I got home today at about 7pm and promptly fell asleep (really zonked today, sleep deprivation is no fun) and didn't get pestered to get up for dinner until.. now (it's past 3am). So my sleep cycle's all screwed up again and.. ah well. It's been a crazy week - PSC interview on monday afternoon, followed by dinner with K, greg, ruby, sean and jiaen, dinner with paul and pam on tuesday, dinner with K and jem on wednesday, the admin service dinner on thursday, and I would have had cell group tonight if not for the last minute cancellation. There's tuition, dinner and a play tomorrow, and church, a birthday lunch plus tuition on Sunday. And many many lessons to prepare for before next week. Which makes me wonder - how much time DO I spend with my family? They always get the in-betweens - in between work and dashing out for dinner, in between the night's appointment and bedtime. Now that I don't watch TV anymore we don't even have that sort of semi-interaction. I feel like I'm here, sometimes, but I'm really... not. I could have spent time with them tonight, but instead I fell asleep, and now I'm here looking at Mingyih's homework while everyone's asleep. He's left it on the table, which means he needs help with it, and normally he likes me to help him (or MK, when he's in a good mood :P). But usually, after a few days, when I haven't had the time or energy to help him with it, he packs it away or passes it to my dad instead. All of which makes me very sad. He brought something home today - a brightly illustrated booklet titled: 'The Convention on the Rights of the Child". I remember that one - when I took a human rights course in the Kennedy School this was one of the documents we examined. Missing: the right to love. Which of course makes perfect sense, because the right to love is a contradiction in terms. No one has the right to love, and any love impelled by dictum and necessity wouldn't be love at all. All the things we struggle to do to set ourselves apart, to make ourselves feel accomplished, useful, needed, significant - they all come down to that one single desire: the hope that someone would love us a little bit more for it. And very often it is futile, so somewhere along the way we lose sight of what motivated us in the first place, and mistake instead the stuff we put on our CVs for the one thing that ultimately brings us joy and fulfilment. There is not very much in this world we've made that is precious in God's eyes, yet it feels like there remains so much that is precious that we don't care enough about.