The Friend Zone Part 2

Since the beginning of my university adventure many young people around me including those I haven’t met before call me a “master slayer”. However I wasn’t popular nor interactive with girls or anyone in particular back then. In fact, for most of my journey through high school I carried the same attitude from secondary school where I thought academic success would lead me to generating numerous friendships. I felt awkward, uncomfortable and unwilling to start the conversation with the girl sitting next to me. I was untrained. I didn’t know what a conversation with a girl normally sounded like. It was like I was thrown into the wilderness with no survival training whatsoever. The first girl I met, rather awkwardly, was at a Chinese family warming in year 10. I think her name was Flora. She rarely smiled but we had a few common interests like Pokemon and novels. For 2 years I would text her every day not romantically because I didn’t know any pickup lines, puns and metaphors. My English wasn’t up to standard with grammar errors, elongated sentences, misuse of vocabulary and emotionless remarks. Fortunately she was kind and caring towards me and she taught me a lot about social media and texting. I felt overexcited when I typed my first ever emoji :-) . It was like discovering treasure buried in my front garden. She also taught me a lot of texting gimmicks such as common abbreviations like LOL, LMFAO, ROFL, TY, TMI, BRB and WTF which did assist me greatly when sending a longwinded message to someone. When Flora and I reached year 12, her parents told my parents who told me to limit my interactions with her because they are concerned I am a huge distraction to their daughter which may hinder her performance in VCE. At first I didn’t believe it but both of us understood it was for the best for both of us. I rarely talk to her nowadays but I dream of the day where I catchup with her and see each other's transformation.

When the clock strikes 12, couples around the world dive in for a kiss that stands above all kisses.

There was another event in year 10 that I’d rather forget. My friends wanted me to attend a junior social but my parents didn’t support the idea of me being there which illustrates their tiger parent mindset. All the girls wore somewhat lustful party dresses/clothing, white/ black sneakers or high heels and loads of mascara and eyeliner, whilst the guys had fancy hairstyles, polished fashion sense and an attitude. I, on the other hand, didn’t have the wealth nor the knowledge of party dress codes, hence I wore what I normally wore at home i.e. A sweater knitted by my grandma and saggy pants. By the time I stepped inside the social, the experience was inexplicable and overwhelming. The heavy beats gave me pounding heart attacks, the loud music was unbearably beating down my vulnerable eardrums and no matter how loudly I spoke my words weren’t getting through to my intended person audibly. I thought I was living in a nightmare and I desperately tried to keep my composure. The pitch and tone of my voice kept getting absorbed by the continuous high-amplitude sound waves emanating from the loudspeakers. It wasn’t just loud but it was dark as well. I couldn’t see my own hands with only the flashing coloured studio lights keeping the dance floor temporarily luminescent at various areas spontaneously. I couldn’t hear myself think and analyse the situation I was stepping in. Everyone else around me mindlessly raised their arms and had that hypnotised gaze like the music is controlling their minds. I saw some guys dance in an peculiar way like they had flimsy limbs. I thought you dance only on two feet whilst you wave your hands and shake your waist with the music rhythm. These guys were spinning around with only their hands touching the ground and sometimes they ended up upside down on their heads spinning like a top. At first I didn’t see that as dancing but rather a rapid, odd manoeuvre to show off your flexibility. However, after years of painstaking searching on the net, I found out that manoeuvre I first saw from the social was a particular type of dance called breakdancing or bboying.

Melbourne High School breakdance competition featuring Soul Power crew members

Breakdancing is a style of street dance that originated in Puerto Rico and USA primarily African American youths in the 1970s. The first ever breakdance group were called the Black Spades that started in the Bronx then to Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, New Rochelle, New Jersey and Connecticut by the late 1980s. Since then breakdancing has spread to countries like Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Japan, UK, Australia and Vietnam. I noticed most participants of breakdancing are short with skinny legs and exhibit a passive-aggressive attitude. This could explain their flexibility and lower risk to critical musculoskeletal and ligament injuries around their wrist, hip, knee and ankle joints. I always wondered whether the performance of breakdancing actually makes young men attractive to all types of women. I’ll try to answer that question in another post regarding the links between dance and love.

When I first heard that phrase (master slayer) I didn’t know how to react whether to feel offended, flattered or thankful because it was such an innocuous term. Google was not immature enough to know the origins of this term, instead it led me to the legends of dragon slayers and a 20th century American hard punk rock band. I then realised this was a colloquial slang term mostly spoken by youths in Western societies. In the correct context, a ‘slayer' often describes a young male who has the unfounded ability to attract the opposite gender regardless of personality, age, culture, intelligence, attitude and appearance. This term loosely describes females too but the term ‘hoe’ or ’slut’ is more commonly used. All these terms somehow carry some negative connotation like they’re dangerous to the opposite gender and should not be considered to be loveworthy at all. I don’t know if this is entirely true but so far there is not enough evidence to suggest so.

Most of my peers especially guys and their girl friends who label me a “slayer” live in neighbourhoods in the east, southeast, northeast and northwest suburbs of Melbourne. It turns out each suburbia carries a unique youth cultural vibe depending on the high school they attended such as Methodist Ladies College, Balwyn High School, Scotch College, Penleigh Essendon Grammar School, Presbyterian Ladies College, Xavier College, Melbourne Grammar, Camberwell Girls Grammar, Caufield Grammar, Brighton Grammar, Mentone Grammar, MacRobertson Girls, Melbourne High, Ivanhoe Grammar, Kew High, Doncaster and Doncaster East Secondary Colleges. These schools I’ve listed are amongst those with the most populous Asian cohorts in each year level. The guys there seem to be interested in fitness, bodybuilding, preference of Asian girls in neighbouring schools, relationship bandwagons, naughty moments, gang culture and drunken parties. However most girls are interested in food culture, fashion brands and designs, holiday destinations, work opportunities, makeup collections, opportunities to update their Instagram such as movie dates and brunch, selfies, snapchat filters and gossiping about their partners, and their exaggerating reactions and opinions of other girls. It’s intriguing that most guys have a goal to woo the girls with their oily bare chest and six-pack or Rectus Abdominis and gains/guns or Biceps Brachii and Triceps Brachii. I suspect this has a small success rate because it only attracts girls of a particular persona rather than all personas and there’s a short term vision when it comes to the relationship. Depending how fortuitous you are, you have a chance of attracting girls who have a deep understanding of fitness, fashion and nutrition that treasures strength, bravery, an en guarde attitude and confidence even if it involves assaults and possibly murders. Consider your love as a sock. You assume that one method attracts all but over time that sock will begin to lose its string integrity and ultimately develops multiple failures in the form of holes. Then you have to change your method and the cycle repeats. However there are solutions to slow down the degradation of your attractive gestures but you’ll have to hold onto your horses for now. Apparently there is a lot to cover regarding personalities of guys and the type of girls they most likely and least likely attract which will be answered in another post.