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The current oldest living person in the world is a Japanese lady named Nabi Tajima. She is 117 years old and is the world's 3rd oldest living person in recorded history.
On top of having been alive for an absurd number of years, as of September 2017, she also has 160 descendants.
160.
Here I am, not sure if I'll make even one baby in my lifetime and this lady can claim responsibility for 160 lives on this earth.
The world is truly amazing.
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A friend recently moved up to San Francisco to live with her boyfriend who works in the city.
However, her office is down in Palo Alto, meaning she'll be spending some 4 hours a day commuting.
She had tried to compromise with her boyfriend to see if they could live somewhere further south so the commute wouldn't be so bad for her, but eventually she gave in and they got a place in San Francisco.
I literally can't imagine making this decision for the sake of my partner. Either I would change jobs, or we wouldn't live together, or we'd have to break up, because there is absolutely 100% no way anyone is convincing me to commute 4 hours a day, 5 days a week just so I can live with some dude. In fact, this guy would have to be pretty much perfect in every way possible for me to be willing to commute even 2 hours, much less 4.
This isn't a criticism of this friend. In some ways, I'm envious.
What is it like to want to spend that much time with another person? What does it mean to love someone that much? What does it feel like to feel so intensely?
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At some point in my early 20's, it came up that several of my female friends had independently set general timelines for themselves of when they hoped to be engaged, married and babied. Most of them said 27 was ideal for engagement, then marriage at 28 or 29, and then a baby by 30.
Wait a minute.
Nobody told me I was supposed to draw up a timeline for these kinds of things. When was this homework assigned? Why didn't anyone tell me about this? How did everyone else know but me?
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In 3rd grade, we had an assignment to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up.
I didn't know what I wanted to be-- as it turned out to be a theme in my life, I was bad at imagining the future, so I just made something up. I don't remember what I drew, but it was probably something that I thought would be a 'right answer', like a scientist or something like that.
One of my friends drew herself as a housewife with a husband and three kids.
I was dumbfounded. My mom was trying her hardest to find work in an English speaking country despite not speaking English, doing everything she could to avoid being a stay-at-home mom in order to better provide for her family, and meanwhile my classmate wanted nothing but just that.
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In college, we made so many friends, and so many friends had their first real relationships, and so many friends in real relationships stopped being our friends because they were too busy being in real relationships.
Then the real relationships would end up in tears and our friends would try to be our friends again.
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When I was 19, I was waiting for the bus in the evening. When I looked across the street, the man at the stop across from me had his pants down and was masturbating while staring right at me.
When I was 25, a man jacked off onto the bench next to me in a park. I was thankful he did it on the bench and not on me or my things.
When I was 28, I sat in a bar with some friends next to a window that opened out to the street. I made eye contact with the man who stood in the window, furiously rubbing one out as he watched us.
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NPR had a really great piece a few months ago called "Five Women". In it, five women talked about their relationships with the same one man who, depending on the woman, served as a husband, lover, or employer. Each woman explored how she had met this man, what her relationship with him was like, and inevitably, at some point, discussed other men who had affected her along the way.
Because sexual abuse is never a one-time occurrence for any woman. When it happens, we automatically compare it to a previous case--, "Oh well at least it's not as bad as that time when..." or "This reminds me of..."
It was really interesting to see how each woman rationalized her relationship with this man, even as he cheated on her, lied to her, abused her, shamed her or manipulated her. While I didn't agree with all the opinions that were given, I could see the logic and emotions behind each.
Sometimes I try to rationalize the things that are. But I'm never really sure how much is causation and how much is just coincidence. Are these events really connected, or am I just making excuses?
Better yet, why not just abandon the past where it lives and move on? For whose sake do I dig around in things that can't be changed?