Hello, I blog!

I was walking with one of my dearest friends while she was in the midst of deep thought, when she suddenly whirled around and posed the following question to me.

“Have you ever wished you were someone else?”

I’ve always known the answer to that one, although no one has ever directed that question at me before. It was just one of those questions which I’ve previously pondered about.

“I wish to be no one else except myself,” said I.

“Although, if I could change anything about myself – it’d definitely be my health,” I continued. “I wish I wasn’t a sick kid.”

A few seconds passed.

“No, wait. Scratch that. If I weren’t sick, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to find out who my true friends are.”

With every bad thing that happens, there will always be both positive and negative sides. We just have to unblind ourselves from all the negatives to find the positive.

As the day grows bright, we are turning pages
And we write new chapters of our life
Some are strong and long
Others weak with sorrows
Keep the focus on the rising sun

(Ace of Base – Beautiful Morning)

This song is for you. You know who you are. (:

Just imagine you’re in a public place. Doesn’t matter if the place is quiet or noisy to begin with. Nearby, you spot a couple with a really young child no more than three years old. For some reason or another, the kid suddenly starts bawling at the top of his/her little lungs while the parents struggle to control the kid (but in vain).

Grarrr, when will the kid just shut the fuck up already? Most of us would think.

Well, one of my best friends has this theory of how to get kids to quieten down. Kids often yell, scream and cry for attention. Positive attention, she says. They want to be mollycoddled by the parents, and basically have the parents fall to their knees coaxing the life out of them just to get them to stop crying.

And when the parents actually give in, they are reinforcing the behaviour. In future, the kids will resort to making one hell of a noise to get what they want because … well, it worked before, didn’t it?

So, she says, what if we gave them attention that is contrary to what they want instead?

She continues. The next time you see a kid crying, look in their generation, point and laugh. She assured me that so far, this has had a 100% success rate for her.

This evening, I decided to put her theory to the test.

While queuing at a restaurant, this kiddo standing nearby suddenly began bawling loudly. The mayhem lasted for a good two minutes and showed no signs of slowing down. The younger cousin and I were trying our darnedest best to hold a decent conversation but it was hard when every sentence was punctuated with an even louder wail.

In a mixture of exasperation and bemusement, I decided to share my friend’s theory to the younger cousin.

“So you see, my friend has this theory. Next time, when you see some kid crying somewhere and the parents can’t seem to calm them down, you should just start laughing at the kid.”

That was when I did a live demonstration – on that kid.

Imagine me looking straight into the kiddo’s eyes and laughing. Not a loud, MUAHAHA kind of laugh – but a slightly muted version of that. Well, I was trying this for the first time, so I wasn’t quite sure about err … how the parents will take to it.

And damn, it worked.

The kid clammed up instantly and looked straight at me. Big wide, innocent eyes. As if wondering “waiiiiiiii is this girl laughing at me?”

And it was back to blissful silence.

Awesome. My friend is such a genius.

Caveat: I doubt the parents were very pleased, though – because the kid’s dad was constantly shooting me disapproving looks after that. In response, I returned him a look that was meant to say well, it seems like I can control your kid better than you. (;