I usually post near the first week of every month. I just thought I should change it up and post earlier this time.

Life has been going. Not too busy for work yet, but I enjoy my time off whenever I get them. This post is quite long. It has a lot of psychoanalysis where I talk about love and chance. I also talk about the problems of science and determinism along with the influence of quantum physics; all the way to object a and the gaze of the Other.

Ok ok see you never!

Edit Feb 14, 2025: Valentines is definitely the most hopeless romantic day of the year. 😂 I think I’m going to go write some poetry that no one will ever read. Also, Eashel’s birthday is in February. Everyone should wish her a happy birthday.🥲

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“To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.“

—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse.

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Squid Game Season 2…

was pretty good. I enjoyed watching it for entertainment and also for some of its intellectual themes on psychoanalysis. I remember season 1 featured one of Lacan’s seminar which sparked dialogue with Lacanians. Someone actually did a lengthy analysis of the series through Lacanian ideas and it was quite good. I can’t find it anymore (I will try again later and update this if I find it).

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“Have you ever played golf?”

Yeah man. Long time ago.
A lot of grass died that day.💀

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“I’ve been reading your blog for awhile and I typed you as an INFJ”

This person told me that I read people way too well and my interests in understanding the nuances of human behavior suggests that I am more of an INFJ than an INTJ. It’s good to know and they’re probably correct.🫡 But I’m happy that someone appreciates my black magic people reading skills.🤣 I’d probably make a really good psychotherapist or detective.🤔

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The fastest corner I’ve taken in the R

It depends on the turn and how familiar I am with that particular part of the road. I don’t take fast turns on roads that I don’t know well. But there are some highway ramps with an exit speed recommendation of 60km/h that I can throw the R into at 120-140km/h. No one is usually around when I do this. So if I die, it’s on me LOL. But there was one evening where I was on a quiet road with just another Honda CR-V. We were going at around the same speed next to each other until I decided to downshift and accelerate to hit the turn that I knew was up ahead. At the next lights, we stopped next to each other where I had to roll down my windows to clean the side mirror. Then I noticed the dad driver was looking at me like 😯. It was silly. I just smiled and waved at him then rolled up my window because it’s weird Lol 😂 (it’s hard to see through my tinted windows at night).

I can probably take corners even faster if I install aftermarket sway bars, upgrade the suspension, and lower the car. But I also don’t want to be that guy who drives sideways over speed bumps to avoid scraping Lol. Racing suspension set ups are expensive and are kind of impractical on public roads because they are really stiff which gives the car a bumpy ride. It’s also not good for winter because a lowered car turns it into a snowplow, especially if you have a front lip installed. If I lower my car, it would be minimal and will mostly be for looks. Not to mention that lowered cars are harder to get into. It’s a minor inconvenience. Right now, I already get in my car in a specific way so I don’t put wear on my seat bolsters Lol. I don’t slide my butt down the side of the seat when getting into the car.

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Why is chance so important in love?

This is very difficult to answer. I will try my best.

The importance of chance stems from a little bit of going against the grain in the history of philosophy where the natural sciences branched out on its own in 19th century which took up determinism as its fundamental position that drove its pursue for knowledge (known as scientific positivism). To say that something is determined is to argue that everything that happens in our lives are caused by something else which lies outside our free will (in psychoanalysis, this is the symbolic Other at work). This is to say that science is founded on things like the principle of causality that is based on our observation, where we can observe that “X is caused by Y” as one tries to explain it; such as the effects of love is caused by chemical hormonal responses in our body where nothing else could deviate from this cause. Determinism is used to describe and explain the causalities between observable objects, matter or phenomenon, but it does not explain the normalization and the practice in the descriptive determination of determinism which had come to dominate scientific thought. Science assumes determinism and the preconditions of the mind.

