I’m still a child in many ways even though I’m at an age that’s considered old by many.  Looking at the slightly younger girls around me, they all seem very mature, much more mature than I am.  They are very polite, caring in a motherly way, never acting out inappropriately… these are all actions and attributes that society has determined a mature, adult female should exhibit.  But looking more closely I recognize some smaller, subtler actions that show they are still maturing, that they are still trying to assert their individuality, or “finding themselves”, to say in a very cliche way.  They have yet to realize their individuality needs to shine through naturally and the harder they try to assert it the more posing they come off as.  This is a very cliche topic in itself, but I see these little things girls do and it gets under my skin.  I was once one of these childish girls, having done all these things that they’re doing now, and now I look back and I point and laugh at myself and I want to yell at other girls not to do these inane things.  Things like developing their own “writing style”.  You see this all over Facebook, where girls would tYpE LiKe tHiS and put punctuations marks in front of sentences as well as after or basically all o.v.e.r. the frickin! place! and… there’s nothing wrong with being unique, but why try so hard?  Why not put your efforts somewhere else?  If you see them drop their thing after a short while it means they have thought long and hard before they did it and it’s not really part of who they are.  Yes I’ve done this myself before.  Now I try to develop a writing style that is easy to read, clear and concise, and has a nice smooth flow to it.  There are also shows and books out there these girls tend to like, such as Nylon.  I used to like Nylon myself but it got annoying after a couple years.  The writers themselves wrote like insecure, pretentious young women who branded everything they discovered as the best thing since the internet and again, there is the whole ideology about being different and individualistic that they must shove down your throat.  And then there are shows like “Sex and the City”, which I’ve never ever ever liked and which I’ve heard someone describe as “toxic”, which is true.  Not only is the acting and writing atrocious, which is beside the point, but it again indoctrinates that women must be strong and independent and confident and being in control of your life.  That’s all fine and swell but it is absolutely not necessary to defend your shit by manipulating men and endlessly thinking your current relationship is not good enough for you.  This is what impressionable young women start believing after watching this kind of propaganda and you see girls all over being whiny and dramatic over every little thing that happens to them.  Nothing is good enough for them anymore and they must strive for what others have inspired them to believe are better.  Honestly, if things were bad for them, why hadn’t they realized it before someone else pointed it out to them? Could it be because things weren’t bad in their own eyes to begin with, but only bad in other people’s eyes, and now they’re just being influenced by other people?  So are they such an individual now?  How are they an individual when they’re changing because of something someone else said?  Also, wearing a Dior t-shirt with a giant tutu doesn’t make you an individual; it makes you ugly.  There are so many more things in the world that are more important than showing off your individuality and showing others that you’re a “strong woman”.  There’s nothing wrong with being strong and unique but the key is “being”, not “showing”.  People say girls mature faster than boys, but I don’t know if that’s true.  Boys seem immature because they screw around and make dirty jokes, but this behaviourial immaturity has more to do with their personality than their level of thinking.  It probably also has more to do with the fact they are boys —boys are more carefree and risk-taking by nature.  At the same time, boys can have very deep thoughts and be quite worldly in their views, whereas girls’ main thoughts are very often focused on themselves.  That’s not to say I’m not self-centered myself, and in addition I’m still quite immature.  But I don’t care about how I appear to others anymore.  All I care about is keeping my job and improving myself and getting over this stupid cough.  Attempting to be unique hadn’t gotten me anywhere and, as ironic as everything else in life, trying so hard to be different because others say you should only showed what a conformist I was.  Alas.  I didn’t enjoy writing this because it was so preachy and bitchy and everything I say sounds stale, but it feels good to get it off my chest.

Sometimes people react to things in ways that I’m not used to, and I get annoyed.  Eventually I realized these are nuances I should appreciate; who wants to interact with a whole world of clones that act the same way?  I mean, unless they’re really annoying.  But we as humans are given the ability to adapt to various environments, and the culture that arises from a given group of people is a kind of environment that we should be able to adjust ourselves to evolve in, and that culture encompasses their type of behaviour.  I suppose we’re not always successful in adapting, but we should still try.  Being successful doesn’t mean that we adopt their ways of behaviour and thinking, but that we are able to accept it and collaborate with them amiably without losing ourselves.  Now ‘losing ourselves’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘changing ourselves’ — if we find other ways of thinking and behaving that are superior to ours, it only makes sense to embrace them.  I really mean ‘losing ourselves’ by the way of us pretending to agree with the values and preferences of others when deep down we don’t, thereby deceiving others and sometimes ourselves.  So the adaptive skill is what I wish to attain; most of the time I simply get visibly annoyed at others and I’m starting to annoy myself by doing so.

