Flies and Butterflies (苍蝇, ハエ, 파리 and 蝴蝶, 蝶, 나비)

Every once in a while MJ and I will be annoyed by an unwelcome houseguest or 2: the fly. Not sure how it gets in since we have all the windows sealed and doors shut, maybe flies follow us home from the outside, but once they're in they make themselves well known, buzzing around the home like they own the place and whizzing by our ears as if taunting us that we can't catch them. And it's true, it's really hard to catch them at their speed while flying around, but if they land and pause for a little bit, it's a different story. When I was a kid living in suburban Illinois I made a habit of killing flies in our home, getting whatever piece of paper was closest to my hand and swatting the flies as they landed. Maybe certain flies have evolved, or different regions of America have different flies: the ones MJ and I deal with seem bigger, faster, and just a tad smarter: they don't land in convenient places for us to swat them, and they sense our hand movements just a nanosecond because it comes crashing down upon them. I even tried to anticipate their escape path and swat away from where they are to where I anticipate them to be, but flies sometimes can fly away from where their heads are pointing towards. I'm not sure why I have such a bloodlust for killing flies: they're actually pretty harmless, as long as you don't put food out for them to infect. MJ doesn't like them because they're around dirty things and don't want them to touch our food; fair point, but they definitely can't sting or bite or cause any pain, something that can't be said about mosquitos and/or other creatures that can get into the home. I think it might be a bit of OCD too: something just seems off when the home has a fly in it, like something stuck in our teeth that we need to extract, a pimple on an otherwise blemish-free face, a literal "fly in the ointment" as the idiom goes which actually comes from a Bible phrase from Ecclesiastes about fly ruining something otherwise perfect. The Bible, turns out, is the source of a lot of vocabulary and phrases that we still use today. Breaking Bad even had a whole bottle episode with Jesse and Walt in the meth lab trying to excise a fly from the lab, a kind of metaphor for their relationship. Butterflies, on the other hand, are the exact opposte of flies, despite having its name in their name. MJ and I went to a botanical garden today and most gardens have a butterfly preserve or some sort of hothouse/greenhouse indoor component for when the winter months come rolling in. The butterflies were free-roaming, and it just put us into such a better mood than the flies. Butterflies are like the calm classical orchestra concert to the heavy metal flies or "Ride of the Valkyries," butterflies just want to be left alone and flutter up to you unassumingly, not making any noise exact the tiny pitter-patter of beating their wings. They have such exquisite patterns on their wings that we forget that the center of their bodies look kind of like house flies, they just survived through evolution through their beautiful wings, and now human beings cultivating them, whereas flies survive through sheer will of crowding into people's houses, surviving on other organisms' junk. It'd be so easily to kill a butterfly just by clapping your hands around them, yet they're so precious no one in the butterfly house even thought of doing something like that. There's a reason there are no houses full of flies (maybe iguanas or frogs would get a kick out of that though). The relationship between flies and butterflies is kind of symbolic of human life too (I always try to relate it to myself, selfish human that I am ). Some people are born butterflies, some people are born flies. Everybody just naturally gravitates towards butterflies and they can do no wrong, they're like gods' gifts to the world and they act like it, just going about their day as they please without worry of predators, they become soft. Flies, on the other hand, get no positive attention for others, they're just on their own to survive, yet they still manage to survive and make a living out of it. There's something admirable about it; it's not like they can just turn into a butterfly, and they didn't ask to be flies, they were just born that way. Maybe something us humans should consider at least when treating other human beings. As for actual flies though? No mercy if you've entered the Yan household! You know that phrase "wouldn't hurt a fly!" that does not apply to me.