of frenemies and ecology

I was doing my usual round of blog-reading (since I still have broadband speeds). That's when I come across Isaac Wong's blog, where he posted this:

Our class - 4SA'08 is gonna have a class outing real soon. YAY!

I'm quite happy to be honest, cos I haven't seen those dudes in like 7+, 8 months, except for a really minute some.

And, I'm really hoping everyone will come, and like seriously bury all hatchets. I mean, what for get angry for like so long? And, its not fun when like a few people don't want to come, just because they don't feel like it, or they don't want to see each other, or they figure they should just get on with life and forget old friends.

That gave me an idea - I should draw up a relationship web of 4SA'08 to show who are friends or enemies, and where the clique groups are.

I can see it already. It'll go along the lines of a mathematical psychological representation of social circles in 4SA...

Let + represent friends, - represent enemies, and +/- represent "no clue, but it's probably both ways".

Based on what I see, hear, or perceive, you can say that the 4SA web looks a little like this...

Yi Lei + Ryan + Zong Ren + Melvin Lim + Nigel + Reuben +/- Jing Kai +/- Kevin + Donavan +/- Vishnu - Jaga + Sahul + Sara - Joel +/- Justin + Ken + Clement + Wei Yong + Choon Zhe + Elohim + Zhao Long + Rakesh + Isaac Cheong + Bryan + FCK + Aaron + Melvin Tan + Scott + Jonathan + Matthew Tang + Andrew + Sheng Ren + Ben Toh + Nelson +/- Jasper - John - Isaac Wong+ Me + Matt Sia + Ian +/- Arvindh +/- Chee Yang + Nicholas

That's a reductionist representation of the relationship links in 4SA'08, from what I know. Of course, each person in 4SA doesn't form just 2 relationships. They come together to form clique groups - something I kept in mind when doing the above chain. You'll see the transitions:

Yi Lei to Reuben is what I like to call the "cult of personality 1" group - the only group who knows how to have any real fun. Well, sort of.

Moving on, I had to do a bit of scattering, including the Tamil Class group (I deduced that when the school lets the minority mother tongue students have class together in a more closer setting, they will inevitably have more extreme ties, since there is a smaller social circle, which means more concentrated interactions.) and the "Justin League", made up mostly of 2C students, then the famous FCK gang. 

Strangely enough, the FCK gang's priest leads very nicely into the Sandwich Gang - Aaron Chua is part of 2 societies. And another BB boy - Andrew - makes the segue from Sandwich gang to Game fans. Admittedly, I had a hard time transitioning Ben Toh to the remaining bit of the chain, but I stacked Nelson in between Ben and Jasper. And Yes, I broke Jasper and Isaac up using a common 'hate figure' which is not really an enemy but just someone both dislike to a small extent - John. 

Let me be clear - It's just something I came up with for fun. Please take this with a grain of salt. What I aimed to show here is that ties between students, even in a class, can be quite complex. What I did was to simplify the explanation using just one long relationship-chain. Imagine a web. That is pretty much how students interact with each other in their own class. You can complicate things even further with students from other classes or with elements such as  CCAs, past encounters with certain people, "teacher envy" amongst the teachers' pets (in reference to Freud's Oedipus Complex theory. It's sexist, and I don't agree with it fully, but I get his point, and I'm adapting it here. I will not explain his theories, you have to do your own reading.) etc.

One more thing I wanted to bring up is enemies. Sometimes, I wonder what makes us make enemies. I think if we lived in an ideal world, we would have no enemies, only friends helping each other. It's in our conscience as social beings that we want friends for social support. So why is it that we make enemies? Enemies can be uncomfortable and awkward - not just for the two parties, but also the people in the overlap of the two sides' social circles. One example is a certain 'frenemy' classmate I had. I got so fed up with him 'labelling' me as an enemy (he was ignoring me, and to me, that implied that I was his enemy) that I actually confronted some of his friends (with whom I was still friends) about why this guy doesn't want to talk to me. 

Well, I can go on with the new theories I learn in Psychology class, but I think I'll leave this post as it is for now. It's getting late (1:56am), I need to wee before I find more ideas to blog about, and I need to take a nap at 6am UK time (12 noon Jakarta Time) to curb jetlag effects.

Sorry about the long blog post.