Archive for October, 2005

On Signs and Make Believe

Monday, October 31st, 2005

Tonight I and W were chatting over Bolognese (which I cooked disaster-less in the kitchen *gloat*) about how I eventually see my life with a family and how I will opt to rearrange my career priorities with children coming. And so I told him about how I see myself more in doing something of my own that will give me the flexibility of time to look after my children and also to spoil my husband a little bit more than making him a sideline like some career women unintentionally fall into. How I’d probably want to get serious with a creative hobby and hope to make money from it or the possibility of a consultancy job if I concentrate on a field for a sufficient number of years. He was quiet with a little smile forming in his mouth while I was blabbing my way through one piece of pasta penne after another, prattling through one possibility and jumping to the next, I was able to draw for him my ten year plan in less than fifteen minutes complete with irrelevant intricacies as to which languages I want to learn and how some bright colors will probably never make my future closet (dude, alpha female definitely, hehe). He had this smile and said, “do you think our son could be blonde?”… I dropped my fork and half of a tomato from my open mouth and finally managed to say, “No, Asian blood is quite strong, especially if it’s a first born son” when what I was really thinking about was, “my uterus is still fine with its diet of eggs”. God, I was more freaked than when I watched The Cube. But then he reached over and kissed me on the forehead and said, “I love you, you think at least at 30 you’ll be ready?” I didn’t say anything I just gave him a hug. I think he knows.

That was just a story of the simplicity of a conversation and a being together that makes you realize why you could never trade someone for anything, that is an illustration of the love I am now blessed with. I had to use that to illustrate a point. I don’t even know if W would like one of our conversations published like this but I am too much of a gossip and an entertainer to listen to my conscience, so there. Not. (That last sentence was clearly an exaggeration, I think its part of my writing disease, if you haven’t noticed yet, I have elephantiasis.)

See, I’ve only been with him for less than a year, but everything feels right. Yeah, tell me about it. Tell me something about being meant for each other. Tell me about how I should have probably recognized him this way approximately two years ago when we first became very close friends. Tell me about how I should have gone for it a long time ago even when it meant hurting someone I was totally, unimaginably in love with. Tell me how I should have realized it was him that the fortune teller (sucker that I am) told me I was going to fall in love with next and be the one for me, the guy who the fortune teller said had a name beginning with the 23rd letter of the alphabet but he could just not make it out. (YEEEAAA fill my head up with cheese, I have enough wine!!!) Indulge me in the stories of Serendipity and make me see that those were all bits of a code that I did not force myself to decipher.

Man, I have been thinking about it. Daydreaming about what-could-have-beens and sliding doors. Had I taken another door, would things have been different? But should I have? Should have I overridden principle and integrity over random shows of mysticism? Should have I made decisions based on a white rose or a zodiac compatibility? These days I have been thinking, but still I remain puzzled. Should I really believe in signs?

For me, signs are tricky and at one point they can be deceiving. I do not often follow my signs; I make my own decisions according to my own mind and not my heart (yeah right, I mean my id). Don’t get me wrong, I am not dense, or at least I would not like to think so.  But this is how I usually live my life or go forward from each stage, I recognize the hand of God but still I follow what feels right. I take the best decision my limited brain capacity can mutter that would make me look at the mirror in the morning without feeling last night’s dinner play see saw around my throat. I do get hurt though, very hurt for being like this sometimes.

Oh, I don’t know, my head is buzzing with an assortment of questions that I fear would heighten my sensitivity with these secret codes and allow me to misinterpret my future and make me foolishly hardnosed.

I had a friend before who was a fanatic of this, she would say “if my date today is giving me a red rose, he’s going to be my last love”, she didn’t exactly blow her dates off when they are ‘sans the sign of the day’, she just keeps on looking for what’s wrong with him. Or take this other friend who meets someone and takes every friggin’ compatibility into account like she just found her long lost twin and calculates it as “its amazing how we connect, he was even at Starbucks the same time I was there yesterday..(insert glow)”… when the truth is she wants to get laid but does not want to seem too available. She does not want to admit even to herself that she wants something that goes against her values. It’s just all too complicated when we want something but do not want to seem like overeager son-of-a-toooots. What we do as an alternative though is to throw prudence to the wind and blame it on what the fates are trying to say. Sometimes, I reckon that maybe people just use it as a scapegoat to deny or indulge or keep an image of themselves.

I have W now without having to follow signs, but then on hindsight, those codes now mean something. But tell me, doesn’t everything seem to make sense if you want them to? Know what, I do not really have a resolution for this, all I know is that my decisions are based on trying to thoroughly understand a situation and standing up for what is right and what is best for me. I do not wish to de-romanticize love stories, it’s just that for me it’s great to always acknowledge that, true, there is something or someone bigger than you planting each little lego part of your destiny, but to base theories from connecting each dot you think you see, is dangerous. In the end you’ll never know which path you took, or if you even were the one who decided it. 

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Saturday, October 29th, 2005

Bookshelf It’s not New Year yet but I think I owe myself a rough look-back of how inconceivably humbling and gratifying last year was. 2005 was my year, I have two months left but I think they’ll hardly surprise me. At this point when introspection is as inevitable as my habit of only remembering to lock the car after ten paces, it’s a hhuuge realization that I have become what I have tried to avoid claiming for the past 5 years. I am an adult, in a lot of ways. I have grown up, who would have thunk?

This year was literally the year of the overhaul of plans for the future and of the circumstances of the present. It is the year of the truly cunning yet unpremeditated redirecting and emphasis on what I have always tried to stand for. Sounds more like a comic book blurb (if they have such), though believe me there is nothing fiction about this.

The challenge of really living on my own away from all comfort zones, the brawl finely connected to getting resented for being too young for some position, the excitement and inevitable little mindless fears of adapting to a life foreign to you, business trips with unrecognizable points of beginning and end, getting bitched at for being stupid (and young and female !#(@^%), finally getting respect which I honestly anyway cannot handle most of the times, saying hello (with a big smile) to renewed friendships, breaking a bone for the first time, wonderful mind blowing vacations, meeting strangers, dreaming vividly, losing someone through circumstances which were unimaginable to me previously (read: I thought differently of him and me and us), forgiving, committing myself again to someone who’s now everyday proving why this is really my place :), deciding to stay where I am (and probably indefinitely moving my life away from home, I’ve come to accept that flightiness, is well… not such a big deal;)), and being pushed so many times to stand for something – to choose and to choose well — all of this in a year I thought was going to be one of the more predictable ones.

More than anything though, it is what it has slowly made me that makes me feel so much more prepared for more. The cliché is right; when you’re younger you do feel omniscient. You may end up fucking yourself several times over for your beliefs, but you get up, you look around if anyone’s watching and then you proudly pick yourself up like nothing happened. Think about it, really, most of these principles are the purest ones when you’ve made them all during those times of pure idealism and simple mindedness. Sometimes gray areas spoil us. They give us excuses to forget. When you’re getting older you realize that your ability to ruin things get more intense. Afterwards, you form your own justification for your malfunctions and call it a tenet, or maybe you will blame it on fate and think its all because it was meant to be so you just have to indulge. Soon enough you’re using the phrase “it’s a matter of principle” more often than you actually form them.

I am extremely pleased though that I managed to fight even for the littlest and maybe even stupidest principles I invented in my youth. I never thought I’d say this so bluntly, but this year made me recognize that — I do like myself.

2005 shook all the little facets of my mediocrity: my perspective, my relationships, my struggles, my little beliefs which I battled to hold on to even if it meant getting nth degree burns out of each fight. It was (and still is) the year which has both tacitly and overtly given me the most beautiful scars.

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