Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who studies the psychobiochemical basis of love, has been a prominent researcher in the dating industry. I thought to study the phenomena of love as it has affected me in a blind-sighted kind of way. For many years, I couldn't feel anything, and thought that if I were to engage in a relationship, it would be a kind of sterile contractual obligation. Oh dear, it seems I'm just a late bloomer. Maybe it's odd for me to dissect my feelings and thinking. There's a part of me that wants to resist being subjugated to almost uncontrollable feelings. But as of late, it seems I can't rise above it. I'm sure there have been many intellectuals who wish to be able to control their impulses and instincts. But others have defended it as one of those traits that make you human. I'm at the stage where maybe it's about time to embrace it, rather than fighting it.

A friend suggested that I memorize emotionally-related vocabulary and practice how to identify how I feel, in essence, to raise my emotional literacy. In order to practice, I have to update my Facebook status every few days. So to start off, I feel insecure and apprehensive in embracing what I have considered for so long my hidden "demon", that emotions made me weak. But today, I'm changing that notion. Emotions make me human. Hah, as if to say I've been a robot all this time. Maybe I have been, locked in a mellow-amiable generic emotion.

Fisher also mentions that if you try to clear your mind of the person you love, it makes the longing stronger. So I'm worried about struggling to move on. But I'm reminded of the advice I gave to a homeless man when I was at a Vietnamese student conference in Portland, Oregon last week. During the scavenger hunt on Thursday night, I was assigned to a station on a bridge. I stood out there for about 2 hours alone, not knowing that they postponed the starting time by an hour-and-a-half. My station was near homeless folks and crackheads, which scared me, because I was sitting on the railing, feet tired, waiting, apprehensive at the possibility of being pushed over the edge, for about 2 hours, being too well-dressed, and the only Asian American on the block. What passed the time and calmed my nerves a bit was one particular homeless man who came up to me and talked about being a wanderer of sorts, and rejecting the material comfort that society induces us to consume. He was an intellectual who became almost an aescetic, but it was clear to me he was abusing substances to calm his nerves and find escape from the pain of surviving. "I don't know where to travel next. I feel like I'm stuck," he says to me. And I told him, "Why is it that we have to pick a destination before we travel? Couldn't we just travel and let the journey define us?" In the end I concluded, "We just have to inch along, no matter how painful, and especially when we feel stuck. You can't hope to get lucky and improve your lot by staying in the same place." Now I have to turn that advice back onto myself. It might be painful, this love thing, the strongest feeling to date. But I have to inch along and hopefully find respite in another place. "Thank you," the man says to me. We never introduced our names, because names were unnecessary when two souls understood one another. "You're not aggressive like other people I meet." My fellow, it is because I have walked in your shoes before.