There is one new classmate who is driving them nuts. Every chance they get, they complain about her. Being on the outside now, I've been preaching tolerance and patience. Give her chance, they've only known her a couple weeks. If we had judged each other so quickly last term, maybe we wouldn't be friends now.
But with my interactions with her, I have to admit that I'm asking a lot. She's pretty wack. They have to deal with her in class, and that is apparently bad enough. Outside of class I've witnessed quite a few of her "what the hell?!" behaviors.
She is ethnically Chinese, but she was adopted by a Swedish family and raised in Sweden. I'll call her "Emma" (not her real name). She is quite the princess, living in her own self-centered world. She aware of this. She says as much. She lives in a world where it's all about her, but she knows that there is a world around her that isn't responding to her demands to be all about her.
I sat with her at lunch yesterday, and she complained about the food in Taiwan. Taiwan, mind you, is a place where no one will ever starve. Unless you're an overprivileged princess from Sweden. And I don't know if she's overprivileged, she just acts that way, which in some ways is even sadder.
I feel most sorry for people who have gripes about food. Food, this sacred commodity, this human right, what we need to survive, what so many people in the world don't have enough of.
I generally make a point of not being picky about food. If it has been "offered" to me in any form, meaning that it's in front of me, I at least try to accept it, and avoid situations where the food may be too repulsive for my sensibilities.
In reference to practice, eating meat is not an issue for me in this lifetime. Maybe it was in a past lifetime, maybe it will be in a future lifetime, but in this lifetime, it is OK for me to eat meat. When I eat meat, I'm mindful of it, and when I eat meat, I'm aware of the sentient being it was and how it suffered.
When I eat meat, in my mind, I acknowledge its life and I thank it, and send a positive thought to the "soul" of the animal to wish it to a favorable rebirth. At the monastery, I had no problem that there wasn't meat, either. It didn't cross my mind. It was good food. So either way, it's not an issue.
Oh, but Emma. Our human interactions are an economics equation of suffering and pleasure. We try to maximize our pleasure and minimize our suffering. But in our daily being, we also create suffering and we create pleasure for other people.
The "core" group from last term, we stick together because the pleasure we get from each other is high, and the suffering we cause to each other is low. There were two others in our class who caused us more suffering than pleasure, and they're not here this term and we're not missing them.
Emma is causing much suffering to my classmates, but she also suffers for whatever reason we don't know. She suffers because of her princess perception of herself, one of the manifestations of which is her pickiness about food. Another manifests in the classroom and creates suffering to her classmates.
But I try to convince my former classmates that the suffering she creates for them is not an objective fact. There may be other people in the world for whom she creates great pleasure, and they would be dismayed at us and our negative view of her. They haven't done us any wrong, but we may be creating suffering for them by our negative view of Emma.
Isn't this true for all of us? We don't know why, but some people just don't like us, our personality, our background, our being. But we have people who love us who would be saddened by the animosity of these other people. And these people who love us might be perfectly amicable to these other people.
Ultimately, I think they will win and convince me that "Emma" is not worth the effort nor deserves the benefit of doubt. Which saddens me because I'm trying to not judge people like this, neither attachments or aversions. I'm doing well with not attaching to these classmates. I need support to not avoid people who annoy me. And, oh, yes there is one seriously annoying person in my class. Oy vey. He's . . . ok, I'm not going to say where he's from. He's from a place I'll call "Mongolia" (not a real country).
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| 9:59 a.m. - On my way to school. Looks like they're re-painting the Da'an Park footbridge. My apartment is just down the street going off to the left. I probably just used the footbridge to get from the corner across the intersection to this corner (northwest). From here I'd turn around and walk another 5-7 minutes to school. |
