Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Networking & Paper
Networking... Probably one of the things I hate most about adulthood.
I hate it when people whom you have barely met for five minutes try to get to know you... For the sake of getting to know you on a superficial level. These people usually want to suss out:
a) What sort of person you are
b) What things you can do
c) How what you can do may benefit them in the future
Option C is exceptionally annoying, but sadly it's also the quintessence of networking. I genuinely believe that when people network, 90% of the time it's because they want to know what they can get out of you, when they need you. I can't deny I haven't asked my friends to help me out when I need them (e.g. asking Kenny to act for my LocVid Adapted Project) but AT LEAST I ask my FRIENDS. If you network, and then you get to know a person for a day, add them on Facebook/get their contact numbers, AND THEN ask them for a favour... You are seriously asking for a beating.
I can't say I've ever been an immediate victim of networking. Well true, on multiple occasions (especially when I was an Exco in Council), people have tried sucking up to me and getting into my good books (just as a note, these people usually give up because I always realise what they are trying to do and I always end up playing and toying with them or dao-ing them). But no one has ever really made use of me, I guess perhaps because I am the sort of person whom people think has no apparent talent in anything. That, or even when people recognise the things I'm adept at, usually they'd know someone else who can do it better. Or my skills are not very useful in most situations.
But I have been a victim of the whole "Networker gets to know you > Adds you on Facebook > Ignores you thereafter" scenario. And I HATE it when people do that. I HATE it when people get to know me just because I might be a potential lifeline (or slave, more like) in future situations. I really despise these people although I know tons of people (adults, especially) do it.
I just hate it when people network and then ignore you forever, because it proves that from the very beginning, the only reason they wanted to get to know you was because they knew you are another person they might be able to exploit for their own selfish gains. But if you maintain relations with the people you network with, I actually think it's okay. It shows that you are actually trying to establish a friendship. It shows you actually care about the person.
On a very different note, I've been pretty vexed about one person recently but I'm trying not to care. Unfortunately, my attempt at indifference usually comes crashing down whenever I check my Twitter. Said person updates his Twitter quite a lot, and whenever I see his tweets, my heart does that thing where it sinks a little (although this is not physically possible, hahaha).
The situation is, as I frequently say, complicated/complex/hard to explain.
I want to explain, write his name right out over here but then I realised there are people reading my blog and I feel like maybe it's not such a good idea to do that after all. But I guess explaining the situation wouldn't be that bad – what I'm afraid of is the mortification of recording his name down. When I used to write in diaries in primary school, I would sometimes write about my crushes (names included, of course). Reading those entries never fail to make me cringe because it's just so humiliating. So I am not going to repeat this mistake LOL. If anyone wants to know who this person is, you can ask me personally and I'd tell you.
So this friend, as you should already know, is a guy. We have known each other for really long now, but we only became good friends in recent years. We would talk sporadically, and the conversation would always flow really well. I guess it was during these conversations where we became close. Our friendship was always fine and smooth-sailing; I suppose it's because I never expected anything from him, because of how infrequently we spoke. But I could tell him many things I daren't tell other people, and I guess his perceived value of me as a friend (omg I'm such a diligent Marcomm student, "perceived value") was equal to my perceived value of him, because he told me things he had never told anybody else before too.
We were pretty tight, except we didn't talk to nor hang out with each other a lot, which was why it didn't feel like a close/best friend thing. I guess it's sounds really incredulous, but the cause of the start of the degeneration of our friendship is actually... Paper.
Well, not paper per se. What happened was this: I had a bunch of documents I had to print out for school. It only struck me sometime over 9 PM that my household ran out of paper, and Popular was closed (which means I couldn't pop downstairs to buy paper).
Normally I wouldn't have done this, but because he and I happened to be texting that day and because he lived around my area, I called him up and asked if he had paper to spare me. He checked and said he didn't, but I asked him to help me ask another mutual friend (he was closer to the mutual friend) for paper. We ended up at Mutual Friend's house talking till over 11 PM.
Soon thereafter, maybe the week after this paper incident, I made an impromptu decision to catch a certain bittersweet movie because I was having one of my bad mood days. I asked him out because I felt a certain sense of closeness to him, and I knew he wouldn't find the sudden/random invitation strange. We hung around the mall because there was some time before the movie started, and Mutual Friend joined us too. We all cabbed home together after the movie and as I was walking home, he texted me "Text me when you reach home! I want to talk to you ^^", and talk we did. We began to text consistently for a while.
This is getting too long-winded so I shall cut straight to the point. One day, we decided to go study together because he had work to do and I had a Common Test to study for. He is such a nice person, I honestly think I might have had a crush on him. But I know better than to act on infatuation. After he finished work and I decided to conclude my study session, we went to walk around and we spent the whole day pushing each other around and laughing at each other. I guess it was then we got too close, because after that he started to be rather aloof towards me hahaha
Now we don't talk anymore, and even when we do, it's not like the way we used to. I also managed to confirmed he was avoiding me because when I texted him a while after the day we went to study, he would take ages to reply (he used to reply immediately, almost like we were really talking in person). He would lie to me and say that his phone died when really, he's been posting on Twitter and talking to other people on said social networking platform while his "phone died" (you were too careless, my dear friend... Or maybe you did it intentionally because you wanted me to know?).
I was vexed about it, am vexed about it whenever I'm reminded of it, but I'm adopting my usual tactic towards such situations – "I don't care." But right now I still care and I know I care but eventually I won't care, no matter how long it takes. Because right now I hardly even care about the things/people that bothered me really badly this time one year ago.
This concludes the end of an incredibly long post. Goodnight
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