Q

Three reasons why I’m not fit for survival.

a) I’m too drawn to ugly things.

The majority seeks symmetry. Symmetry connotes the lack of deformity, which indicates health, and the most primitive part of us calls for a healthy mate to birth healthy babies and ensure the survival of your genes. Intuitively we see symmetry as beauty, meaning the plainer you are (and by plain I mean unblemished), the more attractive you are to others.

So obviously I’ve found pretty things/people pretty, but it’s a kind of appeal I can explain away – it’s nice and pleasing. But those invoke only a beach-y, wavelike pleasure that easily fades when high tides’ over.

What I cannot get over, and what draws me in like a freaking tsunami that had laid dormant for fifty years waiting for a victim, is hideousness.

I know it’s strange, but ugly things are just so. damn. attractive.

And by ugly I don’t mean those Hello Kitty glasses that’s increasing in frequency and which I dislike with the passion of a starving activist. Neither do I mean the unaesthetic, the kind of thing that’s dour and unhygienic and gross. I mean people who just look strange. Like crooked teeth. Like wild hair. Like acne. Like a broken nose. Like uneven ears. Like eyes that are too close to each other or slightly out of focus. Like people who look too uncannily like an animal (I love people who look like animals).

I can’t stop staring at people like that. Yesterday at work a man came to ask some questions (I can’t remember what), he was Indian (neither can i remember what he looked like in general). I just remember sinking in love with him as he was talking because he had these amazing canine teeth which were grotesque. But amazing. It made him look beautiful I don’t even know how. And a week before there was a primary school kid with her mom. She looked pretty normal otherwise, except for her eyes. They were so extra-terrestrial. The shape was all weird and they were too wide set. And she had acne that were a perfect constellation around her ugly nose. One part of me was going, Omg Weiqing stop being a freak stop staring she’s noticing you staring her mom will think you’re deranged stop it but I could. not. stop.

Yet on the commercial level we revere deformities. On models, for instance – if you have an abnormally strong brow or gap-teeth or an obvious mole, it can be taken as an extra appeal. So why are we only alright with deformities and asymmetrical beauty at a distance? In real life we are attracted to safe-looking people, otherwise we do things to make us safe-looking people, with hair products and pimple cream and breast enhancement and braces.

My theory is that true beauty is idiosyncrasy. Is hideousness and grotesque features you’ve never seen before and the general chaos of the face. Producers of Healthy Babies are just conveniently labelled beautiful because we are attracted to them to, well, produce healthy babies.

Maybe we’re just repelled by hideousness because it’s a kind of beauty so intense that it hurts to look at it too much. But it’s a sick kind of pain that I can’t get enough of. Because I’m disgusting that way.

This also means my future partner will be an absolute troll to the rest of the world. And if our basal instincts are true, we’ll produce a pool of offspring as susceptible to extinction as I am, dying out faster and saving the world from my genetic freakishness.

b) Competition petrifies me.

Survival is basically how well you respond to competition. Surviving is one huge mother race itself. If so, I suck at surviving.

I’m not sure if it’s inborn, or a nurture thing, but I’ve never performed any better under the thought of competition. In fact all it does is make me want to give up. Just the thought of it.

I don’t remember my parents ever comparing me with someone else, in fact when I try to point out my strengths in relation to another in anticipation of a compliment (in my more asshole-y days), they’re seldom impressed. Neither have I any competition with my closer friends. Not even the healthy kind. I know some people who, in order to push themselves, set their friend’s achievements as yardsticks or try to match themselves to their friends. Maybe because we have diverse interests, but I seldom feel the need to race against any of them, much less wish I ‘did better’ than. If anything, we (or at least what I glean from our WhatsApp group chats) wish to death the others would do well, because in the (highly) likely scenario that one of us become homeless unemployed-s, we have someone’s mansion to crash (forever).

Anyway. The healthiest and strongest of the pride are the ones who, with the fuel of competition, generate a shitload of go-getting energy to get somewhere. Mine works in reversal. I’m not just slow to rise in a competition, I practically quail and falter in utter panic until I die. Okay, it’s not all that dramatic, but the very notion of having to compete against anyone by myself makes me feel uneasy and reluctant. I have no idea how people with ‘competitive spirits’ do it. It’s not a spirit. It’s the soul of Satan’s spawn taking over you. And it scares the shit out of me.

K, let’s say there’s a barren island and there exists only one edible fruit at the top of a tree. If I were alone, I’d climb the shit up there in five seconds and have the damn fruit. If there were five other starving people eyeing the fruit, I’d probably attempt to climb it, but warily and passively and wouldn’t really grab if I had to. If there were ten other hungry idiots besides myself I’ll just walk off and eat some grass instead.

And that is how I’d die out – malnutrition-ed. As with my genetically passive children.

c) My shit sense of direction.

My shit sense of direction in clever titles and anecdotes.

ALTHOUGH I have been actively trying to improve this as of late. Aided much by necessity (MY JOB) and also Google Maps and patience. I still get lost about 99% of the time, but the time I take to re-orientate and finally find my way is… somewhat shorter. I think. In an apocalypse I’m still the most likely to run off the edge of a cliff or end up in a colony of L4Ds while trying to locate Twinkies though. Especially since Google Maps would then be defunct.

Come to think of it, my job’s been refining my survival skills. Microscopically, but still. (For one, my Mandarin’s better than it has ever been since circa 2006 [pre-06 I wrote freaking Chinese poems. Tang style.], I can now stand at a spot for half an hour straight without peeing in my pants with hyperactive rage, I can memorize lunch menus verbatim [during a shift where I stared at the guest menu for three hours bored and hungry]). So in the event of an apocalypse, post-working Weiqing can:

a) navigate her way around marginally well. marginally.

b) i can communicate and request for help from over one billion more people than before. politely (an occupational hazard).

c) recite a lunch menu so extraordinarily tempting, the hostile forces will weep and exalt and retreat.

…Obviously, I am severely under-equipped for survival. I have nothing except for my biting wit and slightly bonkers courage borne mostly out of Tourette’s and lack of common sense.

That is all.