On Gilmore Girls, the big G, and Southeast Asia

'Gilmore Girls' is a hit with guys, too'

Yes!!! Now I can finally come out of the closet - I, too, am a Gilmore Girls fan! Wow, what a witty, charming show. I initially started watching only by accident because I was watching w/ someone, but then quickly got hooked. I just love the snarky, clever diaogue and embedded cultural and literary trivia all throughout the show. It's almost impossible to find TV with such wonderful writing these days. Just a very intelligent show with lots of warmth and endearing characters over all.

Yeah, and I love pink shirts too. There. :)

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In other news, I formally accepted my offer from the big G today. Yup, I will be quitting my first full-time, professional job. What a surreal moment. I never planned to stay in Seattle for more than a couple years, but still it seems like just yesterday when I first moved up and For those of you (gosh, for my limited blog readership - that's like what, all of five people?) who've been with me through out this drawn out process, thank you so much for your support, encouragement, advice, and well wishes. I couldn't have done it w/o my wonderful friends. Thank you all.

So now that I have some time off between jobs, I'm super excited to get back on the road again. It's been almost a year since I last strapped on my backpack, and I'm itching for some adventure. First, I will take two weeks to do a roadtrip across the US with some friends. Well, halfway across, rather than the whole way. I wanted to go the whole way but the other guys couldn't quit their jobs :) . We'll fly into Chicago and take the Oregon Trail, going through the Great Lakes, Niagra Falls, out to Boston, then down to NYC. You can even take a look at our trip plan here (btw, Live Local has got some awesome features. I think GMaps has kind of been sitting on its laurels the last couple of years. They really need to get off their asses, heh, maybe I'll be the one doing it).

Then, I'm planning on going to SE Asia for 5-6 wks, just backpacking through the mainland. So far on my itinerary is Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and possibly Myanmar. Any travel suggestions/advice people?

Hear, hear!

Soccer has become a favorite pastime of the American intellectual. "Many people would say that soccer is the latte or the Subaru of the sporting spectrum"

The other shoe

has finally dropped. It's been, what, almost five months now, since I wrote this entry? I can't believe it's been so long. And now the point has finally tipped, it feels so surreal. I've crossed, and now I just have to make a decision. What will it be? I supposed I should feel elated; instead, I just feel relieved. It's been such an agonizingly long process that during this past month I just wanted it to end - I didn't really care how. And now that things have, I feel surprisingly calm about it. Things aren't completely what I'd like them to be, there are a couple details that really irk me, though I don't think they will be deal breakers at the end.

Moreoever, I guess the decision will come down to what I'm looking for. There's been so much hype, part of me want to say yes just to find out for myself what's real vs. what's hype. That aside, everything I've learned and heard about the people have just been really great. People seem to be really, really sharp, and passionate about what they do. Which really excites me. I really want to re-capture my mojo again, to get so excited about something to want to work on it 24-7. Am I just really want to work with top-notch people. A+ people I can learn from, and be inspired by. That really excites me. They are growing really fast, too fast for my comfort, but then that's to be expected I suppose.

And I guess I do have some stories to tell, though I'm pretty wary of the power of search engines - I don't really want this to getting /.ed or digged or anything like that. Maybe it will suffice to say that I was asked questions of all shapes and sizes (in four different languages - first three went pretty well, pero mi espanol era muy malo though), from water bottle packaging, to egg dropping, to coding, to lots of infinite numbers, lists, sorts and optimal this and optimal that, to growing apple's market share, to winning in china, and a few more things here and there. Yeah, they do beat you up until you think you can't go anymore, and then some.

So what's it going to be? I don't really know yet. I guess I'll sleep on it for a few days, and then think about it some more. And I guess at least now I can watch all the world cup I want without worrying about this anymore. Ha!

Goooooooooooooooooool!!!!!!!!!!

I've been watching a lot of World Cup this past week, averaging about 1 match/day. It's been awesome. I've never been a big football fan previously, because I always felt it was too low-scoring compared to games like bball and tennis, but now I can truly appreciate the game. The game can turn in seconds and every shot counts, unlike other sports. And I love how how the fans get so into it. The roar of the fans after a big play is simply electrifying.

Anyways, I found this as the official World Cup theme. Pretty cool, not quite as good as Ricky Martin's "La Copa de la Vida" but still really good.



And check out this goal - how incredible is that?!


