Hey A,

The Seinfeld speech is a solid one, I checked it out. I somehow feel like “falling in love” is a corollary to “pay attention”. A common belief is that love is something you cannot chose, you kinda just “fall” into it. While this is sometimes true, a good deal of it can be manifested through the mechanism of attention.

Speaking of attention, when my flatmates and I hosted a house party last month, we had a guest, AP, who’s a close friend of my flatmate (close enough that she has the keys to our place). She had come early to help make the cocktails. This was on a Saturday when the house help that does our dishes suddenly took leave. This meant that we had a large pile of unattended dishes.

AP’s lavender and mango-based cocktails were blocked by access to utensils that were a dirty mess under a huge pile in the sink. And she hated doing the dishes. I told her it’s no worry. She was a guest for the house party after all - volunteering to make some banger cocktails was already a great privilege for us. I brought out my iconic rubber gloves (more on that soon) on and started tackling the dishes.

I nonchalantly told her that I have a great hack for getting through dishes. “Do your dishes like you’re bathing baby Jesus. This trick really works. Wanna try?”

Truth be told, this wasn’t some trick that I actually ever applied. I was being a bit fraudulent. But fast forward an hour and AP had done almost all of the dishes herself and made cocktails for everyone. It worked like magic. She got through the dishes and perhaps even liked it because of my silly turn of phrase that I got from who-knows-where (a phrase that I too am now a fan of).

A note on the iconic rubber gloves. I like to call them murder gloves. They look like the exact kind of thing you’d want to wear when hiding a body - long, clinical, sturdy, light green and a little floppy at the forearms. It’s another hack I have to get me excited about doing cleaning work that I would normally consider a chore. I usually do a bit when I pull up my gloves with more gusto than necessary and adopt a surgically murderous body language. And then do the dishes or clean the bathrooms or the fridge.

Life is definitely messy. There will always be something that doesn’t go my way. But I’d still rate it a 10/10. I got my gloves, dirty dishes and a questionable sense of humour, after all.

Cheers,
AR