The Convivial Gist

Yesterday I had an interesting discourse with my TB (talk buddy).  A talk buddy is someone who I engaged in conversation by a telephone regularly, come tornado warning or the call of a child wanting to practice his newly acquired efficiency on using a toilet.  She told me that the opposite of love is not hate but apathy.  And she's right. The feeling of  hate  evokes strong emotions, it can still stir up feelings. But when you are dispassionate to someone, you just don't freakin' care if that someone was  trampled over by 27 elephants or suffered the most virulent  diarrhea on his/her wedding day.  Total indifference, that is painful , of course being under the elephant and having the runs are exhausting too.  Which would you choose? There is so much indifference in this world, it seems we just stopped caring or maybe we are suffering from the I Me and Myself  syndrome often. So in parting,  I would rather you hate me if I did you wrong  rather than be detached to my existe

Lately, I had been watching a lot of Short feature movies. I find  these movies engrossing and thought-provoking.  No mega stars, CGI's or fancy props but it leaves an imprint on my mind that I can recall an entire movie even if I saw it months ago.  Last night I saw the brilliant work of Masanori  Babu, writer, producer and director of Chiyo. It's about the story of Chiyo (played by Miyu Tanaka) her quest to see her father (Hiromasa Takagi) , a soldier who went to war in 1944.  A year later on the night of the Obon, a Buddhist tradition wherein the dead  visit their relative, Chiyo searches  for his father.  During the course of her search she met various spirits but not her father. When she finally found him, he can not see her. He told her,the hell he saw in the arena of war  blinded him.  He was implying that there was  a limit to man's ability to endure extreme cruelty and not seeing what you were seeing was the only way to survive (his spirit not his physical being in

Two weekends ago me and my husband got 2 bird feeders, a tubular kind and touted to be squirrel free.  From his home office ( alternating as our formal dining table when he decides to stop working) he has the view of the bird feeders and he thinks its time for us to enjoy and explore the science of ornithology. We did not expect that we would  also be  reeled  in the science of Sciuridae. Those rodents have more fun eating the seeds than for whom it was originally intended for i.e the birds. This outraged my husband. Squirrels are very patient, intelligent, conniving and insulting animals ( according to my bitter half - relative to the squirrel issue).  My husband tried bells, moving the locations of  the feeders about 18 times a day, slathering the cords and poles with motor oil and cooking oil, clearing the deck of my spider hanging plants (the rodents use these as their launching pads); and spiking strategic parts of our trellis with nails.  Sad to say, if  squirrels can give humans

A friend of mine admitted to me that she had an extreme aversion to washing dishes.   She would rather iron laundry as crumpled as crêpe papers than execute that somewhat mundane and so ordinary chore.  I can watch the episode of  Anthony Bourdain's No Reservation while scraping and soaping the china (that is if  I feel like being  environmentally responsible by not using the dishwasher which is not very often). It's one of the devoir that you can carry out without requiring an extensive ability and let's be frank about it, it is one of the most boring task to do around the house.  There are no variations or any deviations that you can engineer to make it more exciting . It's so starkingly and painfully simple task and yet  how come a lot of people started developing phobia (I still have to search for the name) to it.   Some household are resorting to using disposable eating  utensils instead of their exquisite porcelain or the so ordinary melamine dinnerware  (tsk tsk

Society in general set up criteria on which we as members are defined. Philosophers, thinkers and even  the detritus of our community muse on what is the definition of person.  Take note that I am using the word person instead of a more dramatic noun "man".  That is because I am a woman and I am trying to make a more politically correct piece. Let me start on our conception. We are measured by the inconvenience we gave our mother, so much so that we are compared to our siblings in terms of how much nauseuos mornings, cravings, moodiness and unwanted weight gain  we exacted on our host ( our mother, of course)  during the time of pregnancy. During our first foray in the outside world, we are measured on how  much we weigh ( she/he is a big baby 20 pounds)  , gushed our parents, the fracas brought about by our wailing and  how long and painful the labor pains are. This is  used often by our mother to send us on the familiar guilt trip. Statements like " It was 32 hou