Archive for September, 2007
29 Sep, 2007
Donnie Darko
Gretchen: My mom had to get a restraining order against my stepdad. He has emotional problems.
Donnie: Oh, I have those too! What kind of emotional problems does your dad have?
Gretchen: He stabbed my mom four times in the chest.
Donnie: Oh.
28 Sep, 2007
Like Listening to Your Own Voice
I had never really liked him. I did not have any obvious or compelling reason not to like him, and why I disliked him had been a question that had bugged me for some time. I had come up with some answers, some more reasonable than others, but today I think I found an answer that appears to be the most likely of the lot.
Listening to your own voice
“Listening to your own voice,” she said, “is like eeeeeeeee…”
We were testing my MP3 player’s voice recording function, and playing back our voices on the computer. The moment she said this, I started wondering why. It wasn’t just her, but me as well, that couldn’t quite stand the sound of their own recorded voice.
I’d always found that my voice sounded terrible when recorded. It wasn’t so much the difference per se, for I knew that I was going to sound different when listening to the playback of my own voice, but that it simply sounded bad.
It wasn’t only until I started practising speaking through a microphone, honing my voice to suit what I thought I should sound like that I started finding my own voice acceptable.
I guess the point I am trying to drive at with this analogy is that it was so much easier to hear the flaws in my own voice through the recording and subsequent playback of my own speech.
Watching the self
When I see him, I see me. He, the person I dislike, tends to remind me of myself. I find so many parallels between us that it’s scary.
So my mind is saying, “if you share so many characteristics, you must be like him in every other way.”
But when I look at him, I do not like what I see… not at all! I see ill-discipline; I see cunning; I see sloth.
And when I think about what my mind is saying, I start thinking that what I’m seeing are things — characteristics — that are latent within me.
And I get scared.
I tell myself that I cannot be like that.
And disliking him is simply my way of disliking the self I do not wish to become.
23 Sep, 2007
The Friend Bell Curve
A friend of mine wrote:
So the issue comes up again. After a few months, the people in [Currie Hall] have all drifted into cliques. Typical of [S]ingaporeans.
But I have to disagree with him. I think he’s being a little too harsh on Singaporeans.
People all over the world drift into cliques; it’s simply part and parcel of being human. We all have some people whose company we prefer over others. Pretending it’s otherwise — that we all should treat each other on equal footing, that we like each other equally — is a ridiculous concept.
I asked another friend of mine if he intended to move out of Currie Hall. He told me that though he’d get much closer to the people he moved out with, he’d have much fewer friends.
I, having intended to move out for a long time, asked him (rhetorically) how many real friends he had here. “Not everyone here’s your friend,” I said.
He thought about it for a while, and seemed to agree with me, at least somewhat.
I continued, “I once tried to be everyone’s friend. But I found that I was spreading myself too thin. I realised I couldn’t put into every relationship or friendship equal amounts of energy. After a while, I realised that I had to focus energies on a smaller group of friends.”
“I never,” he said, pausing a moment or two, “thought about it that way. I guess I never really had any close friends.”
It didn’t really surprise me that he told me that. My friend was a diplomat, someone that had no close friends, but who made no enemies, at least not here in Currie Hall. I, too, was once such a person, and probably to some extent still am. But I made the conscious choice to limit my circle of close friends, realising that I couldn’t give everyone the same amount of “me”.
I felt it would be unreasonable to expect a 100% from every single relationship in a large circle of friends when I could only give each 60% of my energies.
“My circle of friends started out small,” I said, “small but close. Then expanded to a large circle of friends, though not really close. Over time, I found the circle of friends shrinking, but within these friends our friendships were stronger.”
I paused for a while, and then added, “it’s like a bell curve! Few friendships grow to become many, then shrink again.”
It’s just the way life goes.
21 Sep, 2007
Giving a Presentation
Never attempt to give a presentation you didn’t prepare for when you’ve got too little sleep. Half the time I was up there presenting I felt as if I was stuck in a bad dream; and to think that I was expecting to present pretty well for this.
Sure, it wasn’t a disaster, but it definitely was far from my best, which incidentally, is very good :)
16 Sep, 2007
Top Student
“So, you prepared for your [Statistics] test tomorrow?” he asked me.
“Well, sort of,” I replied.
“Going to be the top student?”
That was a most unexpected question. This semester has been, in the words of another friend, my sabbatical. “Nah,” I said, “I know who my competition is.”
I forgot what he said next, but it was along the lines of, “so they studied hard?”
“The competition is my neighbour lar,” I said.
He looked at me, gave me a knowing look, and smiled.
I smiled back. He understood.