Wednesday, January 8, 2020

SINCERITY IS SCARY


I'm sure that you're not just another girl
I'm sure that you're gonna say that that was sexist
I feel like you're running out of all the things I liked you for

why can't we be friends when we are lovers?
'cause it always ends with us hating each other
instead of calling me out, 
you should be pulling me in
I've just got one more thing to say

The saxophone in this track always makes me feel like it would be nice to groove to at a wedding, but the lyrics are quite cynical, but then again they do encapsulate a real relationship.

Last night, I met Lucas' mother for the first time. She was flying to Frankfurt from Singapore this afternoon, using one of Lucas' dependent tickets and so she had a night of layover in our tiny city.

It's the last time Lucas can use his dependent ticket 'cos he's leaving Singapore Airlines and doing more of his IT work in another multinational corporation. It will be a new industry for him so we're hoping he will enjoy it more than he did working in SQ. Singapore Airlines is full of old corporate boomers so he didn't enjoy the working culture there.

We met his mother for dinner last night and brought her for a walk through the nicer areas of the city, and at a park this morning after breakfast. She seems to really like me, as is the case when you are meeting your child's significant other for the first time, I would reckon.

I was very amused during breakfast because she was praising me for being able to understand Lucas and accept him. Lucas is a very quiet and shy introvert when he doesn't know you, and so his mom must think it would take a special kind of person to be with him. To be honest, his mother and mine are pretty similar from his stories, she is a conservative Catholic whereas mine is a Muslim, and Lucas just doesn't open up to her because he knows he cannot change her, and that to be candid with her would just mean arguing.

She was nice and friendly to me, though, of course, because she doesn't yet know that I come from a Muslim family despite not having any beliefs, myself. She kept taking photos of me, saying she would show them to Lucas' babcia (his grandma) in Poland, whom she is visiting on her trip. She also began singing Lucas' praises, how Lucas has been independent ever since he started working and how he knows to save and manage his finances, especially with his Bitcoin and other investments.

It was like I was an interviewer, and Lucas was the applicant, with his mom being the recruiter/headhunter, talking up all his good points, so she could get a commission. I loved being in the position, because tbh I am actually the mafia lololol.

His mom was probing whether I would be interested in living in Australia or Poland, because Lucas can obviously live and work in Australia, and he could also have an apartment in Poland eventually, as his grandmother is there, but Lucas flat-out said no to her ideas, much to her grief, hehehe.

She also thanked me because Lucas has called his babcia twice while we've been together, which he hadn't done for years. She said his grandmother cried when he called, which I actually already knew because I was by his side, and listened in on the call, although I didn't understand a thing, because they spoke in Polish, and it's not a language I have any insight on at all.

It was a wonderful experience, but I would suppose it is a common enough occurrence whenever you meet your significant other's family members. I felt so many feelings. It was nice to see how fond Lucas' mother is of him, as mothers tend to be, and how we all actually instantly turn into kids when our parents are around, because they start telling stories of us and our siblings from our childhood.

It was a little disconcerting to, again, be questioned on our future plans together. Lucas is going to be starting his new job in a couple of months, and I want to go back to studying in the fall of this year (meaning to say fall of the northern hemisphere), and I always yearn for adventure. I don't know if Lucas is necessarily all that fond of adventures, I think he loves me and by extension, he likes to be adventurous when I'm involved.

In the past few days, before meeting Lucas' mom and sending her off today, I was actually in a bit of an argument with my own mom, via text. It started with her sending a video to our family group chat, of someone called Zakir Naik giving "intellectual answers" to an atheist at a forum, right. I watched it, and then I did some research about the man.

He believes that thieves deserve to have their arms chopped off, and that it is permissible for a man to beat his wife "lightly." He recommends the death penalty for homosexuals, and he also says that the theory of evolution is an unproven conjecture at best.

My mom said that as I was already watching videos on Youtube, she also recommended Nouman Ali and Mufti Menk. I then did a quick Google on them, and told my family that Menk thinks the LGBT society are worse than animals and has been banned in Singapore, and that Nouman Ali Khan actually used his religion to prey on women, basically engaging in spiritual abuse.

I told my mother that if she wanted to recommend people she should find out about them first so I would take them seriously, or they were all bigots to me. My mother then said "one mistake done by a person doesn't mean the whole cause by him is wrong."

Yesterday, my mother sent me an image of a quote, apparently a verse from the Quran (Al-Isra: verse 36), it says "don't pursue that of which you have no knowledge." To fight on her level, I Googled another quote from the Quran (Surah Taha, 20:114), in exactly the same format, with text in front of an image of a sunset, it says "My Lord, increase me in knowledge."

I told her that anyone could Google Abrahamic verses on the internet and it neither proved nor disproved whether they were good people. I said, the two verses we'd each provided had literally the opposite meanings, because one was to discourage people from seeking knowledge where they didn't possess any, and another was literally a prayer for seeking knowledge. I asked her what it meant, that it had contradicting verses, clearly that it was to confuse its readers into not doing anything, which is precisely a great message to lead people without being bombarded with logical questions.

It culminated when my mother said "a person who only has scientific reasons to live will never believe of mukjizats and miracles" to which I responded "if we only believed in miracles and not science some of us would actually be dead by now..." when the conversation ended.

I finally realized, there and then, that my mother has an extremely complicated form of survivor's guilt. She beat cancer not solely on her God's terms. She went through chemotherapy and surgeries, obviously, and that was science, that was not miraculous.

One day, I will set out to read the texts of all three Abrahamic faiths and underscore just how many contradictions there are, that cannot possibly exist if they are supposedly perfect. I'm going to take one for the team so that future children of religious parents have an anti-thesis to look to for responses to their parents.

My mother survived her cancer, and she believes it was because God loved her enough to let her live, and her prayers worked, along with the science (if the science was at all necessary to cure her, lol). My aunt, who is my mother's sister, also had cancer. She also prayed, and the entire family also prayed for her, but my aunt died. When she died, everyone said she moved on to a better place, and that God loved her more. So if God loved my aunt more, does that also mean he doesn't love my mom as much then? Either ways, that's a whole lot of survivor's guilt to deal with.

And then there are verses that say "God will never test you beyond what you are capable of." When someone has a mental illness and commits suicide, it is a sin, and somehow the idea of God only testing within your capacities is erased, and no one talks about it. What does it mean then, that you are only tested within your means, in what realm is it valid???

Also, nobody ever talks about the abuse of power within religions. This is not exclusive to Islam, but nobody ever wants to talk about how verses are always written to protect the interests of the people who were and who are in power, and to keep anything from changing. How come the person to whom the Books were apparently "revealed" are all men, and all the verses are always about men being leaders of the house, and that men have the right to discipline their wives?

What if I decided to start a religion right now, and I said, oh a divine power has told me that women are the more powerful sex, and therefore women should control all the money in a relationship, what would a person's natural instinct be --- would it not be to say: this woman clearly just wants to protect her self-interests, and she has unfairly written the law to be on her side????? Why don't people question these very same things then?????

Lucas just received a text from his mom and sent me a screenshot, it says "please look after Sarah. She is a good girl."

That's right, mofos!!!!! I'm the bestest girl, and you best not forget it.