Not the highest kite
Music: Nothing in particular, though Speed of Sound is great.
Book: Matt Ridley - The Agile Gene
As time passes I find myself growing more cynical. If this were purely an evolutionary gesture then I would have to ponder what it is within me that biologically determined this path that by far, sees no one else. I would also have to wonder why, along with this growing sense of deep-seated cynicism, there is a growing prowess along the lines of intellectual awareness.
And it is an irony, this ambivalent growth of mind and heart, an irony in two ways. Could one really call it a ‘growth’, insofar as growth encapsulates a degree of maturation? And why is it with increasing awareness I am unable to arrest the generally unwanted subversion of normal emotions to, roughly put, darker ones.
Lets switch over to old-school blogging style for a moment. Actually for some moments.
People have told me the 5-day residential seminar I just went for was really good. And throughout the camp I saw youths of all sorts coming together, cheering and dancing and all that kind of thing. I am not against those—in fact the rushes of blood to the head when you do those kind of things made me feel good, though personally it could have been much better if my group contained less yuppies and more country pumpkins and cowboys and space-gazing individuals, but I am rather critical of some of the other things I witnessed.
These ‘other things’ are essentially what I would, without hesitation, condemn as superficialities. Take for example the testimonial writing we were asked to do for our group (around 20 people, one or two from each college/institution) members. We were told to write something about each other member in the group, and we sat in a circle and wrote and passed it along to the next person when we finished. It took 3 writings to tell me that hey, why don’t these people just come up with a template and that would be that—because everything they wrote were all (ALL) similar on one way or the other. Friendly guy, cheerful girl, enjoyed meeting you, you rock, had a great time with you, remember me. Urgh. I thought the point of writing this sort of thing is to state your impressions of the person, or what you thought of him/her, or what you felt and not mass-produce something for everyone; the uniform responses either indicate them as blatant liars or indicate how little they know of each other.
How did I do it then? I tried to be as honest as I could without ruining the prevailing mood of false camaraderie, since people like to revel in that so much; to do that I had to resort to trying-to-be-funny rhyming couplets that were descriptors of the person involved. (It had to rhyme or it would have looked too serious, or crude). If that failed I just told them to take care or something of that sort, neutral and non-committal.
And my student liaison officer (the equivalent of the OGL) just msged the whole group, saying that we rocked and we will live forever and it was a great time being with us. And my roommate said I was the best roommate he had ever had, and would love to live with me again. Considering that all the group did in 5 days (and 5 days is a very short time to actually get to know one another) was play games and cheer and move about together and have our meals together, and considering that my roommate and I didn’t really bond well (he talks and looks like Matthias chew, a sec schmate, btw) I wonder how can people actually bring themselves to tell such lies.
I have got two approaches to this. One, they don’t know those things are lies, in which case it would imply that they are ill-exposed to the Truer Stuffs (like Real Friendship and other things in capital letters) in life. The reasoning here is that higher standards through greater exposure render veterans less sensitive to what may be trigger-happy things to others; the converse is also true. Two, they internally know that what they are saying are vast exaggerations, but say it anyway, for social decorum which one could argue is necessary at all levels.
Anyway I got to witness ACJC’s holier-than-thou attitude first-hand.
Maybe abit more on the group. It wasn’t a fantastic group, roughly congruent to what my class is like—I noted the similarity when, even on our 3rd meal together, the guys were all seated on 2 tables and the girls on a separate one. In fact the guys only sat together at one single table after the 5th or 6th meal. I knew it was all over then, on that 3rd meal, whilst other groups were already coming up with their own unique group cheers and the like while we still remained divided by the first natural barrier to group cohesiveness: the male-female divide. I daresay no group can ever attain unity if that divide is not dealt with, though I would also venture this divide, in most groups, is never ever dealt with adequately, only covered up. The truest, most ideal group then, is for me one which is able to overcome, genuinely, the differences between the females and the males.
