Author Archives: Tsiwoni

About Love

Most people seem not to understand the difference between love and relationship, or at least what people think is love.

There are people I’ve loved with a passion, but for various reasons, those people weren’t able to engage or sustain a relationship. Their unresolved or even unrecognized personal issues turned them into psychological manipulators, or distancers, or rendered them inept or unable to express themselves or engage with others in a meaningful way. With one exception, these were sad men, not bad men, and what they lacked-including the refusal to accept that they needed to learn a different way of being- was inherited and learned from people who themselves had never known intimacy beyond the physical.

Sex is not the only form of intimacy and without the others, it quickly wanes. I would never deny its importance and the joy it can bring within a relationship. Done well, it helps create closeness and trust, because in order for sex to be truly great, each partner has to know not only the other’s body, but their limits and fears and thresholds of pain, however that may be expressed. There’s a level of respect that creates trust and allows for further exploration and innovation and perhaps lovely surprises for both. It’s knowing which boundaries are firm and which might be nudged for greater satisfaction. It is playfulness and time traveling and an assortment of discoveries and joys that can extend the shelf life life beyond the body’s physical limits, because really good sex goes far beyond the physical body and into “the Real,” where souls meet and reconnect. It is a gift and the best fun I can think of, and it enhances love and intimacy. But it’s not the only way that relationships work.

The thing with relationships is that they play out in real time, in real dwellings, among real relatives and friends, at real jobs, in the real trivialities of our daily lives. It’s remembering to replace their ice cream when you’ve eaten the last pop, or that they have a meeting or assignment that they’re dreading. It’s letting them sleep while you walk the dog or change the kitty litter, let the chickens out of the coop. It’s alternating who gets up to rock the baby and get them back to sleep. It’s not teasing in ways that amuse you but annoy them. It’s picking up after yourself and recognizing the baggage you brought into the relationship and working on it, not expecting them to do your work on top of their own. It’s being appreciative of their support as you do work on your shit. It is knowing beyond a doubt, that this person loves you and has your back, ride or die, as no one else can or does. It’s taking the risk of showing someone every aspect of yourself over time and realizing that even if they don’t like it all, they still love you and will be there as you slog through whatever muck needs cleaning or ditching in yourself.

That last bit is particularly hard for people who have shame or guilt and they’ll often reject the beloved for loving them, crazy as that seems to others. It’s hard for people to see themselves through the eyes of the beloved when they’ve been criticized, judged, disparaged, or rejected by others, especially in childhood.

Or perhaps they did wrong things that they’re ashamed of, and are afraid to face that or have it known to the person they only want to see them with eyes of approval. They fear- consciously or not- that they’ll lose esteem or even see horror replace the love.

I’ve known folks who were in the military and by doing their jobs, were responsible for the deaths of other humans, and even years later, could not reconcile that with their inner morality/ethics. Some had survivor’s guilt that they had survived when good companions had not.

Some might have treated women badly at other points in their lives, and others could be ashamed of criminal or unethical behaviors in their pasts.

Some, like me, might have done things others would consider trivial and ordinary childhood events, but they still weigh on that person and seep into the relationship. It doesn’t have to make sense to the beloved, but they have to accept the reality of it for their partner and go from there. Comfort, reassurance, and professional therapy can go a long way in most relationships, because even when we understand and accept a person, we cannot fix another person. We can help to create an emotional environment of peace, acceptance, encouragement, and love that allows for healing, but part of having healthy relationships is knowing where to place the necessary boundaries and to know what is and isn’t yours or yours to fix/heal.

I can chant “there, there” or “sana sana” over a bad cut or broken finger, but professional medical assistance is still necessary, and there’s no shame in that, and there should be no shame if the required assistance is for mental health care either. We are not meant to cover every job in relationships. We are meant to want to help, find out how to help, and to the best of our ability, lovingly point the beloved towards the resources required for the particular issue. Hell, going together to the library to look up resources is a great way to express solidarity and for both to learn things.

There are no wrong or right ways, only what works for you both. And that will change over time, as you change. That’s why honesty is crucial from day one. You have to take into account changes that will have an impact on the relationship: returning to school/new job, wanting to move, have more kids or prevent having more. Big or small, your changes have or can have, an effect on your beloved and they need to be informed. Your partner shouldn’t the last to know if you’re unhappy or dissatisfied or disappointed or turned off in some way! Keeping info from them isn’t “protecting”them or “sparing”them, or any of the cowardly lies you might tell yourself when in reality (remember? Where we all exist..) it is denying them choice and agency. It is a sure way to ruin a good relationship.

