Life Philosophies #1: Empathy

It is impossible to hate anyone that you understand, because the second that you understand someone you are making links with them, connections between the way they act and the way you’ve acted. Connections between their internal motivations, their hopes and dreams, their relationships, and yours. It is this concept that gives me this incredibly idealistic and probably naïve belief in people and their ability to just ... be humans: empathy.

We all have the ability to understand each other because of our common humanity. Some people you have to try incredibly hard to understand; others you just naturally connect with so deeply that you know how they are going to react to any given circumstance. Then there are people who won’t try to understand others because it offers justification for the way someone interacts with you; if it’s not a positive interaction, then it can be daunting to understand why it was that way. Then there are people who are just so optimistic and idealistic that they can’t help but spend hours in other people’s heads, trying to work out the mechanics of human beings until they come to the conclusion that everybody is inherently good.

I’m one of that last kind of people. I’ve resolved that it’s not necessarily a good thing.

When I was about six, I remember having the biggest breakdown psychologically. I was in my bedroom one night, I don’t know what I was thinking about, but I somehow decided that everyone in the entire world could be a robot and I would never know, because I could never see what was really going on in their head. Everything I saw was a façade, every action a performance of the ideal person. It’s all very Hamlet. But as a little kid the thought isolated me and I became very locked up in my own head, until I decided the best way of being a human was to trust the fact that there was some spirituality (not necessarily religious) that linked us all and that was when I promised myself that I would always remember that all people are people are people are people.

Not robots.

The thing is, it makes it very difficult to hate others. This is a good thing in a way, hate is soul-destroying and just generally disgusting. But it’s easy. And if you don’t naturally like someone, the thing about being incredibly empathetic is that you just keep working away to find something beautiful and good about them. Sounds like a good thing, right? I suppose it is but just ... once you understand them, you connect with them, you know how they’d feel if you did something that might hurt them, and you just generally end up hating yourself that little bit more.

Hence why not being empathetic is easy – you then have justification for not being good to people all the time.

I think you have to be a very, VERY good person to be able to empathise with others and not end up feeling kind of shit, just generally.

Alright that’s my philosophising for the night, Lox just got back from the Gold Coast and I’m super pumped to talk to her for a bajillion years. So I’m going to leave you now. Look forward to more philosophising in the future.

Love you like being human or something.

x

It's Time: Plottier

I think it’s time that I shared with you a very interesting time of Lox and my high school careers, seeing as said career will be finished shortly and I won’t have much of an excuse to revisit it.

In year eight and nine (before I tired of it) I did debating after school and in year nine our tutor was this guy called Kelvin. It seems weird now but apparently he was 18 when he taught us. He seemed to be constantly uncomfortable in our lessons (perhaps not used to teaching a large number of squeaky 14-year-old girls?) and I liked to make fun of him. So did Lox. She loved to come up with pranks to pull on him and she called them plots. So one day I wrote this little short story for her and called it Plottier for said reason. (I feel as if I am giving away all of our in-jokes, Lox. I’m sorry. This is all for you <3)

*

Plottier

For Loxie

Kelvin Yu was not, perhaps, the most physically gifted male in his year group, to say the least. He was quite short and scrawny with a comically high voice, which amused itself by saying the word ‘like’ almost as often as the stereotypical brat often portrayed in American teen angst movies. His hair stuck up at all angles in a fashion that J.K Rowling would be proud of, and if he was to be reincarnated everyone believed that he was to be a mouse. The baby of his group, his skin was conceivably pale from the many hours of studying he had partaken in during his senior years of high school in order to achieve his UAI of 99.65. As it was, this was an astonishing fact, his tagline that he pulled out quite often to, really, any girl that he met. He seemed to cry out at any possible opportunity, “I may be scrawny, small and own an awfully girly voice, but at least I have the means of securing a high income!” And it was true. He was rather clever, and everyone knew. He was a debating tutor, after all, and had an incomprehensible knowledge of anything to do with anything happening around the world at any given period.

