Neurosis

Today in school I saw a girl wearing a familiar t-shirt. It turned out to be the GEP 20th anniversary shirt. My first reaction was utter disgust, cos who goes around wearing a GEP shirt? Your primary school shirt, no problem. I walked around in a 1993 Teochew clan association t-shirt inherited from my cousin (who probably got it for free) until I finally decided to dump it in 2005. Do the maths yourself. I've got saucy t-shirts that amuse my friends to no end and have raised a few eyebrows (eg. at the Student Affairs Office today). But a GEP t-shirt is plain bad taste.

Ah... the neurosis. Golden Rule: Never let anyone know you're a gepper unless under torture or insistent questioning. If you break this rule you're an arrogant show-off. Geppers should be aware of the dirtiness of their past and should be properly defensive and secretive about that bloody period of their lives. (it's like being an ex-Nazi in Israel. You don't exactly go around sporting Hitler memorabilia.) This rule does not apply if you're blogging.

It also seems as if geppers combine an overweening, arrogant sense of destiny with a neurotic (that word again!) but similarly arrogant inferiority complex. Geppers are supposed to achieve everything, and if they haven't, they wander about all day wondering why they haven't become the 1st Singaporean to become the President of the United States yet and angsting about whether this means that they're actually (I can't even say this without an existential fear gripping my being {haha}) dumb.

Geppers also like to blame their disastrous lives, lack of social skills, poor grades, emotional breakdowns, relationship problems, lack of direction, inability to finish work on time, even their successes that are actually failures (omg why did I get an A when I actually wanted a B?) on GEP. Geppers are therefore sincerely apologetic for not being grateful enough for the unfair advantages conferred upon them by the use of taxpayers' money.

Note: pls ignore all generalizations made in this post.