The Greatest Showman

I don't know how many of you have seen it.

I've seen quite a few.

And Stanley has seen enough.

Which of course means I'm not referring to penises.

I'm talking about show-offs who feel compelled to snap photos of their IPPT result slips and post them online.

Stanley has counted - he's seen at least 27 of such posts.

"Okay, so you got gold for IPPT. Very good. And your point is?" Stanley said agitatedly to me, thrusting his phone in my face to show me one such post.

The current offending post belonged to Stanley's NUS junior who Stanley said is annoying as hell in real life too.

The caption of that friend's post was "finally, cleared my IPPT this year, haha".

The fact that there was a "haha" in that caption didn't make the post funny nor humble.

 "Waaah.... so clever....." Stanley said in a nasal voice as if he were talking to a child. "Can do push up, can do sit up, can run.... wah.... so cleverrrrrrrr. So fiiiiiiiiiiit."

And then, suddenly sounding British, Stanley concluded: "What a stupid show-off" and rolled his eyes before clicking 'like' on that friend's post.

"Okay, what shall we eat?" Stanley asked me, suddenly returning to his normal self, all bright and cheery again.

If I had not known Stanley my sex bunny friend for some two decades, I would have thought his screw had come loose.

Which actually, given Stanley's risque lifestyle, isn't far from the truth - the words "screw" and "loose" would accurately describe Stanley on any given day.

Some days, when Stanley is truly worked up, he can channel various characters - and display his perfect mastery of voice changes - to express his sarcasm.

And on those days, Stanley would look so possessed that the only way to control him would be to beg a priest to cleanse him and firmly tell Stanley that "I command you to get out of Stanley, whatever you are (likely a dildo) and whoever you are (which can be any gay man on the street, really)!"

It's a Thursday afternoon and it's sweltering hot.

The two of us are at Holland Village - I was on one of my trips back to Singapore and Stanley had taken the day off to have lunch with me.

We settled for Crystal Jade where Stanley would always order his favourite chicken-duck congee and XO carrot cake.

We were shown to a very tiny table that was a tad too close to the adjacent one.

I kid you not.

The spacing between Stanley and my table, and the one next to us - where two very grim-looking middle-aged office ladies were having lunch - was only two fingers' gap apart.

We would have joined the two tables and shared the space if not for the fact that the two office ladies looked like they belonged to an ultra conservative religious group who would frown and utter prayers under their breaths if they had heard us talk during lunch.

Because with Stanley, meal time topics was sex.

Drawing on my 20 years of friendship with Stanley, I telepathically begged him to keep his topics lunch-friendly by eyeing the two severe-looking women who looked like they seriously needed not only to talk about sex, but to have actual sex.

Stanley rolled his eyes at me and said out loudly: "How? Should we have the sex lunch? It's very value for money."

The two office ladies glanced over at Stanley cautiously and continued eating their noodles with fierce concentration.

Fortunately, Stanley was in no mood for sex talk.

He's still highly charged by online show-offs.

After we got our orders out of the way, Stanley revisited the topic.

Stanley wonders who the hell it was that started the trend of posting IPPT results online.

It's such a humble brag thing to do, Stanley said, shaking his head, and then nodded approvingly as he fed himself a spoonful of the smooth chicken-duck congee.

I agree with Stanley.

I've seen my fair share of humble brags online.

I can still respect you if the post had been blatantly self-promoting.

What I cannot stand is how people would, for instance, post photos of themselves with not a hair out of place, and then write brazen captions like "late for work.... bad hair day".

"And," I told Stanley, "I hate it when guys post photos of themselves half naked and -

"Wait - top half or bottom half naked," Stanley had to clarify. "'Cos sister, if it's bottom half, there's little to hate."

One of the two ultra conservative office ladies suddenly stopped chewing noisily. The other one coughed and needed immediate sips of tea.

Lowering my voice, I continued.

"I can't stand it when guys post photos of themselves half naked and then say stupid things like 'oh dear, put on so much weight after my holiday... need to lose weight now' and the bloody photo shows that guy's bloody six packs."

Stanley nods appreciatively, hearing the words "six packs".

But yeah, seriously.

I do dislike humble online brags.

Give me a blatant show-off any day and I'll respect them.

Of course, there's the online breed of show-offs.

And then there are the offline, real-life humble brags.

Those are more annoying because you can't scroll them away.

And I have one such friend.

My university gal pal Sasha - who goes by Sasa to her close friends - would know.

We have this annoying classmate, Lionel, who has been humble-bragging to us since Day One of uni.

Lionel would humbly brag about his results. About his deep knowledge of world politics. About how he's quite a popular guy.

And when we graduated and started working, Lionel would humbly brag about his salary, his wealth and would find ways to remind us that he owns a car and a BTO.

"If only he owned some hair," Sasa once whispered to me during a class gathering with Lionel, a comment that sent us into violent fits from controlling our laughter.

The problem is, Lionel isn't exactly unpleasant.

I mean, if he isn't humbly showing off, he's actually quite nice.

And truth me told, Sasa and I secretly enjoy hearing Lionel humble-brag.

It's become tradition that whenever we have class outings, one of us would goad Lionel into humble-bragging and each time he falls into our trap, we would kick each other under the table while maintaining keen, attentive eye contact with the braggard.

And we all have such people in our lives.

And it's up to us, how we deal with these people.

For Sasa and me, we choose to make a joke out of these annoying but harmless people.

I shared that coping mechanism with Stanley during dessert.

As Stanley chewed his pomelo sago, his eyes brightened.

"Yes. I know how to cope with these humble brags now," he said, as if he had attained nirvana.

"You see, guys who need to show off means they have hidden flaws."

"And in most cases, it must mean they have a small penis."

Stanley immediately whipped out his phone and began investigating.

"This gives me something to do - and if my theory were right, I could well submit this as my PhD dissertation," Stanley said wisely as he tapped on his NUS junior's Facebook photos to enlarge it for further examination.



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Adam's stories are based on real life events and inspired by real people