One out of two mornings as I get dressed for work, the radio blares Ferras’ single, Hollywood’s not America.

I actually had to google that, because the track sounded so country I figured based on local tastes, it had to be done by an American Idol hopeful.

Do you know what his Wiki entry says about him?

At the age of five, his father took him to the airport promising a trip to Disneyland, but instead spiriting him away to Amman, Jordan. He stayed in his father’s native country for three months, and there began writing songs, taking solace in the Casio keyboard that his father gave him.

Is that not the singularly most deadpan, depressingly quirky Wiki write-up on anyone you’ve seen?

But I digress.

Point is, the song goes on about how the bright lights of Hollywood isn’t ‘real’ America. And it occurred to me that most countries attempt to pretty themselves up during popular portrayal such as TV or in the movies.

Most countries tend to sell a glamourised image of itself–in this instance, America. Case in point, the women in Korea do not look like those in the box set dramas your mother buys, I assure you.

But Singapore, strangely, continues to beat itself into a flaky pulp in order to ‘engage’ its people, continually playing up the crass in the media.

TV programmes such as Phua Chu Kang or Police and Thief immediately come to mind–local primetime sitcoms so insistent on centering themselves around the ‘everyman’ protagonist (who’s ironically fairly atypical in Singapore society) that they deliberately introduce subplots and plot devices directed at making the characters as ‘low-class’ as possible.

I’m not saying these people don’t exist, but the contractor with the curly hair, yellow boots and the mole is such a caricature of this ‘everyman’ that he’s unrecognisable as such.

We’ve even stopped our newscasters saying ‘es-pla-nahd’, switching that to ‘es-pla-naid’ so as to encourage more people to visit the Esplanade. What was stopping them before? That they weren’t sure of the pronunciation?

Welcome to Singapore. A country which thrives on its constant commercialisation, and strives to be the regional hub of…everything. A country so modern, so ‘advanced’ in its technology and economy, yet so afraid its people will reject it as the fancy relative which struck gold one day and stopped being accessible.

The nasty, sticky subject of getting emotional is often likened to the follies of youth or the drunkeness of a life that could better be spent on more ‘productive’ hobbies.

Emotions are for children, troubled youth and perhaps a select group of poets and artists who need to tap on that resource to dig for inspiration. You and I? We’re regular, working folk. Who has the time for emotions these days?

You come to a point where you don’t have the time to be sad and inward-looking anymore. I once gave someone the license to be emotional too—albeit just for a short period before I was filed away under the next ‘to do’.

Getting emotional is altogether too self-indulgent a past time. Like taking a moment to listen—no, really listen—to all the different instruments as they cascade in and out of a piece of music, or savouring a really good morsel of chocolate, letting the sweetness and bitter notes dance upon your tongue.

Getting emotional is something like that. What used to be a vast ocean you dove into, you now look at and file it away because you don’t have the time to get out, dry yourself and get a hot shower before looking for a change of clothes. Cleaning up takes far too much time to justify the activity.

And so you don’t. It’s there, you’ll just…’get to it’. And when things grind to a halt as you accidentally trip and fall headlong into a body of tears, you think, oh, what a bother!

Now, I’ll have to quickly get up and return to my next appointment, you say, glancing around as if looking for the one who pushed you into the pool.

How juvenile the prank, you think. What a waste of time that was.