Friendship

How do we chose our friends? What distinguishes a friend from a mere acquantance?
Children are more likely to become friends when they are alike in age, sex, ethnicity, race and interests similar.
In adolescents, as in adulthood, it is similarity in attitudes, life goals, and intelligence that helps us establish a friendship.

Just recently i had a discussion with my friend about things/characteristics in personalities that we didnt like in other people. We ended up talking a lot about friendship and what it means to us, how we find friends and how rare they are.
For example, think your best, best, bestest friend in the whole wide world. How did you meet and how did they become your best friend?
How come we like one person but not another? It's because we look for oursleves in other people. we look for our attitutes and beliefs in our friends. We look for people who share those attitudes and beliefes as they are most likely to support us when it coems down to it. If you think about it, considering we are all different, everyone has the chance to have and make friends even people that you can't stand. Have you ever not been able to stand someone because their beliefs were just too different from yours so that you thought: how can anyone put up with this and be their friend?????

i know i have, not many times but once or twice have i met people that have just the complete opposite view of me and we just never got along. we didnt fight but we just didnt talk. we did our best if we had to work together in classes but that's about it.
I'm sure most of you have had similar experiences. I never qite understod that friendship phenomenon but i guess your clos friends now are close because of proximity and how much tim eyou spent and had to get to know each other. For example i had a best friend in austria before i left, we still send each other letters and keep in touch, keep each other updated in the happenings in our lives, however i do sometimes worry that maybe since i havent seen her in six years she might have become a different person by now. i now i have changed a LOOOT since coming to singapore. it's just very hard to be friends when you are thousands of kilometres apart. so i do think proximity is very important. however i also believe that distance helps establish whether it is real friendship or if it's just an acquaintance. For example, my friend and i have been writing each other letters for six years. there are quite a few people in austria that used to write me but then stopped because maybe it was too muc work to them and i just wasn't worth it. i dont know but i do know that i'll always appreciate my best friend who still writes me because she's my only connection to my home. My point is really, that it if you are still in touch after so many years you must have something special because it would be a lot easier to just go look for another friend. there are quite a few people that i know in singapore but only few that i know i will be in touch with if i leave singapore. there are just always people that you can trust with anything and then there'll be those that you can have fun hanging out with, but nothing more. Interesting.

Altruism vs. Egoism

This time i thought i'd blog about altruism and egoism. After watching American Idol's charity show called "Idol gives back", how many of you were in tears over the kids in Africa that die every 3 minutes of malaria, or maybe the thousands of children in the same part of world who have been orphaned because their parents died of AIDS and many of the kids themselves are HIV positive? How many of you cried? Even if you didn't watch it last week, think of another time you watched a documentary on poor countries and while you're in the moment, watching you cry, feel bad, want to do good. But how many people actually pull it through? How many wake up the next morning even thinking about the show or the documentary that made them cry?

For the few that do wake up with the will do change the world, did you do anything about it? What did you do?

It's very easy to say you want to change the world, you want to make a difference, but how many people actually end up doing life and world-changing things? And how many of those do it because they are philantropists, rather than that it makes them feel good?

I don't mean to attack you but i want you to really think about this:
I'm sure all of you have given spare change to a person in need at some point in your lives. What made you do it? Did you do it because you genuinely wanted to help that person and even after you gave him/her the money you were thinking about what his life must be like and how he must feel asking you for money? And who of you gave him the spare-change simply because you felt bad for the guy? How did that make you feel? Good? If that's the case wouldn't that mean that the reason you gave him the money in the first place, wasn't even to help but really, to make yourself feel better so you don't go home with a bad conscience? Do you think that's at all a possible explanation for your charitable-ness?
If the latter is true that would make this an egoistic motivation for helping where you may still be helping another person but doign it not for the sake of helping but to obtain any form of reward or to avoid punishment. The former would be an altruistic motivation for helping where the helper's end goal is to simply provide some benefit to another.

SO are we all really good people who want to help others or are we, deep down doing it all for self-profit?

My point really came up after watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and the episode where Phoebe tries to find a self-less good deed, but can't. can you think of one?

Comments?

Prejudice and Discrimination (against Overweight Women)

Someone made a comment today that prompted me to write this week's blog entry about prejudice and discrimination against overweight women.

Firstly I'd like to point out that I am pretty happy with my body; even so, when someone makes a negative remark it can be quite upsetting and make me quite self-conscious. Someone was looking at a picture of me today and told me (even though i never asked for his opinion) that my arms looked "flabby". Why is it that that comment upset me? it might be because the media has taught us that being bigger built or flabby are undesireable characteristics in a woman. however i think the main reason why it upset me is that it's bad enough if strangers judge you but you'd think that your friends wouldn't because they are your friends for different reasons. I just know that i never notice if any of my friends gain or lose weight. and it's not because i dont care about them but because i just don't find their outer appearance of importance. Unfortunately there seem to be people who do care about their friend's outer appearance.

Given the profound negative connotation of obesity for women, it is not surprising that even normal weight women tend to be very concerned about their weight.

Why are so many women unhappy with their body-shapes and sizes?
One reason is that they are constantly exposed to unrealistic standards of thinness.

I remember the first time i heard that Madonna (the singer) doesn't allow her children to watch tv or read newspapers/magazines and how i felt sorry for them. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=7&entry_id=1341)
I have to admit that by now I completely understand and i respect her for being so strong with her children. they might still grow up in the spotlight but they won't be (so) affected by the media in so many ways.
They will not grow up thinking slim in beautiful, they will make their own decisions and maybe not even stereo-type (as all of those ideas are formed by the media too, since the media likes to focus on negative news). For example, the only time mental illness comes up in the news it is usually portrayed in a negative light, thus the steroetype that the mentally ill do bad things.

Most parents try to shield their children from the world but fail by the time their children become adolescents. It is not even such an extreme action to be taken, but the same way cigarrette ads were banned from tv and news-papers, slimming ads should be banned too.

Am i getting off point here? I just want to add one last point. Singapore is especially bad when it comes to slimming ads and whitening ads. Telling their own country-men that they need to be whiter and slimmer to be considered beautiful. What is up with that? Telling your own people? I'd never seen slimming ads in Austria and even there I was aware of being a bit biger built so I cannot imagine growing up in a country like Singapore where the ideal body is advertised at bus-stops, on tv, in magazines and you are always given a brochure when u walk down Orchard Road. There is just no way of escaping from it.

It's just so sad.