How Many Bottles Of Cologne Has It Been

he’s a fretter. always fretting. ‘go back into your room and change your top!’ he would growl while flailing his arms about; as if by concealing my cleavage from his sight, it would somehow go away. i always respond with a distracted ‘aiyahhhh’ before i grab my keys and am out the door into the car of the next boy waiting. one time i looked up and saw him watching me from the balcony with a cigarette in his hand. the balcony - that’s where he goes when he wants to smoke and i’m in the room. i notice these things but i’m just too proud to acknowledge it. i once said thank you; it was barely heard over the voice of the CNN newscaster, and i said it as if i wasn’t impressed, merely aloof, but i know he heard and i know he knew i was impressed. ‘you’re welcome,’ he said. and after his smoke he came back to the couch and we continued watching TV, tsking and shaking our heads together at all the misfortune and bad news the world seems to go round on.

i dont quite know why, but he has this thing against wet hair. whenever he sees me with my hair still wet from the shower, he always tells me to go dry my hair, lest i get a headache. like i said, fretter. ‘yes lah yes lah,’ i will mutter but i wont do anything about it because everyone knows air-drying your hair is better than blow-drying it, plus i’m lazy. a grown man pulling a hairdryer by its extension cord and then blow-drying his daughter’s hair in the middle of the night as she plays The Sims 2 is a funny sight.

when i was little, i used to draw stick figure pictures of me and my dad, where we both had heads too big for our stick bodies and bright orange skin. i would write corny things like My Father My Hero across the top, but once i put the finishing touches on my 7-year-old objet d’art, i always forgot about it, like children are prone to do when other things catch their fancy. but many years later when i was rummaging through my parents’ wardrobe, i found a whole stack of aforementioned corny stick figure pictures in my dad’s underwear drawer, folded neatly and tied up with a rubber band.

it’s the little things about him that i love - the piles of books he buys but never reads, how he has absolutely no fashion sense, how he orders cappuccinos without foam, the way he pronounces Skype, his dentures hahahaha, his passport picture, how he never knows what to order at McDonalds, how he hates all my boyfriends, how he always says sorry very nicely when he makes me cry.

happy father’s day, pa. dont eat so many cholesterol thingies! and dont always make me cry. i love you.

(i forgot to mention this, but my love for my father has multiplied tenfold because he is the only person on this planet who will take me to watch Michael Learns To Rock when they’re here next month, and not make fun of me for liking them. sniff. *grateful)

(part of the Rice Bowl Journals collaboration for June 07)

Comments June 18th, 2007