The old man at home.

My father - my dad.

Friends of mine would say I don't talk much of my dad.

I'd like to say that he's a man of few words, yet on the contrary, he can be so noisy he drives me nuts.

When I was just a little girl, and my brother was just a blob of fats lying in the cot, an incident that happened was imprinted in my memories. It wasn't that big a deal when I come to think of it now, but it was, then. My dad had to report for reservist on my birthday. For any little toddler, a birthday is when the world stops for you, and you alone, and so, I wailed and bawled, when my dad's world simply wouldn't stop for me.

During the first few years of my life, my dad was my fort - withstanding the storms, tsunamis, lightning, thunder and all creepy crawlies for me, most importantly, my mother.

As I grew older, the affections, in a way, tipped the scales to that of a lumpy blob of brother I had. Perhaps, my dad simply had no idea how to dote on his little girl. But, every time he came home, he came back with something nice for my brother, and none for me. Initially, I started to resent it, threw tantrums and all. In the long run, I got used to it and simply shut both eyes whenever it happened.

I grew up speaking english at home. My parents were english educated. My dad's Mandarin, to be honest, is pathetic. Yet he didn't give up trying. Everytime he learnt a new phrase, he'll pepper every single sentence he attempted in Mandarin with THAT particular phrase. I would always grimace at the sound of it.

He used to copy new words and their meanings from dictionaries on small pieces of paper so that he could learn them whilst he was on the road. His many attempts to share them with me didn't work out as well as he would have liked, yet, little to his knowledge, one particular word stuck to me all these years, only because he was always mentioning it.

I learnt the true meaning and usage in Literature in secondary school and amusingly, I fell in love with the word. That's the title of my blog - soliloquy.

He used to make me stay awake on buses to recognise road names. As everyone knows, it absolutely didn't work. I'm still the road idiot.

Now, at 21, my dad's no longer my fort. He's a friend at times, a dad at times, nonetheless, sometimes he still irritates the hell out of me, on purpose. Apparently, I'm still 7 to him, and it seems that it's going to stay that way. He still thinks I can't make my way round this island. Even now, he still thinks I took Mass Communications in polytechnic.

This old man I have at home, is turning old. I see the white hairs sticking out of his head, I see the wrinkles forming, I see the aches and pains he has now that he didn't use to have, but he's still that 30 year old man I knew all my life.

I admire his responsibility to this household, by being able to put up with my mother for so many years, for providing whatever he can for us, despite being almost jobless, for buying food that I like, and nagging at me whenever I finish it, for giving me the same trait he has - being sentimental, to all things, even inanimate objects.

He has his quirky thinking, like how he refused to repair our water heater for one month, and made us boil water to bathe, just to "let us have a feel of how it was like last time".

Sigh, this old man I have at home, does drive me nuts.