The Boy Inside

Though my elitist brother is stuck in boring Brunei, hopefully leading the Paris Hilton life entertaining the royalties, he keeps himself busy with script writing. Recently he emailed me his script for submission to TheatreWorks' Singapore Young Dramatists Award 2007 competition. He may have emerged 2nd place in the 24-Hour Playwriting competition in 2006 but he never stopped there.

As a brother, I never supported his staged plays and always dissed all these as dumb. For the first time, I read his script. I thought the least support I could provide was to read his script. I may not be impressed or awed by the language whatsoever but I felt what the protaganist was going through. Typing out this blog, I've lost count the times...

I've scratched myself.

This is the paragraph that locked me.

"This boy has a skin condition – eczema. As such, he would scratch himself uncontrollably at times. Many times people have commented about it, and even told him outright to stop, but you know, it’s not that he doesn’t want to. His heart wants to, but his body refuses to listen. If he had a chance, he would want to swim in the open sea without feeling any sense of pain. But he would never have the chance because this skin condition is incurable. Do you know how inferior he feels? He is not even comfortable in his own skin. Do you know what it feels like to wake up every morning with bloody fingernails, just because throughout the night, you have scratched yourself unknowingly, and scarred your own skin?"

Apart for my elder brother, the both of us have this condition. Many times, we're always in a situation whereby our Mum would tell us not to scratch. She may not understand what we're going through and always thought the old wives tales of applying stuffs like iodine solution, rubbing joss paper or even soaking in the sea water will "cure". She never realised it's a condition that is incurable. We may have exhausted all sorts of creams and moisturizers, the scars are evidents, the skin's forever breaking, the bleeding's still on our bed sheets. Our nails are constantly kept short to minimise breaking the skin but we'd still scratch no matter how hard we try to control. In fact, it worsens when we start perspiring or when the weather's hot and humid. Going through army outfield was the harshest times of our lives and we still have reservist to induce the skin irritation. In my situation, it's not I want to avoid reservist, I just want to save my skin literally. The medical officers don't understand me, they thought I tortured my skin to skip outfield. Ok so fuck them.

It's not that we don't want good, smooth skin like everybody else. We don't have a choice. Meeting new people is an embarassing situation. Coupled with comments like "I notice you have a skin problem or are you having an allergy", it really puts us in a spot in answering their question. How many can feel and relate to us? We can't put on swimming trunks and swim freely like everybody else. The scars, the scratch marks, the healing sores on our arms, back of the legs, the neck (the commonly affected areas for people like us) - imgine the number of stares we will get. We're not suffering from any transmissible dieseases, we're just prisoners in our own skin. I'm not going to comment anymore on the skin issue.

I'm now an atomic bomb waiting to be exploded, many thanks to the person who gave me life.

My home has turned into a warzone, over selling old newspapers for $3. The karung guni uncle came and I sold the newspapers for $3.

She: "How come today give so much money?"

Me: "How would I know, I don't even know the rates."

And the war started with her saying I'm rude and showing her disrespect. The thing is I don't answer, she'll say I'm ignoring her. Answer her, she'll say I have no respect. What does she want me to do then.

As from offically now, I'm not going to

• clean up my dishes after meals
• put the newspapers back to where they were
• put my shoes back onto the racks
• leave my bed made
• not clearing rubbish
• change as many clothes as I like in a day
• throw my tissue paper into the bins
• share the food I've bought
• dispose my unwanted food away properly
• and many other actions which I can't think of now

She says I'm spoilt and pampered. I'll show her what she says is true because she never brought her son up well. She says she don't display favoritism or have any contradictory issues.

Incident 1:

I asked her if she wants the usual snowskin champagne mooncakes from Raffles hotel. She says if I want to eat it, I have to go buy myself. I didn't say anything about asking her to buy. The stupid elite wants mooncakes, she ask me to go buy the Raffles one and she'll pay for it.

Incident 2:

She asked me to reply to my aunt's friend for a job offer. I have no interest in that line and yet she kept yakking that people is being nice in offering me a position in the company. I sent the email and I was called up for an interview. The day before the interview, she said why waste time going for the interview as the job is not good. Who was the one asking me to go try out in the first place?

I said enough.