Hurt

"Hey darling, what time are you going home?"

"I will come a bit late, but will drop by on the shop to buy your favorite cheesecake."

"Thanks honey, miss you."

"See you soon my love."

Life is surely interesting. You find love when you least expected it but when you meet the one, you just know. Both of your quirkiness start to make sense. If sometimes you felt out of place, suddenly you understand how the strangeness is made to complement a missing piece. Perfection is not about you but how both of enable a beautiful symphony. And when your fingers meet for the first time, you forget how to walk alone. There is something strange about sharing warmth through the tip of your hand and how wrapping each other hand can create a different level of closeness. 

Somebody told me that when you fall in love, your world starts to gravitate into the other person. You feel a sense of completeness when he is around either by sharing the same couch or watching him eating next to you. You will surprise that watching somebody brushing his teeth can make you happy. Well, you still like presents but you start to find peace with mundane details of being together. A complete trust to share your deepest fear.

Conscious Detachment

“We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” Dr. Seuss

How to stop everything when things feel right? A synchronized weirdness that somehow ticks all the right boxes. At the same time, you know that there are a boundary you could not cross and the relationship will end anyway, sooner or later. Probably, I should turn the whole experience into a fiction, a version where two persons have to face a tragic ending. Maybe, by doing that, I can imagine a better ending for the two of us. Or maybe a version where they constantly fighting due to cultural differences and by having that imagination, I will be happier to be able to dodge a bullet.

I know I did stupid things. Trying to create a distraction that made me even miss him more. Probably, instead of doing stupid things, reducing the dose? It feels like drinking a sea water when you are thirsty, you want to get rid off the thirst but you even make it worst. 

My brain breaks ... I don't know what to do or what I want when the ending is clear.

Obsession

In a relationship, there are three elements involved: man, woman and the relationship. You can be a perfect person for yourself and the same goes for the woman as well, but if both of you are not compatible with each other, your perfections won't really matter. In imagination, you are perfect for each other since you portray the other as what you always have been looking. The absence of reality makes imagination more detached with the reality and thus, perfect. 

Obsession works in this way, you feed your brain with imagination that become less and less true. When you start to create a path to reality, you start to realize that your imagination has no resonance with what you have imagined. Maybe, for people with obsession, it is better to be hated than not to be remembered. And me with a short term memory could not even pin point what I have done to get this kind of obsession. Probably, I should stop responding text or email from strangers. The plurality of the whole thing made them nameless for me but probably not for them. 

"What makes you attract to me?" he asked. For me, it's really about space. People who confess their love tend to make everything about them. I love you, you made me happy, I spent hours thinking about you, the way your smile made me out of my mind, I could not work thinking about you. All of these reasons are about them, not me. They never asked what I want or how our life should be. Everything is about them and their minds. 

Sober

It's quite difficult to be sober when you are on a love struck period. You talk until early in the morning without really remembering the conversation. You know you are happy but could not pin point the activities that trigger the happiness. So yesterday we had a talk on how to take control of our lives again. We made a table on the positive and negative sides of what we did and tried not to pass a certain bed time limit. I think that's why people call it as falling in love, you don't really have control of what happen to yourself. And yeah, sometimes, the world becomes a blurry since what exist only your feeling towards him, nothing else matter.

Probably, the biggest downfall of being love struck is that you become vulnerable, you don't have too much control of your emotion anymore. The way he behaves influence how your emotions going to be. So currently we also try to detach ourselves, to give ourselves a sense of identity again, not got too entangled to one another. 

I never imagine having a self-control of being sober and just follow the flow can be hard. I always believe I am a human of logic, but yeah, my past has shown that logic failed when heart interfere.  

Sense of Deja Vu

"What did you do to me? Why time flies when I am with you? You are a time eater."

"Did you hack my system? Why can't I think straight when I am with you?"

Somehow these conversations gave me a sense of deja vu, a taste of familiarity to the new experience. We just talked or looked at each other in silence until he wasn't able to look at me and I lost my words, did not know how to react. I lost count on what rules we made and later on, what we dropped since it could not contain our emotions. We talk, we tease and we drive each other crazy. 

We like to make a story together. Hah, another deja vu. 

Are You Happy?

Well, that's a one million dollar question, isn't it? This article about success and happiness argues why success and happiness don't go together. I thought one of the possibles negotiation between the two is placing success as an indicator for happiness since I see many people obsess with success. After reading the article, I realize that both of them are built on opposite values. Their incompatibility is like arguing ~N is similar to N. It's impossible since when you chasing success, you always want to compete and your sense of achievement is built on how you can be special compare to other, whereas happiness is something that you achieve from inside, a sense of ignorance of other people's achievements. 

Does it mean happiness cannot go with success? For me, the question is not matter of whether it can be achieved or not but rather a question of means and ends. For people who are chasing success, a sense of 'happiness' is achieved when they get recognition of what they achieve, whereas for people who practice happiness, success is the result of being happy. If you manage to find peace from what you are doing, you are successful. I think this argument is kind of fall into an extrovert versus introvert thing 😅 Extrovert tends to find justification from outside, whereas introvert from inside. As an introvert, I find the extrovert exhausting, so this is my personal bias.

