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"Hanting Hanting! We've studied your face carefully, and we want to tell you what we think!"

Involuntarily, my curiosity piqued. Face-reading, not unlike its sister science palm-reading, is a detailed study that hails from centuries ago. Man has long since recognized that, as preposterous as it may seem, there is some correlation between our outward appeareance and our destinies/personalities.

Didn't the Chinese even derive a comprehensive reference chart that could highlight the significance of the placement of moles on the face? Or the cosmic meaning of a squarish jaw, a button nose, or high-foreheads?

For all I knew, my new friends from the Presentations group could have had unparalled schooling in the mystic arts of reading faces. Eager curiousity soon betrayed itself on my face.

"We think you look like an uncle sort, who would push a pram and carry diapers in about 10 years!"

They went on. Daddy-looking, guai (or Mandarin for obedient), crappily corny, so on and so forth.

*Phish*. My pricked ears could barely make out the sound of an ego deflating and then spontaneously combusting.

But all in all, it wasn't anything new. It seems that my entire life I've had to receive remarks of the same ilk. People have told me I look honest, that I would grow up to work in the government, that they would trust their daughters with me.

On the flip side, they vehemently refuse to believe that I'm not in the Library Society, that I actually have seen the inside of Zouk, that I actually relish performing the blasted Frog Dance. Oh, the extrapolations people arrive at from the way you present yourself.

I've always wistfully hungered after the detached, self-assured coolness of the reticent biker dude. You know, perpetually balled-up angst, sauveness, everything that Wolverine is in the comics. Nothing I do helps, of course.

My pierced ear revolted anyone above the age of 12 (my 10 year old cousin being the sole supporter) while my plans for dyed hair have been shelved, after my dad promised me I wouldn't look cool, and instead just look like a human carrot. Let's not even discuss the hip-hop classes I took.

The silver lining presented itself just a few days ago.

A friend told me that she really enjoyed talking to me, that she was comfortable enough around me to speak her mind. Something about the, in her own words, 'crappiness that you have', disarmed safeguards that would have prevented her from opening up. It was something, she reminded me, that not everyone could do.

Everything happens for a reason then, I suppose.