Interestingly, the traditional powerhouses aren't doing terribly well. Brazil has underwhelmed in its two games so far, and so has Holland. France is on the verge of elimination, and Englad barely scraped through its last two matches. Argentina is the only one performing to form so far, their 6:0 crushing of S&M was awe-inspiring. Too bad they may meet the Germans in the quarterfinals.

As a side benefit, it's certainly helping me get up earlier these days, to watch these 9am matches. Maybe I'll be conditioned into an early riser after the Cup, ha!

你心中的這個特別的朋友

你心中有這樣的一個人嗎？
你們可能相愛過，你們也可能喜歡著彼此，
但是，為了什麼原因你們沒能在一起？
也許他為了朋友之間的義氣，不能追你。
也許為了顧及家人的意見，你們沒有在一起。

也許為了出國深造，他沒有要你等他。
也許你們相遇太早，還不懂得珍惜對方。
也許你們相遇太晚，你們身邊已經有了另一個人。
也許你回頭太遲，對方已不再等待。
也許你們彼此在捉摸對方的心，而遲遲無法跨出界線。

不過即使你們沒在一起，你們還是保持了朋友的關系。
但是你們心底清楚，對這個人，你比朋友還多了一份關心。
即使不能跟他名正言順的牽著手逛街，你們還是可以做無所不談的朋友。
他有喜歡的人，你口頭上會幫他追，心里卻不是很清楚，你是不是真的希望他追到。

他遇到困難時，你會盡你所能的幫他，不會計較誰又欠了誰。
男女朋友吃醋了，你會安撫他們說你和他只是朋友，但你心中會有那麼一絲的不確定。
每個人這輩子，心中都有過這麼一個特別的朋友，很矛盾的行為。
一開始你不甘心只做朋友的，但久了，突然發現這樣最好。
希望我們來世還有線能相逢
你寧願這樣關心他，總好過你們在一起而有天會分手。
你寧願做他的朋友，彼此不會吃醋，才可以真的無所不談。
特別是這樣，你還是知道，他永遠會關心你的。
做不成男女朋友，當他那個特別的朋友，有什麼不好呢？
你心中的這個特別的朋友……？是誰呢？
*************

你好嗎? 雖然我已再也不陪伴在你身旁 可是我還是一直想念著你, 牽掛著你過得好不好。我會永遠在遠方祝福你,為你祈禱。也希望我們來世有緣再相逢。

I'm getting old...

God, I must really be getting old. I played a bunch of bball today, 2 league games at the pro club, then another hour of pickup afterwards. Now my legs feel like they are going to fall apart. My right ankle hurts still from turning it last week, my calves were cramping, my left quad is tight as a steel cable, and let's not even start on my knees. It's sad to know that you've hit the age when your body is slowing down and you're just not able to recover the way you used to. I used to play bball all day long out on the blacktop courts of wilbur, man every day after class freshman year I'd be balling it up for hours until sundown. Never a pain or an ache, except the occasional turned ankle. Sigh, those were the days...

I'm sure everyone deals w/ aging differently, but it's funny to note it happening to myself. It basically started sometime last year, when I started to have knee problems. That was when it really hit me, "oh shit, so this aging thing that people always talk about...it's actually happening!" It's not that I didn't believe I could get old; it was simply that thought never crossed my mind, because there was never any sign of it. I could run all day, stay up all night, work all the time, drink all I want (well, maybe not all I want, but a pretty respectable amount). Until now I guess. Anyways, so now I pop vitamins, b-complex, and fish oil every night, watch what I eat, workout 3-4 times a week, don't binge anymore, etc etc etc. All the stuff that my mom nagged me for years to do to no avail, suddenly I'm doing it all religiously by myself. With no one watching over my shoulders. Ironic, isn't it?

Another thing I find kind of funny is how I tend to overdo things when I start. Like when I first started watching what I eat, I think it must been from reading one too many Men's Health mags that Garry had lying around or something. But suddenly one day I just decided, I'm going to start eating better. So I cut out all this stuff cold turkey. Literally, like I just woke up one morning, and stopped eating all of this -

pizza
fries
potato chips (or pretzels, mixes, any sort of stuff you'd find in that aisle)
fast food (except grilled chicken sandwiches)
soda
ice cream
chocolate (a lot of it, at least)
cookies
and some other things I don't recall right now

And I actually did this for months! What made me eventually cave on pizza and soda was not so much the craving, but the fact that our cafeteria is such crap and the food is so shitty, if you don't eat pizza you'll basically starve to death many days. And if I don't eat something high calorie, I just can't get through an afternoon. But still, there was stuff I completely cut out that I don't miss that much. Like potato chips, fast food, ice cream, cookies. It's weird. It's like after you don't eat it for a while, you don't want it anymore. weird.