And I couldn’t get along with them. No, not in that way you might be thinking. When it comes to social niceties and moving along with the flow, anyone can do those. Which was what I did, and though at times it went ok I felt rather dissatisfied both during and after the camp. Sad to say, it seems like I’ve lost the ability to mix with prim-and-proper, conventional-humour- people. In fact I’ve probably lost the tolerance for them too.
More negativism to come. I had quite some hopes for the supposedly highbrow presentations, group discussions, panel discussions. I thought I would have the opportunity to observe, to add on to my notes (of virtually anything). Well observe I did but the observations were far from satisfactory. First, I thought it would’ve been a bottom-up kind of thing where us students come together to propose (or if not formally then at least suggest) new policies or amendments to old ones, since they did call in some big shots from the civil service. Instead they turned out to be run-of-the-mill Q and A sessions, where one after another people went up there to question this and that. The worse thing is that the questions striked me as questions asked for the sake of asking, or questions asked I thought questions should be thrown to clarify doubts, or in the form of rhetorical questions, to genuinely prove a point—and not thrown about to display the speaker’s knowledge on certain issues.
Now before you think I am some arbitrary dissident complaining about everything and doing nothing allow me to tell you first I am quite apathetic towards all this governmental issues; I don’t care whether Singapore should have two chambers in parliament or how we should seek to encourage birth rates or what as a small city-state we can do for the international community at large and neither do I find any concern over the hyper-clichéd issues of liberalism and entrepreneurship and all that kind of sickening stuff. Why did I go for it then? Because I thought it would have transcended that mundane level, and because I like adding experiences to my life-- doesn’t necessarily mean you have to get into the thick of things though.
A number of people cried during the celebrations on the last night. And I was just wondering…if you’re going to cry over people whom you’ve met for 4 days, what value is there in those tears? What value, too, would there be in the tears you would shed in the future? To make no mention of the fact that the whole celebration was fundamentally geared to induce a melodramatic, tear-jerker environment.
Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know.
Several points/experiences taken over the 5 days.
1) I cant eat 6 meals a day. They had some good food there though.
2) Had the lowest amount of sleep I ever experienced, over a course of 4 nights. 5 hours on first night, 4 on second night, 3 on third, 2 on the last night.
3) NY’s students carried themselves better than students from most other colleges, pardon me but I thought that was kind of surprising. Good stuff nonetheless.
4) Had what is possibly my 2nd most freaky experience in life so far. I went jogging with a mate on the third night, down the long empty roads branching off from NTU. It was pretty cool actually, passed by quite a number of people jogging (1AM?), and I thought the residents must have life good there: that nice quiet life where you can pop out of your doorstep for a jog along a forest, on very long stretches of roads. But anyway, we passed by a particular spot where there was an orange glow on the pavement (the street lights all shone on the road). My partner pointed out that it was light from the crane beyond the canopy of the forest but it was noted that the light emitted from the crane was white. That’s nothing of course, but I couldn’t help feeling a wee bit uneasy when we were later on approached by a lady asking if we had seen her a male jog past us, her husband. Okok come to think of it it’s nothing.
5) Golf is some awkward stuff, until you find out you can hit the ball 100m out without much energy.
6) Kite flying is damn cool, think that was for me the most enjoyable experience of the camp. Being typically adventurous I attempted to set my kite to the highest possible height and it was really, really nice just watching it float on air, that little speck (that is how high you can go) reaching out toward the sun, its life tethered to your hand. Quite unfortunately my string got entangled with two others’ (because I was trying to be funny by walking my kite all over the vast grassland, about the size of 3 soccer fields) and it flew down and down and hit the grass, and because the string was so damn long and because there were thorny grasses on the field my kite sustained a small hole in the midst of the recovery operation. I scotched-taped it up but after that it couldn’t fly normally anymore.
I could still bring it to respectable heights yes but whenever the wind changed the kite would tend to dive-bomb a lot due to the difference in pressure or lift or thrust on the side with the hole and the normal side. So I ended up with a kite that could do some amazing flips in the air, and I thought that was pretty cool. Even if it meant that my kite could never fly amongst the top anymore. Because the other kites couldn’t travel as fast, or with as much élan as mine.
