The Post Valentine TGIS Post

1) Adam Sandler’s Grow Old With You from The Wedding Singer is still my number one favorite love song. (It was also when I started to really like Adam Sandler movies). I watched the movie through a couple breakups. And even today it can make me misty eyed and just….happy. I think “I want to grow old with you” is the nicest thing and the biggest commitment someone can make to someone else.

The early flush of “love” is the easy bit; it’s sticking it out in the years to come, come what may, that they should celebrate more. And for the single people out there, you are still free to run the other way if you haven’t found The One (Yes I will put it that way :D). Watch Wedding Singer, you’ll want to hold out for the right one. Because Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore nearly end up with the wrong ones before the whole dramatic Knight in Hawaiian Shirt and Mullet sings over the PA system scene. And you will smile.

Anyway. V-day this year saw me running around like a headless chicken because our helper’s agency suddenly called late the night before when they realized our helper’s immigration permit expired yes, on V-day. So she was on a bus to go queue in Wan Chai for a new permit while I wrestled still-asleep (yes he still does that) Rockstar into his school uniform and some breakfast into him before The Mens set off together to catch their different buses, then there was the toddler feeding and dog entertaining.

I was struggling with v-day cards because I was not feeling like making mushy and then one card stood out.

It simply said “hand in hand” on the front. And I thought, “I could do that. I’ve done it. I could still do it.” I agreed to marry Kings when he was very heavily in study debt, and he would carry debt for several more years; I followed him to Hong Kong, where I switched to the buy side of banking thereafter. The whole reason I even started blogging was because he once wanted to build a blog platform and needed an experimental blog to slice and dice. The night I knew he would publicize the blog for the first time I couldn’t sleep – it scared me that people would read my blog. (When Kings realized I had then come to enjoy blogging and knew he would be giving up the platform and moving on, he secretly worked late in the night while still at a demanding bank job during the day, manually duplicating some 250 blog entries one-by-one from his platform onto WordPress. He would even tell me later, “I thought I’d add more Rockstar pictures.”)

And so 10 years down I thought the most meaningful thing I could say to Kings was Hand In Hand: I Could Do That. I Still Am. And so hand in hand it was.

Oh, and an interesting fact: Kings and I have no idea what our anniversary date is.

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2) Bored Panda’s 20 Interesting Facts About Love.

I found these two especially interesting:

“There’s evidence that when looking for a fling, the body wins over the face on a physical attraction basis. The opposite is true, however, for those who are looking for a long-term relationship partner.” I can guess why. We look for people with “staying power” because at the back of our minds we are aware of the ups and downs married life will inevitably bring. A person’s face tells us a lot – I always think people who are “nice on the inside” actually show it in a pleasant-ness in their face we often respond to and find more attractive than they really are. (And that’s why they appear less good looking on film than in person?)

“Studies show that people at an early stage of love have lower levels of serotonin, which is associated with feelings of happiness and well-being, and higher levels of cortisol, associated with stress. This is strikingly similar to those people who have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder….. …Check out this vivacious video that explains the theory.” 

It highlighted for me how much of emotion (or for that matter mood, I guess) is chemical in the brain… And how stimulating or suppressing some of those might cause some very big behavioral changes… (No, not such a romantic. But I am loyal…..)

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3) Oh, so you want to be in Matt Damon’s kid’s class too?

Yeah you and everyone who didn’t get their kids flown to South Africa for school trip. (In the article it says he did it because he was filming there, didn’t want to miss his kids and didn’t want his kids to miss school. So, the solution to this little pickle is to bring his kid’s class there. Well he is from Harvard…)

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4) Little girl sends letter to dead great grandmother in balloon to heaven….. and gets a response.

5) “Tech is something like the new Wall Street…” How a few monster tech firms are taking over everything.

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6) Meet Hollywood’s Master Composer. Link inspired by a friend once telling me, while observing the musicians playing in the lobby of a nice hotel, that a friend of hers with a degree in music had been unable to find a job and had resorted to playing in the lobby of a nice hotel for awhile. So finding this article was interesting for me, it got me to remembering there’s Academy Awards for best music scores and well, Taylor Swift.

Only loosely related yarn: I made the acquaintance of a mum whose child is by many indications gifted, particularly in music – picking up our kids one day I’d congratulated her on her child’s latest musical achievement and she had rather sheepishly returned, “But you know, I push her to practice.”

I respect the honesty of that answer. Because people who say “I’m just lucky,” aren’t being completely honest with you. No matter how gifted, you need to do some work (some work. Not go nutty).

(As an aside, I “hacked” my way through a pass in Grade 8 piano – I couldn’t afford the minimum 3 hours a day of practice that my teacher prescribed in order to scrape through because I also had 10 SPM/”O” Levels and lots of taekwondo training and some debate tournaments, and so I listened to my exam pieces on tape – few minutes here, few minutes there, Oh is this played this way… I sat down at the piano after dinner for maybe 90 minutes a day. I went into the exam making mistakes on my scales. Until this day I have the occasional dream about going in not fully being able to execute my scales because I was painfully aware throughout exam stress that I was unprepared. (I scraped through, the examiner said in her comments on my results slip, because of the way I had played the pieces.) But it was all the time I could afford. And so I’m grateful for my lowly Pass. In retrospect though being prepared is a lot less stressful :P)

7) OK enough yarning. This week The Rockstars do……. Something. Performance art, skit, a parody of love – you decide.

(Rockstar was getting the Miss to bury him under those foam shapes… He got annoyed if you uncovered him…)