Will you screw up? Inevitability. Again, that’s reality. We all do and will, mostly in silly, downright stupid ways that will annoy, perhaps anger, even inspire amused pity in the partner who wonders how they can love such an addle brained fool. In most cases, you’ll even have a good laugh about it and it might become one of those family stories, shamelessly dragged out with friends you trust, among the many stories from everyone’s enduring friendships. The person who screwed up might be first to tell on themselves, noting their own idiocy and fallibility. Those first years together are guaranteed to create such stories, and most are just that: the errors made in getting to know each other, innocent boundary crossings, silly missteps and mistakes. A friend and I both had husbands who used our cutlery for tools because the toolbox wasn’t handy! Annoyed, yes. Forgivable, absolutely! Funny? Most certainly, and the four of us had a number of loving laughs about the daffiness our guys shared. They, in turn, could laugh about our little foibles, like my insistence that you shouldn’t change directions when mixing batter. Believe me, I know it’s daft, and I shake my head at myself and laugh along. If I know nothing else, through my experience and professional training, I know that humans are bundles of contradictions and comically complex. Life gets a lot easier and far more enjoyable once we can own that and laugh at ourselves.

Bigger grievances, true hurts will obviously require real attention, and when trust is broken, if repair is still possible, understand that it can take a very long time and complete self monitoring to rebuild. The aggrieved party is the one who’ll decide when they’re satisfied, not the perpetrator. A real hurt might require that professional assistance we mentioned earlier. Automatically saying you forgive the person or even wanting to be able to forgive them is unrealistic. Boundaries and trust broken is a big deal and has to be handled with delicacy and commitment. Just because the offender gets tired of the dog house, they don’t get to push their way back into the main house of their partner’s heart. Their ego has to be put aside and they have to commit to making amends. And just as in AA, they have to understand that their willingness to make amends doesn’t give them an automatic pass. The loved one can continue to love you but they may not accept your offer until they know that their heart and peace and boundaries are safe. If that will happen or how long it might take cannot be predicted or limited. And if the person who originally ignored what was best for their partner is now unwilling or unable to make that commitment, they don’t really know what love is.

And that’s why knowing what’s most important to your partner and respecting that comes first. If you will not understand that and commit to that level of care, you can never reach those “higher”levels of intimacy and the satisfaction and happiness that they bring.

Is it always easy? Hell no. Is it worth it? Yes, beyond measure. I’m old and have done a number of things, seen a lot, heard more, made more mistakes than I care to admit, and I can think of nothing more important in any relationship, whether friendship or lover. All relationships go through changes. I have a couple of friends from my teens and over the years, we’ve lost touch, had disagreements, reworked how we know each other, and renewed and created new understandings of how we’re friends as we go through life and move further away from the kids we were. Aspects of those original relationships are there, bound by shared experiences, humor, and love, but if forced to remain the same and stagnate, respect and love would die.

My sister and I had a fourteen year age gap, so as adults, we very consciously worked on getting to know each other as individual adults with very different takes on our childhoods and parents. It allowed us to move away from the family story into our own sometimes shaky, but genuine relationship.

All good long term relationships require flexibility, adaptations, and humor. What makes them doable is love and commitment. I learned as much from my son as he from me and my love for him allowed me to rethink, even put aside at least some of my ideas about child rearing and the world. I continue to learn from him and his family, because their experience of the world isn’t mine nor is their world the world of my past. So I try to keep that in mind and work to resolve inevitable differences between our strong wills. We’re all worth the effort, because I know that they and all my loved ones enhance my life and make my world and the world a better place. They and I are worth my sometimes bruised ego or the pain of adapting to new ideas and realities, and I love them enough to sometimes request the difficult conversations.

We can change most easily through love. It never stops growing, and our capacities are built to accommodate that amazing, sometimes mind-blowing growth.

It is the only true way.

