People seem to like countdowns an awful lot. Every time something deemed even the slightest bit significant seems to happen there will always be someone grabbing a stopwatch, another one with a loudhailer placed somewher between his larynx and his nostrils, one with ten fingers wagging about while a bunch of others try to get everyone else hyped up. You’ve seen this the first time a space shuttle left the earth and every time after that. You see this when a new year approaches. Now, you’ll see me counting down to my homecoming.
And by homecoming, I mean it literally.
Of course, when you start counting down, the hands of time have a way of slowing down, almost agonizingly while you wait. Seconds feel like minutes, minutes feel like hours, the list goes on. So I do feel somewhat mired right now. I could stop counting down, but that would make the time even harder to pass.
—
Everywhere, the world is shifting one way or the other. But then there was the saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” You know, I think it’s true. People claim that Singapore is getting richer all the time, that the stacks of papers containing numbers don’t lie. And to some extent, they’re right- numbers can’t lie. But the people behind the numbers can. Are we really getting richer?
The cost of taking a taxi has risen incredibly after the introduction of many different surcharges.
The cost of food is steadily rising. Remember when chicken rice was $2 a plate? Now $2-a-plate chicken rice is something to shout about.
The cost of rice has gone up 26% last I checked.
Did everyone really et a 10% rise in their income? It’s probably more like an average, since people who sell stuff start earning so much more.
No, I don’t think we’re getting richer. Then again, as someone who just had a 300% pay rise from last year, I’m hardly in a positon to complain.
And yet, I still do. Because I’m Singaporean and I’m human. Yeah, that’s national day for you.