I tried quitting ramen, but that was just too damn hard. It's a constant struggle for a continuous eater like me (my boss says I'm like a cow. I don't eat, I just continously graze). I'd have periods where I go "dry", but then I would totally relapse and start binging on ramen. Sigh, bad habit from college. Oh well, I guess you gotta have one or two things to indulge in.

Haha, too funny

Recently a recruiter for a major firm visited several prominent business schools to interview the best candidates. As is common in interviewing today, she asked a number of behavioral questions to asses the candidates potential. “You are driving in a rental car to a client’ s job site in the Arizona desert. The car hits a nail and one of your tires blows out. The rental car company has forgotten to put the spare tire in the car’s trunk and your cell phone is out of range. You are several miles from the nearest public phone and there isn’t a lot of traffic on the highway. What do you do?”

Here’s how the candidates responded at various schools:

HARVARD: “I’m so important to my client; he’ll come looking for me.”
CHICAGO: “The present value of a tire and wheel is less than the future value of a client contract. Therefore, drive as many miles as necessary on the flat.”
STANFORD: “I’d drive on the flat tire; however I’d let the air out of the other three tires first so that the car rides better.”
MIT: “I’d remove the tires and install rocket pods.”
MICHIGAN: “This would never happen to me. I only rent Japanese cars that don’t get flat tires.”
COLUMBIA: “The desert and the middle of nowhere without any people? You must be thinking about New Jersey.”
WHARTON: “There are so many Wharton people; it will only be a couple minutes before an alum drives by.”
CORNELL: “You must be mistaken; Arizona is not the middle of nowhere. Ithaca is the middle of nowhere.”
UNC-CHAPEL HILL: “I’d do whatever the NASCAR guys do in a flat tire situation.”
WISCONSIN: “Start drinking. Repeat as often as necessary.”
USC: “The first thing you need to do in this situation is to call a lawyer.”
UT-AUSTIN: “Burn the tires for a smoke signal.”
PENN STATE: “Pop the hood and see if the spare tire is in there.”

She hired the Penn State grad.

Oh hey look, I found the question (Yarr Maties) that I bombed years ago when I was interviewing for an equity trader internship at GS...ah, those were the days.

Brilliant. The best commercial I've seen in a long time...

Those of you who understand Chinese will absolutely appreciate the brilliance of this commericial.

Background:
Tongbohu is a famous dead poet who's also known as quite a playboy. There's a famous old Chinese poem, loosely translated as "It's raining now, should I keep my guest or not?", which I actually don't remember if it was written by him or someone else. But, it plays on the importance of punctuation in the Chinese language, and how merely moving a period or comma from one character to another can completely change the meaning of entire sentences or even paragraphs. It's a well-known story studied by kids all over in elementary schools, and even I still remember it till this day. It also illustrates an unique nuance of the Chinese language very well.

Enter video:


Brilliant. Simply absolutely brilliant

I love the none-too-subtle exophobic jab and underlying nationalistic implications here. Plays extremely well to the Chinese youth market and popular sentiments. I am quite impressed.

Personally, I have compared both searches, and I do think Baidu does a better job of parsing Chinese than Google does. Google has got a real competitor on its hands, and things are gonna get interesting...

English translation as follows -

Foreigner: I know! Heh heh.
Tangbohu (a famous Chinese clever guy): Hahahaha~~ You may not know!
Tangbohu: I know you don’t know. I know you don’t know I know. YOU DON’T KNOW.
Foreigner: I know!
All: Ei? [audience is surprised at Foreigner's seeming agreement with Tangbohu that the foreigner does NOT know (as in does not "get it"]
Foreigner: Ei!I know!
Tangbohu: Not necessarily. I know you don’t know me, I know you don’t know me, haha~ I know you don’t know!
Foreigner: I know!
Tangbohu: I know that you don’t know I know. You don’t know that I know you don’t know!

Look Ma, I'm on TIME magazine!

Well, almost. My team and our product made it into 3/20 issue of TIME magazine. Check us out.

I think this one is going on the refrigerator...

