Funny thing about endings.

Isn’t it funny that ever since we were young, we are taught to think in endings?

We (or mostly me here) spend our days trying to answer the big questions:

What do I want to be when I grow up? Will I live happily ever after in a bamboo cottage built around a banyan tree with THE love of my life? Would I say that I have lived the life I wanted? At the end of the day, what can I say is the most important to me?

Jeesh, there are many movies about it… (I will let you fill in this spot with countless titles you’ve Netflix)

They become these points of pressure for us to reanalyze and dissect our every decision.  I am sure somewhere along the way, it was meant to be a good habit to assess our goals and provide some internal searching.  But lately, I just feel like they are another layer of doubt and incessant need to linger onto every possible mistakes/failures that happenED.  

Why aren’t we taught to wonder when the things that are important to us today begin to become the things that matter to us at the end? Or when do we begin living the life we want and how do we get there?

I mean, why isn't that stolen first dance that Phillip took when he sneaked up on Aurora in the forest as magical as the waltz at the end (minus the color changing dress)?  Why do some believe its more logical and believable to assess love at the end of a relationship but not by the first glance? 

Perhaps this year, my biggest resolution is to stop thinking in ends but with beginnings.  For every end, there must have a beginning and after that end, there is a new beginning… right?

I will stop my instantaneous expiration marker and pause my deadline clock.  I will try to plan my take-offs instead of estimating my finishes.

To beginnings.  Happy New Year.   

It gets better. Lucky me.

So all these It Gets Better campaign postings has me thinking on my way to work today...

I wasn't lucky enough to grow up in a progressive liberal city.  The majority of my secondary education was at public high schools in a bible belt sort of high school where the kids are not so Jesus like.  So I was reclusive from the majority of mass culture, I kept myself in the kitchen.  I watched sexy foreign movies alone.  I flip through fashion magazines.  I picked up this absurd taste for music.  All these things that made me weird in High School.  Lucky me?

Then college came... 

The first boy I met, on a campus tour... He was Thai, handsome, with a immaturely developed taste for Etta James and the Blues. After 3 years of skimming the net for the best versions of  STOP THE WEDDING, man, did I have it.  Of course, he turned out to be my first.
...
Then the summer that followed, I met my first bf. A tall handsome Vietnamese writer/student with the same name as the first part of mine.  A few days into our fling, I proposed the idea that we should rent a small student housing rental on top of the fabric outlet by the Chinese Binh Tay Market.  Of course, being about a decade older, knew instantaneous of the reference to L'Amant (The Lover 1992).  I think I fell in love for the first time that summer.   
...
A series of guys later, I met the first law student that I dated from Ohio. A guy with a small kitchenette in his studio about 2 miles from school.  After a late night of bouncing, I was hungry and the only thing that was opened was the Schnucks (St. Louis's QFC).  So we went there and picked up some chicken, bacon, and the medleys... which i turned into Coq Au Vin. Though I knew it was impressive, I just did not realize how much until that point.
...

Well, I am not trying to say that my sprinkling of romance is a sigh of progress to match the theme of getting better.  I just want to say that teenage seclusion sure made me quite Lucky. ;)

Joking aside, it really does progressively (though slowly) get so much fucking better.  From the awkward boy thing I once was to the confidant mannish boy that I am now, the difficulties of growing up a bit quirky and different was a process of ... fabulousness (I love "gay" words). 

To all the boys (young boys in my family especially... who's mommy is telling them that she will jump off the roof) out there...You have no idea how much it gets better. Just hang in there. And when you can look back and say Lucky me, It got better. We can toast gay bubbly champagne to that!

Old habits die hard.

Some nights I just can't help it.  
TV dinner + grocery store sushi 
+ Carrie Bradshaw&Co. 
Bliss.

4 years ago.

I played this song on repeat over and over. Walking in the dirty snow to class each morning.  Feeling the wind break against my chubby cheeks with the harsh and early winter.  Buried inside my coat and layers, I felt this song.

Tonight I am feeling it hard.  It brings me warmth knowing somewhere in me, the same kid is buried deep in those layers.

Feeling the change a coming.

Princess Tiana

After a long talk with a buddy of mine tonight, for some reason the soundtrack of Disney's The Princess and The Frog came into my head.

I remember Daddy told me: Fairytales can come true

You gotta make 'em happen, it all depends on you"

So I work real hard each and every day

Now things for sure are going my way

Just doing what I do

Look out boys, I'm coming through

And I'm almost there, I'm almost there

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu9mktOGvY0&feature=related)

I feel like I am at the stage in the movie where I (the hardworking "princess") still believe entirely in the dream I want for my life.  And some very unexpected things will come into my life and off-course the dream just a bit. Yet our princess will meet the goal if not only bigger and better than she had conjured up in her nightly prayers.  

Right? I sure hope so.  And I hope the next time, I compare myself to a Disney character it is not another ethnic princess ... 

Minh-ing-ful Favorites for 09/05/2010

This will be a new thing, I will post my favorite moments of the day.  Just to remind myself of all the positive things that can and do happen.  So for the first list: 

1. Mom is in town and I get to play host/tour guide of Seattle.  And actually doing things on my checklist that I have been putting off for so long.

2. 5$ bouquets from Pike’s market.

3. Dinner with mentor from work, friend and family.  Integrating 3 different lives into 1.

4. Opening a suitcase my mom brought with her, filled with things I left in St. Louis.  Very crucial things like this pregnancy pillow.   

mmmmmm HMMMMM! 

Follow-up: Summer Squash.

If you are curious...

The squash, I baked with red bell peppers, plums, leeks, white wine, green onions, a bit of tumeric and curry powder. Topped with Viet style shredded pork and a stack of baby spinach.  Wasn't bad. ;P

A meal isn't a meal without meat to me. So I paired the summer squash with some roasted Cornish hens with mango chutney glazed and some mustard/molasses glazed (not in pic).

