Current mood:

contemplative

brrr
I woke up from an odd dream and the lights were on. What must have happened was, I sprawled on my bed to write something, I thought to myself, "I'll just put my head on the pillow for a bit..." And then no prizes for guessing what happened next.

Anyway, a couple of days ago at the National Library, I was walking to the bookdrop to return a book. There was this man with his son who was staring at the bookdrop like he'd never seen it before. I walked past them and was taking my book out when he said, "So when I come to return my book, I can just put it in here?"

Yep, I said.

He and his son watched as I dropped the book - Alec Guinness's My Name Escapes Me - into the bookdrop. The book fell in, and the little screen above the bookdrop showed the book being spewed out onto the tray. The tray, which was full, then moved away to make way for an empty one.

I turned to look at him, and he had the most amazed look of wonder on his face.

"Is that cool or what?" he said, with a distinctly non-Singaporean accent.

I grinned weakly and went in to the library, completely thrown off, because of what I'd just thought to myself. He was a Singaporean who I could tell had been out of the country for a long time. I had just placed him as a sort of non-Singaporean, which meant that there must be something that is Singaporean. And all this while I'd been struggling with the question, I'd just decided that perhaps being Singaporean didn't actually mean anything. Or at least it didn't mean anything positive. Or, at least, I'm not the person who can decide what being Singaporean means except to myself, and to me, being Singaporean means nothing other than being Asian and speaking English natively. No, really. But evidently it means something else. What?

I'm trying to figure out.