looking for it, whereupon they look at me blandly as I approach and say, “Yeah, we know. We checked the cameras.“

More things that make ya go Hmmmmm.

These are “The Birbs” on our sofa.

Spot the Birbs on HN’s old collage art piece

(I was in the process of spray-painting and lacquering the “junk modelling sculpture” when the birds discovered it. They love to chew the paper, which deeply scandalizes HN when they get at her craft, she starts dancing around yelling at them – which just makes them do it more).. And now I have to put the spraying on hold in case they get sick.

And I will know when the hub next reads this because that is his tv they are sitting on (sorry husband!) (waves)

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum staged a jailbreak one day when I was trying to fix one of their toys. They’d been restless and ready for more action for weeks, having concluded we probably didn’t adopt them from the SPCA to eat, and so it was only a matter of time. Those two get bolder each day, drowning out conversations with a wide variety of chirps and tweets (only when you are trying to speak), chewing our sleeves… one of ’em bites hard. Not out of fear, more I’m The Boss So You Will Take My Bid At World Domination Seriously. Her bites hurt. I have to keep from flicking her little bird tushy when she does it (it’s not like we can spoil kids now, can we?) I…. don’t know why we do these… Things With Animals. Makes us happy, I guess. Animals don’t care if you’re popular or smart, only that you’re not mean so they can be. Humph.

We leave em twittering about our apartment for an hour or two before trying to get them back in each day. So we have to lock the door now <shrugs>

End of bird update. (Oh, where were WordPress and Youtube when I was growing up with the 16 hamsters I let out all over my bedroom daily… that began as 2 hamsters the pet shop thought were both female… I learned to breed them when I was around Rockstar’s age because I got upset about losing the first litter because the cage wasn’t initially prepped for babies..)

Rockstar likes to watch cartoonist Jaiden Animations, who showcases her bird “Ari” a lot:

He found her through Odd Ones Out…

ps: Neither here nor there, but one day I remarked that these two popular Youtubers had this unique way of speaking which made them very easily identifiable… whereupon he said that both had mentioned somewhere in their videos that as kids they had “speech disabilities” (he says those were their exact words)…

Epilogue:

Don’t try this at home, kids…

She uh, scraped the two birds off the underside of the aircon above that map. Because… it was bedtime and she didnt want to wait for them to come down.

“Crocodile Dundee” has a thick sock on because “Savage Peach” is going for her fingers

“Conventional wisdom holds that some people are innately creative, while most have few original thoughts… Adam (Grant) shatters these assumptions. …Great creators don’t necessarily have the deepest expertise, but rather the broadest perspectives.” 

– Sheryl Sandberg: COO, Facebook. Founder, LeanIn.Org. 

“You have the right and the power to choose how much potential you have. Self awareness is something you learn. Ability is a gift we already possess..”

“When you choose to do the right thing… your character expands. With each right choice, you develop the strength to make more right choices… more difficult choices… every time you choose to… turn your back on what you know to be right, it shrinks your character..”

– John C. Maxwell, Annual speaker to Fortune-500s and government leaders, Best-selling author NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider and teaching pastor.

“Even hereditary traits are malleable.”

– Adam Grant, Originals

As someone who chose parenting as my (current) main obsession /vocation / I don’t know what this is …thing, the constant dance shift and balance between nature vs nurture is something I find very, very interesting. So too the risk-reward or shall we say payback ratio of choosing selfless behaviour over selfishness. Give & Take (yup, that’s Grant’s other big book)…

“…I looked at engineers’ productivity. Medical students’ grades… Salespersons’ revenue. The worst performers were the” Givers”. In medical school, the students with the worst grades were the ones who most agreed (it was important to help others)…” (Is this not truly scary – doctors by definition are supposed to help others, yet top students in this field appear to believe they need to be the opposite. Do you want someone like that in charge of you or loved one’s care? But they’re brilliant, aren’t they??)

– Adam Grant, Give & Take

So y-eah, you need to be selfish. Everyone knows that, right? <shrugs> 😀

BUT SERIOUSLY – that’s not all his TED talk says (below). Adam Grant, organisational psychologist who draws from 38 studies and 3,611 organisations for this talk, goes on to elaborate that Givers may perform the worst on their own individual performance charts, but what the organisation they work for gets back on the whole is always far more. 

No surprises re the selfishness though – being a self-serving lone wolf pays the lone wolf on paper, it’s why there are people who keep doing it. Organisations however are compelled to reward these people accordingly because hey, that’s what all these performance reports indicate you should do, right…..?