I took to a remote hill top after many more entanglements and damage done to my kite. Felt a remarkable connection with that object then. It was damaged, torn at the edges, but still I tried to make it fly. And it did, and the moments it flew high I couldn’t help but feel it was listening to my voice, bidding my will.
One lesson I took away from that 3 hours of flying with my kite is that you’re just going to get into a mess when you’re with the crowd. If you want to fly high, fly alone.
7) Had the opportunity to speak with the education minister, marking the highest level of personnel I would have conversed with. The previous –record- if Im not wrong was a permanent secretary working in the civil service. Was pretty nervous because he was taller and looked pretty wise and had a head with very little hair.
Cynicism isn’t bad. Not being yourself is.
Book: Matt Ridley - The Agile Gene
As time passes I find myself growing more cynical. If this were purely an evolutionary gesture then I would have to ponder what it is within me that biologically determined this path that by far, sees no one else. I would also have to wonder why, along with this growing sense of deep-seated cynicism, there is a growing prowess along the lines of intellectual awareness.
And it is an irony, this ambivalent growth of mind and heart, an irony in two ways. Could one really call it a ‘growth’, insofar as growth encapsulates a degree of maturation? And why is it with increasing awareness I am unable to arrest the generally unwanted subversion of normal emotions to, roughly put, darker ones.
Lets switch over to old-school blogging style for a moment. Actually for some moments.
People have told me the 5-day residential seminar I just went for was really good. And throughout the camp I saw youths of all sorts coming together, cheering and dancing and all that kind of thing. I am not against those—in fact the rushes of blood to the head when you do those kind of things made me feel good, though personally it could have been much better if my group contained less yuppies and more country pumpkins and cowboys and space-gazing individuals, but I am rather critical of some of the other things I witnessed.
These ‘other things’ are essentially what I would, without hesitation, condemn as superficialities. Take for example the testimonial writing we were asked to do for our group (around 20 people, one or two from each college/institution) members. We were told to write something about each other member in the group, and we sat in a circle and wrote and passed it along to the next person when we finished. It took 3 writings to tell me that hey, why don’t these people just come up with a template and that would be that—because everything they wrote were all (ALL) similar on one way or the other. Friendly guy, cheerful girl, enjoyed meeting you, you rock, had a great time with you, remember me. Urgh. I thought the point of writing this sort of thing is to state your impressions of the person, or what you thought of him/her, or what you felt and not mass-produce something for everyone; the uniform responses either indicate them as blatant liars or indicate how little they know of each other.
How did I do it then? I tried to be as honest as I could without ruining the prevailing mood of false camaraderie, since people like to revel in that so much; to do that I had to resort to trying-to-be-funny rhyming couplets that were descriptors of the person involved. (It had to rhyme or it would have looked too serious, or crude). If that failed I just told them to take care or something of that sort, neutral and non-committal.
And my student liaison officer (the equivalent of the OGL) just msged the whole group, saying that we rocked and we will live forever and it was a great time being with us. And my roommate said I was the best roommate he had ever had, and would love to live with me again. Considering that all the group did in 5 days (and 5 days is a very short time to actually get to know one another) was play games and cheer and move about together and have our meals together, and considering that my roommate and I didn’t really bond well (he talks and looks like Matthias chew, a sec schmate, btw) I wonder how can people actually bring themselves to tell such lies.
I have got two approaches to this. One, they don’t know those things are lies, in which case it would imply that they are ill-exposed to the Truer Stuffs (like Real Friendship and other things in capital letters) in life. The reasoning here is that higher standards through greater exposure render veterans less sensitive to what may be trigger-happy things to others; the converse is also true. Two, they internally know that what they are saying are vast exaggerations, but say it anyway, for social decorum which one could argue is necessary at all levels.
Anyway I got to witness ACJC’s holier-than-thou attitude first-hand.
