15. Anoy Ying and Yiri Tating

Once upon a time, there was a boy called Anoy Ying. Anoy was a normal boy. So normal and ordinary that in a world of weirdos and crazy people, he felt he was the only normal person left in the world.

He was very rational and logical. It didn't make sense to him why people might butter the undersides of their toasts when one should obviously butter the top of the toast in order to prevent anything from dripping and making a mess. Realising that not everyone knew how to make use of gravity and prevent messes that might need to be cleaned up, he insisted that if people must butter the undersides of their toast, they must at least have a second piece of toast to catch any accidental drips or drops. That way there would be less mess and little to no waste.

Then there was the way he saw his mother mopped the floor. Obviously, the cleaner parts must be mopped before the dirtier areas, otherwise the dirt from the dirty areas would make the cleaner sections more dirty. Not less. However, his mother didn't appreciate his nagging.

There was also the way people threw their garbage in the rubbish bin. In a world where it was recommended that plastic waste and rubbish be limited in order to protect both landfill and seas, Anoy noticed that more plastic bags were required to contain the household waste because people threw things in the bin without thinking. If plastic wrappers were folded and tied up into knots, more rubbish could be fit into a bin and less plastic bags would be required to contain it. Otherwise it was like a bad game of Tetris where the blocks just stacked up.

Anoy found that both his family and friends found his rational thinking and nagging annoying. The only person who was willing to listen to his ranting and complaints was his neighbour, Yiri Tating.

Yiri Tating was not exactly normal like Anoy was, but she was more normal than most other apathetic people. Yiri was bubbly and cheerful when things went her way but had a tendency to pick her nose and whine when they didn't. Anoy could put up with the whining but not the picking of the nose. As such, he had taken to always carrying a packet of tissues on him so that if Yiri started whining and picking her nose, he could quickly give her a tissue before she flicked any booga on him.

The things Yiri liked to whine about were always other people. It was always someone else's fault if something went wrong and she was always definitely in the right, even when she wasn't. Other people were stupid and never listened to her ill advice. They also liked to gossip and backstab her when she never did the same. Yiri always made sure she stabbed people in their chests with her words rather than their backs, because she wasn't like them. She was a straightforward, blunt truth sayer who never gossiped about people behind their backs or stabbed them in the back with her words - except for when she did. Nevertheless, she much preferred to say what she thought without filter, leaving wanton trails of destruction in all the relationships around her without realising.

Anoy and Yiri got along with each other pretty well. Or so they thought. Besides the ninety percent of the time where they found the other party annoying or irritating, they got along like a house on fire. Literally.

Their parents hadn't been too pleased with that and subsequently banned them from the kitchen, chemistry experiments and magnifying glasses. That didn't worry Anoy or Yiri at all. They just nagged and whined to each other about the unfairness of the world until they came into united disagreement that the world was about to end and the apocalypse was coming.

The internet fed their fears and anxieties, filling them with false theories because they didn't know how to read or analyse real scientific research. That was what the media was for, wasn't it? To highlight the most important aspects of the latest scientific research? Anoy and Yiri read nonsensical articles that weren't backed up by any evidence and took them as the truth, and grew angry when other people tried to correct them.

Those people didn't know anything. Didn't they know how to read Facebook news articles, Twitter posts, Google and Wikipedia?

While Anoy was in awe of logistical departments because of their lack of logical logistics, Yiri agreed that Greenies should save the Earth as long as they didn't come to bother her and her comfortable lifestyle. That was why this paragraph was purposely written without good logical flow. It was important to highlight that Anoy felt he was always right and that his intellect was infallible, despite the fact that he was still in primary school. Grade six, to be exact. He didn't understand why he'd been held down in grade six for so many years when he refused to listen to his teachers or do any or the recommended work because he felt the teachers were stupid and boring.

Meanwhile Yiri was just never wrong. Whatever was wrong, it was someone else's fault. What was wrong with picking her nose and flicking her booga away? She wasn't wiping it on anyone. It didn't bother anybody. Nobody had ever told her that she'd gotten her snot on them and so everything was fine.

Whining and complaining about people to their face was fun. It gave Yiri an adrenaline rush to watch people's faces twist into grotesque expressions and change colours. Anoy had told her that her directness was what endeared her to him, except for when she said things that made him want to slap her. So everything was right with the world.

Next year, when she turned thirty-six and Anoy turned forty-two, they would still sit in the back of their primary school classroom, squished into those tiny chairs, surrounded by crowds of forthright children who spoke painful truths. The two felt they were very grown up.

It was a pity that it was all in their imagination and that they didn't know that digging themselves into inescapable pits would result in them becoming frogs at the bottom of a well. Which was why the three wells sighed, "Well, well, well."

As such, we can learn that names like Anoy Ying and Yiri Tating may or may not have anything to do with a person's character or future. Nor may it have anything to do with maturity. All we can conclude is that some people never learn nor grow up.

And some do.

One man's wisdom can be another's foolishness, while the foolish man may be wise beyond his years.

I hope you have found the contradictions of the abovementioned oxymorons as confounding as quizzical puzzles that require squinting to see or not see the illusions within. Should this defunct style of nonsensical writing amuse you, I applaud your bold persistence to read this unnatural spiel to its end.

May this be as annoying and irritating to read as it wasn't to write.