The scientist

The white lab coat and the people that wear them have always deeply fascinated me from back in the day when I actually had a dream and purpose in life. This was way way back in early primary school, when I had a total of only 2 good friends and a heartfelt wish of becoming a scientist. Labs still haunt my imagination like they did in those days with their bubbling multi-coloured solutions, cages filled with white mice and the hulking shadow of a robot under construction in a dark corner of the room. When I was a kid I was notorious for being extremely absent-minded and people were noticeably thrilled when I in my childish innocence declared to all and sundry that I wanted to be a scientist on growing up. I can almost still hear them say "Yes! Yes! That's the (only) thing you will be good at." I had found my twin soul in Dexter and his mysterious lab helped in no small measure by the fact that I had a frequently irritating elder sister like Dee-Dee, Dexter's exasperating sibling. Except that my experiments were limited to my Chemistry kit, alternative paper plane concepts, experiments illustrated in Tinkle and botched attempts at making a kite, unlike my hero who was into cloning, time travel, nuclear weapons and pretty much everything that was cool and illegal.

The years have flown by since those days of spirited scientific enquiry leaving me still as absent minded as then, but without enough enthusiasm to live out my lab-coat dream. Somewhere along the way I ran into some new friends, and then some more, and then some more. Their world was my world now: the world of terrace cricket, 8-bit video games, sneak peeks at the neighbourhood beauties, WWF (the wrestling circus, not the conservation guys), maths tuitions and all else that required at least a set of 10 different guys for each of the activities. There was no more space for my private universe, for my impractical dreams. Not to blame any of this on my dear buddies who were my partners in crime for some of the most amazing years of my life. It's just that they gave me the best reasons for not pursue what at one time had captivated my mind and helped me give in to my most deep rooted flaws, my laziness! Nowadays, I spend so much time on the social networking world keeping track of these aforementioned buddies, making smart Alec comments, replying to smart Alec comments, posting viral videos and in short doing anything that is totally pointless, that I console myself saying I am a new breed of scientist instead - a social scientist.