Leadership coach John C. Maxwell talks about a payoff that is much harder to quantify – strength of character. “Abundance” thinking. You can “share” easier if you think there is always more and better that is available to you. You can share more easily, if you see the payoff you are striving for as not completely dependent on said organisation using the paper performance reports. For Maxwell the “abundance” belief ties with a Christian faith (which in his book he carefully says you can skip the chapter on, but he has to at least tell you what worked for him). That the best is yet to come. Your belief that there is a window somewhere helps you look harder for it, when God appears to close a door. 

In addition, I also think you are able to “share” more readily, if you con yourself into believing believe yourself perpetually capable of producing better. Or fine, the flip side: if you gave away all your old tricks, then surely you’d be pressured to come up with some new ones. (Come now. Don’t you want to? Get better at something you enjoy? Learn some new tricks? Is that not just the most exciting thing that tells you you’re still alive and functioning, dammit?)

For real though, this has to do with why I think pitting kids against each other for a quick fix in paper results is risky; for one thing it appears effective. In the short run. Yet being constantly on top vs being willing to risk that top position for a chance to get better at what you do risks being too much of a tradeoff – when the two shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. I bet if we weren’t so pressured to produce quick results we wouldn’t do it so much, but going to school nowadays it’s just very, very hard not to feel pressured. Yet that chance at getting better  at things, potentially by risking a current “top” position, is so crucial to kids, their brains are so much more capable, so nimble.

Case in point: I learned to ski when I was almost 40. During the <cough> “learning process”, one ski instructor Just Completely Couldn’t Even and totally bailed on me. Both kids however learned at around the age of 4+, zipping and weaving about relatively disgustingly effortlessly, like…. little penguins. The image of how they learnt something completely new vs how I did, bearing in mind there’s a good chance we share some genetic similarity, is forever embedded in my mind. (Besides, in 5 years, in a decade, no one will remember if they came in first or second or fifth or tenth in say, primary school, but the loss of a valuable lesson and chance to erm, grow a few more related neurons that will come in useful when they are adults is one that will potentially cost them, for much longer.)

In Rome, use the Liras… Fine, Euros. Givers in this world “hurt” themselves on paper. I don’t think they’re all nuts, a lot of ’em believe the paper isn’t the “real” payoff, is all 🙂

We build muscle – body, mind, spiritual, character etc muscle – from applying “good stress,” because “no stress” is almost as bad for you as “bad stress” (yes, I really am a big Nassim Taleb fan). Or to quote 7th Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, a qualified medical doctor who at 92 years old ran for and won the latest Malaysian General Election couple months ago, having served 22 years as 4th Prime Minister decades earlier:

“If you don’t use your muscles and lie down all the time, the muscles will not even carry your weight… The brain is the same. …If you don’t use your brain, if you don’t think ..don’t read ..don’t write, the brain regresses…”

I’ve met several taxi drivers in their 80s who tell me they used to be police inspectors etc, and they’re driving cabs in retirement to keep their minds sharp. (After 7 years living and therefore cabbing from the same area, we can recognise 2-3 “regulars” – old timers who yes, remember us too. One of em has a heavy Putonghua accent and appears to either be slightly hard of hearing or is just VERY LOUD and the moment we get in the cab and realise he’s the one driving it, we AUTOMATICALLY START SPEAKING REALLY LOUDLY TOO. It’s funny, but the point is someone “that” old makes a point to recite all the places he remembers us going and asks us if it’s any of these.)

Now lets look at selfishness. When you still need to use the “on paper” tests in an organisation therefore, Adam Grant charges that it’s in the incentive of the organisation to figure out how to reward givers just so they don’t end up firing them for apparent non-performance. (And I should change my name to No Free Lunch Mum because Sarcastic Mum is so often taken.) It is therefore in the organisation’s best interests to make sure their givers don’t decide to crawl into the cracks in the walls and hide burn out.

“The negative impact of ONE taker… is usually double or triple the effect of one giver, on an organisation…”

“…Most of us.. are Matchers…. One favour for another.. An eye for an eye..”

“Let even ONE taker into the team and you will see that the givers will stop helping… Effective team hiring and building… is therefore not about bringing in the givers, it’s about weeding out the takers… ..Matchers usually go along with the flow..”

In other words,

Change the situation, have a better chance of bringing out better in people.

Epilogue: The “Social Experiment”…

I’ve always believed everyone has the capacity to be good or bad… What’s interesting is that in times of real strife are when we often find amazing acts of selflessness, but in times of plenty, many more people are selfish, self-absorbed. Why is that, I wonder?

