I get it

I have a mistake I keep on making over and over again...Please don't judge me, I don't follow the adage about making the same mistake twice, etc etc.

So, this must be the life lesson I'm supposed to be learning. I get it. But I still act contrary to the lesson I've learned. I guess God will put me in this situation over and over again until I learn it.

The problem is I know the mistake, I just choose to ignore it.

How do I make the right decision when my heart and my mind are in disagreement? The right decision according to my mind always feels so wrong deep inside. How do I stay away (the right move says my mind) when my heart yearns for you?

But then again, my heart is stupid and irrational. It doesn't seem to notice that it gets hurt every time and yet it still keeps coming back. Over and over and over and over...

Shoot me please.

I'm only

pushing you away because I'm trying to protect myself.

I know I said earlier that I wanted to run away. But I won't, not this time.

So, please just have a little more patience. I'm just not sure what I'm doing.

I want to

run away and hide. Or just plain run away.
.
.
.
.
.
Again.

David and Steffi (Part 3)

Part III

(Read Part I here, and Part II here)

Steffi

I rushed to the hospital. All the while I was thinking that David was all right. Trying to reconcile what happened last night and what I knew now. Maybe they had the time of the accident wrong. But then again, David wouldn't have left in the middle of the night. When he stayed over, he usually stayed until breakfast.

It couldn't have been a dream because it had felt so real.  I was sure David had been with me last night. I remember the feel of his arms around me. I remembered my bed's neatness where David should have slept. I felt a chill run through me. I was sure, but I was scared. If it had been a dream, what did it mean? That wasn't a ghost or a spirit was it? If it was, why visit me? Why me? No, David was fine. Last night wasn't some spooky supernatural thing. David went to my apartment, we talked, we slept. He left. He left? But why would he leave in the middle of the night?

I was turning into the hospital's parking lot when my phone signaled an incoming SMS. It was Tanya telling me they were at the ICU and asking me if I was sure about going to the hospital. Crap, ICU meant it was serious, didn't it?

I  entered the hospital lobby and asked directions at the concierge. It wasn't until I got to the hospital proper when I realized I hated hospitals. The muted lights of the lobby gave way to the harsh white lights common to hospitals. I felt my body grow cold and my palms were damp. I really hated hospitals after having spent the worst two years of my life in one.


I walked through the seemingly endless corridors to the ICU. I saw Tanya and Mike standing outside the ICU. Tanya saw me coming and rushed to meet me.

"Are you okay?", Tanya immediately asked me. She grabbed my hand and shook her head. "Your hands are cold. C'mon, you don't have to be here."

Tanya knows how I feel about hospitals. I said, "No, I'm fine. I mean it's David. He was with me last night. I don't know what time he left my apartment but --"

"No, that's impossible, Stef. David came from the office last night. He texted Mike that he was just leaving sometime past one."

Mike came over to us. I gave him a hug, "How is he?" How are your parents?"

"He hasn't woken up yet, Stef. A cracked skull, broken arm, broken ribs. Doctor said it was lucky no organs were damaged."

"Look, I don't know. I think I might be going crazy, but he went to my apartment last night. He wanted to sleep over but I guess he left."

"No, Stef, that can't be. He texted me when he was about to leave the office. That was already past one in the morning." Mike searched in his phone inbox and showed me the text from David.

I shivered. Tanya and Mike looked at each other. I was pretty sure some wordless communication occurred at that moment because Tanya put her arm around me, "C'mon Stef, we can't do anything here right now. Let's get some coffee."

"Wait, I haven't seen David yet." I pulled away and went to the ICU windows. David was unrecognizable for all the bandages.  But I would know his face anywhere. He was that dear to me. I felt tears sting my eyes. I was confused. Last night felt real to me. But everything that Tanya and Mike told me proves that last night was impossible.

I turned to Mike and asked, "What's going to happen next?"

"Well, we wait. The Doctor said that he'll wake up on his own in a few hours. Mom and Dad were here a while ago but they went home to prepare some stuff. They'll come back later. You go with Tanya and get coffee."

To be continued here.

When you're there,  and I'm in the mood, I make sure you notice me.  When you're there and I'm not in the mood or I'm feeling neglected, I ignore you.

Sometimes, we don't have to talk, just the thought that you are a quick call or message away is enough to calm me. Sometimes when we're both online, just knowing that you are there is enough for me and I feel happy working.

I miss you when you're gone. I miss you now.

