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Have you ever asked someone to do you a favor, promise they will be there to lend you a helping hand, and then have them retract their hand, and along with it, their invested interest in your well-being? It's hard enough that the circumstances have brought us into difficult predicaments, but it's worse to have the light shining on us be suddenly eclipsed by a person's resignation of his/her's consideration, understanding and cooperation. It's like saying, "You were worth it at one point, but now, not so much."
I was put in this situation a couple of days ago. I asked for aid in my life, and the person abandoned me. If he couldn't have possibly performed the favor, mightn't it be easier if he had just said so in the first place?
It's a slap in the face if you ask me. I thought we were family... I thought we were friends. But I guess the feeling's not mutual.
Don't you hate it when you depend on another person's help, only to find out that it hurts you even more in the end?
The life of a university student is quite interesting. We are finally adults, responsible for our own money, time, property, physiological well-being, and general lifestyle, emotionally mature, with a supposedly more developed mental health, while also carrying the rights to marry, to vote, to work, to join the army, to drive, to travel abroad without parental consent, to drink, to smoke, to have sex, to gamble, and the list goes on. We choose how we want to live our lives, and in university, that largely includes the way we want to learn.
No longer must we conform to the timetable of high school, be obliged to attend classes, consult teachers about class content, have lunch at a reasonable hour, sleep at a reasonable hour, do our homework on time, or spend hours and hours studying for our tests. We are free of all obligations, our duties are for us to define. We can skip all of our lectures and seminars, we can forget about studying, get wasted every night, sleep in every morning, eat junk food everyday, revise for our examinations at the very last minute, and give less than a rat's tail about our assignments. The only drawback about that game plan is the fact that we would fail at the end of the year, and that's quite a lot of money to send down the drain.
One key thing that you may find different, is the fact that you don't need to take notes down anymore - it's not required of us anymore - as adults, we decide if it's necessary for our tertiary education. We can just sit there, cross-armed the whole time and put the gift of memory to good use by listening intently, taking it all in and deeply engraving it in our heads, or we could leave an audio recorder on the lecturing stand for aural replay on a later date.
But if you really wanted to capture the entire essence of the talk, if you really wanted to experience the lecture like it was exactly once again, you could get a video camera, and tape the whole damn thing.
I thought I've seen some stupid things in my lifetime. This girl put a video camera on the lecturing stand, to tape the professor giving the talk, and the reason for this was that there was nowhere else to put the camera. With the soft, cotton-filled, round-edged seats in the theater, the chairs were useless when it came to balancing anything on top of one of them. She could have just held the thing in her hand the whole time instead, but she probably figured she needed both hands to take down notes. The one thing she didn't figure beforehand was the fact that the lecturer didn't exactly stay at the stand, or in any one particular place.
In fact, the lecturer moved almost everywhere except the lecturing stand. When the professor was standing on the right, the girl student was happy, and she sat there - not listening to the professor - but always eying her precious visual project to make sure she was capturing the video (i.e., being distracted). When the lecturer walked over to the left-hand side of the lecture hall, the girl would get up from her seat, and turn the camera towards him. And then the professor would turn, and walk back in the opposite direction to the right-hand side.
This went on for about ten minutes, and the girl had gotten up seven times. She finally figured - she would have to stop getting up and sitting down - so she found a plastic chair and sat right next to the lecturing stand. This only gave her easier access to her camera, and she would tweak the angle at which her camera was pointed repeatedly at around one tweak per minute. She wasn't even listening to the man. The guy was telling us very interesting things, about the Azande people of Central Africa who believe in witchcraft, who purify their newborns by holding them over smoke, and whose criminal justice system involves determining a suspect's innocence in a crime by observing if a poisoned chicken dies or survives after ingesting a toxic substance.
And this girl wasn't listening to any of this. She kept adjusting her lens, tending to her sacred angle that had to be pointed at the professor at all times. She was distracting two hundred or more other students, and let's face it...
Why waste one hour or more in the future by watching it on tape?
You can just pay attention the one time, the first time, and that's the only hour of your lifetime that that lecture would take out of your time. If you videotaped all of your lectures, you would effectively be taking the same course twice, spending twice the time listening to the same content twice, not forgetting the fact that you would have to spend additional hours more dealing with the technology and the hardware.
Why bother?
This is a classic case of people trying too hard, but achieving less.
Alternative motives can usually be discovered where someone does something that seems good for you, when truthfully, they're doing it for unknown reasons of their own, and not because they want to be nice.