This is actually a classical philosophical problem that stems from people like Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and even people like Leibniz (who was the inventor of calculus alongside Newton). And if you study it further, you will get into some renown physicists who debates this topic within quantum mechanics like Max Planck. In quantum physics, as we see today, actually deviates and challenges scientific determinism that I just spoke about. This is because quantum physics works very differently than all our hard sciences and physics of our real world where determinism is assumed. The famous double slit experiment is a prime example which shows us how particle behavior is indeterminate until humans observes and measures its outcome (watch this video). The very act of observation and interpretation changes how particles behave. It is not possible for scientists to determine which slit the atomic particle went through to create its wave pattern outcome because its behavior escapes observational deterministic probability. This is to say that, at a fundamental level, the behavior of these particles are indeterminate, like pure contingency.

Now, Lacan was very influenced by this dimension of historico-philosophical thought (he studied under Alexandre Kojeve who was an expert in G.W.F. Hegel). He saw that determinism, as found in science, is inadequate to explain many dimensions and experiences of reality, such as those produced through the effects of the unconscious mind and the fundamental experience of love. That the experience of love is not simply caused and determined by biological responses, but by something much more contingent which escapes the structure of the symbolic Other, our conscious grasp of reality, and the descriptive language used in deterministic science.

Lacan often associates this contingency with the Real where chance ruptures out of it which surprises us at the level of the symbolic. That there is pure contingency where love is spoken and articulated in our everyday lives that completely lies unconscious to us. The rupturing of this contingent movement is an event. It may appear as our words, a truth, a thought, feeling, or a special person, which may change how we perceive reality when we come to its realization. It is like the encounter of love that shakes up all our determined meanings established in our life; just like how quantum physics might reshape how modern physics determines the laws of reality in the physical world.

Lacan believed that pure chance only exists within the Real. And through the symbolic, nothing is left to chance. You see this in the discourse of science since most of it are perpetually stuck in the ideology of determinism (hence nearly the entirety of the discipline lacks creativity). It might also be how Freud points out that there are no mistakes in the things we say. Yet the things we say points to something else that is unconscious and ambiguous which arises out of our words contingently in places we never thought would. It’s sort of like casually talking to someone you initially didn’t think much of where you suddenly realize you fell in love with them. The Real ruptures out of nowhere for a brief moment and changes everything!

This is why you will see some contemporary philosophers emphasize on this idea of pure chance. I think it is most notable in Alain Badiou’s philosophy on the Event. You also see it in his student, Quentin Meillassoux, who argues for the necessity for contingency.

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Night Drives

It’s mostly aimless driving. I sometimes chill in random parking lots at night and play Pokemon TCG Pocket. Other times I get fries at McDonalds because I’m the French Fry King. But I never use the drive thru because they sometimes have weird curb placements where I might damage my wheels by accident.

I really hope it snows hard again because I haven’t tried drift mode yet. I want to do some donuts in an empty parking lot. I also have yet to set my personal lap record around the new ring road that circles Calgary.🤣 I remember someone on Reddit lapped it at 58min travelling at an average of 105km/h. Those are rookie numbers.😏

In the summer, I used to drive out of city to look at stars. I should do it again this year. There is also an observatory just out of city that hosts cool events at night where they set up telescopes and let you look through them to see planets and stars. I haven’t been there in a while. But it’s a really cool experience and probably a great place to go for a date. Too bad I’m forever alone.🥲

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“If you think about the way Eashel turned you down, she said her boyfriend won’t like it if she gave her number to you. So the reason she isn’t giving it to you is because her boyfriend won’t like it. This means she would’ve given it to you if she didn’t have a boyfriend.”

I had the same thought. But it’s also a bold assumption and not everyone thinks like this.😂 Maybe she was trying to let me down easy because she is genuinely nice and chatty with everyone. But a jealous boyfriend is not the drama I need. They’re the definition of trouble where they can become violent and controlling; things that I don’t wish upon her. Full blown jealousy and bad behavior are dangerous in relationships and will ruin it when they are kept unchecked. But I have no interest in interfering with her relationship, even if I have a lot of genuine feelings for her. If I knew earlier, I would’ve done things differently. But it might be too late now.