Kelvin taught at his old school. Sydney Boys’ was practically the only school in all of the Sydney state that he could feel comfortable teaching at. That’s just how it was. A given. A set fact that could not be altered in any way, shape or form. It was known, agreed, specified, prearranged, certain. Whatever word his thesaurus brain could arrive at, his job was it. Until, of course, a distress cry came via the form of a curiously misspelt text message from a friend of a friend; a debating coach from Sydney Girls’ High.

“Kev,” it said, confirming Kelvin’s initial impression that the text was from someone he didn’t truly know, “we @ SGHS hav 1 coach <. Need nu 1. Plz come or else will all hav 2 teach more kids. Repli ASAP. Luv, Gina.”

At first, Kelvin had blinked. Twice. Then he had put down the phone. Sydney Boys’ was his home. He couldn’t teach at more than one school anyway. Right? But then he looked for the third time, and thought of the pay. He replied quickly to this Gina in affirmative. He was going to teach at Sydney Girls’ High.

And now the day had arrived. He scanned the sheet he had been emailed, sight-reading hastily in order to find his name. Finally he saw the bold-lettered “Yu”, and quickly ran his finger across the muddled table to see which year he was to teach. The number seemed to explode out of the page. He felt his body going weak. His class was year nine.           

The group of students that Kelvin taught at Sydney Boys’ was a year nine group, too. It was merciful bliss if ever he could get them to listen for a moment, let alone use the correct structure for first aff. He couldn’t imagine the terror of a gossipy, loud and squeaky class of hormone-driven fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls. What if their voices were squeakier than his?

In the car park of the girls’ school, Kelvin sat in his tiny blue car with the dent in the boot door. His class began in less than five minutes. Kelvin began to get terrifyingly nervous. He ran his hands through his hair until it stood perpendicular to the roof of his car. He bit his nails until they had all been ripped off. He must have checked his fly now for the hundredth time, and of course he had practiced using a low voice. Nothing was to go wrong.

Confidently he swung the door of his car open and leapt out. He could hear shrieking laughter coming from the classroom above. A girl with dark hair looked out, and screamed in such a high voice that it rivalled his.

“OH, MY GOD!” She screamed. “He’s a guy!”

Kelvin coughed a couple of times and flashed the girl a bracing smile. Quickly, not wanting to be seen near the shrieking girl, he slammed the door of his car shut and walked away. Or at least, he attempted to walk away; his shirt had gotten stuck in the door and he was wrenched back against his car almost indecently. The girl in the window laughed loudly before clapping her hand over her mouth and ducking down. She had seen him seeing her.

Kelvin cursed his chances and proceeded to remove himself from the car roughly, thus ripping the back of his shirt. His jacket covered the rip mostly but Kelvin truly wasn’t having a great day. And he hadn’t even properly met Louise yet. His life was about to get much Plottier.

*

P.S. This isn’t entirely a true story.

P.P.S. I did write this when I was 14. Please don’t blame (current) me for its oddness.

Bruv just came into my room and proudly spurted a brilliant pun. “I went camping the other day ... it was intense!” (In tents? No?) How I do love him.

Love you like fridges in suits (I won’t give away all our in-jokes just yet).

x



My First Romance

I was thinking about how interesting our high school reunion is going to be when I was suddenly thrown back into a forgotten memory with such force that I almost relived it. You know when you remember something that you haven’t for a long time and you feel as though you’re reading an old book, because it’s so foreign yet so familiar? Well that’s what happened to me.

When I was seven or so, we went to my mum’s twenty-year high school reunion at the Hydro Hotel in Leeton, a small country town close to Wagga in NSW. And in this hotel I met my first love.

His name was Jack and that’s pretty much all I remember about him, unfortunately. But during the weekend we stayed in the Hydro, we played together all the time. I remember being in the beer garden of the hotel and feeling like Mary in The Secret Garden, which was my favourite book and movie when I was little. I was Mary and he was my Dickon, and it was all very romantic.

