Pastiche

Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2005

Photo by Candida Höfer

Anonymous asked: Hi Unka Glen, I’m tired of waiting and praying for God’s best when the man I’m highly attracted to now has not made any moves. I take that to be a clear signal that he is not attracted to me. Should I just give up waiting for him in my heart, and accept the pursuit of other men (not necessarily my version of God’s best, but are fine men nevertheless) who are attracted to me, who have made the move? [edited for length]

Unka Glen answered: Well, let’s run down the options here:

— You could give up on the relationship, turn to the next guy who comes along and say, “I guess you’ll do, I mean, you’re not the guy I’m interested in, but you’re a vaguely similar man-shaped person. Do you mind if I call you Tony? And do your hair up like he does it?”

— You could wait on him, in silence, just hoping and wishing in a totally passive way that he would figure out all the moves, make them, and do all the work of bringing this thing together all on his own.

— You could just tell him. But that might lead to one of three possibilities.

1) You could be so chicken and overwhelmed that your embarrassment would begin to collapse in on itself, eventually increasing its own mass, until it bends both time and space, forming a sort of shyness quantum singularity, eventually tearing a hole in the fabric of reality, and destroying the known universe, or…

2) You might say something like, “hey, I think you’re great, I dig our friendship, but I think we could be something more, what do you think?” and then he would point at you and say, “Ooo! look it’s one of those wicked women who throw themselves at men, the kind of woman that makes wild and scandalous sexual advances by suggesting that we all pray about becoming more than friends”, or…

3) He might be interested. Maybe he’s going through a tough time right now. Maybe he’s getting over a breakup. Maybe he’s been working up the courage to make his move. Maybe, well, who knows. But good relationships are not built on trying to read signs, they’re built on honest, open, and clear communication. (This includes your relationship with God, by the way.)

Nonetheless, once you get past the open communication, based on being as vulnerable to him as you expect him to be to you (ahem), then the real bottom line is this, and you should be perfectly clear about this through the rest of your dating life: you deserve to be with someone who is CERTAIN that they want to be in a relationship with you.

Someone who isn’t absolutely sure, doesn’t make the cut, period.

I feel like nobody on Tumblr cares about what happened in Taiwan because we are a small, small country.

Even though I’ve been acting chilled and keeping on my blogging stuffs, I still feel a little bit sad and worried that everyone on Tumblr only knows things happening in big countries. I’ve talked about this on my blog only a few times but nobody really pays attention to what I said. Maybe because I don’t have enough followers, maybe because media doesn’t have enough reports about this thing, maybe because nobody has died in this event so people don’t consider it serious. 

You guys probably think governments which are being harsh to their people are scary, but recently I realized governments which ignore their people are scary too. My country, Taiwan, is trying to pass a Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement with Mainland China. The problem is not about this agreement, the problem is that our people have no idea how this agreement work, who is in charge with this agreement and how many professional estimation has been done before the agreement gets signed. We are afraid, because if this agreement has some problems, our economy might collapse and thousands people might lose their jobs and their families. This agreement is too sloppy to be signed. Our people tried to express our worry but the government didn’t give a shit.

So on March 17th, hundreds of college students broke into the Legislature and occupied the building. It has been 6 days since those students are inside the building. They have no resources and everything is in bad condition. The building is surrounded by bunches of police officers. Even though the government promised they wouldn’t attack those students, we have no idea what would happen if those students keep on occupying the building. The leader of the students, Lin and Chen, declare that their purpose is to fight for everyone’s right in a peaceful way. They want the government to accept their 2 simple requests: disapprove the agreement and make a new law making sure the agreement would be deliberated in a reasonable procedure. But after 6 days, the government still doesn’t pay attention to them and resist all their requests. Our president, Mr. Ma, also refuses to meet the students leaders to listen to their demands. Students inside and outside the Legislature have been irritated by the government’s attitude. The situation has gone wild and there are even some violence stuffs happened despite how hard the leaders are trying to handle all over 30 thousands angry students.