Information overload

I just spent most of the day studying more marketing, and reading up on Google, their analyst day slides, the various aliases, and blogs. Talk about overwhelming information, whew. But it is exciting and stimulating. This certainly makes my day job look boring as all hell when I have to get in tomorrow to write about...ugh, video drivers. F*ck, It's getting harder and harder to get up these days for work.

The analyst day slides were interesting, but still not as interesting as Batelle's forecasting of possible Google moves. Still, I came away impressed by the company's focus on growing a sound business. The media often paints an image of Google being a bazaar run by engineers where no one knows what's going on, but there is financial discipline. I like the various operational and financial metrics used for measuring performance as well. I think that's a good sign that a company is maturing.

Some of the mentions were interesting, I wonder what Lighthouse is? Hmm...

It is still not clear to me how Google has a competitive advantage when it comes to offline advertising, however. I'm not sure how well Adsense applies to print and radio advertising, you'd have to digitize all the content first. The only advantage Google offers is leveling the playing field by introducing the auction model to advertising, essentially cutting out the middle man (advertising agencies). But in print/radio media where traditional advertising is deeply entrenched, I'm not sure how well that'll play. It's also biting the hands that feeds them, as advertising firms have the traditioanl relationships w/ all the big named accounts. But then again, I'm still a novice about this space so I can be way off.

Too tired to write more, need to go home and sleep.

Oh lastly, I benched 175 today! And that's at an end of an inverted routine as well (8x 125lb, 6x 135lb, 4x 145lb, 3x 155lb). Quite proud of myself. I wonder if I could possibly break 200lb this year?

On marketing and diamonds

OK, usually I think marketing training and books are a waste of time; most of the time the material just seem like common sense to me. While I still don't think it's rocket science, I am gaining have a little more respect for the discipline now.

Consider this:

In 1932, the global market for diamonds was $100,000. De Beers changed that forever by altering the perception of the purpose of diamonds. They launched a deliberate campaign to create an association in the minds of young men that diamonds are a gift of love, and an association in the minds of young women that diamonds are an essential part of romance and marriage. Their strategy included seminars on diamonds to high school students, news stories about celebrity romances and their diamonds, and strategic product placements in Hollywood movies such as “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “Diamonds are Forever.” So how did the strategy work?

More than 100 million women now wear diamonds.

Over 75% percent of brides receive a diamond ring.

The market has grown to 50 billion dollars.

De Beers controls two thirds of the market.

Frightening, isn't it? Now millions of men everywhere like myself will have De Beers to thank when we plunk down that 3-6mo salary savings on a rock. (OK, OK, it's really for that sparkle in your eyes when we get down on one knee, but still).

And now what are they working on now that they've convinced the women of the world that diamonds are a symbol of love?

The new De Beers campaign targets women's right hands. The left hand says "we", the right hand says "me." The message is that even if you are married you can still make a statement with your other hand. And, if you are not married, you will still want to make a statement--and you can make a statement of independence with your right hand. This new campaign is targeting emotions, changing perceptions, and redefining the category once again.

"Women of the world. Raise your right hand."

Genius, I tell you. Pure genius. You gotta hand it to these guys. I have a newfound respect for marketers now.

Pace of change

Talk about accelerating pace of change...geez. I was feeling OK today, still doing all my work and everything, but then started reading some blogs, doing some puzzles to prepare tonight and now I'm feeling it a little bit. I hate to use the word "stressed" cuz it makes me feel like a wimp, but let's just say it'll be a little harder to fall asleep tonight. It's like being back in school all over again, that frantic period when you're about to graduate, trying to keep all the balls in the air, lest one of them fall. After working for a while I guess you just turn on autopilot and aren't exercising your brains anymore, and now suddenly I have to get it cranking again. It's gonna be intense.

Leaks...and then some

Wow, has everyone seen this? I feel robbed. :(

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holy crappola, i didn't realize my link showed up on mini's trackback. good god, i yanked the link asap. don't want that mass of people over here.

