I need a sugar daddy

Having to work your way through University to feed yourself, pay for your bills, pay for your brother's insurance, stay in hall, buy textbooks is depressing enough...But it gets worse when you receive a letter from CPF board after you've graduated for a year, asking you to pay back the damn sum of $18,816.76 that you owe them.

That is a gi-normous amount to think about. Hell, I've barely started working and the whole world is asking for money from me.

After the damn CPF freezes about a quarter of my pay-cheque to "assets" that I cannot touch until I'm too old to tell $5 from $50, I am still faced with financial concerns like...

My grandparents ask me how much am I paid every week I go to their place...

My parents are like an alarm clock that rings timely every that time of the month when people generally get their pay cheques...

My brother's insurance still automatically deducts a fat sum from my account at that time of the month, and it has been doing that even before I graduated.

On top of all those major bloody suckers, I still have my bills, medical, transport, food and whatnots...

And now CPF wants me to return $250 in installments, every fucking month for the next 12 years, to my dad's gahment controlled CPF account.

What is really depressing is I just found out that my parents had kept this piece of information from me all this while. They knew all along that I was expected to pay the sum back. All these while, they have conveniently leveraged on the "I slogged so hard to pay for your very expensive school fees so you'd better be grateful", or that "You start earning money and you keep forgetting to give us an allowance, don't forget who saw you through University."

Granted that I was aware of my family's un-rosy financial situation all these years, and I was expected to make a contribution to my family the moment I graudaute, tricking me into contributing to the family's gross income was wrong and so was leveraging on that idea to control my freedom and privacy all these while.

I blame it on Tradition. I know that if I were to call my parents lying scumbugs, I can be assured that I'd make my way into the top 10 most hated bloggers in the entire blogosphere. So I blame it on the deeply entrenched Asian-Singaporean Tradition, dictating that children have to contribute to their family's financial well-being the moment that they step out of school.

It doesn't matter what your own financial capability is. If you've gotta have to eat instant noodles (even cup noodles is too expensive) and drink plain water every day, then you've gotta do it. The bottom line is, you have to make your offerings at the end of every month, and your parents have every right to use whatever methods to pry that wad of hard earn money away from you. So tradition it is.

As for those who complain to me that you are constantly in their parents' debt because they need to have starbucks for breakfast, Crystal Jade for lunch and Lawry's for dinner, you really don't know the true meaning of being in a debt.

With reference to my title, no, I won't be picking up any of you losers from Butter, (or St James for that matter) even if you somehow managed to guess my chinese name correctly.