Bittersweet

As the saying goes "Item X and Item Y 往往只在一線之差", many things in life are really in a microscopic middleground between two stark contrasts. Bittersweet is one of them. How can something be bitter and sweet at the same time? Yet, we can think of many examples where bittersweet rises up to the occasion as a good description. Say, for example, dark chocolate. I love dark chocolates, because your taste buds are thrown into a turmoil as both of the sweet and bitter receptors fire wildly away. In the process, one is thrown back and forth, back and forth, just like a see-saw, going up and down, up and down. It's repetitive, rhythmic and almost silly, but yet, very satisfying for some unknown reasons.

Recently, we managed to catch video clips of the Mediacorp show "Life transformers". The family in the show is undergoing great sufferings to the extent that bitter is really too mild a term to describe their circumstances. Yet, simple acts that the show volunteers did quickly tip the situation over into the "sweet" regime. Their flat was improved and intriguingly, life just changed. It's as though someone just put a small dash of icing sugar of their lives and it was sufficient to make them sweet again.

As the summer rolls into an end and night falls earlier and earlier, we look ahead, apprehensive of the crazy engineering classes we are taking again. Keeping our eyes open in lectures, struggling with integrals and differentials, scribbling over draft paper with so much mathematical symbols that if the paper drops somewhere on the street, someone may contact NASA that we have established contact with extraterrestrial life and of course, late nights just to push our solutions towards the grand answers one line at a time (accompanied by Trader Joes granola, C-mart instant noodles and random junk food). But of course, we always know that in the midst of "bitterness" we define for ourselves, we just need to fall the other way and it's sweet.