anyone who has simply read my blog but never met me in person would believe i am an empty shell with little to no social skills and the number of friends that i have would attest to that.
many times when i read my on blogs, particularly on "good days", i always see myself writing as this really emo angsty kid. sometimes i find myself incredibly immature. and yet at the same time, i feel very immature for calling myself immature. did i just make any sense back there?
for purposes of understanding, good days are those where i am in a RELATIVELY good mood because the last thing i could remember happening was something pleasant.
i am incredibly pessimistic, the only things i am really optimistic about is the food i am about to eat later will taste good as long as someone other than my maid is cooking. i tend to, and i do fault myself mostly, proclaim that i have few friends on my blogs. on any good day, when i see this, i will think about all the good friends i have, which comparatively to maybe the most popular guy on campus, may be little, but to call them few is quite an injustice to them. on any good day , when i read my own posts, i feel a little guilty for saying that i only have so and so friends.
as a kid i always used birthday parties and birthday gifts as sort of a gauge to see how many friends i have. in recent years, if i get more than 2 i would jump for joy, and i'm not kidding about that. every birthday post that i have written about in my blog has been a "bad" one, and by bad i meant i only received a cake from my family and maybe a shirt or a card from someone considerate enough to remember. P.S thank you wen hui and also all the insurance companies. when i was in sec 4, i decided to change all that, i told myself that hey if i wanted more gifts, then i should do the same and give them to other people right, thats' how karma works. but it doesn't. eventually i started to feel that my gifts or gifts i shared in cost were becoming more and more insincere and i felt more like a chore than a truly thoughtful gesture. eventually i gave up on that silly idea and only bought and helped with people i truly cared about. it wasn't very often, but the feeling you get is infinitely more satisfying.
i often feel emotionally and socially crippled, maybe not as much as some people, but i do feel that there is a part about the nuances of society that i don't seem to be getting, which others do and that puts me at a disadvantage. i have rather low self-esteem if any of you guys have not yet picked up on that. many of my actions that i took in jc are merely "leaps of faith", hoping that if i do enough crazy things i wont appear insecure. but it never truly worked. i still am lousy at running despite 2 years of will run. i hang on the my broken shoes, as an excuse that i couldn't really let go of because i don't want to face up to the fact that i suck at running. i always tell others gp so easy what, just as a way to make myself feel a little better about what little strengths that i have, even though i always come off as a jerk. most of the times, i only realise how much of an asshole i am after the words leave my mouth. although i have no reason to apologize for giving others a reason to judge me, i have a strong compelling urge to say i'm sorry, for perhaps belittling you somewhat.
speaking about birthdays, i think the reason i get so upset is because i'm jealous of others. everytime i visit blogs or from other people verbally, i always see this recurring picture of lots of people surrounding them as they either have a meal or go out and have a good time. i see pictures of people who have enough gifts to put on the ground and take pictures without having to zoom in. and then on every 6th september, i look at the computer screen and walk around in my house with nothing but boxers and a big t-shirt, wondering what went wrong with my life. because every 6th september i am reminded that i will not have a great big birthday bash like everyone else. to be fair every birthday night i can expect a nice small little strawberry cake from my parents, and to that i really must say i love them. i don't tell them i love them enough.
i never fully understood the concept of humility and i feel that is also why i'm socially crippled. unlike many other traits or values, this is one that you cannot fully adopt and portray it. some people feel that imagination is the most difficult, but i do not think so. just think a little different from how you normally do, and stop applying logic and you should be fine. but humility is difficult, because it cannot be displayed prominently like perhaps courage or moral integrity. sometimes when people talk to me about my achievements, if i downplay it and say as if its' nothing or that its' very simple, people, particularly my mother, say i am arrogant. if i talk about it as my ego would allow me to, i come off as an even bigger asshole. if i don't talk about it people think i'm anti social. so i sometimes really do admire and perhaps be a little jealous of people who come across as humble. perhaps it's the little subtleties that makes it such a simple idea so much more complex.
for the sake of simplicity i will, as i have in the past, refer to anyone who believes in jesus, christians. because there are really too many splits if you want to nitpick
i actually wanted to use my little birthday analogy to start as a small little anecdote before talking about some of my friends. particularly the similarities. i noticed that i remarkably large percentage of people i knew whom i think, or at least gives the impression of having great social skills and hence numerous friends including many who are close friends, are in fact practicing a religion of some sort, most notably christians. granted i do have friends who are somewhat "meh" about any religious views, i have only met one person who is even remotely atheistic, despite the fact that i have 200 odd "friends" on facebook and probably more in real life. i think as a general approximation, i think that only may be 1 out of every 5 friends that are "meh" about religion, are relatively successful when it comes to socialising, whereas for religious friends it is the opposite, 4 out of 5 are great at socialising.
