It can get irritating when your parents chide you for not doing what you should be doing. According to them, I am on the computer too much, and if I continue I will start failing my exams, be unable to land a job, and get crushed by our oppressive society. They belong to the generation who believe the computer is an evil machine that robs the young of their sanity and will to study. So even when I am typing on MS Word, I am supposedly playing games. MS Word does make for a good game, I'll tell you that. You can play... typing games! Damn I am so excited by the thought of an alphabetical frenzy.
So I am a lazy slob. I am also in university right now. Only 1 in 6 Singaporeans of my age group are in a local university. And maybe a few more in overseas ones. So what happens then to those people who are not in university? I guess they simply vaporize. My parents never seem to realise that I'm still in the top 20% of my age group, so I should be safe where finding a job is concerned. They seem to think that no matter how well I do in university, the 20% above me will consign me to the depths of oblivion and make sure I am making them coffee and shining their boots. Oh, they don't even want shoeshiners anymore? Holy shit I'm doomed. I better start making a really good coffee. Starbucks might still want me.
Its even more irritating how they keep asking me to REVISE MY FRENCH. They don't seem to understand that its not that I don't want to continue learning french, its just that the school doesn't allow it cos it keeps clashing. So fearing that I will forget everything, they insist that I revise religiously whatever little french I have learnt. It's kinda hard to explain to my parents how the modular system works, because they only understand the secondary school system, where everything follows a syllabus and when you learn a subject, you learn it forever. In university, once you're done with a subject, you're done. You can burn your notes, stitch them together to make a pretty set of underpants, whatever. But once you're done, YOU'RE DONE.
And they ask me why I can't speak a single word of my dialect although they've never tried to teach it to me. How am I supposed to learn it when they don't teach it in schools, and they don't teach it at home either. Use the internet they say. Your cousin learnt hokkien through the internet. Um you conveniently forgot they speak it at home too. And its impossible to learn any language well through the internet. It really is. Especially dialects.
And all day long I deal with all this. About how I'm not doing enough, how I'm never good enough. Not clever enough, not hardworking enough, don't read enough books, not entrepeneurial enough to strike out on my own, not creative enough to invent the next big thing.
What can I do, I'm just me. I never said I was perfect. Although I give myself hell trying to be.
But they are my parents, and all I can do is forgive, and live with it.