Maybe abit more on the group. It wasn’t a fantastic group, roughly congruent to what my class is like—I noted the similarity when, even on our 3rd meal together, the guys were all seated on 2 tables and the girls on a separate one. In fact the guys only sat together at one single table after the 5th or 6th meal. I knew it was all over then, on that 3rd meal, whilst other groups were already coming up with their own unique group cheers and the like while we still remained divided by the first natural barrier to group cohesiveness: the male-female divide. I daresay no group can ever attain unity if that divide is not dealt with, though I would also venture this divide, in most groups, is never ever dealt with adequately, only covered up. The truest, most ideal group then, is for me one which is able to overcome, genuinely, the differences between the females and the males.
And I couldn’t get along with them. No, not in that way you might be thinking. When it comes to social niceties and moving along with the flow, anyone can do those. Which was what I did, and though at times it went ok I felt rather dissatisfied both during and after the camp. Sad to say, it seems like I’ve lost the ability to mix with prim-and-proper, conventional-humour- people. In fact I’ve probably lost the tolerance for them too.
More negativism to come. I had quite some hopes for the supposedly highbrow presentations, group discussions, panel discussions. I thought I would have the opportunity to observe, to add on to my notes (of virtually anything). Well observe I did but the observations were far from satisfactory. First, I thought it would’ve been a bottom-up kind of thing where us students come together to propose (or if not formally then at least suggest) new policies or amendments to old ones, since they did call in some big shots from the civil service. Instead they turned out to be run-of-the-mill Q and A sessions, where one after another people went up there to question this and that. The worse thing is that the questions striked me as questions asked for the sake of asking, or questions asked I thought questions should be thrown to clarify doubts, or in the form of rhetorical questions, to genuinely prove a point—and not thrown about to display the speaker’s knowledge on certain issues.
Now before you think I am some arbitrary dissident complaining about everything and doing nothing allow me to tell you first I am quite apathetic towards all this governmental issues; I don’t care whether Singapore should have two chambers in parliament or how we should seek to encourage birth rates or what as a small city-state we can do for the international community at large and neither do I find any concern over the hyper-clichéd issues of liberalism and entrepreneurship and all that kind of sickening stuff. Why did I go for it then? Because I thought it would have transcended that mundane level, and because I like adding experiences to my life-- doesn’t necessarily mean you have to get into the thick of things though.
A number of people cried during the celebrations on the last night. And I was just wondering…if you’re going to cry over people whom you’ve met for 4 days, what value is there in those tears? What value, too, would there be in the tears you would shed in the future? To make no mention of the fact that the whole celebration was fundamentally geared to induce a melodramatic, tear-jerker environment.
Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know.
Several points/experiences taken over the 5 days.
1) I cant eat 6 meals a day. They had some good food there though.
2) Had the lowest amount of sleep I ever experienced, over a course of 4 nights. 5 hours on first night, 4 on second night, 3 on third, 2 on the last night.
3) NY’s students carried themselves better than students from most other colleges, pardon me but I thought that was kind of surprising. Good stuff nonetheless.
4) Had what is possibly my 2nd most freaky experience in life so far. I went jogging with a mate on the third night, down the long empty roads branching off from NTU. It was pretty cool actually, passed by quite a number of people jogging (1AM?), and I thought the residents must have life good there: that nice quiet life where you can pop out of your doorstep for a jog along a forest, on very long stretches of roads. But anyway, we passed by a particular spot where there was an orange glow on the pavement (the street lights all shone on the road). My partner pointed out that it was light from the crane beyond the canopy of the forest but it was noted that the light emitted from the crane was white. That’s nothing of course, but I couldn’t help feeling a wee bit uneasy when we were later on approached by a lady asking if we had seen her a male jog past us, her husband. Okok come to think of it it’s nothing.
5) Golf is some awkward stuff, until you find out you can hit the ball 100m out without much energy.
6) Kite flying is damn cool, think that was for me the most enjoyable experience of the camp. Being typically adventurous I attempted to set my kite to the highest possible height and it was really, really nice just watching it float on air, that little speck (that is how high you can go) reaching out toward the sun, its life tethered to your hand. Quite unfortunately my string got entangled with two others’ (because I was trying to be funny by walking my kite all over the vast grassland, about the size of 3 soccer fields) and it flew down and down and hit the grass, and because the string was so damn long and because there were thorny grasses on the field my kite sustained a small hole in the midst of the recovery operation. I scotched-taped it up but after that it couldn’t fly normally anymore.
