randomshinichi
Don Juan
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2008
- Messages
- 64
- Reaction score
- 1
Disclaimer: This has nothing to do with girls.
I ask this because I'm not very sure where to set the line. Personally I feel worse when friends laugh at me, and I feel nothing when relative strangers laugh at me. But recently I did something rather embarassing in public (brought a skateboard to school without riding it very well, also I'm a bit old for what seems to be a teen oriented sport). I'm not even sure if I should be embarassed for what I did! But all my peers laughed at me, including my friends. Incredibly enough, nobody laughed at me when I was making a complete fool of myself in the park with the board. Grandparents egged me on, no doubt because they see relatively little difference between a teen and a twentysomething. The guy who sold me the board and told me how to ride/stop it said "don't give up". Even two girls stood on the balcony and tried to strike up a conversation with me, although I was a bit too self absorbed to bother extending the conversation to determine if they were laughing at me or not (wait, isn't that just an extremely unhealthy frame of mind?).
What's even more surprising was that when I talked with one friend later, he practically expected to be laughed at by his friends if he did such a thing himself. I thought friends weren't supposed to laugh at each other? Also another friend quite obviously moved one seat away from me after smelling the sweat that I worked up from trying to balance on the skateboard. I would never do that to a friend, mostly because (I expect) it would hurt a friend's feelings if I moved away from him for such a trivial reason. Maybe I'm just not used to the Western people's idea of "friendship"? Or are they all actually just bad friends?
But you cannot make people stop laughing at you. As far as I know, you can only prevent that. So I can't really see anything to be done here. What would you do?
I ask this because I'm not very sure where to set the line. Personally I feel worse when friends laugh at me, and I feel nothing when relative strangers laugh at me. But recently I did something rather embarassing in public (brought a skateboard to school without riding it very well, also I'm a bit old for what seems to be a teen oriented sport). I'm not even sure if I should be embarassed for what I did! But all my peers laughed at me, including my friends. Incredibly enough, nobody laughed at me when I was making a complete fool of myself in the park with the board. Grandparents egged me on, no doubt because they see relatively little difference between a teen and a twentysomething. The guy who sold me the board and told me how to ride/stop it said "don't give up". Even two girls stood on the balcony and tried to strike up a conversation with me, although I was a bit too self absorbed to bother extending the conversation to determine if they were laughing at me or not (wait, isn't that just an extremely unhealthy frame of mind?).
What's even more surprising was that when I talked with one friend later, he practically expected to be laughed at by his friends if he did such a thing himself. I thought friends weren't supposed to laugh at each other? Also another friend quite obviously moved one seat away from me after smelling the sweat that I worked up from trying to balance on the skateboard. I would never do that to a friend, mostly because (I expect) it would hurt a friend's feelings if I moved away from him for such a trivial reason. Maybe I'm just not used to the Western people's idea of "friendship"? Or are they all actually just bad friends?
But you cannot make people stop laughing at you. As far as I know, you can only prevent that. So I can't really see anything to be done here. What would you do?
