Not So Me

September 28, 2006

However, lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around the dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens - memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it. –taken from Mitch Albom’s Five People You Meet in Heaven

Today, as I was exchanging e-mails with my friend Byn I made a recap on my year. Nothing special was retold. Xoxo here, xoxo there. I guess that’s just the way we make updates to some friends. Sometimes thare are just so many things to be told and you just don’t know where to start. Then, you end up not telling something special at all. She asked me if I was seeing someone special. There was none. Pathetic as it may sound but I just told her about my one great love since college.

Funny because I am one person who is always eager for change but years after graduation I am still bragging about the same guy. Maybe it’s really great love. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe just lost great love. Love still.  We’ve been chasing around in circles for years (maybe it was just me chasing him) and I’ve always thought that these happenings are cosmic. That we’ll still probably end up together in the end.

I am officially becoming pathetic talking about this love-y stuffs but I rarely talk about these. I am not the committing type and a guy friend even told me that I am not the marrying material. Perhaps. But at the end of the day, I am still like the typical girls who want to love and be loved. I really wish that someday, my DAWAN will come into my life. but what if that DAWAN has already come and I just let him pass by. Will there be DASEKOND or DATIRD? haha.

In The One’s perfect time, everything will fall into places. Perhaps someday, Dawan will come across this message and find this sweet. Sweet but funny. Sweet and funny. So long Dawan!

QLC strikes back again!

September 27, 2006

For a long time I thought I was over it. Everything was smooth sailing and then KABOOM! That was the problem. Everything was in sweet harmony! I am not legitimately the title-holder of the most monotonous life if you can call this a life. I stay at the office for roughly ten hours. Most of this time, I’m not doing anything actually productive. Just typical corporate blah-blahs! I have random dinners and breakfasts with the close friends. And as I see it these “random” chitchats have now become rhythmic! I hate being part of statistics.

My family and closest friends can testify that I am one person who easily gets bored. That’s why, up til now I am still wondering what career path should I choose. My first job was in a typical corporate arena. Typically, as a first job, it was an eye-opener for me. I thought monotonous office work was not for me. I resigned and tried my luck on research. Fortunately (and unfortunately), I got a job as a research assistant in a UN-funded project. But somewhere along the way, I felt that it still wasn’t the career path I want to pursue. I resigned again and this time I have no plans at all what to do next. I figured out that there were many things I missed to do after I graduated. I had my driving lessons. I read more book. I took the Prof exam (forgot what they call it), though I know it won’t be of any use since I don’t have plans of working for the government. Travelled a lot. I eventually took a job in a call center and fortunately got an analyst postion.

Now it’s been more than a year and surprisingly, my buffer job is no longer for buffer sake! I’m actually enjoying it. In between my free times and long weekends, I still travel. I painted once (something that took me longer time to plan and be interested than actually doing it), read more and more, explored photography, wicca, particularly tarot cards reading. Funny but true! I find my life really becoming boring and boring by the day! Is this really the life I want? Is this what my heart truly desires?

Call me over-analyzing things but I think I am in the crossroads of my life wherein I should be deciding on what I really want. I can’t wait for five years more and realize that this is something that I don’t want and unlearn the things I am already used to doing.

This morning I received a text message from my friend BYN saying she has a quarter-life crisis. I thought it was a sign that people have always associated me to quarter-life crisis. I don’t have the answers to fellow QLC victims but I sure am willing to share what I am going through. I’m just afraid it will make us like drinking buddies! Inakay ng bulag ang kapwa bulag. haha. Byn is in the US so drinking buddies is not a possible scenario for the mean time. Well, Bynie, just stick around! We’ll get over this! We don’t have the answers but who the hell knows the answers anyways? In God’s perfect timing, everything’s gonna be alright. As I always say, timing is everything!

headless chicken

September 5, 2006

Just want to share some parts of a letter I read in Inquirer.
The adressee has been experiencing doubts about her decision and
episodes of depression arising from existensial questioning of what she really wants, the same question haunting most twenty-somethings today, like me.

