Sam's Sanity Diary

Having a teenager is a pain in the ass. The snarkiness I can handle, but the snarkiness while being ignorant just makes me want to tear my hair out because it makes me feel like I've failed as a parent in more ways than one, like I've failed to teach him manners and I raised a stupid kid. Me, my wife and my son were flying back from Singapore yesterday, and we looked up at the big board to check which gate we were boarding at. My son says, "G1!" and starts rushing off. I said, "Wait!" and I took a few more seconds to look at the board. He was exasperated. Then I said, "It's not G1, it's G10." Our flight, AK712 was flying out of gate G10 to Kuala Lumpur. Gate G1 also had a flight to Kuala Lumpur but it was flight AK710. I looked on our boarding pass and our flight was AK712. But my brain had just absorbed all this information and I hadn't yet found the words to explain all this to a rushing teenager, so we went back and forth like this f...

 I only want two things right now. 1. To wind up my father's company properly and quickly, so my siblings and myself don't have to stress anymore about it. 2. To reinvest the money before my wife spends it all, so that she, me and our son will have some income. I tried to think of a third thing but actually everything else is insignificant. Even comedy. I think I gave up the dream somewhere along the way, even if I never wanted to admit it. I would not mind it if I found a way to enjoy comedy again, but chasing a comedy career doesn't seem to be the way for me. Sometimes I think I am hanging on to comedy because I am afraid of having no identity. Honestly, I've lost the drive for it and although I would not mind finding it back, realistically, it's quite possible that I might never do. This is all old man talking. I wish I could tell all this to my son sometimes, but I don't want to burden him more than I already have with my tiredness.

A long time ago, when I was in university, I played an online game, I forgot what the name was but it was a MUD. Sometimes new players would come on and ask how to play the game and someone will give a snarky reply - just press the play button. I was always fascinated by this concept of a play button, because most games have tedious parts and sometimes, they are improved through updates by removing these tedious parts that players had to go through but if we removed all the tedious parts, maybe the game would be too simple and it would just be like a play button. You press the button and you're already playing the game and of course, that would be no fun at all. Nowadays, I sometimes wonder if I don't actually like living and I just want to press a live button. I don't actually want to do anything. We just got back from a trip to Finland and Singapore and I don't really want to go anywhere after this, at least not for a long while. I don't want to organize any come...