ROMEO AND JULIET
“And all I do is miss you and the way we used to be
All I do is keep the beat, the bad company
And all I do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme
Juliet I'd do the stars with you any time”
- Mark Knopfler, Romeo and Juliet
Educated in an all-boys school, I went through my early years
oblivious to the charms of the opposite sex. Things only began changing when at
the age of 13 I started stealing glances at my sister’s collection of
Cosmopolitan. With hormones raging, I had no idea on how to talk to a girl,
except that I became interested in them. I remember waiting by the lobby of my
flat (we are talking about real flats, not the apartments of today) almost
every evening, hoping to catch a glimpse of this attractive girl – but without
the guts to make that first move. It didn’t help being in an all-boys school as
I did not get any practice in dealing with the female gender. So it was all
rather abject.
Things got slightly better at 16 when I was made a prefect, and also
joined numerous clubs like the Interact Club, Career Club, etc., with the sole
purpose of meeting girls from girl schools. I was particularly keen on students
from Sri Aman, Sri Petaling, Convent Bukit Nanas and Kuen Cheng. I didn’t think
much of the ones from Assunta as I thought they were all rather hoity-toity.
Besides, they were only keen on those buffoons from La Salle PJ. As I had some,
ahem, talent in singing and I played the guitar (just 4 chords), I had a small
‘troupe of groupies’ particularly keen on my charms. It was then that I
realised that one can look like an absolute berk, but if you had some talent,
you could, well, score. Trust me when I say that I looked like a toad with a
pair of glasses so thick you could hardly see my eyes.
And that brings me to what I really wanted to write about:
relationships between our kids. I’m not talking about friendships. I mean real
boyfriend-girlfriend thingy. The thing is they’re starting at 12. And don’t you
tell me you don’t know that’s actually happening. If you really don’t then I
would suggest you start paying close attention to your kids’ moody behaviour.
But we can’t stop this though. It’s really all part of growing up. It’s just
that they’re growing up that much faster and that they’re starting really young.
Miley swinging on a Wrecking Ball does not help very much too.
As a father, I’m not too keen on my daughter having relationships
simply because I think it’s a distraction. When they’re so caught up in a
relationship, their emotions are bound to play havoc on their focus. Studies in
cognitive science have already shown that multi-tasking is absolute hogwash. So,
lacking focus isn’t good. Banning my daughter from engaging in a relationship
though would be a futile exercise, so I’m handling it in a different way. For
me, distraction can either be positive or negative. If one’s all gooey-eyed,
unable to focus on school work or just totally spaced out, then that is
definitely a negative distraction. A positive distraction would be encouraging
one another to accomplish goals, like studying harder, getting better at a
musical instrument and so on. Of course it’s all well and good if the
relationship continues with little drama because I really wouldn’t know what to
do if she suffers a break-up. That would be frightening. Hard enough as it is
to get through to a teenager on normal stuff, it would be near impossible to
penetrate their psyche when their relationships go sour. Good thing is my
girl agrees with me on this, though I’m not sure if she’s just merely humouring
me.
As for me, I never got into a relationship in school. I had some
moments with the screaming, panting hoard of fans (just my imagination) and
that was really it. Besides I was almost always surrounded by boys, and though
I didn’t know it then, boys, turning into men, would later in life have a keen
interest in me. But that’s another story for another day!
Cheers!
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