Musings on "The Search" and other ramblings

I'm reading John Batelle's "The Search" right now, about 1/3 way through it. I don't think there is any self-respecting techie who can read the story of Sergey and Page and not get completely fired up. It's basically every wannabe entrepreneur's wet dream come true. Reading through history of all the incredible innovation that came out of Stanford, from Excite, to Yahoo, to Google, to god knows what's next, it reminded me what it was like being there at that time. The electricity in the air, when there was a startup job fair every other week, competiting ads in the Daily with ridiculous offers, business plan competitions getting more hype than March Madness (well, almost. we sucked after I got in), free t-shirts everywhere, and everyone trying to score that coveted internship. It reminded me that at one point, I had that same passion, that same fire of wanting to change the world. To be a part of something from the beginning and believe in it so much, that I was willing to eat, breath, and sleep it. I suppose I am trying to recapture that kind of passion in my life. Do I still have it? Do I still have what it takes?

This also made me think about how things turn out in Life in ironic ways. I remember when I was applying to college, I actually really really wanted to go to MIT, and I was bitterly disappointed when I was waitlisted. Stanford was my top choice too, it probably would've been a toss-up between the two had I gotten into both. But now in retrospect, I would not give up going to Stanford for the world. That was absolutely the best place for me, to be there from '98 to '02, witnessing the bubble grow and then burst and to take in that atmosphere. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that had a tremendous impact on my development as a person. But I would never have experienced this had I gone to MIT. Sigh, why can't foresight be as clear as hindsight?

So that was a long winded way of convincing myself, maybe something that I'm bitterly regretting now may turn out to hold something else for me in turn? Or maybe not :) But I guess that's all part of life.

As I've said previously, things are now in motion and accelerating at a breakneck pace. For the first time, I have zero cycles left at work, which is rare for me since my upperbound is literally every waking minute. While it's not all work, I'm still exhausted. I went home at 5am last night and had to pull myself up for work at 9am...almost reminds me of college again :) Maybe I should be careful what I wish for.

It is nice to be firing on all cycles again. I have to say, I was refreshing my knowledge of basic bayesian statistics last night. I swear, I could hear the gears grinding and groaning as I was slowly firing up that dormant machine upstairs again. It definitely took a while, at first I couldn't even remember the theorems. But man did it feel good when it all came back. It's nice to know I've still got it, at least some of it.

It's also been frustrating trying to prove myself to skeptics who doubt my business acumen or management ability. I understand their concerns, but at the same time, it really is not rocket science. Especially at the product level. Sorry if I sound full of myself, but if I've more than proven myself to be smart enough to completely pick up being a PM in a field I did not study, I find it difficult to imagine I could not do something similar. Yet another challenge of professional working life I supposed. I find that often the hardest part is not doing the job, but rather "showing" that you can do the job. They sound the same but are actually quite different, and this perception management part probably frustrates me much more than actual execution itself.

Sorry, I wish I could be less vague, but there is no access control on this blog. I really wish blogger had that feature. :(

Tipping points

In Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point", there is a concept of "tipping point" - a point where critical mass or momentum propels tremendous change into reality. Sometimes called "strategic inflection", "chasm", or "singularity" from other business and science literature. I wonder, if there are tipping points in our personal life too. Every so often, my life comes to a tipping point, where I can feel it accelerate into change. Perhaps I am at that point again now, except this time, instead of coming to a fork where I can somewhat see where the various paths lead, I've come to a cliff beyond which is the vast unknown. I can feel myself accelerating faster and faster toward this point of no return. It came earlier than I expected, and I'm not sure if I feel ready for it. But then again, are we ever ready for these things? All I know is, six months from now, my life will be very, very different than what it is today. This is quite new to me. For much of my life, I have taken comfort in mapping out what I want my future to be and following it. Whether it was where I wanted to go to school, the people I wanted to meet, the places I wanted to go or the career I wanted to have. Through my efforts (small factor) and good fortune (large factor), for the most part, things have not strayed that far off my expectations. I suppose last year was the first time when I have really felt Life taking a dramatic, unexpected turn off "course", beyond my control and against all my wishes. That changed my life forever. But perhaps it was a lesson I needed to learn. To accept the limitations of our feeble attempts to create a master plan, to chart a known course, to impose our will upon Life. And not only accept it, but learn to embrace it. Perhaps to be free is not to be omniscient and omnipotent, for they instead burden us with the desire and responsibility to forever design, calculate, and execute our futures. Then there's really no "freedom" left, since everything is known, and everything can be done. Perhaps true freedom only comes from embracing the unknown, liberating myself from the anxiety and neurosis of deciphering and planning the future, since despite my best efforts, Life never ceases to surprise me.

I think I am already quite different than I was six months ago; the transformation began then, but it was largely inward. And now it's about to manifest itself outwardly. Let's do it baby. You only live once right?