I also had another person tell me the other day (not on here), “It sounds crazy, but I think she likes you and can’t admit or act on it”. Yes it’s very likely lol, and I’m usually right about these things. But I won’t ask or make her uncomfortable about it. Honestly, I’m not even sure if she realizes it or if she is in denial. All I will say is that the way she looked at me that day. I know those eyes. They are very rare. People may lie with their words. They may lie with their actions. But the eyes never lie. I remember after I gave her the treats, she gave me these eyes again with a cute smile while holding onto her work iPad as I walked up to her (I was going to give her another KitKat). Then when we broke eye contact, she kept smiling to herself as she looked down at her iPad. It was at that moment where I knew she had feelings for me. It was unmistakable.

Unfortunately, there is not much more I can do about it. The only right move is to give her space.🫡 She can make her own choices. She now knows I like her and would like to take her out. I’m not the type of guy who turns a rejection into a scene or hold grudges on a girl because they said no. I will keep my distance and will still talk to her as friends if she can handle it and reciprocates. I just won’t ever make any advances again unless she gives me a signal. And if she does, she needs to make it really obvious—so obvious that she might as well ask me out type of obvious. I’m not dumb enough to get rejected twice because it hurts, especially when it’s from angel.🥲 But like I said last time, I’m not going to wait around for something that may never happen. This means the longer time goes by, the less likely anything will happen between us.

I must say, things haven’t been the same ever since I asked for her number. I can’t say exactly what it is. But do you know what’s most surprising? She steals glances at me even more than before lollll. And you would expect the opposite after a rejection. But we sometimes play eye tag where we catch each other’s eyes like there is no tomorrow. Her eyes are also sometimes very intense and shiny like laser beams. But she is really sneaky about it where I sometimes miss it. These glances are also occasionally accompanied by preening gestures like fixing and twirling her hair and hair flicks (she is flirting and she is not aware of it; for education purposes: this is a good example of the unconscious mind at work; the Other says no, but what does the subject say?). But she already gave me my answer. Besides, I think she is trying to avoid talking to me now. It’s obvious. I likely won’t get anymore opportunities to talk or get to know her anymore—even as casual friends. It sucks because I enjoy talking to her. But it’s probably a good thing for the sake of her relationship. If she kept talking to me, she will only be fanning the flame between us.

I sometimes wonder if the outcome would be different if I spoke to her way earlier when she gave me the very obvious “come talk to me signals”. I never did back then because I wasn’t ready for anyone at the time. I guess I’ll never know.

* * *

“You are a very sweet and beautiful man. My heart broke for you when I read what you did for Renee. If Eashel read what you wrote, she would melt even more and realize she ran into a fricken gem! It’s her loss. I’m impressed by how much you remember about her.”

I’m pretty sure this is the compliment of 2025. I’m really flattered.🥺 Someone said something similar to me weeks ago. But Eashel doesn’t know about this site. It takes a special person to make it on here where I write about them the way I did lol. She should be flattered. And yes, I remember almost every little thing she tells me. My memory is very visual. But I’m also a really good listener and very observant. I even sometimes randomly comment on things I notice about her, like her new nails lol. Not everyone gets this level of attention from me. But I should stop because there is no point giving so much attention to someone who doesn’t care or can’t reciprocate. If I continue, I’ll just end up hurting myself.

You know, when she tentatively agreed to have sushi with me, I was planning to get her a single flower for our first get together. She made me so happy that day. I haven’t felt anything like it in a long while. But it was so short lived (oof, I felt this one). Too bad it’s never going to happen now.😭 But even if I get her a flower, it still won’t be as beautiful as her.

Oh she has no idea.
Eashel is the flower and the flames.❤️‍🔥

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Similar Story, Different Context

This reminds me of another girl who used to work there long time ago where I became friends with. But this situation was different. I was the initiator where I spoke to her after work. I had a casual chat with her in the parking lot where she already mentioned her boyfriend to me. I didn’t care, because I was after friendship. But she definitely thought I liked her (which I did, as friends). So we ended up following each other on Instagram. I eventually got her number few weeks later because we were both into psychology. I believe she also had a crush on me according to her co-worker who told me lollll. But she was in a relationship and can’t act on it which is correct on her part. So she always kept her distance with me but remained friends which I was okay with since I just liked her as a friend anyway. Many people who used to work there thought I liked her romantically because I always spoke to her at the bar while she made drinks. But I actually didn’t like her that way. People seriously have a terrible judge of character and are clueless LOL. I’d imagine people asking these same people for their advice about me and gets them all wrong HAHA. Hilarious.🥴🤣

