Open House Blues; whee! picture of tokyo!

Autumn in Tokyo is nice, except that the leaves ain't flaming red or brilliantly orange yet. There was a post-apocalyptic gloom hanging in the air that extinguished most of my expectations of jumping into mounds of leaves washed in gold and amber. But hey, it's okay, I like grey skies anyway.

I have just discovered, hidden among some random chain e-mail glurge, that we are having Open House consecutively for 4 days in a row, right after the release of the PSLE results and after the joy/bitter disappointment has sunk into the hearts of children and their obsessing parents. I am terrified.

So there goes my after-A-maths-remedial-plan to go to the esplanade library and look for the dang Erik Sate scores. My afternoons will now be spent trying to sell something I've grown weary and tired of to unsuspecting families. I am trying to think of smart-ass comebacks to counter comments steeped in ignorance.

Furthermore, how am I guaranteed a better turn-out after experiencing the dull mediocrity of the previous one that was supposed to be more hyped-up than the ones falling on these days? I am tired as it is of listening to the authorities go on and on about the importance of image (and that grating voice—no!), watching parents fuss over squirming children, trying to console parents who turn up with a child whose T-score falls short of the cut-off for the year, and sitting around waiting like taxi drivers at Changi Airport terminal 1.

And then there are the parents who arrive with a predatory glint in their eye as if trying to strategically place their child in a school where their academic pursuits would be further enhanced by T-scores significantly higher than the average student. Not that I have anything against high aggregates, but I can't stand people who enter with a smirk that says 'I could go to but I'm giving you a chance'. Nor do I have the heart to entertain parents who come in and start criticizing our severe lack of CCAs and land mass.

However, I am speaking from a pessimist's point of view (and one that is still pissed about not being able to use his own computer yet). Perhaps tomorrow will be a fair weather day and there will be happy smiley parents and children who are eager to come in and express avid excitement about the programmes offered in school. And maybe they'll send in a hokkaido ice-cream vendor and the rest of my day will be spent laughing and eating salted caramel gelato and vanilla soft serve ice-creams. (yeah, I wish)