7/7/24

Having My Say: intro to Political Realities 100

Here’s the thing, people: I am three days younger than snow, and I understand how this system works. I’ve studied it from multiple angles, in and out of college and graduate school, and I am quite clear about it and where I am within it. In my entire life, I’ve had the pleasure only once of voting for a candidate I wholeheartedly supported. The rest has been voting in the best interests of me, my class, and my people. I don’t have to love the candidates, but I vote for the one most likey to support an agenda that doesn’t set us back in terms of environment wellbeing, race, class, gender, and community well being/prosperity. If they actually move us forward, praise be!
Should it be that way? NO! But I don’t live in a world of “shoulds” and dreams. I live in a proto-capitalist society that is veering from an intended-to-have-been democratic republic towards a theocratically tinged, racist, misogynist oligarchy. So hell yeah, I’m going to vote against that, despite any qualms I have about the candidate or party for which I’ll vote, because as much as I dislike neoliberalism and all that goes with it, it still beats the hell out of any possibility of being completely disenfranchised and having my rights as a woman descended from enslaved Africans and other people of Captive Nations revoked or seeing my children and loved ones threatened.

As of yet, I see no genuine and long lasting plans for a real revolution, or for what happens afterwards. If half of the current citizens don’t know how their system works and why it was set up as it was, do you really think you can garner a large enough base to have a people’s government that wouldn’t be prone to fascism? That other greedy and interested groups/countries would just sit and watch? Most Americans don’t know what socialism is, but they’re a’gin it, and we remain the only “First World” country with corporate healthcare that bankrupts families on a daily basis. So understanding communalism or other non-Eurocentric forms of government and types of societies isn’t even possible.

Bottom line: I do know much, and I know enough to know that people who speak and act against people who look like me should not be given power over me. My mother “didn’t raise no fools” and I am sick to death of people who “don’t have the sense that they were born with” writing about the short comings of the most viable candidates. Do some of you really think that redistricting, setting back voter’s rights, defunding and otherwise sabotaging our postal and educational systems is accidental and that they would do all of this if your vote didn’t matter? That union busting isn’t an act of war against the working class?

It’s a flawed system, but X marks the spot, baby: you are here and unless you’re independently wealthy (own corporations, resources, means of production, etc.) your ass is a worker- white collared, blue collared, or without a shirt- and you need to understand that you have more in common with the single mothers, Black, Latino, Appalachian, sex-workers, migrant workers in the fields than you do with people who make what you do in multiple years, every single second. You need to understand that you’re not going to become one of them, question the sick desire to accumulate more than is needed in ten thousand lifetimes, and grasp the reality that voting in the interests of a class to which you might aspire is voting against yourself and helps keep you where you are or worse.

So that’s it. Few people will read this and fewer will pay heed. There’s nothing I can do about that beyond having had my say and hoping that they didn’t drop you on your heads and there’s still some good sense in those big heads your necks support.

I wish us all peace, a safe place to live, enough to eat, good health, and the joy and solidarity of community and love. And I hope that you can separate ego and illusion in order to serve yourself, the actual Constitution and its Amendments (14th is important!) and do what’s in service to the generations of us all.

“Goodnight and good luck.”

Gastropoda Gold

How did I not know that people are using snail mucin on their skin?
I have SO many questions, from extraction methods to who on this garden grub green earth thought of this? Seriously, I want to know who looked at a cute little snail, plodding along, minding its business, and said, “OMG, would you look at that glowing complexion! I say there, Snail, your complexion is flawless, what’s your secret?”

I might imagine some famished ancestor noticing a bird chowing down on a snail and saying, “Move over, Bub!”and grabbing anything that didn’t kill the animal. Hunger can make otherwise unappealing comestibles seem doable. Go forward a millennia, add butter and garlic, and you’ve got a desirable protein, not merely something pragmatic.

So maybe someone noticed that cooks who prepared escargot had particularly lovely hands that looked youthful. In busy kitchens among cooks whose hands are subject to abrasions, nicks, and burns: that would be noticeable. But I’m just creating a scene born of my need to know how such an inconceivable item is now promoted as the beauty product of the year.

Having lived in a shell-less cave, I’ve been snail mucinless this entire lifetime and I am hurt to realized that not only have I been deprived, but people who I thought of as friends were withholding vital information that could have preserved my youthful glow. Instead, I’m another victim of physics- a shriveled hag, encased in a wrinkly skin bag. And why? Not because it is a side effect of the natural passage of time, but because no one cared enough to tell me that inside that shell-house that they carry on their backs, snails have wee, tiny labs where they’re turning what we previously thought of as their yukky secretions, into pure gold, extracted from desperate consumers under the spell of the multi-billion dollar marketing of an aesthetic illusion.

I can only hope that the snails have lawyered up and are being rewarded. That unlike others, they won’t become victims of their innate talents, exploited and discarded by another heartless human industry.

