stupid realization #1

it is a truth universally acknowledged, that two people in possession of similar/identical items/vocabularies/tastes/ideologies/etc., must be a couple.* of sorts. this is why:

• when you really like someone, and you go out for dinner or coffee, you get whatever he/she has, say, a triple espresso or tazo chai redolent with black pepper, or a cherry-infused green tea, even if all you really want is a blah cafe latte or a caramel frapuccino.
• after years of watching the same movies, reading the same books, listening to the same songs, you find yourselves finishing each other's thoughts and sentences, and you know exactly what the other person means even if all you read in the message is a single punctuation mark.
• in korea, couples of various age groups declare couple-hood by toting/wearing exactly the same items (e.g., fake nerd glasses [what siege calls artificial intelligence], green baseball caps worn backwards, orange hi-top chuck taylors, hot pink t-shirts--sometimes all four items worn by just one middle-aged couple)

theory has never been my strongest point (or more honestly, just not my point at all), and probably never will be. but here's a try: maybe we do this mirroring because we want to believe we have found the Self in an Other, we want this one-ness so badly that we change the Self into the Other, even if it's just on some wonky level like turning marxist after being poststructuralist for years simply because the Cute Boy/Girl wore a che guevara t-shirt to graduate class one day.

i just read over that previous paragraph and it looks a helluva lot like (a) bullcrap, (b) pointing out the obvious, (c) the result of yet another sleepless night, and (d) all of the above.

at the end of The Global Soul, pico iyer writes of his japanese girlfriend. they've been together for 12 years and yet, they cannot read a single word in the other's language. although (or because?) educated at eton, oxford and harvard, iyer speaks japanese like a three-year-old and gets laughed at by toothless octogenarians in his suburban neighborhood. how the heck did they manage to even last through a day together, let alone a dozen years??? iyer then writes about a private language, what a much lesser writer would call a mother tongue used by a society of two.** simply put, having a private langue is one of the defining features of a couple. the complex theory needed to explain that is sadly beyond my ken.


* adapted from the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice. but you already knew that. what you probably don't know is that all these months, one of the kookier teachers here has been insisting that s & i like each other, are in fact a couple, an item (such a quaint term!) because we carry identical lime green flippy LG mobile phones. it was more mundane than anything: a result of sheer cheapness on our part--part of the hard bargain we had to drive to lower the price by 1,000 pesos.

** that cringing much-lesser writer would be me. cringe, cringe. ok, i'll stop now. gotta sleep.