Wording

I was recently drafting a letter to our medical interns. This is a letter about the common professional, medical, and ethical challenges they will face in daily practice – and more so at the end of their internship. It took a long time to write.

"If you don't mind," my friends told me, "you sound like Sir Humphrey Appleby, always beating around the bush. They will understand not an iota of what you mean. These days you should put away the toolkit of etiquette." Everyone says so.

It's rather sad, don't you think, to be downright explicit in our communication? It wasn't always so. I kept remembering that masterpiece toilet sign. It was something that Ruth Wajnryb wrote about in one of her books on language, of having linguistic politeness. In a ladies room, she read a sign above the cistern. It said: "There's a toilet brush next to the bowl in case it is needed." Not a single word of "you". Absolute anonymity. This is the most unblemished and unblaming communication I've ever known. Some of you might probably scoff at this example and say, "That's so goddamn beating around the bush." In that case, you will no doubt teach me to rewrite the sign like this: "If you dirty the bowl, you should/could/must use the brush."

If I could have one wish, just one crummy little wish, it would be that I don't have to rewrite. There was part of me that admired sitting on the fence, and part that loved the characteristic role of middle-born as a peacemaker.

Listening

Big day for my daughter Jasmine. She has been rolling over from her back to tummy, and is now wiggling and shuffling. Watching her attempts to crawl with the butt high up is an absolute wonder. It's the answer to anyone who wonders if they'd go straight home after work. My wife and I celebrated by giving her a big hug.

My wife was talking about the fascinating baby shuffles and wiggles when I was reading Mitch Albom's Having a Little Faith. I nodded but, oh, she knew my eyes remained fixed on the book. Oops, I made a funny face sheepishly, as what a naught kid did when he was caught red-handed.

Although trivial by any measure, this is a lesson for us who want to do anything more than listening to our wives.

This led me to a story from Mitch Albom's book. A little girl endeavored to show her mom the drawing she'd made in class. Her mother was too busy in the kitchen when the girl waved her drawing repeatedly.
"Mom, guess what?"
"What?" the mother said, tending to the pots.
"Guess what?"
"What?" the mother answered, tending to the plates.
"Mom, you're not listening."
"Sweetie, yes I am."
"Mom," the child said, "you're not listening with your eyes."

I tried to remember the last time I'd listened with my eyes. Or if I'd ever done that.

Salary

At a recent coffee time, with my colleagues, the conversation turned to the salary within our department.

Any time the word salary is part of a dialogue, it's a taboo. After all, asking our friends about their salary is virtually the same as (and probably more impolite than) asking their age. That being said, we all want to know others' age and salary, as what Tom Sawyer's great law of human action had predicted, "In order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain."

But guess what the link between the amount of our salary and happiness is like. Uh-oh, rather weak. Studies had shown that countries with the "happiest" people are not among those with the highest personal income. One of the true human obsessions is with our friends' salary, but not our own personal income. H. L. Mencken put it so well when he noted a man's satisfaction with his salary depends on whether he makes more than his wife's sister's husband. Why the wife's sister's husband? Because (I was told by Dan Ariely) this is a comparison that is salient and readily available.

Colour

Just as a writer plays with words, a painter works with colours. Good painters dance back and forth across an infinite splendour of hues. For novice like me, it may require a hell of a lot of lessons to learn the know-how.

Yes, though it shames me to say it now, I wasn't sure what to answer when my wife quizzed me about the three primary colours. Truth be told, I've been having a hard time figuring out the colours of the clothes in my wardrobe. Wearing a black suit and charcoal grey trousers is the closest I will ever come to colour matching.

It's one thing for my wife to understand my difficulty with colours, but quite another for the genetic logic to explain the evolution of colour vision in primates and other vertebrates. Colour (like beauty), I was taught, is in the brain of the beholder. In other words, the colours are not "out there," but are constructed in our brain from sensory inputs. Quiz a dog, for example, the primary colour and he will answer you blue and red. Dogs have only two types of specialized receptor cells called cones, with peaks of sensitivity in blue and red. And yes, the majority of mammals have two-colour vision while most birds, reptiles, and even goldfish have four cone types, giving them four-colour vision.