Anyways, few months later, they broke up for reasons that was not my fault. Then she specifically told me that they broke up and told me she is single. But I never really liked her that way so nothing happened between us. But I think she is a sweetheart and a really good person who is incredibly empathetic. I’m still friends with her till this day and she seems to be okay with it. I sincerely hope she finds love one day. I remember she could read my mood from just looking at my poker face sometimes.😂 Honestly, I just didn’t feel that spark with her like I did with Eashel or Renee, for example.

Maybe in a different universe. Just maybe. 🙂

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Object a: The Gaze and the Voice of the Other.

I keep getting questions about this every once a while. So let me try to elaborate on it more. What is object a and what does it have to do with love? Object a is Lacan’s most ambiguous term and the most difficult to grasp simply because it is ungraspable since it is unconscious.

In popular culture, you often hear people talk about how those who are in love will look at each other in specific ways. We see this in all our stereotypical romance movies where people meet and they catch each other’s eyes and falls in love. In everyday life, people refers to this phenomenon as “dreamy eyes” (or “the look”; some scientists refers to it as “bedroom eyes”) where you see the person carry an extra glimmer or shine in their pupils. This phenomenon stems from the subject’s pupils dilating that is caused by excitement which makes their eyes reflect more light. But what other meanings could such a famous cultural phenomenon imply other than material and deterministic causalities? Let us try to understand this from a psychoanalytic perspective.

In one of my random posts, I pointed out how desire by itself is aimless. It is aimless in the sense that desire has no particular end to it. We most prominently see this in the man who desires one woman after the next. We also see this in the child who desires for one toy after another. Desire perpetually slides and moves, focusing on one object after another, but never finding what it seeks. Desire constantly misses the point because it is trying to capture something that has been barred and castrated from the split subject (repression).

This Thing that desire tries to capture but always stops short is known as object a which also sets off the movement of desire. Yet, while object a sets off desire, desire must always keep itself distant from such object. If desire gets too close, it would come to a halt. But what exactly is object a? Why is desire and love two sides of the same coin?

The easiest way to understand it is that love (object a) produces desire, the latter which functions as a metaphor for the former which can only lead to partial satisfaction. But this love isn’t just any form of love one might experience in their relationship on a conscious level, it is an imaginary fantasy bond of the unity between the mother and child. It is an experience that the child can never find and therefore, never achieve complete satisfaction in the real world (though one must always think of this example as a metaphor in order to understand it).

Lacan once spoke of object a as the “lost object” in the sense that it is phantasmal. It is the lost object because it has been lost from the very beginning. One cannot find it anywhere in the real world, but can only be found through their memories and fantasies. Hence love at a fundamental level is imaginary (it is a metaphor for the imaginary unity between mother-child); but this is not to say that love does not exist per se. Rather, love only exists as a remainder (lack) that cannot be symbolized through language which is why it can only reveal itself through metaphors! To experience love, is to touch the Real, but only insofar that the Real is an impossibility. Love is castration. And through castration, the subject is not one.

Hence, love is transference. This form of primordial love is the fantasy of a unity with mother (object a) that the subject can’t have due to the father who, early on in the child’s life, lays down the symbolic law in various ways by unconsciously saying, “Your mother is mine! Go find another woman!” (a metaphor for castration and the Freudian Oedipus complex). What desire attempts to capture in someone who caught their eye is the love from their parents which is an impossibility. It is the parental and child bond that is impossible which ruptures as a metaphor through our desires and surfaces as symptoms (remember the first law is the prohibition of incest). Love emphasizes on this wound which reveals its lack.

The peculiar thing about desire is that it is an acquired behavior learned from childhood. This is to say that desire is learned from the Other’s desire, such as the way the child observes the way their parental figures looks at an object or a person. And it is this very act of seeing; of looking, which provokes the desire in the child. The ego always attempts to maintain the right distance between object a and desire where the latter circulates the former but never reaching it. Desire stops when one encounters love (object a).