I’m not saying everyone should dance around in clown makeup (sorry, HN!), but…

In the scene below, The Joker rigs explosives on two ferries. One ferry is filled with civilian passengers, the other houses prison inmates. Each ferry is given the detonator for the other ferry. The ferry that blows the other one up gets to live. If by midnight neither has acted, The Joker blows them both up.

On Upstanding Citizens Boat, passengers start yelling how the inmates on the other ferry already had their chance (it’s interesting they get a character who looks vaguely like Soccer Mom to say that), what are they waiting for, those inmates have the other detonator and could blow them up first, etc etc. They decide to put it to a vote. The tally is:

140 against, 396 for blowing up Inmate Boat. “Those men… chose to murder and steal… it doesn’t make any sense for us to have to die too.”

Except, they hesitate. Because then they realise the inmates haven’t blown them up either.

On Inmate Boat, one of the inmates tells the commanding police officer, “You don’t know how to take a life. I do. You can say you were overpowered. Give me the detonator. I will do what you shoulda done 10 mins ago.”

Then he throws the detonator out the window. Upstanding Citizen Boat rather predictably comes closer than that to blowing up their “rivals in survival” 😀 …..but ultimately doesn’t do it either.

Altogether now. Can we all say, “BATMAN ISN’T REAL*.” 😀

 Everyone has a capacity to be good or bad… A lot of how good or how bad depends on how everyone else around them is That is the true danger of having “Takers” around us.

*Batman may not be real, but Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker was… Heath Ledger was a teen heartthrob who came to fame in (of all things) the dubiously named 10 Things I Hate About You, loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew: Pretty, bubbly, popular younger sister every boy in school wants to date. Prickly, sharp-tongued older sister everyone’s scared of. Possessive (long-suffering :D) dad who comes up with the “inspired” condition to keep his daughters safe: Popular younger daughter may have a boyfriend…… when her scary older sister finally decides to date 😀 This leads to the younger sister’s suitors hiring Heath Ledger to go out with the older sister.

(Scary older sister turns out to have a much more sensible head on her shoulders – her reason for not dating any of the “eligible” boys in high school is that they’re all idiots she fell for one such idiot, realised her mistake and pulled herself out of the hole, thereby committing “social suicide” because he was one of the most popular boys in school. Popular younger sister eventually is revealed to have become incredibly self-centred and selfish, made worse by all the shallow attention.)

But get this: Ledger was actually trying out for the role of Batman when he was given the role of The Joker instead. Before Ledger, have you ever known a “Joker” to outshine a “Batman”? Batman got da gadgets. Da whole playboy billionaire alter ego shielding brooding hero persona. Yet Ledger totally owned his role as the Joker, deeply frightening veteran actors like Michael Page in his portrayal of the brilliant but psychotic villain, becoming the only actor in a superhero movie to win an Oscar. Just think what the Batman franchise would’ve been like, if Ledger had failed to see what a blessing in disguise, what an amazing opportunity The Joker was. 

Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) Certification. Quick post, following some curiosity about what the kids were doing that wasn’t housework 😛

“Hi Mum! I Wuz Here!” Rockstar’s wearing a Koding Kingdom camp t-shirt and that expression right after passing. And the cert is gorgeous, with a little sheen on a thick, heavy paper.

Rockstar’s been cramming for this Microsoft Technology Associate Certification intensively for 2 hours daily in camp for the last couple weeks, following many months of (only) once a week of the same course during school term time, culminating in this exam through Koding Kingdom, a recognised testing centre for Microsoft. (Yes, the Microsoft, not the shop somewhere in Shenzhen that sells just the most comfortable pillows and bedding. No, this is not an invitation for us to start receiving anonymous hate mail about Windows OS either.)

Seeing her brother cramming online for this thing, HN insisted on coming for computer classes too, and so she did 2 hours Scratch camp daily for the last two weeks as well, whenever her brother was in class, revising each day over lunch as he did…

(Yes, she can sit for a long time, despite the noise she produces when allowed – I might have mentioned the two kids rub off on each other, and while HN is the “stronger,” more assertive one, her brother has a 4.5 year age advantage over her, Praise the Lord for how that turned out) … her Scratch was adjusted by KK tutors, since she’s significantly younger than the age group their original syllabus was intended for.

I cannot thank Koding Kingdom enough for all this. Rockstar has been asking to go for camp here for the last couple years when school is out, so they’d seen him on and off and had records of all the stuff he’d been doing with them. One day they floated a thought – can he make the 70% pass mark to get officially certified as an MTA? He got an 86% last weekend, coming in one quiet Saturday afternoon, dedicated staff all making themselves available for support.

(And so we’ve been checking out like teenagers who are done with Finals, for the last couple days :P)