How to Fall in Love

How to fall in love with someone? Where does the feeling coming from? Is it a matter of chemistry or if somebody is close to you, he will create a sense of familiarity and you will end up missing him once he is gone? Does excitement come from curiosity or from compatibility? 

Currently, I am doing a detox to online relationship. I really don't know what to expect from online platform and the interactions over there kind of drained my energy. I am naturally bad at introducing myself to new people, adding the artificial space made it hundred time worse. Probably, since the platform is an instant thing, people were quite straight forward on what they want or in other cases, just come and go as they please. There is nothing wrong with that as long every one accept it as the norm. And even when that is the common norm, there are always exception. I usually ignore people that I am not attract me but sometime people are bad at reading sign. Does it make me a bad person?  

Is it possible to have a deeper conversation beyond daily activities? I even don't know whether I can fall in love through mediation and not by meeting the person directly. The person who can increase my heart rate only by his smile and turn my face red with his words or just simply doing activities together without a word. Funny, a picture entered my mind when I wrote the latter. I was working when he came and said, "can I work here, I don't want to be alone?" There was that as well, a strange relationship.

Rambling

I have to work on five more sets but even thinking about it gives me headache, so here I am, hiding from my responsibility by writing nonsense. Thinking what to think, the art of procrastinating, or simply running away. 

If you remember certain things from the past, does it mean you miss the place or the person? Or that is only a memory, a fraction cell in your brain that grows with you. What do you consider as home? I think after my grandmother pass away, I don't really have a definition of home. Home is a place where you feel attached and somehow, I don't feel attached to anything right now. I have a job but since it has an expired date, I don't really prepare myself to settle in. Somehow, I am still considering to return to Bandung, but don't know whether there is a possibility for me to work there and also the type of job that fits me. 

I have been checking places I want to visit after Covid as well. Probably going to a beach. But traveling alone has lost some of its charm. When I was younger, I enjoyed traveling alone. Meeting people or simply being invisible in the crowd, but nowadays, I prefer to be alone in a familiar place where I know what to expect. Probably, I lost my adventurous side or I never had one to begin with. 

So why do you keep posting in English? I think because currently, I am on my writing period, I prefer to think in one language to make the process faster. Although the main problem is probably the lack of data. Oh well, back to work. 

Third Culture

"Are you even one?"

"I like to consider me as one. It always feels that I don't really fit in one place. When I first started in elementary school, my Bahasa was still bad, my skin was fair and my mom used to pack food instead of gave me money for snack while other kids always have  something on their hand. Until now, my daily meal always consist of bread. I can eat without rice for weeks but feel miserable if I cannot bread for several days."

"So you feel more home when you were in Europe?"

"That's another thing. I did not drink, I did my prayers, I wore veil, I fasted. Those things created a thick barrier on the type of activities that I could be involved in and not. I still went to the bar though and ordered apple juice since the color is the closest to wine (or beer but without the foam)."

"So what are looking for in a relationship?"

"A person who can read my mind."

"Keep on dreaming, honey."

"The dreamy answer will be a person who share the same frequency as I. But if you want me to elaborate it, I think a person who can read between the lines since I am not the most talkative person in the world. I found this quality most in people who are older or introvert since they tend to be more sensitive."

"What is your next destination?"

"I don't know. After Europe, I was planning to settle down in Indonesia, but I couldn't find a job that suits me and here I am, still questioning my life as I did a decade ago. Life seems moving no where for me."

"It adds the complexity for people who want to approach you. Do you have specific preference?"

"Apart from the things I mentioned earlier, I want the person to share the same responsibility as me in house chores. This makes me more West than East. It's difficult since I still adopt things that are considered as conservative but I want a type of relationship that is more contemporary."

"Do you consider yourself as beautiful?"

"Hey alter ego, did someone hijack you?"

"Noo, this is a logical question. Somehow, you seem cool with the whole situation and I know one of the reasons is because you never lack of admirers."

"I don't think I fall into the beautiful category, I may consider myself as cute though and that has a different niche market. I always have a chubby cheek so I think people have tendency as seeing me as a little girl and attract elderly people or people from the service industry. There was a time when I fixed my eyeglasses and my mom asked me how much I paid to repair it. When I told her, I got it for free, my mom responded, 'you gave him your smile, did not you?' By time, I also know the type of respondents who are willing to do favor for me based on our interaction during interviews. Somehow, I also got a lot of request for random sampling since I rarely say no if someone ask me a favor. I have no problem with that, I only feel bad for people who ask me for direction since I am bad at direction, literally and figuratively." 