I had this feeling that the hotel was haunted, although at that age I had a bit of a thing about ghosts, and everywhere I went I thought had some sort of spirit lingering there and talking to me; the Hydro, and holiday house we rented once in Berry, even the house next door to my primary school. I was a veritable ghost whisperer, like that television show with that woman who looks as though she is in a permanent state of distress in it ... um, moving on. So Jack and I did some investigating in the grandfather clock in one of the rooms, and we even went into his bedroom (the floorboards were dark wooden and there were trains everywhere, from memory), which, being Not a Teenager, was not weird at all.

Just before my family left to go back to Sydney I remember playing along the side of the hotel with milk cartons, all the grass was burnt yellow, there were weeds everywhere and broken bricks.

Anyway, that’s all I can really remember of my first beautiful romance, tucked away in country New South Wales. And don’t worry! Being seven (7), nothing untoward happened. It was just nice, as far as I can remember.

Love you like little kids in “love”.

x

My Brother is a QT

Okay so I have a younger brother, occasionally referred to as ‘bruv’ on this blog, known as Patrick, Patch, Patchy, Pat, Patty in real-life situations. Right now he’s in his terrible teens, he’s fourteen and the most annoying person you have ever met. EVER. I swear I wasn’t as awful as that when I was fourteen. Sometimes, however, you just have to remember the really, really cute times, and then use them to embarrass him.

So two such cute times that I find funny/cute.

1.       We had just seen the first Harry Potter film. It was around Christmas time in 2001 so I would have been *awkward mathematics moment* seven and Patch would have been four. So we come out of the theatre into the shopping centre and, because it’s Christmas, there’s a bit of a nativity scene thing going on. My brother looks at it for a little while and, with his shock of Weasley-eque red hair gleaming in the fluorescent lights, turns to my dad and asks, “Daddy, is that Harry Potter?”

Oh yes, all you people who billed Harry Potter as satanic and devil-

worshipping, my little brother mistook Baby Jesus for Harry Potter when he was four years old. IT WORKED.

2.       Remember primary school talent quests? I won one in year six with a bunch of girls from my class, we sang Joy to the World (Three Dog Night, not Christmas carol) with actions. My brother won one when he was in kindergarten. FOR BEING CUTE. -- There was this girl in his kinder class called Kaila. I like to think that they

were in love, even though he denies this profusely, even almost ten years after the event. (Still has a photo of them up on his notice board. I go in your room, Patch. I see these things.) Anyway, they were both tiny baby red-heads and the cutest things in the world. Patch and Kaila even spent a couple of afternoons at each other’s houses to practice for the Talent Quest. And on the big day they got up on stage, and Patch took out his kazoo, and Kaila sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and he did the accompaniment, and it was the cutest thing ever. 

               

Hope that made you smile! Anyways, it was better than Ben Tooth and the other year four boys stripping to It’s Getting Hot in Here. Ah Ben Tooth. Does anyone remember/know that guy? All the girls in year three thought he was shoooo attractive. A friend of mine caught the shirt he threw at the audience (while he was stripping to It’s Getting Hot in Here) and hugged it and I thought I was going to be sick.

What can I say? I was a very innocent eight-year-old AS ONE SHOULD BE. I saw a boy and suddenly was like EWW A BOY. BOYS' GERMS. I still do. I actually used to pretend I was physically allergic to boys so that they wouldn’t be my partner in lines to get into the Italian rooms in the morning. Typical Clare conversation in primary school:

                BOY:     Hey Clare. Can I be your partner for lines?

                ME:       Oh gosh, I’m sorry. I’m allergic to boys.

                BOY:     Oh sorry! I’ll stand over here then?

                ME:       That would be greatly appreciated.

Just putting it out there: no longer allergic to boys. Especially not Swedish ones. *Wink*

Love you like the good ol’ days of boys’ germs and Talent Quests and Baby Jesus.

X