I'd rather be "us"

There is separation when it's you and me.

You are still you and I am still me.

When you becomes "u" and the self becomes "s"

To create us,

There is no distinction anymore of a you or me,

But a whole, complete unit that cannot be separated

Into you and me.

Spent pens

There is something refreshing about fully used up pens. Mind you, this is different from pens whose ink has dried out. There is a feeling of waste and a slight twinge of regret in having to dispose of them.

In throwing out these used up pens, there almost seems to be a sense of clearing out the clutter.

Perhaps I simply have too many pens.

I meander

Perhaps this is how bad habits are formed.

Perhaps this is why it takes me so long to do things.

Perhaps this is why I love both late nights and early mornings (and yet sleep trumps both if I'm ever tired).

Yet if I am relishing the moments I have as I meander through life, is that all that should matter?

The balance between meandering and taking the direct path.

I prefer to meander.

Dance across my heart

Things out of context seldom sound right but I like this phrase. (I suppose that's my thing right now - pretty phrases... though I feel like that's always my thing...)

Anyway, the rest of the passage was cloyingly saccharine and I didn't want to share the rest of it but I liked how those four words sounded.

I think that depending on context, it can also sound unfortunate (in that when someone dances across one's heart, that person could be playing with one's heart) but I like to think of it as a metaphorical manifestation of the way someone can come up in one's thoughts and the feeling that the thought of the person gives feels like that. They are dancing across one's heart in a beautiful and poetic way because of the happiness that stems from thinking of the person. One's heart beats a little faster, a blush becomes deeper, and a smile unwittingly plays across the lips because that person brings that kind of joy to one's heart and mind.

Hehe. *^_^*

Brushing my teeth with my non-dominant hand

This is from an article about willpower:

"Just like practicing self-control in one aspect of your day (resisting a brownie, say) depletes the entire well, it also strengthens the entire muscle. “If I'm practicing self control in any domain, it should help me in all the others,” says DeWall. Multiple studies have illustrated that when you exercise self-control in one area of your life -- such as brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand -- you can exert more willpower in another area, such as suppressing aggressive behavior. The two behaviors may be very different, but they share a common energy source."

For some reason, the thing that I got out of this is:

I want to brush my teeth with my left hand. That's it. Hahahaha

Hey, if it helps me learn to exert more willpower, why not? :D

For the full article, click here.

The poetry of subjective moments

I don't know why, but I think the phrase is beautiful.

Moments that can only be interpreted by the person who feels it, yet there is poetry to that moment.

There's beauty in a situation for only the person who is experiencing it, and the quality of that experience can only be translated and mediated through words.

I can tell you about the beauty of something I experienced, but the experience is already once removed in my telling because it was my personal experience; the fact that I brought in my own insights, thoughts, and feelings at the time that contributed to the beauty and poetry of the moment makes it hard for someone else to understand how I truly felt.

I don't know if it's beauty though. Poetry means more than just beauty. The aesthetic quality of something personally experienced perhaps?

Emotional range

Knowing more languages increases the range of emotion one feels

Things are often lost in translation and what exists in one culture as a "thing" doesn't necessarily exist in another culture. There is a type of frustration (짜증나) that exists in Korean culture where the word for it in English: frustration is a poor imitation of the depth of what it means in Korean. The word for troublesome (めんどくさい）in Japanese that similarly cannot convey the same kind of feeling.

When we look at Saussure and subsequent thinkers (linguists, theorists, or whatever you want to label them), they claim that emotion, things, etc. cannot exist without the word existing. In essence, that something that does not have a name cannot exist. That's a poor, diluted version of what they are saying, but I find there to be quite some truth in it. It's almost as if I didn't have those range of feelings without knowing what it is.

Perhaps this is why people say one should travel. The range of experiences, the range of words that one is exposed to, and the type of thinking that it engenders allows one to be more open-minded (which is I think what it boils down to - we learn to see and accept other cultures and in turn, accept other ways of thinking that we previously would have been unaware of, or closed to).

This feels half-baked. There's more to it, I think, but it's interesting how powerful language is.