Do I hate success? I mean sure, I like to have my paper being published or able to get the first place for something. But the satisfaction does not come for the achievement but rather as a form of responsibility that come from inside. Well, at this point, I think I am walking on a thin ice since I don't like to disappoint anyone so I kind of seek justification from outside as well.

Well, I think at the end, we cannot escape from being a social creature. We somehow constantly being confronted by the social. 

Falling in Love

What are the symptoms of being in love? For me, any type of emotion always comes from attachment (or care) to someone/something. The feelings of hatred, anger, love, betrayed, sad, happiness and enjoyment emerge through the way we associate our self to something. So moving on is not about shifting from one spectrum of being attached to another point on the same spectrum (i.e. from love to hate) but rather to shift from attachment to detachment, to initially care about someone to become indifference.

From this perspective, falling in love starts with a sense of attachment. You turn a stranger into someone you barely know, an acquaintance. At this stage, the other person's existence does not effect your life yet. Although if something good happen to them, you may get a slight happiness since you know the person. This one is followed by a friend stage where one's existence become very dear to you. At this stage, your life kind of being affected by the persons you are friends with. Although distance, frequency, work, family may influence the intensity you have with your friend. You will know the big events that happen in their life but your life is not fully rotated around their lives. The last stage is lover. At this stage, both of your lives kind of collapse to one another. You try to combine two different rotations to meet on particular time and place. You're in contact on daily basis and you want to know everything about the other person's activities. You get joy in knowing that somebody had finished their lunch or going to brush their teeth.

If you have symptoms of the last stage, then you are in love. 

Culture

I think one of the main thing about cultural differences is values. In one country, being someone to be proud of is valuable whereas in other place, what is valuable is your happiness. I never understand why people like to compare one to the other or brag about their or their relatives' achievements. Probably, because I never have been a fan of being in the spotlight. I prefer people ask me about whether I like something or whether I want to do it or not. And probably, that's also the reason why I felt lost when my Oma passed away. She was one of the persons that never forced me to do anything. We just loved accompanying each other.

The interesting part of moving from one country to another is that apart from facing different cultures, you also find a mixed culture where people re-create a new identity based on the mixture of different people. And since nothing can be taken for granted, we communicate. I think one of the thing about assuming that if you belong to one place, you expect people to be similar to you, all of you are assumed to follow the same values, but in reality, people have personalities that may not be what you think of them. With differences, people are aware that things need to be communicated since no one knows what are the norms.

Probably, that's also the reason why talking to him is interesting. He is like Scheherazade from the Arabian night where he captivated me with his stories and voice.

PS: I took the picture when I went to Fort Canning Park. They have this wall with names of people who passed away during a certain period. They came from various countries, UK, US, Indonesia and others.

Un/productive

I managed to submit a paper for a conference last week (I have to write the abstract, introduction, discussion and conclusion but at least, the data and framework are there) and revised an abstract, so writing wise, I am quite okay. However, it was not the case for my main projects. I still need to write an emails to people and to start reading all the materials that I have been collecting for the past couple of months. I have been easily distracted these days, doing random things without any result. I won't even call this phase procrastination since I don't really have a new idea.

But life wise, I am on an okay condition. Initially, I use to worry about love and career. I need to have certainty and sometimes, my obsession to certainty detach me to people I care about. Now I live my life closer to the younger version of myself, let everything flows, don't worry too much about what the future will bring as long that I am happy. So having someone who calls me everyday without any commitment is kind of liberating. The older version of me may questioned the motives or even ask for certainty but this current version does not really care. C'est la vie. That's life. Acceptance.

Probably, that's one of the reasons why I am not productive. I prefer to daydreaming than working, ahahaha.

Honey

In one of the WhatsApp groups, there was an offer on getting a free mask. So I contacted the number and asked for a free mask. The unusual thing was the person addressed me as honey (or cayang). I found it funny, but since the mask is coming from a formal institution, many of my friends reached out to me saying that the greeting was improper. After getting many messages, I started to ask myself whether I should feel offended by the greeting but I still could not see the mistake. People in the salon or in online shop like to call their customers with honey as well, so I think the call is acceptable. Some others argued that it's improper because the one distributing mask affiliates with a formal institution so it's better to have a formal reply. But had been working as an admin myself, I know how boring a standardized response would be. Having people responded with a smile or thank you could really made my day, especially since there were people who think getting responses from an admin were their rights. 

On the other hand, since I traveled to many places, I received many calling, 'sweety' (from flight attendant), 'honey' (from salon or online shops), 'sister' (when I went to department store), 'beautiful' (random), and catcalling (when I passed random guys in a bad neighborhood). Apart from the last one, I could accept the others. What annoyed me is people started to judge me and asked to many personal questions on first meeting. I considered it as an invasion to my personal space.

Do I have to speak up more? Or should I be offended? My golden rule is to think that people are naturally nice. So the first thing I do when I get a strange response is to rationalize it in my mind and assumes that it was only a cultural difference. I will argue when I feel threatened (which rarely happened).

The Heart

“But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.” Fox to the Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Human's mind is an interesting thing, we love to fall into a routine. Our days are being defined by how it falls into the same pattern. We start to miss things once its change. Strangely, we don't really have a control on how light or heavy the change can be. Thinking about the possibility of having no control on your heart is a scary thing. If you runaway, you can save your heart but you may loose your chance to find happiness.

So now I am just following my heart and feel miserable due to time difference.