The argument for not reading (A man's point of view)

A few months back, I saw an article about dating a girl who reads, which I promptly reblogged here.

Well, what do you know, I stumbled on this article by Charles Warnke (No, I don't know who he is.) You can find it here.  But once again, I've copied the article below:

It's beautifully written, and in the end, you really should date a girl who reads. :-)

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl

Jan. 19, 2011

By Charles Warnke 

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love. 

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

just thinking

In J.R.R. Tolkien's Return of the King, there is a scene where Eowyn kills the witch-king. I don't have the book with me now, but, in the movie, the scene goes like this:

Witch King: You fool. No man can kill me. Die now.
Eowyn: I am no man.

Eowyn is no man because she's a woman. (Duh.)

John Donne writes: "No man is an island".

I therefore conclude that "Woman is an island."

Bow.

5 years has passed.

Happy 8th anniversary!

Eto pa rin ang masasabi ko: "Utot mo!"

Alam ko walang class. Hahaha.

Seriously, I'm happy now. Single but amazingly happy. Content and at peace.

Thankful na naging tayo at that time in my life. Pero thankful din na hindi na tayo ngayon.

David and Steffi (Part 2)

Part II

(Read Part I here)

Steffi

7:30am

I woke up to the sound of my alarm blaring Joan Jett's "I love rock and roll!".  I was alone. Not even a crease on my pillow or the sheets where David slept.


Smiling, I got up from bed and decided to tease David via SMS:  "That was quite a getaway. You didn't even wake me up. :)"


I got ready for the errands and the meetings I had for the day. After my shower, I expected David to have responded to my SMS already. But no reply. No biggie, David was notorious for not responding to SMS that aren't work-related.


9am


My first meeting of the day involved a socialite who wanted to dress up her gazebo and pool area for her luau. Still no response from David.


I sent him another SMS: "Hey stranger. You left without my good morning kiss. Wasn't it good for you? Hahaha!"


11am

Brunch with a couple of blockmates inviting me to join their design firm. Still no response from David.
Another SMS: "Hey Davs, this isn't much fun if you don't join in. :D"  I thought about giving him a call, decided against it, but ringed him anyway.  His phone was turned off. I knew how busy he could get, at least he'll get a laugh when he sees my messages.


2:30pm


On my way to Manila to canvas materials, I got a phone call from Tanya. Tanya is a lawyer like David. She's dating David's brother, Mike.

"Stef! Where are you? I got bad news."

"What?! What?!" 

"It's David. He's been in an accident. We're on our way to St. Luke's right now."

"Ohmygod! What happened? Wait, I'll go there too."

"We don't know what happened. MIke said it was hit and run, around 2am this morning. A truck judging from the damage to David's car. Look, I'll text you more news when we get there."

"Ok. Ohmygod. I'll be there in half an hour. I'm on EDSA right now."

It wasn't until later that it dawned on me that Tanya said the accident happened last night. When David was sleeping in my bed.

To be continued here.

Headache in the morning

Air Supply said:  

Making love out of nothing at all

Well, I learned in science class that all things are made of something. And nothing exists in a vacuum.

Therefore, making love out of nothing at all should be impossible.  This is further supported by:

The Sound of Music:  

nothing comes from  nothing, nothing ever could.

On the other hand, the Sound of Music also provides a theory for this:

So, somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.

Aha! Karma! That one I can understand.

David and Steffi (Part 1)

Part I 

Steffi

I woke up from a rather restless sleep to find a man on my bed.

Hi! My name is Steffi, well, Majesty Faye, but Steffi has a nicer ring to it. I'm 31. Single. Free-lance lights designer. Normal.

I live alone and finding a man on my bed is a very rare occurrence, especially when I don't know how he got there.

The man isn't exactly strange. In fact, he frequently crashes at my place after a late night. Purely platonic, for sure, and much to my disgust (the platonic part). He's David. My secret crush for the past two years except that I think he thinks I'm a convenient friend.

No, nothing's ever happened between us, it's just that we connected as easily as magnets with opposite charges. So I guess my reaction in finding a man on my bed may not have been the most normal, but since it's David, well, maybe there was a little wishful thinking involved.


"What are you doing here?" I said sleepily. David was sprawled on the other side of my queen sized bed. I'm tiny, but since I grew up with a queen sized bed, I never got used to sleeping on a small bed.

"I'm not sure. I feel so tired." David replied. His voice was husky.