Perhaps slime really is ultimately the perfect product and metaphor for our age.

Update: “Stressed snails produce slime, however sometimes machines are designed to be kind of like a spa for snails, using a secret spray to pleasure them which also triggers them to secrete more slime. Then they are left in a dark room on top of mesh so that as they scoot around the slime drips through the mesh and can be collected in a tray below them.”

Thanks to Flaky Biscuits Press for the above information.
I’m glad to learn that they’re not killed for it, and if they’re being pleasured in the process, so much the better. I don’t want any stress or depression slime on my wrinkles😉 (Not sure that ejaculation slime is any less dubious, but it’s better, LOL.)

Anjana’s Guide to a Better Life and Society (in no particular order)


Everybody should have to serve and work the line in a restaurant; teach a class; baby sit; work the register (old school, requiring basic arithmetic skills); write a formal letter; clean a kitchen & bathroom (baseboards
included); create something useable/beautiful from scratch; repair/mend something; work in a human or animal shelter/soup kitchen/hospital; spend time with people of a different generation, speak with (not only “to”) a person/people they perceive as “less than” themselves and would otherwise never approach; dance/sing/play for 15 minutes each day; spend time in the natural world without unnecessary equipment or noise; be kind to someone every day; actively defend the rights of the poor, disenfranchised, minorities, women, elderly, children, animals, nature; enjoy and take care of your body and senses; occasionally (knees permitting) jump rope; witness/assist in a birth and a death; vote or change the system through creation, not destruction; skip (while holding hands when possible); learn a new language or skill outside of your comfort zone; drive a cab in NYC; swim; spend 48 hrs incarcerated or in a senior care facility, or in a mental health facility; grow food and flowers; consider your connection to the living world every day; have your social & political life in alignment; reduce/eliminate waste. Be kind.

By Anjana Mebane-Cruz, PhD

July 7, 2015

Half a Day in the Life

Thrilled to have been able to write several pages of the book this morning for the first time in a couple of months, so I was absolutely thrilled. Until said pages completely disappeared from Word, my computer, and the known universe, including copies I’d sent to my writing group.
Just spent almost two hours using every suggested recovery process, por nada.
Finally found an in-between first and last draft, so I saved, saved as, copied, uploaded, downloaded and printed it to everywhere, including sending copies to all my emails.
Immediately after that, the original that I’d emailed showed up.
And this is why writers (in movies) go postal. In real life we bitch about it, get headaches, have insomnia, IBS, and a variety of anxiety related twitches, but ultimately get back to the work at hand.

So cheers, my dear Word Wranglers! May your vocabulary be mighty, the words flow, your pages stay safe, and your critics give praise.

Anole Tales Continued

Green anole basking in a light summer rain

Enjoying a late breakfast, watching an anole hanging out on the BBQ shelf when a smaller insect scurried by and Anole jumped like lightening, devouring the bug in one big bite.

First time seeing an anole hunt and it was surprising: little dudes are fast, and those wee jaws open like a crocodile’s! No struggle, no pain: bug was just disappeared in a flash.

Condolences to the unknown bug’s relations.

Respect, Brown Anole lizard! Glad you’re wee and tiny compared to me.

Dawn and Dawning: the waking dream

The little creek behind the house is almost dry this morning.

I don’t remember it being so these past two summers. I worry.

The creek is dry and sounds from the farm that was behind us

are sounds of heavy equipment, not the sounds of tractors, threshers, or such.

In my mind these are sounds of Death.

Death to trees and all who dwell within and around,

Death to rivers, streams, and creeks. 

I’ll listen tonight for tree frogs and hope that their din is undiminished

That no more housing’s being built for what seems mostly to be the worst of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio…

We have good neighbors, but so many are the ones we hoped to leave behind,

reincarnations of the Confederacy: racist, sexist, and cannot cook.

They join the “Redneck Brigades” of the Carolinas, but reshape it into their controlling and manicured images.

They hate the Spanish moss that hangs from live oaks, bring plants foreign to this soil, then rant about increasing pollen. 

Prefer the foods from supermarkets or artisan shops created by trust fund babies to our local Mom and Pop fish markets, BBQ, chicken shacks, and joints, and they denigrate the very cultures whose charms attracted them here to start with.

I see this across the country, but mostly in the South, where so few people have power to fight the Powers that conspire to let this happen. They take the kickbacks, retire where they can live like kings, expanding the cycle further and far, cluck about the shame of it all, keeping folks hating “damn Northerners” while never seeing who’s selling the land and heritage. 