I could still bring it to respectable heights yes but whenever the wind changed the kite would tend to dive-bomb a lot due to the difference in pressure or lift or thrust on the side with the hole and the normal side. So I ended up with a kite that could do some amazing flips in the air, and I thought that was pretty cool. Even if it meant that my kite could never fly amongst the top anymore. Because the other kites couldn’t travel as fast, or with as much élan as mine.
I took to a remote hill top after many more entanglements and damage done to my kite. Felt a remarkable connection with that object then. It was damaged, torn at the edges, but still I tried to make it fly. And it did, and the moments it flew high I couldn’t help but feel it was listening to my voice, bidding my will.
One lesson I took away from that 3 hours of flying with my kite is that you’re just going to get into a mess when you’re with the crowd. If you want to fly high, fly alone.
7) Had the opportunity to speak with the education minister, marking the highest level of personnel I would have conversed with. The previous –record- if Im not wrong was a permanent secretary working in the civil service. Was pretty nervous because he was taller and looked pretty wise and had a head with very little hair.
Cynicism isn’t bad. Not being yourself is.
15 Comments:
Ha we had to do testimonial writings for our LEP grpmates at LEP camp too. Well not exactly testimonial writings but everyone was given a small notebook to be passed around to other grpmates so that they could write down some farewell messages for you to bring home with. Er honestly the only things I wrote for my grpmates are things I usually write when I have to write just for the sake of writing e.g. "Take care and keep in touch" though I know very well that most probably we won't keep in touch at all (can't be bothered to anyway - unless the need arises when I have to work with them on joint LEP projects between our schools in future). In fact I didn't pass my notebook around 'cause I thought 3 days of interaction is too little for them to know me well enough to write something worthy of remembrance (which doesnt include superficial stuff like "Take care and keep in touch"). Ha some of my grpmates asked to write on my notebook but I turned down their request and their reaction was, "Aiyo, why like that, why you so anti-social one, everyone also passes around their notebooks what why you dont pass around etc etc." Yeah lah whatever.
Btw I heard from Wei Kian that the grassland at which you all flew your kites is a short distance from Singapore Sports School. It was on Thursday at around 3p.m. right? Well LEP camp ended at around 1.30p.m. so it was a bad coincidence (or an absence of coincidence) that we didnt run into each other.
On second thoughts maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that we didnt run into each other after all 'cause if we did maybe I would end up being ill for an even longer period of time (though I highly doubt you're influential enough to prolong my illness I'm aware of the fact that a wicked soul like you is always trying to wish me harm because I'm very tasty - or so you claimed).
And err you mean people actually cry over people whom theyve only known for 4 days.
Heh, why do these sentiments sound so familiar? (Because I had them too)
When I went to Pre-U Sem last year we had the boy-girl problem too, only, we were heavily divided into obvious cliques (there were 2 cliques each in both gender groups, go figure). You know we have curfews right, so I basically stuck to the rules until the last night, when the girls in my eh, clique, came over to my room to talk.
And then I was wondering how it is possible for people who barely knew each other to pour out their hearts' desires and secrets and personal background, etc, etc, to each other. Maybe it is because of the knowledge that you are never going to see each other again so your 'secrets' are basically as good as stuffed into a bottle thrown into the sea.
I have friends who kept in contact with their Pre-U Sem group to this day, I on the other hand, lost contact with them 2 weeks after break-camp. That's how deep these secret-spilling relationships are.
On another note, it is good human relations exposure. You get to see more on the world than you want to (especially if people in your group are extremely fond of gossiping about and bad-mouthing people they appeared to be friendly to).
