Wednesday, September 10, 2003

So the answers to the CAs were revealed today. As were my marks. I got 17 upon 20, which I thought was not too bad honestly. UNTIL people around me started making a big fuss about me not getting 20. Ok, so I was aspiring towards a full score, but I won't kill myself because I didn't attain that goal right?

Sometimes I feel that it isn't so great having a reputation of being brilliant at your studies and all. I must admit it's quite flattering to have everyone ask you questions and think you're some kind of genius or something, but the downside is that everyone expects you to be, well, god or something. They expect you to do all your tutorials 3 weeks before they are due, they expect you to get 90% or even full marks for your CAs, and they expect you to know the answers to every single question they have without having to turn to a textbook (after all if they could have gotten the answer from a textbook, would they have asked you in the first place?). It's an awfully high standard to live up to, especially for me.

It's all so superficial. People think you are intelligent and so they make friends with you, hoping that some of the brilliance (or so they think) will rub off. You feel like you have to project yourself into the preconceived image that they have of you, and so you pretend to know so much more than you do, when all you are good at is drawing lines of logic linking the knowledge you already possess together and drawing an intelligent solution. For me, it's just easy to draw the conclusions because I have a large database of information to work with initially.

So when someone asks you a question and you say honestly, "I don't know" because you have truly no idea, they look at you in disbelief or disappointment. It's like what matters to them is how many things you don't know, and not how many times you've managed to solve their problems. It introduces so many complex variables into the simple equation of friendship (to quote CG, whose short paragraph is very close to heart), and you feel that people start to judge you by how much you know and how much you don't. It's like evaluating every person according to the benefits you can reap from that person's knowledge, and then putting a price tag on the person according to his or her value. You might say I'm overreacting, and maybe I am, but sometimes I feel that judge my value as a friend by how much I know, and I feel intensely pressurised to know everything.

So what happened to simple friendship that was built on whether or not you got along with someone and the similarities between the two of you? This kind of friendship is far too mercenary in nature. Far too material. People pick you up like a dictionary when they have need for your knowledge and they shelve you away when they go out and play with their normal friends. So is that how it is with people who are more "brilliant"? Are they cursed that other people become friends with them only based on need?

I know, I know. I'm exaggerating things again. In fact, I have a lot of very good friends, and I'm not saying P and S are friends with me because of my usefulness. Sometimes I just feel that I'm so insignificant a person, so uninteresting, that it's baffling why people would want to make friends with me. I mean, I seriously suck at small talk, and that always leads to awkward and uncomfortable situations. And I seem to have suddenly lost my sense of humour, which used to sustain some interest in my conversations. Goodness knows when I lost it, but no prizes if someone guesses it was due to NS. Sheesh.

I'm starting to feel that I can't sustain a conversation if it isn't academic in nature. What is happening to me? I'm just turning into a dull geeky blockhead. It's no wonder I start to think that people want to be friends with me only for my usefulness. Sigh, this is like being paranoid about people making friends with you for your money, but of course I don't have money. I suppose other people think I’m rich in intellectual terms….

This starts the question again? Why shouldn't friendship be natural? Friendship is not something that can be bought, either by money or by an exchange of the person's inherent values. I'm pressurised to put in extra effort just to keep up with appearances, so that I can better answer questions pitched above the level everyone else is at. It's just so disturbing that I must be able to do such-and-such-a-thing in order to be someone's friend.

And just when I thought nothing could make it worse, I got abandoned in the lab during practical because THEY had already finished looking at their slides (were they even looking at their slides in the first place?) and couldn't wait to rush off to lunch with THE OTHERS. At least they were nice enough to come over and ask me, but after I asked them if they could wait for me, they just disappeared without a word. So amybe they were just being polite. Who knows? Oh well, I can take a hint when I'm given it. After all, I am the odd one out in their nice little foursome - I'm a non scout member, to be sure, and who can blame me for not fitting in with them. I can't be something I'm not just to make a few new friends, eh?

I don't want to sound bitter here. I mean, I've eaten by myself any number of times in secondary school and in JC to get used to it. I don't like loneliness, but I can live with it, if you know what I mean. So what is the point here, you ask? Do I look like I know anything about what the point is? I suppose I'm just whining about how alienated I feel.

It's almost as though I've been abandoned, discarded, shelved just because I haven't performed up to everyone else's expectations. A new edition has been published, so I can be sold like some NR book for $3. Is that it? Maybe not, but it's the prevailing feeling that I'm getting deep down inside. So maybe I feel disappointed, but why should I be. Part of me expected this, but another hoped that the first wouldn't be right. I'd like to be optimistic here, and say I still believe that it was just extremely bad luck that strung together one disheartening sequence of events. Chance and happenstance. Always happens in TV serials, after all.

But it sets me wondering, you know. About where I fit in with others. Everyone else seems to form nice discrete packets of social connections. Like the THEM and THE OTHERS. Like LY with C and SH. Like S and P and THEM and all their nice little christian friends. But me? I feel like a delocalised electron, a homeless kitten. I go with whichever group is in the fancy to accept me, tag along while others blaze their fiery trail through life. I come in once in a while, interact, and then leave, only to float into the orbit of some other group which will pick me up. Am I destined to be someone who tries so hard to belong but only alienates himself? Oh no let's not even go into the destiny thing here, eh?

Sometimes it's just lack of a person who feels the same way as you do. J was such a wonderful friend. Being in the provost like me, he totally understands how it is between those commanders and us men in the army (More about that on another time. Watch this weblog). But now there's that gap also, since I'm no longer in the army. Sigh, I really miss those days when he would always be there, enduring my insanity and weird behaviour. Oh dear, I'm getting really soppy here.

And of course there's Z. Now that's one friend who's sincere. Well, maybe not in every sense of the word, but at least he doesn't think I'm very great, which is very good; I'm sick of people repeating that I'm smart every other second - you know how stressful that is. So if any of my friends out there reads this, please, stop it with the genius thing already. For fun, yes, like GF, but seriously, NO. If I need flattery I can always do it to myself, all right?

And in the end it's all my fault isn't it? I just need to have a big mouth and trumpet my intelligence to every corner of the world, in the fear that no one will know of me, thus only increasing the stress that forces me to perform. And if I weren't so worried about getting full marks for the CAs, maybe the marks wouldn't have mattered.

EFGH really pissed me off today by going on and on about how I was having suicidal tendencies because I got 17. Please, do you think I'm that immature? I know you probably didn't mean it, but still, please don't ever do that again. I might just kill YOU.

No one is ever going to read this blog. It's light years away from a social commentary. It's more like the diary of some deranged schizophrenic. It's so disordered and abstract...

I suppose I'm the only one who can ever understand what I'm saying here. Well, the purpose I set up the blog is primarily to get things off my chest, after all. Who cares whether other people are going to understand it. Hmmph.

Avaris / 9/10/2003 08:28:00 PM

0 consumed