Having less colour vision among mammals, obviously, is at odds with our intuition (and ego). To help us understand the difference, we have to take a time machine and travel to Mesozoic, the age of the reptiles, when mammals were still small, insectivorous shrew-like nocturnal creatures. In the wee hours, early mammals would have depended upon rods (light-receptors in very dim light) rather than cones. Two-colour vision suffices and, in fact, could have been a great plus. Subjects with two-colour vision have been shown to be better in spotting patterns that were camouflaged by colour.

However, diurnal mammals evolved after the demise of the dinosaurs. And these diurnal primates switched to fruit-eating. The mammalian two-colour vision system was never good enough for seeing red fruits against a background of green leaves. This adaptation to diurnal foraging for fruits is probably the secret for evolution to our current three-colour vision.

Ah, you may ask, how on earth would red-green colour blindness be that common in men? That has something to do with the location of the gene coding for the protein that detects visible light in the red spectrum. It so happens that this gene is situated on the X chromosome. In primates and other mammals, X is a sex chromosome that is present as two copies in females, but only as one copy in males. With two copies of the X chromosome, females could have the upper hand in discriminating colours in the red-orange spectrum. Thanks to the enhanced red vision in females, it allowed them to better distinguish berries and foliage when they were gathering food. Of course, we have to suppose that it's the females who did the gathering in prehistoric times. I won't argue.

Sickness

When it comes to sickness, nothing comes close to the severity of a sick baby.

Mention that to parents, everyone invariably remembers the first time one's child got sick. I wasn't that impressed with the chapter on "When Baby is Sick" when I first read What to Expect the First Year. I managed to read that chapter again today; I fetched the book whilst packing the bag in a hurry to bring my febrile princess to the hospital last night. (What else could I smuggle when there was a full truckload of worries?) Though I had never called sick when I fell into pieces, I stayed with my baby this time and requested an urgent leave today.

I learned a lot from this reading. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention because I didn't need the book to teach me the ropes to manage a daughter running a temperature of 39.4 degrees. That bit, yes, I know. Believe it or not, the most difficult bit is how to be parents of a sick baby. How strange! Now I understand what the authors meant by "An infant's illness, even a mild one, usually hits mummy and daddy harder than it does baby."

Grasshopper

There is no such thing as universal truth in the world. There never was.

Anne Lamott wrote that it took years for her to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught her. I tried thinking of words that I told my little sister when she was young. And I did discover Anne Lamott is right.

One green spring afternoon, I'd been enjoying myself in the garden while my little sister waited for the surprise his brother brought home. I didn't disappoint her. I caught quite a number of grasshoppers. "Grasshoppers?" she asked. She opened her eyes, and then her mouth joyfully. And for the first time in her life, she got fascinated by the little creatures that hopped around inside a plastic bag. She could not even remember if she had taken time to breathe while she enthused over the grasshoppers. It took her a minute to catch her breath after being overwhelmed with joy. She then phoned up our dad and told him the great news. "Yeah," she said, in her childish but enthusiastic voice. "They look funny, jumping here and there! Can you see them?" With that, she held the grasshoppers close to the telephone mouthpiece.

We all laughed – what a witty thing to show our dad over the phone!

Seriously, we were wrong. That was then. This is now. Should I foresee the subsequent development of 3G cell phone decades later, I dared not laugh at my sister.

Sibling

My younger sister is delighted and said it is the happiest day of her life. She gave birth to a boy this morning.

And as the nurse pushed the gurney carrying her baby out from the operating theatre, I rushed in my eagerness to take a peek. I was so overjoyed to meet my baby's cousin. The truth of the matter was, I was reading Only-Child Experience and Adulthood when I waited outside the operating theatre.

I was a middle-child of three children, and have been struggling to imagine my baby being an only child. I would not go so far as to say that the only-child must be spoilt. In no way am I suggesting a bad connotation of the phrase "only-child." Only-children are a a growing phenomenon. None of this is good or bad; it just is. Still, I have always loved the chance to become a brother who understands his sister from head to toe. After all these years, I still find myself calling up my kindergarten memory of saving all the pleasant tea time snacks to bring home for my younger sister.

Nearly nine months ago, I made a phone call to my sister and had a casual talk. In a minute or so, there came a signal, like a jerk on the string, that she's expecting a baby. Though it seems like just a wild guess (okay, maybe my secret wish) when my sister herself had not seen the two lines on the pregnancy test, it's actually true when I proved it by asking my wife to show it by ultrasound the next evening.

Everybody in my family thought that I am prescient and awfully good about crystal ball. "It's simply a brother who knows his sister well," I replied.