Crafty Boys.

Unless you were raised by a band of wild turkeys, you'd prolly have been asked, "What do you wanna be when you grow up?" at least once in your life.

I suppose it would be the same if you were raised by the turkeys, really. Except they'd ask you in Turkey. And there's just the one answer: "Bigger turkey."

But yes, for serious. The little answers don't tend to vary. Doctor. Astronaut. Pilot. Fireman. Policeman. When you're little, you're in a good place, with somewhere to sleep, food to eat, money given to you for candy and toys. And Uncle Bob only very occasionally touches you in your special places.

And then you get older, and people stop smiling when you tell them what you want to be. "Well ok, helping people is all very well, but what do you really want to do? Eh?"

A little hard to intrepret when you're little. "But...I've just told you." Nono. Doctor still ok. Lawyer, banker and engineer are the only other acceptable answers. Everything else is a cop-out.

Some of us never grow out of When I Grow Up. I haven't. I admire craft. Well, the more showy ones, shamefully. Plastering is a craft, but at least for me, it's hard to go, "The way you mix it so perfectly...and the deft strokes you use to smooth it over with the...thingy thing. Teach me, oh master."

The showy ones manifest my WIGU syndrome. But you sort of have to see the people. Hearing a song is fine, but watching a good singer perform makes me want to sing. Dancers make me want to take classes. Instrumentalists have me imagining myself playing their instrument, as if I could ever move beyond Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Even watching cooks makes me think I could make unfunny jokes while speed-slicing a cucumber, and have it all turn out wonderful.

Humour and writing are sort of exceptions, yet not. Comedians do make me want to get out there on a stage and proceed to stare in terror at a few hundred people, having forgotten all my lines. Watching a writer would be...not very exciting, at best. But the writing is the actual performance, and reading good writing makes me wonder how I would write the same thing. Good comic writing is just the shit.

Craft. It's a nice word. Someone crafting a meal makes you want to eat it. Someone crafting a story has you enthralled. Use it on the right people, though. Not on the guy with a can-opener and a microwave. And for the latter, not on Catherine Lim.

Yes, WIGU never leaves some of us. Not all of us are as taken with craft, perhaps. Some of us WIGU about being managers, dreaming daily of ways to steal credit and disclaim blame. But life wears on and you wake up one day to realise, fuck, you're 38 and losing hair like the Singapore law enforcers have been losing prisoners. You have grown up.

That's when you go out and buy a Porsche. Or a six-pack, for most of us.

But try not to lose your WIGU. If you've always wanted to write, write. If you've always wanted to run a shady business importing Russian brides, start running a busi...you get the idea.

If nothing else, keep your WIGU just so you won't be a defective person. The ability to look at someone perform and go, "Wow, that's awesome. I wish I could do that someday," is important. Certain breeds of managers are such pricks because they've lost it. They go, "Well that's nice and everything but can you do what I do? And have I mentioned? Even my children play golf leh. Leh."

If you must know, I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up. Small the time, don't know about all the different branchy-branches what. It was all lab coat, clipboard, test tubes and voila! Win Nobel prize for paper on effects of banjos on cats. Mucho money. Retire. Spend rest of life shagging leftover cats.

Real life, not so easy. Banjos hard to come by. The earlier one realises that, the easier it is for him to deal with it. So the next time little Timmy comes to you and tells him he wants to be a fireman when he grows up so he can help people, do the right thing.

Set him on fire.