Your chance to step into my shoes... one post at a time.
December 23, 2009
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Pride in Performance
Is the Bangladeshi worker below my flat now, lugging his bike, bucket of soapy water and a washcloth around.
Painstakingly washing every car he’s been paid to. Polishing each & every car to its spotless state, restoring every single one of them to a level of cleanliness that the owner will gleefully take credit for in the morning, bragging to all his friends and their mothers about how his car positively gleams. (Just because by some miraculous injustice of birth he was born into our wonderful land of first-world-but-trying-hard-to-pretend-it’s-not. Just because, well, heck, he can.)
I want to remember this when I recall my primary school motto. This is Pride in Performance. The sweat and fatigue and tedium and forcing yourself to go through the mind-numbingly boring motions. Not the mass of eager, foolish, PSLE kids trying to prove themselves through… what? Their superior powers of memorization? Their astounding ability to sit down at a desk and be spoonfed knowledge?
It kills me that this stuff we learn now, Mr. Washer downstairs will never, ever be privy to. Or need. Or even give a soap-sud about.
Back to my romance novels to remind me there’s goodness out in the world. Even if that world is a fictional one.
Fucking bleeding heart of mine.
