I just realised that labelling relationship is like taxonomy. People ask you to catagorise things because they don't know how to define organism individually. Just like relationships, every single bond people have to one another is all different. Saying this is platonic love or romantic love is, sometimes, confusing. How do you know that my platonic love is the same platonic love you have? The problem is when living things are catagorised in the same category, people tend to stereotype, and think that every organism in that family are all the same. In fact, they only share some similar traits.  

My brother used to study taxonomy and got criticised by some biologists in the biotechnology and molecular field. They always think that he studied old science. They only see the future in microscopic scale. But taxonomy is much more than that. It's a science about evolution. It tells stories of how every living thing becomes what they are in the present day.

We don't catagorise Dipterocarpus Shorea to Dipterocarpaceae because every other species in this family are all the same. It's because they have something in common that indicates they share the same ancestor. They are relatives. Dipterocarp means ‘two wings seed’. They are Emergent layer, meant to be the highest trees in a forest. 

In tropical rainforest, we don't have much of wind. It's humid and static. The seeds need to travel far away from where they grew from because underneath the canopy of their parents, there is no sunlight. Imagine you were supposed to be the highest tree in the forest but you can't get any sunlight to be that tall. So they need wings to be in an open space. All the species in Dipterocarpaceae are family because they have something in common. They just look a bit different because they flew to different places and have their own stories. When I looked at the old photo of a seed with wings I took, I don’t remember when did I took that photo. I just know it must be Dipterocarpus because I recognised the wings which must be in some of my undergrad field trip.

When people ask me, ‘who is this dude?’, it is hard because there are so much to put into a word to label the person.