It wasn’t until I was talking to my friend that I realized a small 30-persons company is just as clique-y as a small colonial-sized company.  When you’re working in a 1500-people company it’s impossible to know everyone and it’s inevitable that you’d only hang out and become good friends with your teammates.  But even in a smaller company where you know everyone by name, you pick and choose your friends, and be picked and chosen by.  Usually you hang out with the people you sit close to, but it only works out if your personalities, age and background are close enough.  It’s unfortunate if you don’t happen to sit close to people you could mesh well with because you’re destined to be a loner in the office.  There isn’t really any other opportunity to make friends unless you bump into people in the kitchen and start having an awesomely deep conversation with them… and even then you couldn’t really sustain it unless you continue the connection in some other way, such as asking them to lunch, which is difficult to do naturally if you don’t sit near one another.  So what I’ve gathered is, there will always be cliques, sometimes even with as few as 3 or 4 people, and the geographical location is one of the primary determinants even though it’s one of those that should matter least.

I never knew whether feelings were controllable.  All I ever know is that there is always a voice in the back of my head and somehow it persuades me feel a certain way about things.

I’ve just realized that little voice is always the voice of Big Em.  And it’s horrible because she is one of the angriest person I know.

I need to find a different voice.  The voice of a calm, rational person.  A voice that would always tell me everything is okay, there is no need to get defensive, the world is not out to get me.

I want the voice of a smart eight-year-old.  Or Arale the cyborg.

It bugs me whenever I tell people I’ve watched a movie or read a book, and one of their first questions is “What was your favourite part?”  Sometimes it bugs me because it’s hard enough determining whether I like something, let alone identifying one single part that I like the most.  Sometimes it bugs me because there are parts that stick out and I remember them whenever I think of the book or movie, but I don’t necessarily even like those parts.  Most of the time it bugs me because I tend to see a book or a movie as a whole and it doesn’t make sense for me to like or dislike parts of it in particular.  I don’t blame people for asking this question.  I blame elementary school teachers.  It may have even begun in kindergarten, but right from when we were wee-lings we were always asked in class which was our favourite part of some story.  Everyone knows it’s to test whether we have done our homework or whether we have been paying attention.  The question isn’t asking what it’s asking.  And the question is pointless when it’s asked by the chum sitting beside you in the theatre.

Music is very important for my sessions. When I say ‘unworldly’ music, I mean music that makes me feel like I’m not here, that I’m someplace else, possibly in another realm. And that it’s okay even when I’m by myself at that place. It’s the kind of music that makes you not feel lonely even if you’re alone, as long as that music is there enveloping you. This kind of music is capable of making me feel displaced when I listen to it, but in a good way. It instantly makes “life” feel better, like it doesn’t matter much even if something crappy happens to you, because you’re really only a fleeting speckle of dust in this world and you don’t really matter (again in a good way), and hence the things that happen to you matter even less. Music that has the ability to take you somewhere else is good music.

I have this occasional habit of standing in front of my bedroom window late at night with some sticks and some unworldly music playing in the background. It’s a good time for some deeper thinking that can’t be done during the day. It’s also a good time for making unusual observations. Tonight I saw a white-lighted flying object with a flashing red light cruising from east to west, which I see occasionally and therefore isn’t unusual. But then I saw another similar flying object going in the exact opposite direction, and from where I was standing it looked as if they were at the exact same height. In actuality they were probably quite a distance from each another. This doesn’t sound very interesting, but at the moment when they were about to pass one another I honestly thought there was going to be a colossal collision. I was already envisioning how the sparks would fly before they actually crossed paths.

A moment later a bigger (probably just closer) object of the same kind flew by, from west to east. That’s it.

It’s uneventful on most of the nights I do this, but here are some things I’ve observed on other nights:

A car parked in the middle of the street with its engine running. It stays at the exact spot for at least 45 minutes. I start imagining what’s happening inside. It involves a couple and a dare (my mind never goes much farther than that, really).

My Korean neighbours coming home at 3 in the morning. This has been observed several times.

My Korean neighbours watching “Underworld” (or its sequel) on DVD, or maybe blue-ray. It’s definitely high-def. This is the only time I’ve seen them use the living room.