Conditional and unconditional

I spent my entire life searching for love, and most of the time I was disappointed and hurt. From the time I was only a kid to my adulthood, and into my mid-life, I felt I was going round in a circle and had learned nothing about love at all. Until I have my dog Champagne three years ago, (in fact I longed for a dog since I was a kid), I learned all about love from a dog, and that kind of love is unconditional. There and then I know that for us human, when we talk about love, we are fooling ourselves and other people. How much do we actually know about love?

To me, the most immature kind of love is the love between men and women. A lot of time, we want to be loved more than we want to love, or at least we expect everything to be reciprocated. If it did not happen that way, we felt hurt, disappointed and being cheated. When I came to think about this, love to most people is just a deal, a bargain. I love you subject to this and that. There are always some conditions attached.

I am just one of these people not until I have kept a puppy three years ago. I love him, just as simple as that. He makes me happy and even he annoys me, I love him all the same. I just want the best for him. And if someone loves him more, I won’t feel jealous but only grateful, and want him to share more of their love. It was only then that I realized when you really love somebody, your love can be unconditional and not possessive. You won’t throw your tantrum, or return the same bitter ‘favour’ simply because he/she does not fulfill your expectation. I mean when you still feel that way, perhaps you have to rethink. Your love to someone may not as deep as you claim/thought. Since then, I would only appreciate an unconditional love, either to others or others unto me. And only you can give your love unconditionally can you feel it the same way from other people, i.e. he may not say a lot on how much you meant to him, but you know he does through his act, and not merely words. This is the deepest kind of love.

Valentine’s Day on Saturday

Unlike some post I read in Xanga, I do not detest Valentine’s Day as much those bloggers. I just think it is an occasion for a laugh, and quite entertaining indeed. Imagine you eat heart shape chocolates, heart shape steak and heart shape dessert, I wonder your poo will come in heart shape too!

The fact that it falls on a Saturday this year brings a lot of disappointment to the florists. Certainly less people will order flowers because it is on a Saturday. The office is closed and hence no chance for the girls to show off their bouquet. They don’t really want their bouquet to be sent to their home. There’s no point to show them to their parents or siblings. They want to show them to their colleagues, you see.

For some show-off addicts, they simply want flowers to be delivered to their office on Friday, a day before Valentine’s Day, just to satisfy their show off desire. And I love to identify those people too. I just found the whole scenario amusing more than anything else. You got that bunch of flowers so everybody can see it, and it will be left in the office for the weekend, and by the time you come back on Monday, it is about time to bin it! But under our current financial crisis, we do need these lousy people to boost the economy.

The dog and the clock

Over ten years ago I bought a clock from Ikea. It is a fashionable clock with a pendulum, a combination of modern and ancient and I loved it. Since then, we have moved several times and at one time, I thought the clock was lost but later recovered from one of our boxes. I wasn’t ready to part with it just yet and I was glad to find it. Then at a later stage the clock started to go slow and I thought perhaps it has run its course. No, one new battery made it all alive again.

Years gone and I thought it was about time to change a new look on the wall. I got another clock but the ticking noise was far too loud for me to bear. It was like living with a time bomb 24/7. I took it down and put the old Ikea clock back on the wall.

Since then, I have almost forgotten the idea of a new clock when yesterday I passed by a street seller and he got something which I loved at first sight. It was a clock with the picture of two plush bears sitting together, very cute and loving. I bought it with no second thought.

When I got home, I placed it on the wall, replaced the old clock (with some nostalgic feelings of parting but still!) and it was great. The colour of the clock matched our wall paint and the pair of cute little bears warmed our sitting room. I went into my bedroom happily and that’s when the trouble began.

My dog went back into the sitting room, barking non stop at the clock. Apparently he thought those two bears were enemies! I went out to fetch him, took him back into my room but within half a minute, he was out in the sitting room, barking at the clock again. I could not stop him! So I took a chair, carrying him and stepping on the high chair with him to face the two bears, and said, ‘hello, see these two bears, they are friends, they don’t bark at you, do they?’ He seemed o.k. then and got quiet, so I took him down and we went back into our bedroom. No luck, the next minute, he was back to the sitting room, barking at the bears again!

