robots need love too

“To me, a short line was a blessing and a minute-long stop on the street was the stuff of dreams. I had come from a busy city in a developing country where I sat in traffic for an hour each way during a two-hour commute to and from my job. I learned to be thankful for the length of my travel time because it allowed me to nap in between work and school and write analyses of the solitary hair stuck to the headrest of the seat beside me, on a bus that smelled of fruity chemical sprays, and whose seats didn’t have enough legroom for me to sit without raising my knees and spending the rest of the ride with my feet off the floor.”

-SHAKIRA ANDREA SISON

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/the-relativity-of-discomfort/

“Do you know what I wanted to say? I wanted to say something along the lines of “I miss you and I’ve thought about you every day since I left.” And that was the truth, you know? Of course, that’s not what I ended up saying, but in that moment, I realized that this was what my book is about: it is about the idea—the tragedy —that we can never bring ourselves to say the things we want to say as often as we need.

We spend much of our lives practicing our social skills and we’ve been conditioned, in some ways, to think that there’s a time and a place for everything we could possibly want to say. We’re concerned about how others might react if we let them know how we feel in what we perceive as the wrong context. So we hold it all in. And, as a result, we will never say the wrong thing at the wrong time—we will never have moments of awkwardness. We can avoid those moments that can seem devastating when they happen… But we also miss out on the chance to connect with people. We miss out on the chance to tell others how they’ve affected our lives. We miss out on the chance that they might feel the same way about us. “

-Jon Wong