Sunday, March 05, 2006

Chill

Thanks Wen for helping me come up with an interesting post title to my last post. I was kind of stuck trying to think of one for a while.

Anyways, although I've had a mostly relaxed week this week, I haven't really been motivated to post much. Why? I've had some random thoughts of stuff here and there, but none that seemed really significant enough or practical enough to make into a "real" blog entry. I spent a lot of this past week just chilling out, hanging out with people at Worship Cell and Lifesong, playing through a lot of X-Men Legends 2 with Wen and Duy, and having dinners with them and Alex Chen. Most of my midterms are done, and so I have a small break before my assignments will start to pick up again. Academically speaking, I'm doing "as expected", though I probably could be trying a bit harder.

Lifesong this year was another big drama production, this time featuring Herman's testimony. It was pretty cool to hear him share about his life and how he came to be where he is today. I thought about the people I knew who had lost a parent due to cancer or some other circumstance, and realized that I knew more such people than I had realized. Thinking about it sort of put a new perspective on things; it made me appreciate my parents even more, especially since they usually ended up spoiling me so much when I was younger. There were times when they were super strict too, but in general, I had a pretty good relationship with them, and it got better as I grew older.

Has anyone ever noticed that sometimes when you greet people, no matter if you're just chilling out or passing them in the halls, they sometimes go on autopilot and not really hear/read what you say? For example:
1)
Me: So how was Lifesong for you?
Friend: Oh, it was okay, I had a midterm on Thursday, it went pretty well...
Me: (I guess he figured I'd ask him how his week was...)

2) (Over MSN)
Me: Hello sir. What's up?
Friend: Not bad thanks. What about you?
Me: (That didn't really answer my question...)

At first I thought that maybe the other person just wasn't fully mentally in the conversation at first. I figured it was a psychological thing, that they would asssume that this social interaction would start off like most other social interactions usually do. But then I thought may be it was my fault for speaking too softly. (at least in the non-MSN cases) I've had a fair number of people not hear what I say clearly in converastions, and I've had to repeat myself. Though I might be just exaggerating the number of those occurrences in my mind. Memory is easily affected by our emotions, after all. So what do you guys think? Do I speak too quietly sometimes? How often do I do it? Should I try to talker louder than I normally do to make up for it?

4 comments:

transcendent said...

Interesting post, sir!

Btw, I was planning to write up a review of XML2 (interesting acronym, hmm) at some point, but I'd like to read your thoughts on it. So how about it?

Theomnifish said...

haha...hmmm, perhaps I will write a bit about it...maybe after my midterm on Tues. I could ask Duy to write about it too; after all, it does seem like a game he would blog about. (He blogged a lot about Tales)

Ambrose said...

I dunno, if there's a game that Duy can blog about it's WoW, and I haven't seen many entries from him on that =p

Relaxing is good, go get those guys in CCF warmed up in Smashy! =p I wanna try next term, heh.

Speech volume is also a problem that I have. One way is to intentionally speak louder, or like, shout a little. What sounds loud to you might not be so loud to others.

Unknown said...

I'm not assertive enough, that is all. I have thoughts in my head, like ways I can help the person, but then sometimes I just stand there and listen...

OOOH, we should ALL write about XML2..