Why we feel it's a dog's life
We needn't do so. It is completely within our power to reframe our perspective and be grateful. Joy will follow.
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IT'S the Year of the Dog. Chinese New Year gatherings here are always an occasion for relatives to behave like newshounds, sniffing out the latest scoops and yapping at you until you cave in.
Love it or hate it, getting the third-degree is par for the course during the festivities, along with bak kwa and pineapple tarts. It's the time of year when relatives you see only at this time of year have no qualms asking why you have grown so fat or why you are still single. Their bark is often worse than their bite, so it's easy for me to laugh it off, can of beer in hand.
Micro-aggressions by needling relatives whom you don't really know mean little. But it is somehow different when it comes to peers and friends. At some point during a cosy get-together with ex-classmates, the conversation turned to salaries, careers, buying houses and generally moving up in life - a situation that is a recipe for disaster.
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