And to Miaoyu: The LEP camp testimonial booklet thing, for me, at the very least, is good food for memories. =)
Fang Yu: Call me a skeptic/cynic/whatever, but till now I haven't really learnt how to appreciate such memories. I don't find myself reminiscing them with relish and I guess I don't need/want memories which are unable to stir emotions within me when I look back at them. Well somehow I always feel (at camps) that the camaraderie is there just to make an impression (that was exactly how I felt when I attended a three-day camp organised by Lianhe Zaobao last year as well) and therefore I never really put in any effort in trying to keep in touch with those people I meet through such events. Those are people who just suddenly enter and exit your life; if you dont remember them then perhaps they arent worthy of remembrance anyway. Hmmm I agree with you that 'confiding' in strangers (whom you know perfectly well that you're not going to keep in contact with) is quite a safe thing to do since your paths probably wouldn't cross ever again (though I personally wouldn't do such a thing). In fact last year at Zaobao camp a roommate tried to talk to me about her secrets and I just said, "I'm not interested and please switch off the lights because I'm really tired." Err I guess that really annoyed her (yes I know I know I'll try to be more tactful from now on :p )... But seriously I really can't be bothered to listen to anyone whom I feel is just trying to whine about things (which surprisingly are just mundane things with nothing to whine about). Confiding in strangers! - are these people really lonely or what. But then again people who are truly lonely don't go around confiding in other people just to portray themselves as truly lonely people, just like the truly suicidal dont go around telling others how miserable they are and how much they feel like killing themselves - they just jump off the building and that is goodbye. OK I digressed.
Kc I'm sorry for flooding your comments page with so much gibberish and Fang Yu I'm sorry for the sudden outburst (if you have managed to read thus far to get till here).
Err actually it also depends on what kinds of strangers you confide in and under what circumstances do you confide in them and etc etc. For example once I heard a song which is about how a woman stuffed a letter (on which all her innermost feelings were written) into a bottle and threw it into the sea for it to float around endlessly till someone picked it up and read it and at the very end of the letter she wrote, "Whoever reads this, I love you." and I thought it is poetic. In this case one can also say that the woman is confiding in a complete stranger but what makes it romantic/beautiful is the very fact that out of so many people in this world it is destined that whoever happened to pick up the bottle and read the letter is the one who happened to pick up the bottle and read the letter (hopefully you understand what gibberish I'm typing). But my point is I don't give a heck about roommates who try to confide in me when I could hardly call them my friends and when they could hardly call me their friend (in fact I don't even confide in friends; I only confide in confidants. If you confide in any Tom, Dick or Harry then everyone in this world can be a confidant and then there wouldn't be any meaning to the word 'confidant') is because they give me the feeling that they're just behaving in a 无病呻吟 manner. OK I digressed again. Must be exam stress.
The boy-girl divide happens all the time, and we probably can't run away from it. Generally, the only time when both gender mix well is when they are close to one another. I believe you understand what I meant as I bet you would feel uncomfortable with a big bunch of girls if you do not know them well.
And also if the mix ratio is wrong, people will generally get the wrong.
There was once my friends from orientation 1 wanted to meet together to fly kite, but it never happened. I don't know whether I still have any kites somewhere in my house, but it has been ages since I let mine fly.
Well there's alot that can be said here.
The secret-in-bottle thing is rather interesting. There is always, I guess, this tendency in us to share certain secrets with people, any people. Does this necessarily mean they've got to be somebody close to us? No. And if they are not, does it not imply that we are merely sharing to satisfy our need to share? The strangers are transient, insignificant beings in this sense. For me, and other people out there, these insignificant beings are the pages in our diaries. Some people just prefer having a warm-blooded diary.
The literal message-in-the-bottle is yes, rather poetic at first sight. My cynicism, or stoicism, runs deeper however. The very moment the bottle is thrown into the sea a receiver has to be created, or at least thats the result if you assume the bottle is able to sail endlessly till picked up. And because of the compulsory result the scope for a *romantic* interaction is totally removed. Go figure.
In any case the other assumption here is that the person who picked the bottle is indeed a suitable partner with the person who threw the bottle, an assumption that is very tempting to follow through (because of the potential romantic nature of such a story) but is completely baseless in itself.
