“do me a favor and don’t get drunk one night and start making out with someone and use the alcohol as an excuse, ok?”

this is the advice i got from a friend when i was pining away over this girl that i was crushing over. when she first said that to me i was in a bit of shock. do i seem like the type that could liquor up a girl just to make out with her? and really, if we’re going to make that stretch why won’t we go the extra mile and really take advantage of her? sheesh. =P

[url=http://leafee.ocliw.com/]leeya[/url] recently writes about some of the deal breakers and the essential ingredients in a relationship. i would tend to agree with her that there are definitely deal breakers, lines that one cross, that once done can never be undone.

one of the biggest deal breakers for me is infidelity. if you were to kiss another person that’s grounds for an immediate break up. but there are other gray areas when it comes to infidelity. for example, there’s emotional cheating as well. if you share some kind of intimacy with another person that you are unwilling to share with me…that’s going to be a problem.

but leeya also rattles off a list of other essential ingredients necessary in a relationship.

“For me a mature loving relationship also requires honesty, trust, faithfulness, understanding, support and respect…love is not all you need.”

and this is where i violently disagree. yes, those virtues are important, but i guess i take a much simpler view about relationships. for me, love IS all you need. if you share a true love with another person then everything else slowly starts to melt away. call me a romantic, but if you truly love another person then all of the qualities of a successful relationship are born out of that love. you will obviously be honest and true and faithful and understanding and supportive and whatever else because you are driven to do all of these things because you love the other person.

i believe so strongly in love, that if you have a love so true, so pure, and so undeniably strong that everything else is just a formality. it’s implied that everything will work out if you truly love another because every breath that you take will be for that other person.

finding such a love is not an easy task, nor do i believe that it is common. but you know, you only need to find it once in your life and then you are set for life.

there was a girl who i dated for many, many years. i had loved her like i had loved no other. i thought that the love that we shared is what inspired the greek comedies, cheesy love songs, and romance novels. i thought that our love was so pure, so strong, that nothing could get in our way. maybe it was my naivete, maybe it was just because we were so young that we didn’t know what we had…or maybe i was just wrong. but after all those years of dating it didn’t work out. we broke up.

after that i was devastated. my belief in love was shattered. i thought that it was all a big crock. what is this thing called love? it’s a big sham. something that somebody made up to give lonely people hope. i was bitter, jaded, and angry.

it took me a long time to realize that whatever we had, our love was not strong enough to overcome the obstacles that we faced. it wasn’t so much a matter of whether or not i was attentive enough or that she was faithful enough or anything else. what it really boiled down to what that whatever bond of love that we had, it just wasn’t strong enough for us to stay together. we didn’t have the tools necessary to fix our relationship and we weren’t willing to try to do so. we were just ill-equipped.

it took me a long time to believe in love again. i started to believe that i had lost my only opportunity and that now i was destined to a life of lonely misery. it was a dark time for me.

but love did find me again. and it filled my heart with its joyous song. i had been converted again and my belief in it has never wavered since. see, the thing about love is that it inspires you to be greater than you are. i don’t believe that love should ever die in a relationship. because once the love is gone…what is left? a commitment? an obligation? what’s the point? why bother?

to me it doesn’t really matter if you have all these other qualities in a relationship, if i’m in a loveless relationship it means that it wasn’t meant to be. it means that there’s something wrong. how can you stray so far from what brought you together? and if you have strayed that far, why bother to continue to live diverging lives?

are all of these romantic notions of love unrealistic? i don’t think so. i choose to believe in love. and i believe that love is all you need.

is this why i’m still single? =P

i was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and she said something to me that i thought was pretty hilarious. we were talking about how when it comes to affairs of the heart logic and reason don’t really seem to have much of a role when we make our decisions.

i know this from experience because i’ve made decisions in the past where i knew that it was a bad idea to be doing something, but i still did it anyway because…well, my heart wouldn’t let me do any other thing.

and so i was lamenting and telling her about how one would think that after going through those experiences that you would learn from your mistakes and that you would not repeat them. if you know that pursuing a relationship with someone is not a good idea, you’d recognize that it wasn’t a good idea and you would not go through with it. one would think… i was telling her about how i’m currently contemplating whether or not to try the whole online dating thing. in some ways i still feel that there’s a bit of a stigma there, but in other ways i sort of feel like i’ve done that before and it didn’t really work out so well so maybe i shouldn’t really think too much about it.

my friend said to me, “you know, you never hear about what a smart decision they made when they were in love. you always hear about how stupid they were and how stupid love makes you.”

and it is true. you never do hear about how smart you are when you are in love because love just isn’t smart. it isn’t dumb, either, rather i think it’s more all-encompassing. it just sucks you up and consumes you. your mind gets filled with thoughts of that other person and no matter how hard you try and not think about them the opposite happens and your thoughts always wander back to them. this is infatuation at its greatest.