By then I was getting impatient, I took the clock down to show him that they were unreal, they weren’t alive, and they weren’t even real bears! They were toy bears! But he behaved as if he seen a ghost! When the clock was getting near him, he ran from kitchen to bedroom, as though there was an earthquake. So at the end, I have to give in! I picked up the old clock, which was just about to go to the bin, and put it back on the wall. There it was ticking its way as if it was laughing at me saying, ‘hey, you can never get rid of me, this is my territory, even you dog knew that, you silly old fool!’

Yes, I think my dog wants the old clock back, what can I do? Now when I get some new furniture, do I have to get permission from this dog?

Do your plastic surgery through internet

It has been a while since our company monitors our usage on the internet, and which sites we went into. I tried to refrain myself from using the internet at work, but I simply cannot forfeit using the stock market brokerage through the internet which is part of my livelihood, you see! Well this is not about me, at least not just yet because I don’t get onto the stock market all day, but this colleague who looks exactly like Garfield with half closed eyes gets into the internet chatroom over 1,500 times in a week, according to our IT report. Garfield does not speak to anybody at work. What she does every day is to stock up enough snack from our free snack bar, and goes back to her internet chatroom. That’s how she spends her day.

Various warnings from her supervisor have no effect on the issue, not until when she was told that her net connection could be severed. When she heard this, she broke down and cried! It’s like our company is going to disconnect her life-support machine! It’s only the bloody internet!

But this leads me to think that nowadays why so many people addicted to the internet world. Perhaps inside this internet world, they can be a totally different person. For some, they created an entirely different image for themselves, an ideal image which in reality they can never fulfilled, e.g. pretty, witty, learned and capable, just everything missing in them. They tell lots of lies which are far from the truth, e.g. the most common lie is how capable they are at work but as a matter of fact, they usually are the kind of people other colleagues have neglected their existence. Some never show their photos (that’s me) so as to open to imagination how nice looking they are! (that’s not me, I like to describe myself as an old hag).

I mean there is no harm that every now and again, we do something to boost our ego. But the internet saga is more serious than that. Instead of helping us to accept who we really are, it provides a temporary shelter for us to escape from our shortcoming, like performing a plastic surgery inside this system, coming out with a perfect nose, and lots of fans, and then the nose sank or the breast implants burst after a while, bringing people back to reality in despair.

This may be perfectly o.k. for some. But to me, I cannot help to think that the world’s scenario has changed from bad to worse. No one would make an effort to improve themselves or communication with one other in their actual life. They simply resort to this mirror mirror on the wall, who is the smartest among all, and see themselves as the smartest through the internet illusion. How pathetic can you get!

An old man's tale

Yesterday, my dog and I went to an elderly home for his Dr Dog’s duty. It was around the New Year and so we had a special performance. From the community centre, ten kids joined us too, and each was assigned with a dog. And we taught the kids to do some tricks with our dogs and then showed them to the elderly. It was great fun to watch them.

After the performance, an old man was talking to me. He said he does not like Pekingese in particular. It’s far too clingy. In fact, he had a Pekingese before, the dog cling on to him too much, had to lie on his arm before it could get to sleep. Then after a few years, the dog got an incurable illness, and he had to watch him being put to sleep. Tears were flooded from his eyes when he was holding its dead body. He was so sad that he could not eat for days and days, and only got himself drunk. That was far too painful for him. So his advice for people is, never keep any dog. I said to him that he had his happy days with the dog but he thought the pain of loss was unbearable. Even up to the very moment when he spoke to me, he still got tears in his eyes.

I know some people who do not fall in love because they do not want to experience the loss when a relationship does not last. Some people don’t keep pets because they know those pets will definitely die before them.

But I guess that’s the fair deal in life. When you love someone/something that much, the pain, if not more, will definitely be as much as the happiness one gave you when you were together. Some people will choose never to experience any. While I would, in no uncertainty, choose to experience them all. Infact, I would want to see to my dog until it dies, as I don’t think he can make some important decisions himself. I would want to see him through his life first, and probably in return, he would check if the coast is clear to Heaven, and show me how to sneak through the side entrance if I were not allowed an immediate entry!