The Curious Schemer

Indonesia is a big country. In Singapore you may hear about a grisly murder once every quarter. In Indonesia, you hear about 4-5 times a day. But these are all distant, removed, events. In every single case, I don’t know the murderer(s), I don’t know the victim(s), it’s just an impersonal piece of news. Somebody murders somebody. So what? It happens every second in the world.

Until recently.

Less than a year ago, a Trisakti University student went missing. Her family and one particularly aggrieved male friend searched for her high and low to no avail, until the residents of Bandung, a city 175km away from Jakarta, smelled her decomposing body in a parked car, 3 days after the murder had taken place, and reported the car to the police.

She was on Friendster. The guy who went searching for her high and low with the family? He was the one who murdered her. (Because she was five months pregnant, and she asked him to marry her.) He was on Friendster as well.

While browsing their Friendster profiles–I was linked to them by 2 or 3 degrees of separation–suddenly it hit me how eerie this thing is. This murder was real. It was done by a friend of my friend. The victim was a friend of my friend. Usually, a friend of a friend tells your friend a “verifiable” rumor, which your friend tries to infect you with over coffee. A friend of a friend has the “latest truth about conspiracy in the govertment”, which your friend uses as an argument in a tea break session. A friend of a friend doesn’t go around murdering women he has impregnated. A friend of a friend doesn’t end up being murdered. There’s something positively wrong with all this.

A friend of a friend doesn’t get brutally raped. A friend of a friend doesn’t have somebody cutting her neck so deep she’s almost decapitated. Recently, a friend of a friend did. As I was looking at this cute young girl’s Friendster profile, I felt a chill running down my spine. I was looking at the profile of a brutal rape/murder victim. And she had just logged in several days ago. (Friendster has suspended her account since then.)

Friendster is really eerie sometimes.

Rest in peace, Yenny. Rest in peace, Amanda.

“What do women want in a man?”

I mean what women want in a man, as what qualities does a man have to have so that women want him? It’s funny, but when you ask women this question, their answers are so… standard. It’s almost like they’re reading from the same book and just regurgitating the predetermined qualities in a slightly randomized order. They always say, “we want a man who…”

1. Has a great sense of humor (this one very often comes up first)
2. Treats me nicely / like a princess / like the only woman in the world, etc.
3. Is a good listener, sensitive, etc.
4. etc. etc. etc.

(Ssshhhh don’t tell them, but methinks this list is utter cowdung.)

Proof? Well I’ve got this friend who gets approached by guys quite often, see. She tells me about these approaches, so I get to hear what she thinks about different guys and how they do it. The weird thing is, the “losers” and the “winners” say exactly the same thing. You know, “I’m a 27-year old guy, likes surfing, travelling, blah blah,” or, “I’m a nice guy looking for friendship blah blah…”, or ask the same questions, “Have you eaten lunch?” or “What are you doing?”

But she describes these two groups totally differently. The former comprises “lame, pervert, weird, desperate, homely” guys. The latter is full of “intelligent, charming, funny, sweet, gentlemanly” guys. It can’t be! Sometimes the guys in the first group say something that is WAY wittier than the guys in the second group. Hmmm. Apparently sense of humor is not _that_ important. And I think I know why.

When you ask a woman what she wants in a man, she’s not thinking about qualities that’ll make her like a man. She’ll think about a man she already likes, e.g., Brad Pitt or Jay Chou, then apply the qualities like so: “let me see… what will make Brad Pitt even nicer? Hmmm, well, it’s nice if he has a sense of humor.” or “Wow, I think it’ll be cool if Jay Chou treats me like a princess!”. And these are the ones that come out as answers. The sequence is all wrong!

Q.E.D. I’m such a genius.

P.S.: one of the guys in the former group said something that I thought was pretty original when I first heard it from her: “we can fall in love and get married over the Internet, or we can meet up to have coffee and some stimulating conversation.” Ha! (She said he was too… ahem, homely for her taste. There goes sense of humor.)

P.P.S.: Later somebody told me that this was a canned phrase from somewhere. Ha ha!