Bruce Fink made a very good example of this and pointed out how in Westernized cultures, you often hear people’s preferences of their perfect or most ideal partners. For example, you might hear people say, “I want this in my woman” or “I want this in my man”. Someone might want specific hair color, eye color, body type, age, income, or they might want them to be a doctor, engineer, or to have some specific character traits, etc. You may hear them talk about specific requirements on what they want out of a relationship and all the standards they have for their partner.

You might even read some psychology article telling you what a high quality man/woman should be like and tells you to choose wisely. It can even be how people takes position as the Other and gives you advice on X or Y person through some Western cultural ideological lens. People wants to be accepted by the Other because they want to fit into their social groups, even when it might not be their best interest to abide to the impositions of these opinions. As I pointed out before, someone might be unconsciously saying “no” when they are consciously saying “yes”, or the other way around. What is good for everyone (as defined by the Other) might not be good for that particular person.

Now, the psychoanalytic position is that both men and women do not love others based on these characteristics, preferences, and the Other’s impositions. For what I just listed are all ego identifications that stems from the Other’s discourse as the subject identifies them through language; and it is a rather Westernized/Americanized Other. This is why Slavoj Zizek once pointed out how if you have a reason to love someone, then you don’t really love them. In psychoanalysis, the one Thing that we love in someone is what Freud once famously referred as “das Ding”, or simply as “The Thing”—namely object a (it is a love transferred from their parents). And the reason why love is without reason is because it arises from the Real that resists symbolization in language.

Lacan saw two particular ways people desire and develop love for each other: the voice and the gaze. We can think of it through simple examples that are common among many men and women, such as the way a man looks at a woman and the way she perceives how he looks at her (i.e. as a fully fledged desiring subject who wants and care for her); and the way a woman speaks to the man with the tone of her voice (Freud referred to this as “baby talk”). Both voice and gaze provokes desire which occurs when love transference from their parental figures are established. While our desire is the Other’s desire, it also has a lot to do with the unique ways these transferences takes place based on each individual history. This idea led to popular forms of modern therapies such as attachment theory, which studies how the child relates to their parents leads to how they attach to their romantic partners in their adult life.

I hope I have offered you insights on why people say that, “the eyes are the windows to the soul” (the word “soul” as metaphor to lack; as a form of soul love). The eyes really are the windows to object a when we are able to unconsciously located it in someone else. It is a rare event that does not happen every day. What we “see” in the other person’s eyes is not just dilated pupils, but the residue that has been left over through castration (object a; or in this case, love)—it is what we do not have on a conscious level. It is a lack that we locate in the other which resists symbolization and imagination. Love is what has been lost through the symbolic signifier. All human attempts at isolating and articulating this lack (love) can only be spoken and created through metaphors through our desires where the Real of love gets dissolved into the symbolic. In this sense, desire is as inevitable as love itself.

Perhaps this is a clever play on words and contexts on my part because it’s also kind of funny and ironic. But sometimes you might hear people say, “You are seeing what is not really there!” as a way to tell someone in the most unoriginal way to wake up from their imaginations of some person because they are blinded by lust. Yet most people are also saying this under the impositions of the Other who had already misrecognized what love is. For in psychoanalysis, love is quite literally about seeing what is not there!

And thus more paradoxically so, this is where we get a glimpse of love, such as the parental love or mother-child unity that was never there. It is the lost object which arises in the sense that this love the split subject tries to achieve and sees in the other person is an impossibility—it is a lack. This is another way we can look at why in order for us to desire, we must always be with the wrong person (i.e. your partner is never your parental figures, siblings, etc.). It might be why when we look into the the eyes of someone who holds the potential for such love, something always seem to exceed its experience precisely because it must always be given up on due to castration. And it is this experience as one gazes into the other’s eyes which makes them unconsciously say, “I am going to love”.

“Love is what we are capable of, but also what we are incapable of altogether”.
—Rachel K. Ward