"You're not coming down with something are you? I hope you didn't park in Mr. Lim's spot again." I turned over on my side to look at him.  David's eyes were closed and his eyelashes fanned against his cheeks. Longer than mine. Geez.

David opened his eyes and said "I don't remember parking. I think I left my car at the office." He threw his arm around me and said, "Let me sleep here, ok." He gave me a squeeze. How could I resist, right? But I have an imp in me, so I pinched his arm. Hard.

"Ow! What was that for?" He drew back and frowned at me, looking all offended.  I shrugged, "Maybe you're dreaming. I was just checking."

"Dreaming? Haha. If anybody's dreaming here, it would be you. Now let me sleep, will you?" He said, his words ending on a yawn. He flung his arm over my middle and flopped on his stomach. Squirming down the bed so that we were face-to-face, he gave me a sleepy smile and said, "I'm really tired tonight. When you wake up tomorrow, you have my permission to rag me about this."

I snorted. David's eyes remained closed. And just so he wouldn't get any ideas, I whispered, "Davs, when you sleep here, you stay on the couch."

He didn't bother to open his eyes when he said, "Stef, you're couch is tiny. In normal people's houses, it's called a loveseat."

I grinned but didn't say anything else. I watched David and knew the instant when he fell asleep. I reached over to turn off my night light and noted the time: 2am.

I snuggled deeper in his arms. I wanted to stay awake to savor having David's arms around me.  I mean, who knows when I'll get the chance again. But sleep called me and I slid into oblivion.

To be continued here

4 movies that changed my life

1. Legally Blonde - the reason why I went to law school

Professor Callahan: "Do you think she woke up one morning and said: I think I'll go to law school today"

I don't own the rights to this photo

Elle had the right idea.  Law school was ugly-fying.



2. Clueless - expanded my vocabulary to include "whatever", "as if!", "Hello!" and using "way" as an adjective/adverb i.e. "way harsh", "way existential"

Heather: It's just like Hamlet said, "To thine own self be true."
Cher: Hamlet didn't say that
Heather: I think I remember Hamlet accurately.
Cher: Well, I remember Mel Gibson accurately, and he didn't say that. That Polonius guy did.



Dionne: Hello? There was a stop sign.
Cher: I totally paused.

I don't own the rights to this photo

I was in high school when I saw this movie. After which, a beeper was no longer enough.  I needed a cellphone.


3. The Sound of Music - first time I watched this was when I was 5. And I loved it. So when I was growing up, whenever I got sick and confined to the bed, I watched this movie.

Maria: When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.

I don't own the rights to this photo

The Sound of Music is why I sing and dance.

4. Conan the Barbarian (1982) - my older siblings love teasing me about loving this movie when I was 4 or 5 years old.  I don't remember. But who knows what effect it's had on my psyche?

I don't own the rights to this photo

Something to think about

I almost always start out with good intentions....

An excerpt from Smooth Talking Stranger by Lisa Kleypas

* * * * *
"Unfortunately, I'm temptable."

"I like that in a woman. It almost makes up for your conscience."

x x x

"I should have told you to go to hell."

"I knew you wouldn't."

"How?"

"Because women who are willing to cheat a little can always be talked into cheating a lot."

* * * * *

Obviously, I get my philosophical and self-awareness advice from romance novels.  Hence, my slightly skewed take on life. Nyark.

Osama Bin Laden is dead

and America rejoices. Read article here.

I'm not Muslim. I'm not American. I'm completely apathetic when it comes to politics. I vote based on platform and programs, and sometimes, because the candidate is endorsed by someone I know.

However, I feel that it is completely inappropriate to show the type of revelry that has arisen because of the death of one man.  Sure, this man caused the death of thousands of people, injured countless other, and doubtless, affected innumerable families.  But does his death really call for this kind of celebration?

Let us remember that Osama was a human being, too. A person with family and friends. Let us not forget that he has supporters.  There are those who believe in his cause.  There are those who have died and who will die for his cause.  There are others who will carry on what he has begun.

Don't get me wrong.  I mourned when I found out about the 9/11 attacks. That was a tragedy. Today's death is just vengeance. And violence begets more violence.

I don't want to be an alarmist (but I usually am), but a good commander always has failsafes. A war is not won nor fought by one man.  There is no doubt that while Osama's death may be a blow to the jihad, it is far from over.

Was justice done? Maybe it's enough for the families of those who died in 9/11. But I don't know if any justice was achieved today.