How true

"Relationship development is often understood as a process of mutual
self-disclosures," he [Wegner] writes. "Although it is probably more romantic to
cast this process as one of interpersonal revelation and acceptance, it can also
be appreciated as a necessary precursor to transactive memory." Transactive
memory is aprt of what intimacy means. In fact, Wegner argues, it is the loss of
this kind of joint memory that helsp to make divorce so painful. "Divorced
people who suffer drepression and complain of cognitive dysfunciton may be
expressing the loss of their external memery systems," he writes. "They once
were able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding....They
once could count on access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and
this, too, is gone.... The loss of transactive memroy feels like losing a part
of one's own mind."

- From Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point

Indeed, how true.

Mmm...del.icio.us

Mmm...del.icio.us

Yay for another couple!

Another one of my friends just got engaged! Congratulations to A and J, I am so happy for you guys! I wish you the best as you start a new journey in life together. Wow, that is wonderful news.

what do I know?

Hmm, you all don't seen very interested in my non-tech writings, no one ever seems to comment on them. Sadness, I really do think (hope) my musings as a person is much more interesting than my ramblings as a PM or armchair CEO. Well, so be it...I shall indulge you w/ some more technobabble then.

No, really. Believe it or not I spent a lot of time thinking and writing up that post on relationships - much more than whenever I spout off on tech!

********
I was complaining about my overflooding feed list to Huat again the other day, about how I never have enough time to catch up on all my blog reading. Plus I keep subscribing to new blogs as existing blogs keep linking outside and the network keeps expanding. On the other hand, I've been able to keep my inbox at zero for pretty much the last 4 months now, clearing things at the end of the day and it's worked very well. I wonder if there are analogies of email management that can be applied to feeds?

Could one setup some rules to manage how items are prioritized and read? Obviously the difficulties are there are no "to recipient" rules (obviously) and the "by sender" rule is less useful as authors can write about anything under the sun. And rather than grouping into a tree by author, what if you re-sorted items by topic or relevance? Can some kind of contextual analysis be applied to the content, where the machine attempts to parse the feed content and decipher what the feed is about, then sort it for you in terms of importance, or perahps group by topic? Can you apply PageRank to blogs (actually does google or technorati do this already? I may be woefully outdated) but internally, so rather than having to query an external index using some keywords, what if you flipped the index inside out so that the keywords or nexi (plural of nexus?) are exposed first - basically clustering applied to feed items. Again, what I find so valuable about blogging is its conversational and never-ending expansive nature, as blogs keep linking out ad infinitum. What if you not only clustered your subscribed feeds, but also crawled all their outgoing links, and links to those links, and so forth, and clustered that?

I guess what I'm really looking for, in my search for the next big idea, is a tool to visually organize and present this vast web of discussions out there, so that I can easily filter out the nuggets of gold among all the pebbles, and draw my own connections and conclusions. Actually, I bet there is probably already a reader out there like that, I just don't know about it yet...

Love, marriage, and relationships

Wow, that was a long, unintended hiatus from blogging. I've had a lot that I wanted to get off my chest, but never had the time to complete them all, so I postponed and postponed posting, and meanwhile my thoughts grew and grew. I guess it's finally time to open the floodgates.

Here is something I started on 10/27 and finally just finished -

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I've been buried by work these last two weeks, working like a mad man. Been wanting to get this off my chest for a while, since it's been germinating in my mind for quite some time, and finally have some time to write since I got home before 2am for once.

Seeing some of my coworkers go through divorce recently has made me think quite a bit. I've been working w/ them every day for over a year now, and from what I can see they are, for the most part, decent people. Not perfect, for none of us are, but they are your typical intelligent professional/friendly coworker/adoring father. Not assholes, not bozos, not jerks. Good, decent people. And yet now I see them go through these dragged out, excruciating divorces, where they and their spouses fight over money, kids, property, friends, everything. Which makes me wonder - at one point in their lives, they must have truly loved each other, right? Enough so to have wanted to marry one another, start a family, buy a house, and plan to spend the rest of their lives together. Yet, times goes on, people change, and voila, here we are - you get the house, I get the furniture; you get Cathy on M/W/F, I get her on T/Th/Sa... I'm old enough to know that more than half of marriages end in divorces, so I should be more immune to it not. Yet I'm not. I watch them go through these absolutely excruciating, drawn-out sagas, and it still hits me. Hard. Right here in the middle.