"Are you an extrovert?"

"No, although I may fall into an ambivert category. My comfort zone is always my personal room where I don't have to bother on other people. Probably, that's also why it's difficult to let new people in. On the other hand, since my work forces me to deal with new people all the time, I start to learn how to stretch my boundary. But I am still bad at large setting meeting. I also prefer to text first, a first step of interaction without really need to be social."

"How do you even survive until this point?"

"I believe in the art of resonance. The Creator protects you by surrounding you with people who complete you. It's not that you are dotting on them but in a weird way, you complement each other."

The Act of Service

According to some articles (i.e. DW and CNBC), there were an increase in dating app use during the Covid-19 time. The articles also said that people spent more time using the app. I use dating app on and off. Sometimes the people I met in the app were just too much. I have also been scammed once although since the person was too weird in the sense, saying love too fast and sending words that looked copied from elsewhere, I knew that he was fake. So when he sent me some bubbly words, I Googled it and found that he copied them from Facebook. Also when he sent me a contract of his work in an oil company, I used reverse image and found a similar story with the same contract in the scam survivor website. He played for the long run, it took him a month with daily communication until he showed me the contract. According to scam survivor, the pattern is usually approach, sending a contract, promising to visit and then being caught in the immigration and asking the victim to send the scammers money. For my case, after he showed me his contract, I silent treatment him and he did not contact me anymore.

I don't like confrontation. So I use to solve problem by ignoring people. I think I accumulate bad karma for this approach although (as a justification) I thought that's the main approach in dating app. If you are not into someone after both of you swipe right, then just ignore the person. But somehow, some people who I am in contact with keep on messaged me on daily basis. I think this the effect of covid-19, making people more persistent.

I don't know, it's quite difficult to fall in love to people I meet online. Probably, because I am not really touched by sweet words. I am more touched with the act of service like when someone asked me to do small things for me, or contacted me for a problem I posted in a group and offered to help. Therefore, being in an artificial communication such as dating app is kind of suffocating since people only say nice words for the sake of approaching the person at the other end.

Because of the covid-19, I got many good mornings and I forget which profile belong to what name. I thought I would like the attention but apparently, if you don't have feeling for the persons, answering these greetings become painful since you don't want to create expectation for the persons you are talking with. 

What is a Mathematician, Really?

I adopt the title from Hersh's book, "What is Mathematics, Really?" I found the book in the math library when I was an undergrad and since I like the book so much, I bought it when I was taking my PhD in a subject that has nothing to do with math, or so I thought. I think my learning process is always about finding meaning. If I didn't get why I should do a particular subject, my grades would just fall down the drain. That's why I changed my subject from abstract mathematics to social science. Along the way, I re-learned statistics and programming again as part of my research and somehow, I realized that the way I am attracted towards math is part of a bigger attraction, pattern.

Mathematics is a form of pattern and since it works through definition, I can have one of the purest form of pattern. When I was an undergrad, my final project was about the convergence of Lax-Friedrichs scheme in approaching a continuous formula with partial differential equation. The author of the main paper that I built my final project from is a woman. So reading about her kind of me motivated me to keep going (after being told by my supervisor). I did the same for Calculus, I finished reading all the mathematicians stories that start each chapter in Purcell's book.

My training kind of shaped the way I approached social science. I like to create a social model by defining the rules first. It's like creating a natural number or a space. The way we understand the world is through a lens or a framework. It allows us to become sensitive to different things, depends on the lens. At the same time, failure in understanding the lens also means failure in what it disallow us to see. In math, I see this as a form of transformation where one space may be more effective in solving one problem than the other. We can only say this once we understand the space we are working in. In social science, it's less clear than math and therefore, many people may not see it as an epistemological problem. They confuse truth with situated knowledge.

Movie Marathon

I have been doing a kind of movie marathon and all of them end up with either suicide, break up and regret. They have romance genre as their category but none of them end with a happy ending. Probably, happy ending is not a thing anymore. It's better to leave the movie with an open ending and let the audiences decide the meaning of it. As Barthes said, "the author is dead." On the bright side, it's nice to see that even a fiction has a complicated narrative as in real life. Nothing is really black and white since everyone has their own background that makes them who they are.

