Oh, just pick any one. It'll do. At least just get one.

I know I shouldn't be one to talk.

My mother's telling me about her friend's (oh-so-pretty, oh-so-clever, oh-so-never-comes-home-late) daughters' upcoming graduations. One is in her final year in Civil Engineering, and now she's considering a career in teaching. (*rolls eyes. I know.) The other is graduating from JC and is contemplating which degree she wants to take. My mum meant for it to be just a casual conversation and maybe also to provoke me about my exams in May. Somehow, it ended in me slamming my door and her defending herself to no one in particular.

I hate it when my mother gets together with her friends. They offer each other advice that to me, do not contain solutions but rather mere boasts about how good their own children are. Poor Mum, seeing that she has nothing to boast about, she must have made a really good listener. They make selfish comments and uneducated, unproven methods of resolving matters that only goes to show what a bad idea a clique is - Narrowmindedness. They live in their own, undeveloped world that hasn't moved on since their youth back in the 1980s.

It happened in segments. I was sitting down watching tv when my brother came out and announced that he had just ordered some prospectus from various universities from the UK. My mum asked why he didn't get any from Australia. He said he would need to email them a request instead of just ordering them from the websites. My mum then went on and ordered me to write the email for my brother. In all seriousness, I told her that if he was going to pursue a degree, then he was going to need to learn to write his own correspondence. I mean, COME AWNNNN. He's 21 and still in nappies? She ignored me and asked me to do it quickly so that my brother could send out the email tomorrow. I continued lounging on the sofa.

She then went on to tell me about her friend Auntie S's youngest daughter who's now deciding on which degree she was going to apply for once she graduates from JC. Apparently, she's not as clever as her elder sister, who's in her final year of Civil Engineering (and is actually going to take her clever degree and apply for a teaching job), so she's worried about the choice she's going to make. My mum then said that Auntie R told Auntie S to persuade her daughter to apply for a really obscure degree so that her chances of actually getting into the course is higher. Something in me snapped when I heard this.

Just how selfish can parents get? Yes, they want their children to get a degree so that they would earn big bucks and live in luxury in the future. And also by the way, they would not lose face among their friends and relatives during gatherings like CNY. Parents only think how important it is to get a degree, but have they considered the repercussions those years spent studying would have on their children's career? What if she took a degree in Marine Engineering only to find later on that she loved nothing more than to be in the media industry? But because you invested your hardearned money on her studies, she has no choice but to carry on in a job that gave her no sense of satisfaction whatsoever, until maybe, she finally grew a real brain and tried to defy you?

I told my mother that she and her 'well-meaning' friends had better kept their mouths shut because the girl's future lies in her own hands and not in theirs, so if her future gets destroyed, at least it's with her own hands. I don't know why I'm feeling so strongly for this matter. It's probably because I'm having such a hard time controlling even my own future. When someone fails her exams, the first thing that comes to people's minds is that she didn't study hard enough. How the fuck did they know that? Did they live in her brain?