and once infatuation sets in…it’s hard to think straight.

yesterday was not a very good day for me. with my ailing health, i swear, sometimes i feel like i’m 80 years old. i had some severe back problems which prevented me from doing any kind of work so after having spent an hour getting to work and toughing through two of the most grueling hours of my life, i called it quits and went home.

traffic was outrageously bad so after i hit milpitas i went to a starbucks to get online and see if trang and shirley had woken up yet so i could bum at their place. by the time i finally managed to get online i saw that they had already left for the day so i decided to bum around in milpitas for a little bit waiting for the traffic to die down.

finally got home to find that the cable was out which was the final blow to an already trying day. slept for most of the day, through lunch and woke up around 5. ordered pizza for dinner, but wasn’t able to eat too much. after i got some food in me, though, i was much happier, my headache had cleared, and the cable was back on.

i relaxed for the rest of the day, mostly in bed nursing my back. it finally felt better and now i’m at work again. i think that sitting for long times actually aggravates my back, so i am taking frequent breaks and little walks to the kitchen at work.

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i forgot to mention all of the volleyball craziness that has been happening lately. my monday night team captain accidentally registered us for wednesday nights instead of monday nights this season. apparently there was some confusion about how check boxes work and we got registered for the wrong night. but our team was able to play that night so we’re now playing on wednesday nights!

as a result, i picked up another team on monday nights. we played last monday and it was a lot of fun. hopefully it’ll continue to be this fun throughout the season, but from what i saw there were a lot of teams that were better this season, so we’ll see how we fare. we did manage to win all four games, though, so that was good. there is another strong hitter and two good setters on this team so i look forward to playing more.

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shirley’s back from her month long vacation. i picked her up from the airport and took her back home. after returning johnny, trang, carolyn, shirley, and i hit korea house for some dinner. it was good, but i wasn’t particularly hungry so i didn’t end up eating much.

after dinner we retired back to shirley’s where i proceeded to tinker with her broken laptop. let me just say that i have absolutely no clue how to troubleshoot a mac so this was a bit of an exercise in what seemed like futility.

i found a few knowledge base articles to help step me through the process. who would have thought that holding down various keys would boot the mac into different modes? command, option, P, and R to reset the PRAM or something? what the?! ok…

very different from the PC. after about an hour of tinkering with it, though, i finally was able to get it back up and running. i’d try and explain what i did to fix it, but i’m not totally sure i know, so we’ll just say that i did stuff and it got fixed.

there was a moment in tonight’s conversation where i was reminded that i do not enjoy geeking out when i’m surrounded by people who are also non-techies. i don’t know…i don’t particularly care to alienate anyone when i’m in mixed company like that. so usually when something like that happens i generally tend to play dumb and pretend that i don’t really know what’s going on.

all in all it was a good day. i can’t wait for the rest of the week to come to a close. big weekend coming up…hope it’ll be fun.

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that’s the big question of the day…

well, i have been slaving away on this new project. it’s an interesting project of sorts, but is driving me a little crazy. still trying to understand other people’s code so i can pick it up and start extending it. but enough work talk.

today is the big day that my dear friend comes back from vacation. not really sure what the plan is for tonight, but i think that korea house is involved somewhere. mmmmm. korea house.

my back is still a little achy, i may have to go down to our admin’s desk and ask for some medicine to ease my woes. lunch time is near, but i got into work pretty late today so though lunch time usually marks the ending of my day such is not the case today. i’ll be here until 5pm.

it seems so long and far away. i’m not sure if i’ll be able to manage. but i do think that i will be making my way over to get some egg custard tarts later today. 3 for a $1. how can you beat that?

sometimes she’s so cute that when i gaze upon her a little bit of me dies inside.

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i was talking to john the other day and i was telling him that i’m beginning to appreciate tri-tip more and more these days. it took me a while to really like this cut of meat. i’ve always been pretty partial to new york steak and i think that it may be one of my favorite cuts of meat. but more recently, i’m beginning to discover the joy of tri-tip and it is good.

a lot of it has to deal with making sure that you cut it the right way. who knew? but anyway, i was telling john that we should have dinner and eat some meat. “let’s meat!” i told him.

[url=http://www.track15.com]dardy[/url] told me that he wanted to get together before leaving for his big italy trip so i decided to make dinner and have some people over. [url=http://www.phamily.org]paul[/url], [url=http://leafee.ocliw.com]leeya[/url], mike, john, greg, trang, [url=http://www.mycgiserver.com/~lilplaytime/weblog/]ray[/url], dardy, mia, and i had dinner. in honor of meating, i made 5 filets of cajun catfish, 3 tri-tips, 1 rack of ribs, 6 ears of corn, roasted vegetables, and two loaves of garlic bread.

we gorged…but still had leftovers. go figure.

mmmm, good food, though. it’s been a while since i had a big group of people over. it was a nice change.

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