Somehow, I think that's what a relationship is. It's not a matter on finding the best person but how two persons are able to fit each other's life into a shared routine. The movie where the male character kill himself is a story about depression. The main characters met for the first time at the bridge when the female was standing on top of the bridge ready to jump after she lost her sister in a car accident. The story is narrated from the female character where her interaction with him enabled her to deal with her depression until she realized there was something off with the male character. And at the end, the movie shows that her feeling was right, the male character ended his life.

I think that's how life is, there are moments where you meet someone for a particular reason. The person won't be part of your life but his/her presence in a fraction of your life helps in making you a better person. That's how the Universe protects and directs you.

Unsent Letter

Hey, how are you? I miss you. I know I don't have the right to say that anymore especially since I was the one who pulled the trigger. We broke up twice. Although I kind of not regretting the first one since that was the first time I really believe that you had feeling for me. While I like how we could spend time without talking sometimes I was wondering what you were thinking and the first broke up was the first time I saw your emotion. I think you and I were quite similar in this matter, we did not really like to show our emotion or even used it since it would make us or human in general vulnerable and we chose to be a logical creature.

It's strange that during this weird situation you are the one who crossed my mind. Probably because what you said about not looking for someone kind of ring a bell for me now. The energy to hold a conversation or to open up is just too much. At the same time, it is also nice to have someone who you can talk to without having to pretend anything. And I miss that about you ... or maybe my idealization of you. Since imagination is always better since it does not happen. Reality has frictions and sometimes memory will only leave you with the good bits.

Time

One of the things that attached to routine is time. If I usually distribute my time following my office life, now I have no time division. I can pray, eat and work without taking a shower, which lead to a limbo feeling of being in between relaxing and working modes. It also makes me reflect more on the meaning of time and how Islam describes it beautifully in the surah Al-Asr (1-3).

By time, Indeed, mankind is in loss, Except for those who have believed and done righteous deeds and advised each other to truth and advised each other to patience.

At the end, our value in the world is evaluated based on how we deal with the reality. As Allah SWT has promised, “Surely, Allah is with those who are As‑Saabiroon (the patient)” [al-Anfaal 8:46]

April

I will try to write regularly again. One thing I realize about working from home is the lack of boundary. Usually, I start my day with breakfast, reading some news or comics, taking shower and heading off to the office. But now it does not really matter if I take a shower or not or whether I change my cloths for days or not. There were still meeting in between, but as long as I dress up, the rest is kind of okay. So today I started running and after taking care of my physical health, it is good to take care of mental health by writing. I forget when (or why) I stopped writing regularly. It feels nice to be reflective again and re-thinking about what I want in life. My friend who I met in 2012 said that my life does not go anywhere. My confusion about what I want in life is similar to what I complained to him in 2014. Probably, I fall into one of Einstein's dream spaces where I keep on repeating the same routine over and over, a space where life is a sum of repeated events.

I also want to detach my life from my phone. I will combine my work with more readings and writing without internet connection. Probably walking to the park is also a nice distraction to be motivated again. Just like the old time when my friends I got bored at the afternoon and we had this nice walk around the campus. I miss Europe's nature and since I can do nothing about that I should just focus on what I can do to create the new comfort zone.

Dis/Connected

It's strange that during this working from home period I became more connected than ever. There were no days without meetings. Group meetings, reading group, discussions with student, writing session and weekly meeting. The great thing about group meeting in person is that you can disappear in the background whereas in this whole mediated connection, the device will make you the center of attention once you talk. Maybe this period allows us to focus and to listen to one thing instead of doing multiple things at once.

The staying at home reminds me on the time when I was in Enschede. Christmas period, snowy and no obligation to go outside. No close friends since I was just arrived from Indonesia. But I kind of enjoy the quietness of cold, snow and being alone. There was a lake next to my lake that I used to visit. I was quite productive as well during that period. Probably because that's the type of quite that I like, nature, no email, no human on the street. 

Ten years apart. New place, new continent, new break ups.  

The New Normal

I am still finding my way to the new normal. I worked during weekend and I went to the supermarket in Monday. Everyday becomes a mesh of working and holiday. When I watch movie, I remember work and when I work, I want to escape to do fun things since I haven't had a proper break. Probably, I should start running in the morning, take shower and start to work instead of reading in the morning and feel unmotivated at 10 AM. With the whole lockdown thing, I become more connected to my phone. Usually I only need to charge it once per day, however, during this stay at home period, I charge it three times per day. Crazy!

I have borrowed several books from the library. Probably, it is also good to read in the park instead of staying inside all the time. So, it is either park for running or for reading or for cat chasing. The last one sounds fun :-)