In Continuum.

He staggered a little, and mumbled something that was drowned out by the crowd. Yet, you could tell that he was very focused in whatever he was saying under his breath, intent only telling somebody out there what he was thinking. I thought he was just religious extremist making a public statement about his faith, until I saw that he was actually praying to a giant billboard of a cellphone advertisement with a lollipop in his hands. We are dealing with a crazy man here Houston, and we have a problem. He was living in his own world, like many mentally ill people I have seen on the streets. I remember telling my mother that people in the asylums are the happiest people in the world even if they are crying their eyes out. Emotions don't stay very long in their minds, emotions like depression. So they are always so happy living in their own hallucinations and illusions. Hallucinations and illusions, those are merely euphemisms for the word 'lies', but who are we to say that they cannot live in that kind of fabricated world? If they are happy with where they are, let them be. Who are we to say that they can't be who they want to be? 

Oh, the sirens sing so sweet and watched the sailors go down
Oh, you don't do me in siren song
Yeah, anyone would drown
Anyone would drown

I have met my share of interesting people in my lifetime, there are too many people to name here in one single blog entry. There was Brandon from primary school, the kid who never liked to bathe and had a strange accent, not to mention the permanent shoe mark on his ass because everybody liked to kick him. There was Yi Xiang in high school, the kid who never wore underwear because Albert Einstein - his dead mentor for astro-physics - never wore any underwear, or so he claimed. There was Jared, who publicly harassed my friend's ex-girlfriend in lecture by reaching down the back of her seat to grab a pen that fell just behind her buttock, not to mention the well-known rumor of him masturbating at the urinals in school, something pretty disturbing I know. These are just some of the people I have met in my life, people who have made my life a little more interesting, I'd say. People like that act in ways that we cannot fully explain, and sometimes you just start to wonder if they are just suffering under too much self-imposed stress. All three of them shared a common characteristic though, they all had a serious case of inferiority complex.

In the context of a social circle, if you are not with them then you are against them. There are a few kinds of people in school who can become easy targets of public hatred: The First, The Different, The Greatest, and the Weirdest. Most of the people I mentioned above satisfies two or more of those qualities, and which is also why a lot of people didn't like them in class too much. Brandon wasn't very bright - in fact he was the last in class most of the time - but he was awfully strange in his ways, looking more like a humanized cockroach more than anything. Jared and Yi Xiang were both very bright students, always the top few students in class from their results, but they were just so weird amongst that students that it became hard for people not to dislike them. Yi Xiang is afraid of practically everything, and Jared had the tendency of drawing lines on his faces without him realizing it - fact. Because of that, people have been looking down on them as social misfits of sorts, always seeing them as outcasts, the people that could never fit in very well. That must have been the reason why they started creating this imaginary world, living in them just because the reality can't accept them for who they are.

Sometimes, it just feels kind of sad to be people like that. Or rather, to be trapped in their shoes and not being able to take them off because the laces are too tight, and they tied them up in a dead knot. I guess to people like that, it is just infinitely easier for them to live in lies they create for themselves. You can't exactly call people like that 'liars', since they do not actually have hostile intentions in lying to everybody around them. I suppose they are just people with very low self-esteem, and finds mild comfort in the kind of life they create for others to see. These people take the perception on themselves very seriously, they probably see themselves as how others see them rather than how they see their own reflections. Therefore, if it is possible for others to believe that they themselves are better than who they really are, then it is also true for themselves to believe that what others see is who they really are. I'm not sure if that made much sense, but I just think that they are not lying for the sake of lying, but just an effort to make themselves feel better about themselves. 

Technically speaking, lying to make yourself feel better is no different from, say, putting on excessive amount of makeup. That is the truth, since we put on makeup to cover up the person we are underneath, just so that we feel better about ourselves. But the point about putting on a makeup is more than just creating an illusion for yourself, but also an image for others to see. If you can't apply your mascara properly, then learn to do it or just not apply them at all. If you can't tell a convincing lie, then don't tell it. The problem with lies is that when you tell that one lie, you might have to have a dozen more lies to cover up that one lie, and to be in that situation whereby you are constantly on the ball just to come up with new lies on the spot is just nerve-racking. If you start putting on a false grandeur of your life by adding a notch or two to it, then everybody is going to realize someday that you never actually had such a lavish life to speak of. It's pretty much like the case of Jared and his mother's car, I remember her fetching me home one day. He used to boast about how rich his family was, what kind of car his parents drove. But when his mother pulled up in a old beat up Mitsubishi, I saw through his lies instantly and he knew it. Though, I did not tell anybody since his mother was giving me a ride home. 

It's just like the lollipop man on the streets I saw that night, all of them create this fantastic world for themselves, and they jump right into the midst of it all despite knowing that where they are is not where everybody else is. OK, save for that lollipop man, but I'm sure everybody else knew about it, but they were reluctant to do anything about it. Like I said, if they are happy with where they are, who are we to tell them that they should get out of the hole they dug for themselves and face reality? It is really not our business, and certainly not the case when they haven't hurt us, or frustrated us in any way or form. To me, I don't feel like he has committed something hurtful against me for coming up with all those lies, I don't feel like I want to run a car over his face for lying about his life since the moment I met him. I feel, more sorry for him, and it certain sucks to be in his position right now.

The thing about lies and liars is that you can never truly come clean, even if you do. People are never going to see you as somebody who is truth-worthy no matter how hard you try to convince them otherwise. It's sort of like a jail record, it follows you throughout your life. As long as somebody knows about your history, they are never going to give you the kind of trust or respect that you deserve, even if you try to come clean and change their perspectives about you. This is even the case for family members, and even then can hold grudges against your honesty for a long time. It is one thing if you are going to tell your friends how many cars you have parked in your driveway, but it is another when you are telling your family half truths and whole lies. I think it is OK for you to live in your own delusional world as long as you do not hurt anybody in the process. That lollipop man certainly wasn't interfering with anybody around him as far as I was concerned, minding his own business in his worship of the giant billboard. I mean, we were just people passing by, it doesn't matter if you are going to lie to us about your life, because we are here and then we are gone. But people that trust you, people that invested their faith in you - your family - lying to them is just something that's wrong. It's just wrong, really. The worst part is, you can never fully correct that - ever.  

To those utterly confused with the above entry, you actually know of whom I speak.