Hello,
How are you? You’ve been in my mind for the past weeks-week nights mostly. I apologize for not being ready with the right words during those moments that would even have the faintest possibility of helping ease your depression.

I considered my own depression stage, but Iwas afraid that would make us like drinking buddies. I was asking myself whether it was more apt to sahre with you
my own personal experiences or just focus on the bright light at the end of the tunnel. When it comes to comforting troubled friends, I have come to think that it always helps to tell that that I am in more pathetic situation than they are,
and so they should cheer up! But in the end, I chose to look into a mishmash of both and reflect on the varied and usually polarized opinions of peers, friends and family.

I am hoping that with this “mathematical equation”, I will be able to pin down the non-negotiables, further fortify our person and from there, cruise into a spontaneous personal development voyage.

First off, I salute you. I salute us. Ang galing nga natin eh. We are able to do what we want to do or those that at least we think we want to do. It is always a notable achievement when one is able to make things happen for him or herself. That in itself is a meaningful cause for celebration and thanksgiving. But there is one downside to it that I have discovered. I have realized that because we have actual experiences in achieving what we want, we think we can do anything, be anything, and get anything. That illusion spawns emotional mayhem for the whole world now looks to us like a grand smorgasbord of opportunities-of options.

A friend once reminded me to shape up and bear in mind the fable of two cats and a dog. Cat A and B were comparing notes on their plans in case an angry dog came along. Cat A had one strategy carefully thought out, while Cat B boasted of several options, all of them equally feasible. When the monster dog finally came, Cat A naturally employed his sole plan and successfully escapes from the raging gog. Cat B, on the other hand took some time pondering which option to take and died.

I do not agree with the analogy if you would ask me. What makes it different
from our situation is the element of urgency. I do not believe we are at a critical crossroad demanding our instant response. Cat B was facing a life-and-death situation and needed to employ an effective plan. His multitude of options proved to be more of a liability than an asset.

What I am trying to say is we still are not in that stage where we must decide and decide correctly here and now or suffer. I would like to think we are in the self-determination and self-reinforcement stage where our diverse experiences will be an asset later on. By exposing oneself to a range of experiences, a diversity of culture and ideas and a variety of business, academic and political structures, one involuntarily promotes deeper understanding, tolerance, reasoning and deeper thinking. I suspect these would even give us a competitive advantage later on in life. I look at it this way: We have at least 35 to 45 years to go. As of now we have spent just a few years in the “outside world”. This makes up roughly 10 percent of our productive life.

My thesis is that we are in a timely and proper phase where we can invest in our personal composition. We should bear in mind that success can be defined as society’s positive reaction to us and to our actions. It is usually measured by the value society places on such things and the compensation it gives. Given this, it is a good strategy to carefully understand how the collective whole moves, thinks, reacts and defines value.

This is getting long. To sum it all up: HOLD ON. Savor the experience and squeeze as much as you can from it. Get every penny’s worth of education you can from the classroom and outside of it. This may turn out to be something you didn’t want but the discovery of the fact is already worth your money and time at the very least.
We’re on the right track. You are on the right track. And we will continue to be proud of ourselves.

The universe is always on track and I believe we are where God wants us to be. After all, who are we to have the sole power over our lives? If there’s one thing I have learned from my travels and deduced from my personal travails, it is how utterly useless it is to be chasing after something that goes a hell lot fater than we do. Our recourse is to enjoy the chase.

Hang in there!

Hymn to Isis

September 2, 2006

For I am the first and the last
I am the venerated and the despised
I am the prostitute and the saint
A am the wife and the virgin
A am the mother and the daughter
I am the arms of my mother
I am barren and my children are many
I am the married woman who gives birth
and she who never procreated
I am the consolation for the pain of birth
I am the wife and the husband
And it was my man who created me
I am the mother of my father
I am the sister of my husband
And he is my rejected son
Always respect me
For I am the shameful and the magnificent one

Hymn to Isis, third or fourth century BC
discovered in Nag Hammadi