I wonder what happens when no workers can afford to live and work nearby? Will you complete your dreams of feudal lordships with servants all around, dependent on your land and charity, no church left to regulate usury or the thickness of the sticks with which you beat your human chattel?

I hear all this in these early morning sounds and want to scream out to people,

Rise up, revolt, remember who you are, not who they tell you to be!

But I’m just another Cassandra, like every other wife whose husbands appeared to listen, but continued on towards Doom.

Every Fannie Lou, every Che, every Malcolm, Patrice, and Grace; every Angela, Stokely, and Miriam; Lolita, Ramon and Segundo, and every Dennis, Clyde, and Russell: listened to, but not fully heard, because actions are too few, when any.

The young ones seem so conscious: of Earth Mother, and others who labor round the world,

Of animals and water, clean air, and joy.

I pray each day, afraid it might be too late, but knowing that we cannot, must not, will not give in to despair. I worry as I hear them buying into ideas of generation gaps and lumping elders all together, rejecting the allies with experience and love. Perhaps the chain of Community is irrevocably broken, because they’ve never known a world without 24-7 ads of propaganda,

Never seen groups working across differences for the good of all.

They’ve never known Yangtze River dolphins, nor white rhinos, or golden toads beyond some stories or photos,

Just loss and overstimulation, and rhetoric that makes them think that the workers who bought into American Dreams had Power instead of seeing them as deluded peers to be wakened from their strivers’ dreams.

My hopes are few, yet violently strong:

I wish to wake every sleeping mindset,

shake every single body into wakefulness and agreement on these very few, deathly crucial things.

I’ve prayed to be the Avenging Angel of Justice since seven, and pray now to smite each greedy leader who sacrifices our Earth and Her living souls for their short sighted gains and power.

I wish to fly like lightning, swooping down to save and avenge the planet I love and everything that is part of the natural world.

But I wish to understand what makes such creatures tick before I smite, that my justice is right and righteous. To have it explained, ‘cause their lack of humanity spells death not only for me and mine, but also the children they purport to love, and to whom they’ll bequest their soul forsaken world. I wonder how such creatures exist or think and how they cannot get the basic facts of life and physics: we are all connected through Life. That the illusion of separation is strong, but it is the ultimate joke towards understanding the Universe and how it works: we recognize or die. Unity or Destruction: there is no middle way.

I wonder, as my father instructed, and try not to worry, as it’s ultimately counter productive to action, and action is what I need and want and what might (maybe?) save our world.

But mostly I want to see this world restored to full beauty. To have the children grow with grace and awe, and elders grow wise and kind. To see the animals thrive and plants renew, for arts and healing and generational concern to be our leaders. 

For rain to once again taste sweet and not acidic. I want the babies safe and nurtured and loved, be they two legged, four legged, winged, crawling, or fanged. I want Life.

And being the crazy old lady I am, I dare to dream this dream awake:

I dare to dream of the Peace the comes from Balance, from a sensitive, affirming rendering of Justice. The Peace that’s born from a universal and eternally wise Love. The Peace that meets the heart’s desire in harmony with the cosmic song.

I want to see everything false fall to dust and get blown away to Source, perhaps to be reformed into something useful and good. Like Victor’s father in Smoke Signals, I want to wave my hand and restore all that is good. My waking dream.

6/17/24

A Mothers’ Day

My mother wanted only one child and I was number five. Despite that issue and her many struggles to keep a large and sometimes difficult household running smoothly and efficiently, my mother cared for a problematic mother in law, didn’t hesitate to add an elderly relative with no other home, or to take in a local kid who had a particularly difficult family life.

She was strong and tired, impatient and incredibly kind, frugal yet generous, and although she didn’t approve of some of my choices, I knew that my mother loved me beyond the general care that she showed to everyone under her roof: that her softness was always there when I was most fragile, and that she would enlist an army to fight for me and my siblings if we were in the right and failing to muster our own forces.

She was fearless in defense of her children and others, and it was known that she would spank every kid on the block if they were misbehaving beyond the normal kiddy antics. Kids also knew that if she was baking (and she often did) they would get a treat, same as we did. She never blamed children for their short comings or bad behavior, and had an uncanny eye for the kids who needed extra care.

