On the Definition of a Certain Word

Love ---a woman asked me once what the word meant. I didn’t know what to tell her of course. I wasn't well versed on subjects concerning the softer emotions. All I knew was that it’s a word that manly men should only use when referring to food, cars or gadgets. Using the word when referring to another person is highly inappropriate and should be frowned on. Writing about the definition of love in a public blog is an offense that should be punishable by stoning.

I told her that I may need time to figure out how to define it and I told her that I may need her help. Over the course of getting to know her, I slowly got to know what love does to a person. (This is on a case by case basis of course.)

• Love will make you eat exotic food
• Love COULD make you eat kuhol, given enough time
• Love will change your sleeping habits
• Love will make you go out of your comfort zone
• Love could make you more sociable
• Love will make you throw the man code out the window occasionally
• Love will make you more outdoorsy
• Love will make you a sentimentalist
• Love has an entirely different set of special logical rules which may be contradictory to normal logical rules. Love’s special logical rules will almost always win out.
• Love will make you join a race in which you may possibly have to endure a great deal of “bossing around”
• Love will make you emo occasionally
• Love will make you feel happier in general
• When the object of your love wraps her arm around your arm in a movie theatre, love will make you feel comfort, the likes of which you’re unlikely to feel anywhere else
• Love will introduce you to his cousin, jealousy
• When love leaves, it will leave a void in your chest that would be very difficult to fill

After a few months, she asked me again to define the word. I already knew what the word meant but I still couldn’t define it. So I said it’s like the color blue. How do you define blue without referring to things that are colored blue? You can try your best to define blue to someone who’s blind but you will never come close to giving that person any idea of what blue looks like. The person will need to have perceived the color to understand what it looks like. In the same sense, I don’t think that love, as a feeling, can be effectively defined to someone. You could describe things that are affected by it but He or she will have to have experienced love to fully understand what it is.

It took a while but I can finally say that I now know what love is. You wouldn’t know what you’ve been missing out on until you finally feel it and realize that your life wouldn’t have been half complete without it.

This is the color blue:

And this is love:

Rumminations on Blogging

I’ve neglected blogging for almost a year now. I feel like I’ve become a shallower person as a result.  A friend asked me once for my opinion regarding a suitor of hers. The first question I asked her was: “does he have a blog?” As soon as she said no, I said that he was not worth her time.

I judged a lot of people that way.  The people whom I found interesting were usually those who wanted to keep concrete records of their opinions, convictions or feelings, whether that be through writing, art or even video/audio recordings.

I had a certain respect for people who felt that their thoughts or opinions were significant enough for them to be ascribed some sort of permanence.  The human mind is always in a state of flux. Thoughts are generated, morphed and oftentimes lost. Thoughts are so fundamental to a person’s existence that losing them forever almost seems like a sin. And there’s a finalizing quality to writing in that when you write down a thought or an opinion, it becomes, in a way, final. It acquires a definite and tangible form and structure and ceases to be just a jumble of spontaneous thought bubbles that pop in and out of existence.  It becomes like a photograph, only not of one’s face but of one’s mind

I’ve been re-reading a lot of my past entries. When you revisit memories they’re usually not the same as when you first experienced them. Even the strongest of feelings subside eventually and with them, go the thoughts that they produced.  It’s nice to read your thoughts at the time that they were conceived, thoughts that may otherwise have been forgotten. It’s nice to know what your convictions were or if you had any. And it’s nice to know if you still feel as strongly about them

I feel like I have changed a lot the past few months. Whether for the better of for the worse is a matter of perspective. I’ve modified some goals. I'm not as profit oriented anymore
I got into photography, I went dating, socializing, clubbing(WTH?!), expanded my group of friends, acquired a new appreciation for fireworks. I also experienced betrayal, jealousy, I almost got into a fight, felt the highs of passion and the lows of inadequacy -Normal things for most normal people but keep in mind that I used to spend months not interacting with a single person.

Such a drastic change in lifestyle would probably lead to an equally drastic change in personality. But I take comfort in the fact that even if I change or even if I lose half of my brain mass due to intellectual inactivity, I’ll have a record of who I was.

I write for a variety of reasons. But most significant of all, I write for the same reason that people erect monuments to fallen heroes, or for the same reason that people seemingly waste large areas of land to preserve historical structures - to create a permanent imprint of that which is fleeting, time