"if you dont remember them then perhaps they arent worthy of remembrance anyway" - is another sad fallacy, one which I myself am prone to fall for too. The logic in it is self-sufficient but the statement is a drastically inconsiderate one. The photos we take to remember each others' looks, the letters we write to remind each other of our existence (say the parties involved are split by distance), the objects we keep as wardrobe treasures (which can range from a movie ticket to a kite), are we to say these are completely needless products of one's relationships because what is in our minds would be in our minds--and what is not is not significant enough? Surely not. Because the human mind is not capable of storing so many memories, however intimate they are. (I know this is taken out of your context but I am just talking about this in general; I do agree with you that people not significant enough to have made us want to actively remember them or make us want to extend our interaction together are in themselves not worthy of remembrance, though they might come in useful as the 'objects' [like the ticket of a play] of the event [the play], the trigger entities to the experience (your camp) that might make you remember the experience better. Or they could just serve as side dishes to the main course of thought you had of the experience)
Personally I tend to only confide in people who understand me, and sometimes I feel the pages of my diary understand me better than most other people.
Oh yes lets go fly kite sometime soon.
"In any case the other assumption here is that the person who picked the bottle is indeed a suitable partner with the person who threw the bottle, an assumption that is very tempting to follow through (because of the potential romantic nature of such a story) but is completely baseless in itself." Well I'm not assuming/proposing that the person who picked up the bottle is indeed a suitable partner for the person who threw it. Even if that really happened the story would still just stop at there anyway because in the first place the person who threw the bottle didn't write down any contact information about herself on the letter. What I think is beautiful is that it is just like having a prayer answered (though like I said the person who made the prayer wouldn't know whether it had been answered or not). OK that sounds irrelevant...
Dunno what you all talking about...
Kites! I missed those. :p
I don't think those are literally "superficialities" or "lies". Even if they are, they're probably just sweet white lies that doesn't hurt anybody at all, but rather, put them in a soft and comfortable illusion. In other words, yupx those "lies" are really for social decorum. Haha. But I feel it's more than that as well. It's more like "just trying to be nice". If life is so short, and you know the truth hurts (the truth ranging from not knowing the other party at all and therefore not knowing what the hell to write for that person to whatever else ________ fill in the blank), then why not use some uniform response that the whole world already knows about? The good thing about uniform responses like "friendly guy, cheerful girl, enjoyed meeting you, you rock, had a great time with you, remember me" and stuff is that you are saying that hey, I never had a chance to know you better, but if I did, we could become good friends and who knows what. I mean to say that you leave the other person on a nice note, and you're more like open-minded about that person because you haven't really formed a real impression of that person that goes beyond giving more than a uniform response, and it's a win-win situation because you guys might just meet in the future again. Okay, I'm rambling but I hope it makes sense. What's wrong with being nice and saying safe things like that? I don't think that it means that they are "ill-exposed to the Truer Stuffs". You know why? The thing is that if you stray away from those conventional sayings and you become honest about what you feel about that person, your honesty might be tinged with your first impression of that person which might not necessarily be correct, along with your subconscious biasness and what the hell of other more factors, which might hurt or offend the person since your description about him/her isn't right but it isn't wrong as well. I feel, and maybe normal people like me feel as well, that real and true honesty, should only be used on the people that are close to you aka the Truer Stuff thingy. For the outside world, you still have to have tact and be careful not to mean this or that when you really mean it. Actually anyway, I think that what they wrote and what you wrote for them all holds an identical purpose in mind, which is, like you said, "something of that sort, neutral and non-committal". Just that they used a convential way which irked you, and you used your own way. Of course, if everybody uses the same way, which they did in your case, there will be this mass-production thingy you were talking about. But they are normal people so they don't think so much about individualism at that very second that they wrote whatever they wrote. They probably know they aren't close to you, and being honest is weird when you haven't been honest right from the start. They've just been... trying to be nice and protecting who they really are or what they