It's like the husband that comes home with gorgeous sparkling earrings because he did something wrong, or wants to have sex. It's like the parents that tell their child the house pet's gone to live on a farm to keep the kid from mourning over their pet's recent demise. It's like the kiss-ass at school, or in the workplace, that sucks up to the people in charge just to get ahead. It's like the older sibling that smokes and drinks to look cool in front of the younger sibling. It's like the friend that tells you he/she likes the style of your horrible clothes, or your tragic mess of a hairstyle, only to make bitching about you with others a helluva lot funnier, and juicier, afterward. It's like Jennifer Aniston showing up at the Oscars to show Brangelina that she's okay.
From what I see, it seems we do things with alternative motives everyday. We always want to keep up a reputation of being civil, funny, amiable, helpful, polite, loyal and cordial, and so we do nice things for people, we tell jokes, we make an effort to ask how people are when really, we don't care... not that much, not as much as the beneficiary might be led to believe.
And it's dangerous. Who knows who really cares? Are people just doing it because they feel guilty about something? Are people doing it because they pity you? Are people helping you to impress a girl, to impress your friends? Is your mother, or your sister-in-law, or your son, doing things to look good in the eyes of the rest of the family? Are people calling you up because they're just bored? Are people offering you aid because they want/need to feel wanted/needed themselves? Do bloggers around the world really mean it when they compliment you?
Do they, themselves, know they have alternative motives attached to their actions?
Am I being paranoid, or merely doubtful? Pessimistic, perhaps? Cynical? Distrusting? Or is all of society really this conniving?
They say that a real man admits his mistakes, and that confession is the first step in improving oneself.
I've been in a lot of denial lately - a lot, a lot, a lot of denial. And keeping my embarrassing stories and guilt to myself has been very emotionally and psychologically taxing, to the point where I've been extremely depressed. Withholding my emotions is really not in me, I cannot force myself to be a closed-off person, to be a secretive person... For a long time prior to a few weeks ago, I always wore my emotions on my sleeve, I let people see that I was happy or vulnerable or agitated because keeping a stereotypically Asian-style stoic demeanor is just too much damn hard work for me.
Last month, I sort of felt like I didn't need to tell anyone anything. I was sort of sick of myself, and I think people were getting sick of me, too. So I kept things to myself, and told myself and others that I was okay when, in fact, I was in denial.
It does take balls to admit you're failing. I'm currently thinking of the people in my class and in my family and a lot of them are pretty proud of a vast variety of things, as well. It seems like everyone hates to admit they're wrong, that they're lazy, that they're guilty of something.
I understand the feeling all too well... but ultimately, denial is a heavy weight for oneself, and a heavy injustice to others. The school I went to previously had a motto: Honestas ante honores. It means honesty before glory/honor, and it speaks a great truth.
If everything is concluded to be going alright, but some part of the premise is actually a lie conceived in denial, then everything can be concluded to be going wrong.
Tonight, I've finally asked for some help with my problems, after keeping them to myself for so long. It's the most appropriate sort of help, coming from the most reliable source, and I have faith in the fact that I will get the help I need. But my ego is hurting big time. I feel so small for having to depend upon another person... I need to be an individual, but it turns out I'm just not grown up enough yet.
I just have to suck it up. That's the whole trick when coming out of denial, isn't it? ...A lot of sucking it up.
This is a basic facet of social, interpersonal relationships that I don't understand. How the Hell does this happen? Who would be condemned to the Underworld? The one that meant his/her care less passionately? The one that gave advice or suggestions that didn't work? The one that has an inferior record of performing good deeds throughout his/her life? The one that had a slower reaction and offered help later? Or the one that took less time and effort to think of practical, acceptable solutions?
How is it that this happens? Who's to blame? ...I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
Have you ever tried to do a favor but realized you were taking too long to do it as the person you're helping stands beside you, anxiously awaiting your help to finish? The person you're helping sort of lingers behind you staring at your work over your shoulder, just waiting, waiting, waiting for you to be finished.
I made someone wait like this a few days ago and I then noticed that people always offer help but tend to be slow. Perhaps it's all subjective. While someone is doing something and you are doing nothing, you get impatient quickly. How do you deal with them?
Do you point out to them bluntly that they're too slow?
Do you ask if they could hurry up?
Do you lie and conjure up a reason to leave, maybe continue with the work at some later point when you'll feel more patient?
Do you tell them that you think you've got the hang of it and want to see if you can do it yourselves?
Or do you simply appreciate their help and wait until they're finished, however long it may take?
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