Just wrote in my own personal journal--- 5 pages and 5 lines. It’s been 2 months since I wrote in there. It’s also the second-last day of my 1-week break, and I haven’t done a SINGLE piece of revision or homework. How I rock the universe. Go me.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHH!

“Sorry.”

The oxford dictionary defines it as ‘pained, regretful penitent; feeling pity, wretched’. It’s a word that’s often ALWAYS misused by everyone. For example, someone is late, for, say…CHOIR PRACTICE. Right. Fantastic Example. He or she bursts in, brandishing excuses of the clearly unapologetic who want to get out of trouble, even though the very first thing he or she says may be, “Sorry, my bus got caught in a jam. So sorry…’ What goes though his or her mind is often always ‘I’m NOT sorry for being late for something that’s not going to grant me any PEARLS points (For the REALLY uninitiated, the Ministry of Education in Singapore has scraped off the PEARLS system for Co-curricular Activities. Or Pupil Development Programmes, as they call them in my school. Which means that, technically, we can abdicate whatever responsibilities we have towards our CCAs if we think it’s not worthwhile. Such realists Singaporeans are… but I’m digressing.), so it’ll be a cold day in HELL before I’ll be really apologetic about being late for something that’s so time consuming, that it’s RUINING MY SOCIAL LIFE!!!!’

Now where did that come from…

Point is, “Sorry” has become so misused, that it doesn’t have much significance these days. In the past, grown men would have rather DIED than apologized. The tremendous value and impact of saying the S-word apparently transcended the importance of their own lives; like, “I’ll rather be dead than say sorry, lest my manly pride shatters into a zillion pieces across the night sky…..’ Come on, they probably said something like that. They MUST have. Think Chinese martial art movie. Just maybe a tad more poetic. But similar.

Same goes for the F-word, actually. ‘F_ _ _’ was a more crude term for, er, copulation. Now, it’s used to punctuate sentences, as an adjective, verb, noun, and even to tell time ---- ‘it’s ten-f***ing-thirty……’ but I’m digressing. So…

The whole reason why I’m writing all these is ‘cos I haven’t been a very good friend to 3 people lately, and I really want to apologise, but “sorry” is such a cheap word. I really don’t want to lose you guys as friends.

From the bottom of my heart, I apologise. I guess I’m not the sort who’s really sincere about saying sorry most of the time. You guys should more or less know. It’s a pretty useless word actually. I guess I’m emotionally irresponsible, always not knowing what to do after apologizing; there is always a degree of helplessness on my part. I also have the tendency to apologise for stuff that will inevitably cause hurt and a certain extent of emotional damage to others.

I say it a thousand times, and I’ll say it again: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

=(