First, belated happy birthday to Rica. Sorry, I missed the dinner. We'll do it again, sweetie. Thanks to a barrage of overseas visitors, past two weeks have been a whirlwind of activities - run there, meet someone, run over there, have another meeting, brainstorm, manipulate the situation, etc, etc, etc sprinkled in with my six days a week class schedule. It's been very productive professionally (in past 4 days, we've been able to overcome a barrier that's been dogging our project for at least one and a half year), and fulfilling personally (learned a lot from the genius mentors), but it's also been stressful. There was this Men's Fitness article a few years back that emphasized that unless you stress your muscles, it won't grow (something to do with dead tissues growing on top of live ones, but let's not get into that). And there's this common wisdom that says that from year 3 or so, our brain cells only die, and they don't grow. So, I doubt this stress actually contributed anything more than short term memory loss. Maybe I should put more of the physical one, and less the mental one.
So, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, Grey's Anatomy. No, that's Annabelle's patented territory. Well, maybe she won't mind if I don't use the quote. Would you, sweetie?
So here's finally the topic du jour. Envy. Grey's Anatomy was showing a season two episode last night, where Meredith was holding someone's heart, or intestine or some other internal organ, and dispensing the pop mumbo jumbo about the human condition as usual because the patient had a bomb inside the body. And one of the other interns said, (paraphrasing) "I was so jealous that she got the operation, and now she's in this situation, and I feel guilty" (Yeah, it's a wonder I never became a screenwriter, eh?)
So, that got me thinking about this entry. One of my cousins passed away about a month and a half ago from complications related to unsafe abortion. She was struggling at the hospital where my brother works for three days, and I didn't know about it because I wasn't home much (and my brother didn't bother to inform me). I didn't get to see her before she died, and apparently she called out my name when someone else went to visit her. This was guilt enough for that particular friday morning which got progressively worse throughout the day culminating in a wedding reception and a birthday party from hell thanks to my drunken colonial master.
But the major guilt trip for me was that, the last time I saw my cousin before that, I was envious that she had something that I wanted. Something so stupid, and so insignificant that now in the grand scheme of things, I'm too ashamed to mention this. But it did consume me enough, and I felt the envy. And I began to wonder, of all the butterfly effects occuring in this world, could one bout of envy cause such major destruction and bring pain to so many lives?
I'm not a jealous or possessive person in general. I accepted to be the ding dong (thanks, Siobhan, for my new favorite catchphrase) of someone with a seven year past because I just enjoyed the moment and didn't build castles in air, as Farhana put it. I have happily shared my lunch with other kids, shared my books and movies. I lost my favorite red bike, Laltu, in college because James Fuentes borrowed it and left it unchained outside his house in Tivoli. I got over it, even though it cost me a lot of hours of work at $4.25/hr to buy it, because it wasn't his fault.
So, if the conjecture is true, and my envy can cause destructions, i wonder how my other emotions would fare.
Can I love someone to death? Choke them with my barrage of emotions so that their backs are against the wall, and they are unable to breathe?
I don't know if I can cause that, but I certainly know the effect.