this has mixed implications on me personally, because on one hand cultural diversity, and on the other, it means my chances of finding a girlfriend are slimmer somewhat, considering that most christians i meet would RATHER have a relationship with people of the same ideology. it's one thing to be friends with someone with a conflicting mindset, but it's another thing altogether to have a relationship with someone of a conflicting mindset, especially when it comes to something as big as religion.
ok so now i'm going to base everything that i am about to write on the fact that religious people tend to be more socially "successful" or have a higher EQ for another interpretation and vice versa for non-religious people.
in sociology, the problem of causality would come into effect here. was it that the religious part the cause of such people's social ability, or was it just liek coincidence, maybe because christians make up such a big part that they overlap with people who do well. because both sides are in fact equally possible since chirstians actually make up more than 50% of singapore's population.
but based on my own personal experience, which i must stress is just opinion and not fact, is very simply that religious people, particularly people whose PARENTS preach to them, are the ones who have that extra opportunity to "practice" social interaction. i'll explain what that means.
parents who preach to their kids and bring them to any temples or churches, on a regular basis, like not just new year, who generally have kids that are exposed to more people. so as a kid you will have more time spent with other people, be it kids or adults. and you will pick up certain subtleties very early on compared to people who don't have that opportunity. it is akin to riding a bike. if you can't bike, and you always try to ride a bike everyday, eventually you will learn certain tips and tricks like the faster you go the more stable you are and looking down as you paddle will make you unstable. this are very fundamental and incredibly crucial subtleties that anyone who is already trained to bike will find it difficult to teach because you have already gotten past that phase for so long you forgot how it was to start riding. just like social interaction, the kid who does it everyday will pick it up faster than the kid who does it once a month. so that explains the ability point of view in the ultimate success of somewhat "religious" people.
as for the expanded network and circle of friends, its' actually quite simple. people who go to church have access to a larger group of people to talk to than people who don't. it's simple math. people can always try to "offset" that difference by taking up different hobbies that will help them meet people but then again so can religious people. often times, i have heard of people quoting stories from their church friends, and i always think to myself, how interesting can your church friends be.
as a kid, my parents never imposed any form of religious upbringing in me. they did teach me to be morally upright and honest and always say thank you, values oriented things. but none of what they taught me ever oriented from any kind of religion or even any story. they just said hey you should do this, otherwise other people will suffer, like e.g if you don't share, others won't get to play your toys and they won't share with you kind of lessons. i was a product of a christian convert mother, who never wears a cross and folds incense paper and a buddhist/taoist father who only prays to guanyinma and his late father, unless other people are around. while they have never explicitly stated how strong they were in their individual faiths, i think the main thing was that they never ever tried to influence me in any belief system. so i grew up learning to question others, i grew up question why i had to go to a temple when all the incense smoke was just going to make my eyes tear up, that was when i was a kid. in my primary school years, being in a catholic school, with prayers every morning, it undoubtedly had an impact on me. because according to what they said, everyone was a catholic. and i thought i was a catholic. i remember one time where there was this wishing thing they had where you would send letters to god, and all i wished for was so i wouldn't be careless and keep losing stuff. and my mum was like looking at me with this weird look, and said are you sure you're a catholic. of course i eventually understood that it was just the school and that i was not one of them even though they kept saying everyone believes in their god. as i grew older, i started to respect my roots, become more like my father somewhat, with a quiet respect for the unknown. my dad used to tell me, it's better to give offerings to the ghosts during the seventh month in case.
every time i tried to speak to any god, all i could ever hear was me replying in a slightly deeper voice telling me what i already know i should do.
after one particular incident, i questioned existence, and eventually came to the conclusion that there wasn't. for such a long time i had suspected that if there were so many religions how could i know which is the right one, but i never acted on that impulse. today i look at religion like how a historian would look at history, marvel at the great ones while respecting and admiring their own roots, no matter how detached they feel, there was still a small strand of connectedness with it.
i reflect upon this as i considered my own flaws. maybe that was why i am such a cripple. maybe i will never have a floor full of gifts. maybe i will never become anything more than an arrogant son of a bitch. but i know that inside me lies the potential to change all that, and whether or not i was put here by an almighty god does not matter, because my actions will determine my outcome, and i refuse to let whichever god you believe in take credit for that.
because this is my story, and this is how i choose to write it
this post was originally going to be named the impact of religion
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