In Difference

#193: Is there a Difference?

...between loving someone and being in love with someone? Does the word "in" make a world of difference? I love you vs. I am IN love with you.

I think there is a difference in terms of the level of engagement. One is an overflow of one's heart. It is directional in nature - the flow of which can be increased (or reduced) accordingly by descriptors such as 'very', 'really', 'much' , 'heaps.' I love you. I really really love shoes too. Very much.

The other is a diving deep into the other's heart. It is illustrative of how you have let something embrace you... envelope you. The depth is dictated by the depth of love itself and not one's capacity to love. You are IN it just as a fly is in a bowl of soup. It knows it is in there with or without an idea of how big the bowl is or how much farther the soup it is immersed in extends.

Is it a real difference or merely a perceived one?
Either way, is it an important difference?

Hmm.

Die Scum Die

#192: Drained

Our little apartment has a wonderful shower room. The cubicle is next to a thin glass window that's slightly frosted - like someone has lightly breathed on the surface - and that's two-thirds of the wall in size. Please imagine how it must look from the outside. No, please don't. Back to my point. So every time I shower, I am bathed with paranoia. I stand at an angle to obscure...uhm, nothing really, but to just avoid being indecent in the eyes of whichever indecent freak is watching. (Shudder.) Then you have winter. Cold winds rattling the thin glass will always present a huge challenge to the half-asleep mind leading the body out of her warm bed. So, not only am I giving the fictional voyeur a show, I'm throwing in a bit of break dance there too. (Or what they called, "Strut" in the 80's.) (Shudderer.)

And so the last straw came last week when the shower room floor starting flooding. No, not the shower cubicle floor. That would have been acceptable. The shower room floor OUTSIDE of the cubicle. The water goes down the drain and up again in another part of the room, flooding the area near the washing machine, forcing our bath mats to surrender. But, it doesn't stop there. It spills over to the toilet in the next room. And you think it stops there? No. Today, it decides that it wants to spill over to the carpet, not just outside of the toilet and bathroom, but up to our rooms. So my stuff on the floor - backpack with a couple of useless documents inside, a pair of socks - got wet with strange-ish tinges of rust or whatever it is that the drain throws up. Yick.

Monica, my flat-mate-cum-Ginang-ng-Tahanan-or-Gladys'-surrogate-mother, probably fed up with my "raising the issue" with her so she can "raise the issue" with the landlord, decides to buy this drain-busting liquid that melts hair, scum and ecto-plasm that lives in your pipes. Wunderbar! In a few minutes, the drain gulps and burps and drinks the mulch away. Why didn't I think of that? (Well, the boyfriend suggested it the day before but he gave the suggestion to the wrong person.) But there you go. I didn't think of it because... I... would... rather... believe that if I showered quickly enough and used as little water as possible, the problem would be addressed and everything would magically be alright. Oh yeah, that's after I click my black rubber slippers three times. (Oh, was that ruby slippers that I needed to click?). Now excuse me, I have to rub the soap scum off the back of my ears.

Differentiation Strategy

#191: What's the Diff?

"He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me."
From Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

How do you feel about this line?

I used to carry this notion of "birds of the same feather, flock together" as being more viable in the long term than "opposites attract." While there may be chemistry resulting from polarity, it makes you wonder how long the reaction will last and if it will be 1.) sustainable and 2.) binding. Now I am not a chemistry guru. Far from it. I almost died in my Chemistry class in high school (which my mom will find horrific since she's a Chemical Engineer.) But I've always been cynical about such matches. It had always been more conceivable for me to be with someone who walked like me, talked like me, liked the same books, music, activities. It's like having me - guy version. Now, this is not narcissistic. It's more of being myopic. And lazy.

See, the Lord created man and woman to complement each other. Not to duplicate each other. God could have made Adam and Adam2. Or even Adam and Steve. But in His infinite wisdom, He created Adam and Eve. There will necessarily be differences. In various degrees. I may have been short-sighted in thinking that minimization of differences (or what business school students love to call 'variability') automatically results in operational efficiencies. But I am now learning with each day that complementarity is an attractive concept... and one that has promise of being long-term. For when and where one is weak, the other can be strong.

When I was 15, I wrote an essay about this - exactly about this - for our Christian Values class in High School. I got an A+ for it. Apparently, the lesson does not end with the receipt of the grade. More than a decade after, I find myself doing the practicum.