It was she who grew angry when I mentioned that a kid in class missed days and came in several times with black eyes and a broken arm. Our teacher said he was “accident prone” and made light of it, but Mommy bristled in anger saying, “That boy’s being abused! Somebody’s beating on that child.” I was shocked and freaked out that she’d drawn such a different conclusion, but although she said no more to me, I found out later that she quietly spoke to my teacher and the school authorities, and “Danny” had no more “accidents” that year.

As I got older, I realized how many people she helped in various ways and how big her heart was, despite her often strict demeanor. That so much of that strictness was born of her understanding of how cruel and mean the world can be and her fear for all the innocents and the vulnerable people of the world. That her empathy was hard to bear when she had so few resources to offer. That she understood that her mission and need was to guarantee that we’d survive without her.

She maybe worried most for me, her dreamy eyed, romantic, and artistic daughter- completely unprepared emotionally for the realities I would face. But I knew I had her in my corner. That I could call on, and conjure up a line of women who had gone through more with far fewer resources, and “lived to tell the story.” That I would see my way through and never be the weak link in that chain of women, from my mother and all the way back to “Mitochondrial Eve.” That somewhere within me, I was my mother’s daughter and that if I tapped into that, I would be alright, no matter what.

My mother continues to comfort me and be my resolve when I need it. I feel her presence at times, as though she’s with me, not just remembered, and it gives me heart. It reminds me that I have been and will be loved.

She is always and ever, my Mom.

Cultural Linguistics vs “Love” (but not really.)

Ok, I’m breaking my recent vow to post no more than 7 things per day on that other site (not counting meme dumps) because despite the many responses to this ^ (above) random post that I noticed on someone’s page, to my horror, not one response I read questioned how “love” was being defined! I’ve often heard people with all good intentions say things like “We all just want to be loved” and it hits my buttons and raises red flags each time, because what we mean by “love” varies by temperament, gender, culture, age, and time. It’s not a simple given that we all want it or if we do, what that would look like and be for us as individuals or a corporate group.

Love isn’t merely “attraction” or “shared interests” or “class” as many seem to have been taught. It also doesn’t exist without “respect,” a word many submitted, but didn’t think to clarify.
To me, this was yet another example of how people not only misunderstand each other and skim the surface of “meaning,” but also an example of cultural socialization that doesn’t serve our relationships, or help us to understand the systems in which we reside.
Interestingly, it’s another one of those things I always tried to explore in my classes, and it was generally the first time students had ever considered not only the legal, familial, religious, and professional significances of marriage, but the aesthetic and sexual connections to how we understand “love” and “marriage.”

Wittgenstein said “Love is not an emotion. Love is put to the test.” It certainly evokes great amounts of emotion, but it is in fact, a set of relationships and interactions, both personal and communal. And its presentation and reception reflects and confronts the standards, both implicit and explicit, of the particular culture/society. And so do the terms we employ, which means that if we’re not in agreement about how we’re using these terms and we’re relying solely on our own feelings, or political/familial/religious traditions, or other individual contexts, we’re not only in different conversations, we’re weakening relational bonds.

Everyone “misspeaks” at times (notice the original post’s mistake) but if we have an extended relationship with that person we may know their intent or linguistic patterns well enough to fill in the missing or correct word. In those cases we may show grace and it may even become the source of an on-going joke between friends with shared histories.

But what about when you don’t know the speaker? What if they’re in a position of authority/power? Context matters, words matter. I’m not the Grand Poobah of Love, nor do I claim more than personal expertise on that particular subject, (although the song running through my head right now is the first line in the 1962 Exciters song, Tell Him.) I do however, have a good understanding of what words do and how they work in language, as well as the effect of words and word choices on our audience, intended and not.

And I wonder about the intentions of such queries when they go beyond personal amusement. Like it or not, we’re all engaged in a social experiment and research on the social media in our lives. The fact that in theory we can “reach” millions of people around the world in an instant places an increased responsibility to know more and accept “difference” without imposing our parochial views and opinions. It requires us to understand that if we’re going to communicate effectively and negotiate the myriad relationships we might develop through education, business, travel, hobbies, etc. we must first sit down and hash out our a priori beliefs and understandings within the contextual framework we share. It means that the words we use can be fraught with meaning and we must know that as we enter unfamiliar spaces or renegotiate older relationships.

The requirement has always been there, but we have generally ignored it in judging people within our societies, particularly those perceived to be of lower status.

And that’s maybe what “love” might have to do with it, but maybe it’s just the easiest way to establish any relationship and to build communities that serve the greatest number within that society.