Have to go visit my parents during the Lunar New Year (11th Feb – 19th Feb) to check if they did a good job with the shopping task I asked them few months ago.
They always act like if I don't visit them during holidays, the two of them will cry in the yard in the loneliness with flower petals falling on them. But when I actually visit them, they don't even give me special treatment. Just kind of like every other day.
Hello handsome boy.
I never understand the holidays. Dad doesn’t seem to understand either. But my parents had a book to pray to the ancestors. They never actually remembered the verses. They only went through the book right after they boiled the chicken and found the part that applied.
So I thought “my hometown was pretty lame”. But no way Munich was perfect. Nowhere is. It must have been lame too. Just probably in a different way. So me and Gemini were trying to draw the parallels.
I didn’t find any new puzzle pieces. But I found the logic of why some of the puzzle pieces were missing in the first place!
I have to say, coffee tastes a lot better in my new mug.
I also have a spare mug. It's kind of big. I bought it online so I didn’t know that it's that big in reality.
I'm gonna read my bootleg cartoons for a bit. Good night, Marten.
I actually feel very sad for my parents. Because I got a lot less defensive right after I got out of that town, and out of Hanoi too. But they have already lived there since forever and it's not realistic to just start over somewhere new.
And the reason that my relationship with them is a lot better now, is because I already told them all my grievances to each one of them as individuals, and not as a group. So they don't have to guess where I stand.
I'm glad the hot water is back. I was super worried. Because I remembered your answer to the question about the importance of smell.
Yeah, I wouldn't trust the ChatGPT-generated “understanding”.
Obviously one would feel humiliated. What they do is to convince themselves that they are taking the high road to HELP YOU! They are the forgiving and sacrificing, as Confucius tells them that performing social harmony with people you hate is virtuous. That makes a “real man”.
In the collective society, you need every social capital you can collect to survive and get ahead. Maybe not right now, but if you are top of the class or at work, that’s social currency they can extract later. They simply cannot imagine NOT having relationships with people they hate. They assume that you want that relationship too!
But they convince themselves they need the relationships because they are generous person who can accept people with flaws (you are flawless!), but it's actually because they depend on everyone.
The irony is they guilt-trip their peers to work for free out of the sympathy for the “zero revenue” altruistic mission. But they also cry that companies don't just take the hint and give them money out of gratefulness.