Managing Liquidity

Ibu tertawa terbahak-bahak. Aku pon kehairanan lalu bertanya apa yang sangat menggelikan hati Ibu itu.

'Ayah go down and ask Faim, yourself', jawab Ibu sambil cuba menahan gelak.

Aku pon turun mencari Faim. Dia sedang makan aiskrim sendirian sambil menonton TV di dalam bilik yang gelap.

'Faim, are you OK?', tanya aku.

'Fine', jawab Faim selamba.

'May I ask why the room is dark?', tanya aku lagi.

'Because I am eating my ice-cream and I don't want the lamp to melt my ice cream like the sun', jawab Faim berterus-terang.

Aku angguk dan naik atas mencari Ibu. Jumpa sahaja Ibu, kami berdua tertawa terbahak-bahak.

Abang the Teenager

I never knew this. Nobody told me about it. I never read about it anywhere. And I definitely never experienced it.

When Abang was small, as a toddler growing up, he was learning to know his surrounding at an astonishing rate. He learned all words there is to know. Rattled of names of things in the house, body parts, actions involving those body parts as well as the sound coming out of those same body parts.

At the rate he was going, I was thinking that maybe he could master the whole vocabulary of both Webster and Kamus Dewan combined by the time he entered secondary school. I was worried that by that time he could be bored as there would be no more words for him to learn.

And I was right. Nearly. Well, my timing was off by a couple of years, but I think that was what is happening now. I believe that his brain's CPU is already saturated that he can't absorb anymore. And he no longer wants to use all those vocabularies anymore as if he had grown tired of all of them. Now, his vocabularies are limited to a few choice word or phrases, as if he was reading from the common phrase book issued by a tour agency.

I believe the example below would demonstrate the situation clearly. Please bear in mind that this would happen every 9 out of 10 conversations I have with him :

'Oh, hi Bang. Back from school?'

'Yes'

'So how was school today?'

'OK'

'You look tired. Any homework?'

'A bit'

'Are you hungry. Do you want to eat?'

'I guess'

'After this I am going to Oakridge. Do you want to go with me?'

'Maybe'

And, that was it. On a good day, that would be very talkative by his standard. Maybe, there's a rule somewhere about teenager that I don't know yet. Maybe there is a Teenager Union that limits daily conversation by their teen members. Maybe 500 words per day and he has used up 490 of those words at school with his friends.

I sure am confused.