What is true love? What should be our expectations of love, marriage, and relationships? I think my perspective has changed a lot, from my own experiences, my close friends' breakups/marital problems, and now my coworkers' divorces. I think, once upon a time, I believed that if you found someone right for you, and you both truly love each other, you can see yourself being w/ this other person for the rest of your life. That to expect to spend the rest of your life with one other person was not unreasonable. I'm inclined to think the opposite now - I don't think it's impossible, but I do think it's improbable. Am I becoming more jaded? I don't know. Maybe I'm more realistic. Perhaps in this way I am getting older.

I think it's a given that people are constantly changing as times goes on in every way, whether it's interests, personality, disposition…every possible way. Whatever attracted you about this person today, may not hold tomorrow because 1) the other person could change, so he/she's not like that any more, or 2) you could change, so you don't like him/her anymore, or 3) both of you could change. Then the foundation of love is ephemeral at best, since for two people to spend the rest of their lives together, not only do they have to change together, they have to change in a complementary, compatible way. If we take two free flowing lines as an analogy to represent two persons' states of beings, respectively, as these two persons change, these two lines will twist, turn, and weave in all different directions. So for two people to stay together, the two lines will always have to be parallel (within certain margin of error) as they traverse through time. What are the freaking odds of that?!

(forgive me for my inner geek speaking out above there. I got to maintain my engineering street cred somehow)

And what does it really mean when we tell a person, "I love you" or "I want to marry you"? When two people say that to each other, I suppose usually it implicitly carries the commitment to love the other person, and the expectation that love will be reciprocated indefinitely. It is supposed to mean "till death do us apart". Or perhaps that's what pop culture instills in us. Yet, can you hold human beings accountable for a commitment that we inherently cannot uphold? Perhaps whenever we "love" another person, it's because both of us "happen" to have what the other person desires at that moment. But when those conditions change, then love evaporates, naturally. Perhaps in her first few years, she wanted romance, passion, excitement. Maybe it's the spiky hair rockers who really strikes her fancy, or that sullen, inner artist that just brings out her motherly instincts. Then, maybe later on, she needed someone stable and predictable, a good father to raise herfamily, buy a house, etc. But again maybe after another ten years, this nice, stable guy just bores her now. He just doesn't do it anymore, and middle-aged her is angsty at her fleeing life, so once again, she starts to cast that longing, furtive eye at someone who really excites her. Perhaps because I was in grad school, and you were applying to med school, we "fell in love" because it was good timing during our transitional years. You hadn't seen any premeds you really liked, and I'd never met a girl like you. And so we're together. A couple years later, you're in med school, you're changing and looking for someone different, you meet some great doctors, and you're gone and we're apart. It's no one's fault, really. C'est la vie. Life goes on, as always. So what did our relationship really mean? Was it just a byproduct of circumstance, that we both happened to be at the "right" place, at the "right" time, so voila we "fell" in love? So what does commitment in love mean? Does it just mean "I will love you for the foreseeable future"; "till I don't like you, or you don't like me, or we don't like each other anymore"? Is that what it means?

Both NYT and Salon had articles on the trend of serial monogamy and how it reflects the rise of consumerism in modern times (damn I wish I had bookmarked them). The abundance of choice, the rise in our "purchasing power", increase in gender equality, and ubiquity of information - do they all contribute to a more cavalier, shopper's mentality toward love, relationships, and marriage? "If it doesn't fit, then find another one?" Since the traditional economic and social benefits of a committed relationship (including, but not exclusively marriage) are decreasing in importance today, why struggle through a marriage and try to make it work? Why not just separate and find someone else? Maybe you two were good for each other ten years ago. But now? Surely there is a better match for you, and him/her, out there today. Why, look at that young hunky coworker down the hall. Or that cute doubles partner at the tennis club. Or your girlfriend's newly single lawyer friend. Or all those guys on match.com...

We humans are such contradictory animals. On one hand, we crave the stability, the safety of knowing someone who will always love us, no matter what. Someone who's always there for us, who accepts us for who we are. Yet on the other hand, we are constantly changing, and so human relationships could never provide us this stability that we crave. Perhaps this is where some people turn to religion. If there is a God, then He will love me no matter what, right? He will never change and never abandon me, since He is by definition unchanging, right? That's not my answer though, unfortunately. So what is? The happiness of self? That strikes me as a bit narcissistic. So what else is left?