denis bider

Love and hate are both based upon self-identification in your experience. You do not bother to love or hate persons you cannot identify with at all. They leave you relatively untouched. They do not elicit deep emotion.

Hatred always involves a painful sense of separation from love, which may be idealized. A person you feel strongly against at any given time upsets you because he or she does not live up to your expectations. The higher your expectations the greater any divergence from them seems. If you hate a parent it is precisely because you expect such love. A person from whom you expect nothing will never earn your bitterness.

In a strange manner, then, hatred is a means of returning to love; and left alone and expressed it is meant to communicate a separation that exists in relation to what is expected.

Love, therefore, can contain hate very nicely. Hatred can contain love and be driven by it, particularly by an idealized love. (Pause.) You "hate" something that separat…

We are back to our regularly scheduled programming where I complain about things that were nice to me, but turned out to be sort of unbearable. In this installment, the nice country that delivered our son and let us live there for 5 years.

To start – there are nice things about Costa Rica:
Unlike the United States, it has accessible and high quality health care. It is a mixed private and public system where gringos like me can take a toddler to the ER at a private hospital and pay $150 to have him evaluated, sedated, and extract the foam he stuffed up his nostril. Meanwhile, everyone else also gets decent service at public hospitals and clinics, perhaps without luxuries like air conditioning (which is quite optional in Costa Rica's climate).Unlike most countries, it does not tax foreign income. This, it turns out, is less a feature and more a predicament.Unlike the United States, it has a reasonable immigration process.These factors contributed to us moving to Costa Rica in 2012, h…