Heights

What could be more dogtired than to sit through eight hours of lecture straight? What I have done, under the circumstances, is to either sleep or read other materials.

When I decided to attend an eight-hour parent educational class last weekend, I knew I have to bring with me quite a number of medical journals, just in case. And when I sat down in the classroom, I knew I should not have carried those journals.

The class isn't a ho-hum parroting of theories; it's a story about real people bringing up kids. I never realised the secret of slides on the playground until the teacher reminded me that children learn to walk upstairs before mastering the skill of going down. The design of a slide for those kids to slide down is great - it's amazing, actually.

And how about the traditional jungle gyms or climbing frames? They're disappearing from most playgrounds. Classical as the seesaws had been, popular as the smart-phone game Angry Birds now seems, jungle gyms have turned into dinosaurs. If the story of jungle gym strikes you as a nostalgic memory, you're not alone. I remember climbing heights - and the laughter - on the metal monkey bars that were arranged like Cartesian coordinates in a three-dimensional jungle. It's fun. I'd like to see my little Tarzan learn the thrills of exploring heights but those jungle gyms don't exist on the planet anymore.

Yeah, yeah. I know playground safety is the main concern. But the point is this: children have to gradually expose themselves to more and more dangers on the playground to conquer phobias. A child who's hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights, I have been told.

Safe, Or Save

Think of telephone keypad, and for both push-button and touch screen cell phone users, what come to mind is the standardized grid layout.

Imagine a scene when the telephone factory is running out of certain numerical keys, leaving the manufacturers no choice but putting whatever numerical keys available to fill up the keypad. With such undecipherable keypads, someone could still make use of memory (not many of us) to dial the right number. And I will not say I hate and smash such messy telephones but I will not say I won't.

Yes, dialing the wrong number isn't that bad to be howled about. What if the mix-ups aren't about the telephone keypads but the medicine?

That happened within the government hospitals. Those drugs we gave out to the patients look exactly like the random number telephone keypads. I think no one really knows what a drug looks like because, these days, its appearance keep changing with every new generic drug introduced by the public hospitals. That's why my kidney disease patient (that is, having drug treatment for many many years) could still be confused by the new appearance of pills and took double the amount of blood pressure pills.

Never mind what your hospital managers told you about the top issue of medication safety. They have a higher priority - if money is an issue, they will put anything else behind. There is not a hospital manager who isn't constrained by drug expenditure. The hard truth is, all hospitals go on at length cutting the drug budget, say, by comparing the price of generic drugs. Although brand-name drugs and generic drugs are supposingly interchangeable (another worst-kept tooth-fairy myth), they can differ substantially in their appearance. I'm not saying that generic drugs aren't cost-effective substitutes for brand-name medications. No, the question is not to judge if generic drug and brand-name drug are identical and, of course they never are, we have to accept taking generic drugs. But it seems that we're changing the generic drugs too frequently and totally out of our control.

Of course, we should not complain about things totally out of our control, such as the weather. As for the generic drug change, we seem to change them even more often than the weather change.

Wavelength

Remember the long queue in front of the telephone booth at the university dormitory? Not many - even though, as the common scene before the mobile phones have revolutionised the way we talk to our girlfriends and boyfriends.

If it's not because of the recent movie You're the Apple of My Eye, the picture could have faded in the society's collective memory. This movie has made itself a household name after its debut. There's no medium like the movies to give us the flashback pleasure of going young and fooling around. You're the Apple of My Eye is rife with incurably innocent and naive ideas that make us laugh.

I went to see the movie last week and almost laughed my head off. I'm not saying that we should follow the kids and appear stupid. As adults, it's easy to forget how boys and girls feel. Amazing as it may seem, getting on their wavelength is the only way to draw ourselves closer to the young generation. One of the important lessons from the book Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child is to imagine how we would feel if we were young. Instead of emphasizing that a kid should not whine when his brother received a birthday gift, we are taught to respond in a way to demonstrate our understanding - something like, "I used to feel jealous when I was a little boy and Aunt Mary got a gift."