really feel from everybody else. But again, this might just be me. :) Oh by the way, were you aware that when you tried to be as honest as you could about thought of him or her, you were probably the only one who was showing who you really were? What you write arguably shows your character sometimes isn't it? Ay and 5 days might be a short time to actually get to know one another, but 5 days can be more than enough sometimes. Let's just say it depends on person X and Y, and how open they decide to be with each other from the moment they meet, and how compatible their characters are with each other, and what they do during those 5 days (talk or whatever). When you realized there was "the male-female divide", why didn't you take the intitiative to do something? Maybe if you sat with the girls, the guys would join you and that problem would have been solved instantaneously? Shrugs. You never know. About the value of tears, I agree with you. But just a thought, what if you cannot control your tears? Let's say you are on the verge of crying but you know it's not worth crying over people whom you’ve met for 4 days but you cannot stop your tears from forming and you cry? Hmmm... I don't think that person can be blamed for crying so easily. I don't think you can say that that person doesn't know the value of tears. Unless that person deliberately cries because everyone is doing it and he/she decides to act along or something disgusting like that, then the value of tears has been abused. Other than that, I thinks it's okay if you were to cry, if you really mean it. Hey that person could just be an emotional being. Tears isn't something you can control half the time, plus it's hard to really put a value on another person's tears. Do you also have to calculate how much tears that person sheds, how the person sheds it (maybe melodramatically), etc? Only the person knows lar, so why think so much about their tears? Just care about your own. Haha. You said, "if you want to fly high, fly alone." I thought that was a scary and sad thing that you believed. I don't believe in it. It would have to depend (yes, always, depend depend depend) on how wide the field is, how many people are on it, and how many of them are flying kites, and the weather even and what the people wish of you (maybe they want to drag you down so they can fly high you know less competition). I feel people aren't kites. Like. But they aren't. If what you say is true, I think it would be really lonely and I would rather not fly high at all. But that would be my personal preference of course. Some people don't give a damn about loneliness. Try flying a kite, and bringing someone else to watch you fly it. I should paragraph but oops. Haha. Okay, whatever whatever. If what I said made sense, that's good. If it doesn't, don't let it bother ya. Ta ta~ Faith.
FAITH! Look what you've done to my eyes: X_X
Some points here definitely worth thinking over, but I need to make some of my points clear too.
1)Does it really matter your honest opinions get waylaid by first impressions that are usually false? There is a difference between signing off in a autograph and writing off in a testimonial; the nice good stuffs come in the former but many frequently cut and copy it over to the latter. The point of a testimonial isnt to be an autograph. Of course, neither should it become a thrashing bag where you slam the person with all your negative takes on him/her--the important thing is honesty isnt it, and the praises I did give out were truly geniune.
2) This tact thing has been brought up repeatedly in my life. There are strong cases for the Be Tactful camp but I would wish to point out that in more cases than not, friction actually paved a unique sort of path between me and the persons involved. I tend to see it as an inversion of the route a friendship might take, bringing forth what years of friendship could cover up (but still flush out at some point in time) first.
3)Why didnt I take the initiative to do something? Because I am incapable of being a leader, and all thigns considered, would never ever try being one. (I dont know why my DISC profiling set me as an Influential-Dominant type but I suspect it was referring to how I love imposing my views on others and influence them subtly)
4)I didnt cry because I didnt feel any bond with them, not even my roommate though there was a time or two when we sat down in our beds and talked, and more than a time or two when we couldnt wake up in time, even with the guy pounding on our door for half an hour. Would I cry if I had significant bonds with them? Definitely--who wouldnt? But the thing is, (and I hope this doesnt sound too haughty), it's hard to get close to me and vice versa. This would give rise to the Lower, or rather, Different Standards approach.
5)Would a war veteran shiver and cry every night in his bunk? But surely he would still cry for his friends, and friends only.
6)Perhaps a less obvious lesson in the kite-flying experience is: If you want to fly differently, then forget about flying high. But that is wrong. It should be: When you fly high you cant fly differently.
7)Do paragraph. Alternatively, for people out there who have weak eyes, there's always the option of copying all this onto microsoft word and then fiddle all you want.
8)Lets go fly kite.
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