Loneliness is a lie.
I was waiting at Northpoint yesterday for KS and L when I saw those commercials/advertisements plastered all over the place persuading people to come back more shouting:
BE YOURSELF AT NORTHPOINT.
If at anytime someone tells you to be yourself, that someone is basically saying that the you as you are before his intrusion/comment wasn't yourself, and that you should revert to the you as you were after he rightfully(?) pointed out that you are not you.
But how would he know that you are not you when he isn't you? And if you were to listen to him and revert(?) to the you as you were before you changed(?), you'd probably change to a you as he felt you are/wishes for:
You used to be horny last time. What happened? C'mon, be yourself!
and in the case of commercials:
It's normal to spend money after getting your pay. Head down to X shopping centre and BE YOURSELF!
Note the use of exclamation marks, they are always useful in making the conversation appear more hyped up, sexcited, high, and everything positive, almost as if it's normal to do it and abnormal to not do it, thus scamming people to waste more money at the shopping mall in question.
I guess that about sums up the paradox in the statement of telling someone to 'be yourself'.
And as I was waiting for them, I thought about the feeling that everyone feels at times: Loneliness.
Note that I was 'thinking' and not 'feeling' it.
Why the sudden mention of that feeling?
Because loneliness and associated emotions, are all lies.
Let's revisit the definition of loneliness. From all the dictionary definitions, it means that the person suffering 'loneliness' is feeling lonely because he has nobody with him, or nobody who is willing to sympathize with him, or nobody that he can relate to.
From dictionary.com:
lone·ly [lohn-lee] Show IPA
–adjective,-li·er, -li·est.
1.
affected with, characterized by, or causing a depressing feeling of being alone; lonesome.
2.
destitute of sympathetic or friendly companionship, intercourse, support, etc.: a lonely exile.
3.
lone; solitary; without company; companionless.
4.
remote from places of human habitation; desolate; unfrequented; bleak: a lonely road.
5.
standing apart; isolated: a lonely tower.
They all revolve around the same thing--being alone, not having others share the same feelings as you, unable to relate to others. Which leads to my conclusion:
What you're feeling is never loneliness. It's a statement that you chose to stand apart from others. It's a snobbish act of saying 'I cannot relate to you'.
We've all tried to console someone in our lives before. Our sympathy/empathy for that someone would be apparent from the amount of time we're willing to devote to them to make them feel better. In short, we're always trying to relate to them, make them feel that someone else has 'been there done that', that what the consoled person is feeling is shared by you. You want the consoled person(your victim) to feel that you're quite like them, and so the consoled person would feel the warm fuzzy feeling normally associated with 'love', and go like 'awwww so sweet, someone knows me so intimately now time to give him a blowjob' or some related sentiment.
So if someone with friends feels lonely, he's saying that his friends can't relate to him, and that if they did try, their efforts were for naught.
Thus my statement that such people are snobbish.
But why would such people want to nullify the efforts of similar red-blooded humans? Is it because loneliness is a way to feel good about himself? I mean, it's deemed as 'cool' to be lonely, because being lonely means being in an isolated, emotionally detached state, and that's 'cool' because hardly anyone is in that state..
..or so they think.
Feeling lonely is simply telling of one's passiveness to try to reciprocate the act of relating.
Thus my conviction that loneliness is a lie.
Loneliness is simply an extension of laziness.
Lonely people never try hard enough to be understood. Or perhaps it's cowardice. Or perhaps they just want to feel special.
And because they aren't understood, they think that they are 'lonely', because they are unaccompanied by their friends in a certain state of thought/emotions.
Back to why I went to Northpoint on a Saturday night.
Everyone who've listened to choir performances would know that choirs normally spend their time singing weird songs in languages which normal Singaporeans can't understand. Weird language would be like Italian, German, American, etc. OK you get the drift.
They hardly sing English, and why is that? Is it because they're afraid of forgetting the lyrics and that the average Singaporean could be able to pick on their mistakes? Is that why they don't sing English?
So I was very turned on by the fact that YJC's choir was choir-ing with English yesternight. I mean...yea. It was just intense because I've never heard a choir performance in English before. But it sounded weird because you know the words and how they are supposed to be pronounced, but singing it in a choir would mean pronouncing the words in a slightly different way from everyday speech. That's probably why choirs don't normally speak English, it's just...weird and less mysterious and appears less classy.
But at least it's more honest.
I've always wondered why schools have their orientation camps based on Greek mythologies, legends from the past, constellations, Latin-random-stuff, et cetera. It's all so fanciful and mysterious and interesting, but all so distant, remote. Sure, you want to appear sophisticated, but beyond the realm of normal consciousness? I find that a bit screwed, and too forced.
What happened to the 'houses' of late, named after colours or Singapore islands or founding fathers of the school itself? Why the perseverance in sucking up to random shit that you can never relate to unless you're a _______ ?
(blank filled with: Greek, Latin, German, Italian, blah blah blah)
Why not choose something that everyone can relate to in which no explanation is required?
On the MRT to Serangoon, I was thinking of 'anger'. It's normally a trump card against invading people, it's a form of deterrence too. For example, if I'm bargaining at the market for cheaper prices, and after awhile of bargaining I express my anger/frustration: 'AIYA don't want buy already, I'm off', and if the shop owner is hard-pressed for sales he'd lower his price for you.
But if you keep expressing this anger, people get used to it. They don't know what's the maximum price you're willing to pay, and because they don't understand you they'd give up on you. And then you have no one to buy your meat from.
Anger, and the expression of that, shows the extent of your comfort zone. It demarcates the borders between what 'can be done' unto him, and what 'can't be done'. It's a game of brinkmanship if both parties start exploding with anger trying to make another back down.
Spam it and you become like North Korea--people don't know what you want, and people won't go near you if they have a choice.
Anyway, at the end of the day when the concert ended, I went to Serangoon to wait for WK. Then I bought cup noodles, he treated me to soya milk, and we camped at the lobby waiting for a star to appear.
Sitting on the steps eating cup noodles and dressing casually just seems so..paikia-ish. People going home at 12AM-2AM were like staring at us, but we were bored enough to carry on camping.
We observed a dude going up with a female, staying for around 30minutes, before coming back down to the lobby. With a white umbrella which he wasn't holding previously, and with an air of someone who had just completed yet another conquest(self-importance).
And we both agreed on the fact that if I knew how to whistle,
I'd probably have been parang-ed many times over for whistling at the most inopportune moments(at girls who're already attached).
-- 4/25/2010 03:16:00 AM
