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).