this is your brain in love

so last night as i was falling asleep i listened to radio lab (great podcast, check it out). the segment was called “this is your brain on love”. i learned a lot of cool stuff about the culture of love. like how people who are “madly in love” get the same rush of happiness that cocaine delivers. people who have gone through a breakup feel withdrawals just like addicts do. i learned a long time ago that love is an addiction. it’s one that people never seem to want to break, or think they need to break. i’m not saying it’s always unhealthy, just sometimes. 

anyways, it talked about the three levels of attraction. dopamine, noraeverasdfawe (i can’t remember how to spell that one) and oxytocine (probably got that one wrong too.) i’ll explain

• dopamine is the chemical that gets you in the mood to be drawn to someone. it sets up the party, plays the music and gets you hyped up
• norepinephrine is that moment where all the lights dim except for on one particularly suave tall dark and handsome guy with the vneck and james franco hair, you start drooling a bit and the rest of the night is focused on making sure that guy pays attention to you
• oxytocine kicks in a little bit later, its the feeling of long lasting. after you have hit it off with sexy james franco look alike and have gone out for coffee a few times, had your first kiss blah blah blah oxytocine comes knocking at your door saying “hey wouldnt it be great to start dating this guy” and eventually “hey wouldnt it be great to fall in love with this guy” and then “hey wouldnt it be great to live with this guy”  after oxytocine has come into the picture dopamine and norepinephrine die out a bit. if your brain was constantly being sent surges of the two, you’d go crazy and be hormone ridden for the rest of your life

i always love finding out about these things, the science of love, the science of emotions. there are too many people who believe that love is a religion, that its unexplainable or something. not true people, its 100 percent explainable. love is not a religion. it’s not really a fluffy cloud of happiness. actually, yes it is but underneath that fluffy cloud are all these chemicals that your BRAIN creates. not your heart. 

these days are not fast

i have learned that life doesn’t happen all at once, we are meant to wait for things. the storm does not always pass in one day and tides are gonna change several times. we should get used to it. you aren’t satisfied with the way things are, and trust me plenty of us feel that way. as much as you want to do everything you can, say as much as you can say, run a thousand miles, WHATEVER IT IS, you have to accept that life doesn’t happen all at once and if time is a lesson then we are meant to learn from it.

time-space continuum

people think about the past all the time, i know i do. but seriously they only ever think about how things have changed and people who have left them. and then it results in this continuous spiral everyone throws themselves in, you know what i mean. feeling sorry for yourself, spending hours thinking about it, coming to what you think is a really brilliant and enlightening conclusion that gives you “clarity” and then the next time you have nothing to occupy yourself with, you think about the past and people who have left you all over again. you think about what you could have had and what you used to have but why don’t people ever think about anyone else, about the people actually worth your time.

some people sit around thinking about the past only to fill the present with a constant desperation of something that’ll stop them from thinking of the past. i don't understand how it is that we feel the need or the reason why we're so drawn towards making our lives about someone else when life should really just be about you.

Tôi đang ở Việt Nam

I'M IN VIETNAM!
Day 1: CROSSING THE STREET
and this is why:

the traffic here makes Taipei look humane. People drive the wrong way, there are NO traffic lights. it's chaos and recipe for disaster for sure. The buildings here are french inspired but even though they try to aim for a degree of elegance i feel like I am in the slummest of slums. what is really most saddening of all and makes me want to spill my pockets for this country is the fact that the currency rate is 1 US dollar to 20,000 Viet dollars. TWENTY. THOUSAND. Tonights dinner was a million dollars, one could easily spend a trillion in one day. i'm no economics major but talk about inflation, right?

also, there are a decent amount of wai guo ren here but i feel like the locals still find us extremely exotic. I was standing on the sidewalk with my sister and i look over to find a guy taking a picture of us. and everyone stares at us.

people here seriously sit on the sidewalks in plastic stools and sell all sorts of stuff. the most interesting thing i saw being sold today was um.. drumroll please.. snails. My mom and uncle were about to eat them but fortunately there were no more stools. We had grilled fish for dinner and then later on I had some pho. I take back what i said about pho before, it's good.

also, it is so great seeing my family. really weird to think it's been six months. it feels like nothing has changed.