don’t be a jerk

Today is Valentine’s day, and to celebrate, I’m taking my roommate’s girlfriend out on a date (cause he has to work tonight.) He told me to “take care of her.” Hehehehe, boy will I EVER.
 
Anyhow, I’m just reposting a little essay I wrote on 01/07/2004. Enjoy!
 
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Love is…what is love?
 
Why bother asking? It’s the most played out theme of all forms of art and expression at this point.
 
I don’t know about other languages, but Koreans have a different word for different types of love, as opposed to, say, English, which just has this one word to cover everything. I am undecided on which system is better.
 
An earthworm bumps into another earthworm in the dark and fucks it. That’s love to an earthworm. It’s that simple. Some may say, “That’s not love, that’s biology.” No difference, I say. Love as we know it is a thought process, an emotion, a function of the brain, and the brain is simply a series of neural pathways linked by chemical passages. So, yeah, one of those worms isn’t buying the other a dozen roses and a $40 steak dinner, but it’s still love, earthworm style. It’s what compels them to do what they do. That’s why earthworms, as a species, are still around today, eating dirt and getting snacked on by robins.
 
A lot of Korean households will have a set of wooden ducks (male and female) somewhere in the house. In Korea, these ducks mate for life. They’ve become the symbol of a strong marriage. Do these ducks love each other? I can’t see what else it would be. They may not understand it. But there is something that compels them to stay together, sometimes to the extent that if one of the pair dies, the other will not take on a new mate. Many times that single mate will die soon afterwards.
 
Earthworm does not understand love the way duck does. Earthworm just fucks the next thing it bumps into. It will not die in the place of it’s mate. It will not feel sad when it’s mate is gone. It does what it is compelled to do. How great is the difference in magnitude between duck love and earthworm love?
 
Duck love can only go so far as well. They don’t even have a conscious concept of what love is. One duck doesn’t turn to the other duck and say, “I *quack* you.” Hell, it barely just says, “quack quack quack”. Which could just as well mean, “Hey look, there’s a fish.” Ducks don’t know love like, say, people.
 
“People love” - now this is the one that we are all familiar with. We have sculptures, literature, songs devoted to love. How great is the magnitude between an earthworm’s understanding of love and a duck’s understanding of love? It’s almost immeasurable. And likewise, how much is the difference between the duck’s understanding of love and a human’s? Pretty darn great as well, right? We have the great romances of history and literature. We have Anthony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet. Of course, we have divorce, one night stand’s, and that sexual disorder which causes people to be sexually aroused by amputees. We have such a conscious, intentional understanding of love that it gets in the way of our relationships 90% of the time.
 
Ducks? They just find a mate that they like and spend the rest of their lives with them. When one duck dies, the other does not find a new mate. Sometimes, the single duck dies soon after. Maybe people don’t know love that well at all. We just write and paint as if we do.
 
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Why are we attracted to the people we are attracted to? Maybe the other person is physically well-built on the principals of the divine
ratio. Maybe that other person exudes an exceptional amount of pheromones. I once thought that sometimes it was that whole thing about the other person being a person like yourself, or sometimes being a person that you want to be like.
 
I think too much. I think too much.
 
I think…
 
Sometimes you just like someone. And that’s all there is to it.
 
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Is that “love at first sight”? Personally I don’t believe in that. I believe love at first sight is an afterthought - a fortunate, tho not entirely uncommon coincidence. I think true love can only develop over time. And when it does, it floats happily on the water, with its feathered mate, till the end of days.