off days

It's the middle of January, and by now, most office-workers in Singapore would probably already have booked their leave for the rest of the year. At least, that's how things used to be done Before Covid (BC). When we could still travel and getting first dibs on the coveted stretches of time before and after long public holiday weekends could mean the difference between being stuck in Singapore and a week-long holiday in Bali. The stakes don't feel quite so high now, During Covid (DC). But perhaps we still prefer to book our leave early. It's just the kiasu Singaporean thing to do. 

We call them 'off days' here -- the days when one is on leave. Elsewhere, though, that term means something quite different. In the world of global English, 'he's having an off day' means that the guy in question is not at his best that day, that he's been making boo-boos in his work, that all is not as it should be. It's something akin to what used to be called 'having a bad hair day'. (Though I have to say that between the two, I much prefer the sound of 'having a bad hair day'. There's something adorably disheveled about it, that locates the fault of the bad day in something that could be easily fixed with a nice blow-dry and maybe some handy hair-gel. It just feels more gracious, somehow.)

Off days (in both sense of the word) are reminders of our humanity. No matter what the self-help books and that wonderful song from Wicked tell us, we are not unlimited. Whether BC or DC, we need our days of rest: our long lazy days for sleeping in or running errands, our three-day staycations at Sentosa. And there will be days when things just don't go the way we like, when we will not be at our best, no matter how hard we try. I think that's a relief, really. We're free to be human. We don't have to go through life always defying gravity. And anyway, as anyone who's tried doing that for too long will tell you, there's no defeating nature. Not in the long run. Someone should write a song about that. Maybe they can put it in a musical about Isaac Newton and call it Discovering Gravity.