Some ramblings always help.

My father, coming back home with my mother from the neighbourhood (they went to pack lunch for me), discovered a group of boys trying to play with fire, at my block's ground floor. In his words, "they were trying to burn my flat down".

The boys hurriedly walked away when my folks were near them.
My dad decided to confront them.
They ran.
My father, whom I think has looks that could knock off as a potential terrorist/communist, gave chase, across the road.

He returned home only after I had finished my lunch and drink.
He didn't managed to catch the group of pesky boys, but at least he tried to. He launched into a tirade of how the Catholic school's standard has dropped throughout the years. Afterall, he's an old boy of another Catholic school which is the brother school to the one whose reputation is at stake and plummeting.

I sneak in a little smile, much aware of whom of my folks I picked up my sense of social awareness and action. Then I cringed, thinking of how my Dad, born in the fifties (and is also in his fifties) would react if I were to reveal and tell him stories about the IJ girls I befriend when I volunteer.

He actually made his way to the school (a stone's throw away from my house) after failing to make contact with the fire-bearing boys, so much wanting to see and talk to the discipline master, but was denied entry into the school grounds by the security man when he refused to surrender his identification card - required to enter. Afterall, this is the same cheeky father who filmed a couple kissing and doing intimate things at the ground floor of the block just behind our kitchen window. With his IT-savvyness, he proceeded to record and transfer the video tape to .mpg/.avi format on the computer, burnt it into a VCD and sent it through mail to the (other) neighbourhood school; without a return address of course.
(The last time my Mum and I saw the same couple in our neighbourhood was many months back, and they weren't in their school uniforms anymore. I presume they've graduated from school and gone on to study in perhaps the polytechnics.)

*
There's a need to tolerate my folks' nagging presence (my Mum's, especially) whenever I'm home for the weekends. But I've discovered the 'old-world charm' in them. My Dad has had several crazy actions, or actions untypical of him, ever since - I think - he finally got a wireless point in his room and started surfing the internet leisurely. I know there's a generation gap when I hear from them that tsunamis might happen anytime in Bangkok, and therefore, they effectively rule out a short vacation there.

"The state of Johor is dangerous because you might be robbed!", so they're also giving the place a miss.
They're still visiting the traditional places like Genting, Malacca and Penang.
Perhaps I'm pretty ignorant about catering to tourism for the fifty-and-above age group. I try to imagine and dream that in my folks' mind, "America's a very far away place where things are almost entirely incompatible with what happens in my world, and we'll never want to travel there."

But I know it wouldn't be too tough to coax the two of them to places like Japan (my Mum dreams of going there), China and our ancestoral land, Taiwan (again!) and perhaps Australia-NZ (again!), if money was not an issue. I suggested East Malaysia for a change; afterall, my maternal grandmother was from the Borneo territories, but my Dad has reservations about flying across the 'vast South China Sea'.

I still remember last week, my Mum's excitement over her best friend's daughter having a wedding in either Holland or Qatar (I admit my failure in being able to understand places' names in my mother tongue), somewhere even her wildest dreams are unable to imagine.

*
I am awfully glad that I finally got people excited about the idea of staging a production, by the youths, at the end of this year. I dropped two places where I'll be overjoyed if we would be able to host the performance there - Drama Centre at the National Library and the Guinness Theatre at the Substation - and they seemed happy to tag along with that idea.
It's been too-long-a-time ever since I plunged myself into a BIG project, and I've always wanted to do an ambitious one to follow up on the hardword-filled Puppet Show production for children.
I don't remember doing anything memorable for the previous year, so I'm determined to head out this year with a big bang.

In the grey confines of my brain matter: it'll be a coming-of-age story, infused with amateur acting, singing and dancing. The soul, the camaraderie and the passion to story-tell will be the focus, the highlight. With backstage and lighting crew members.