while i'm still high, should share a joke (or was it a true story) sunny once shared with me when i was in london, i've modified it a little: basically they did this survey among taiwanese, hk and singaporean girls

你喜欢好男人还是坏男人？
台湾妹：好男人
香港妹：坏男人
新加坡妹：我能不能两个都要？？
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haha just kidding. when i was down, someone once told me a story about deng xiaoping. persistence you know? people were harder then. to be put into jail, go on these long forced marches. for him, in particular, he was content to bide his time until mao passed on.

that aside. the old relationship is water under the bridge. but i've been thinking (more appropriately) about the future. i've seen enough dysfunctional families to know at some level that 1. relationships tend to get worse as the rule rather than the exception and 2. it's important to choose the right person (duh). the happy families i've seen, to be honest, are not perfect unions. but they seem to display an ability to learn or give/take along the way. i've seen families that work where there is a coupling of very different people, or very different emotional/intellectual level. i'm not sure that's what i'm looking for. but i'm not sure if it's possible for two people who are alike in too many ways to be in a happy union. why do you even want a happy family anyway? why do you even want love? except that it felt good once and just every single thing you have read/watched on tv since you were young has glorified it as the ultimate virtue (or at least the one that appeals the most to you). and as i said, blazing fireball kebab theory. don't know why that's so important to me.

the notion that one cannot engineer these things is some sort of loss of control. but like many things in life, luck and effort. i don't even look for perfection, but i'm picky enough to fear i won't find the right one. rationally i get more good days out of romantic relationships than bad days. rationally every one i've had so far has failed. what do i believe? but by it's very nature you have to keep failing till you settle down no? and all those things we see, we only observe the final data point. so unique. so interesting. i need to get better at writing again.