I had a fun time at dinner, thanks to the company/clean-up crew.

Summer is shifting into Fall.

Though the sunny days of Seattle's summers has been slowly disappearing for weeks, today it really hit that Fall is fast approaching.  I can go on about much I love the drizzle and all the false emo-ness that comes with it... OR I can talk about the weird change in pace I felt today about my life going forward. If that makes sense. 

On my way back from grabbing take-out lunch for the team, a bit drenched from the rain and having to run back to my car twice. A stranger, a wonderfully handsome stranger with bright eyes, opened the door for me.  Ear to ear smiles, our eyes meet for a second as I offer my gratitude. I felt my heart quicken. And strangely, shy and nervous.  So shy and nervous that I scooted away too fast to be confused about what to do.  Scared to make a move as I normally would. 

As I was having lunch, a mix of emotions flooded in: regret, guilt, satisfaction, shame, just a crazy bunch of silliness that a high school sophomore would have.Thinking about the stranger, about all strangers, what the potential of strangers could mean.  And the mixes of emotions that would come with each.  The anxiety, the confusion, the smiles.  Oh the smiles. 

Then, after pondering for about 10 minutes, I popped open a bottle of carrot juice and started to wrap up my lunch break with a fortune cookie... I cracked 3 fortunes, in one cookie! 

Reading each, I couldn't help but smile.  As if each were to note all the things I carry on my chest at night.  Each confirming that there are some form of spirit out who understands and is reaching out. 

I couldn't help but carry the giddy smile all afternoon.  Seeing how the combination of events, people, successes and challenges are really moving forward.  I feel my steps slowing down from its manic pace yet making bigger strides.  

Maybe the next time I see him, I will keep the same smile, the same confusion, the same shyness. Maybe the next time I see another handsome stranger, luck will strike again with the same turmoils. 

The season does change fast and I find myself getting ready for fall.   

P.S. My 3 fortunes.

I need time.

I miss blogging.  

Lately, ever since moving back to Seattle.  I am on ultra intensity mode to pack a routine back into my life.  Lately, I've been on the fast track to absorb everything that is this city and its surrounding area codes (sorta).  Trying different restaurants, activities, street routes, meeting new people.    

Then there is the new job. Everyday, after about 6am, I feel as if someone invisible spirit out there is wrenching off the cap on some informational fire-hose and letting it release upon me.  Then by around noon, I am swimming in a pool of details and Morse code that I have to un-encrypt by cob (close of business, my new favorite term). 

Somewhere in between these rushes, I need to find time to do these routines that use to be apart of my life.  Blog? Watch TV? Think critically? Hope? Dream? lol.  

However, there are things that I am proud to say I never stop making time for: 

Planning a great meal from ingredients found in unexpected places like these summer squash I found in a box at work, marked "PLEASE TAKE".

Taking in the surrounding, even if only for a few minutes and secret to some.  

Randomly coming across old favorites in French, in Youtube. And spending the next 30minutes searching for the same clips in different languages to only confirm that I prefer the snooty tounge over any other. 

_____________________________________

                         

In this schedule of so many people and so many things.  I do need to schedule some thinking time, or unthinking time and do some good old meditation.   

Shifts.

Life is a bit swell these days.  I would not say entirely perfect for there are many things on my list that I must complete.  But I would say that they are pretty darn great.  

You know that stage in the project, where you just got through a huge milestone.  You come into the office the next day and everything seem so much lighter because you know that you are months away from the next one? You feel like you can do all the other low priority items that you have been pushing off.  Maybe have lunch out with cohabitants of your office instead of eating in front of your desk or even take a stroll to the other end of the campus just to take in the sunlight…  really do all the things that you used to love about your days: coffee with New Yorker online before a long virtual meeting, Pandora while responding to emails.


I am in that stage of my life.  Things are easy.  I feel the ambition dripping away from my immediate focus. All my intensity is right now is really being dedicated to the “B” files I have saved on my desktop for the last 2 years.  I work out intensely.  I cook.  I am making new friends (which is funny because I really did put this off for the last year, totally blocked new people from entering my social orbit).

To many, it might feel like I am changing rapidly and am changing again.  I notice that my priorities do shift every year and my desires change quite often.  But really it’s me juggling trying to satisfy all the things I really want in life in the only way I can, with the same intensity that I give everything else.  

 
The only thing that I am focusing on right now is my body and my goal of 6% body fat by August 2011.  And I am pretty intense about it.  Though I cook… I don’t really eat it.  So I leave it out for my roommate. :D

1st meal made in my new home

First meal I made after moving into my new place in Seattle.  I thought it would be wonderful to remake a lazy meal of shredded rotisserie chicken + squash sauce on wheat pasta.  It was seriously heaven.  

I watched my Disney's favorite today.

Call it sexist if you will (Tina Li) ... but Mulan for is a story about a girl who goes on an journey to prove to herself, and her family, that she doesn't have to fit society's expectation and that she has the strength that would excel in the typical testosterone dominated society.  And by weird fate, she met a guy that loved her for it when she didn't expect it.

She is awkward in the male bonding rituals of nude pond bathing, weaker physically at first due to lack of training and has the worse hand-eye coordinations.  But she is determine and resourceful (blowing up the enemy with fireworks).  I think I loved it so much is that I saw myself in her.  Having to keep apart of myself secret for so long and tried to fit into the silly culture of masculinity. Like her, it wasn't any secret that I wasn't "a man."

I love Mulan because I am hoping that someday I will too "bring honor to us all" by defining my strengths and kick some villain's butt with my acrobatic skills. With the help of unusual friends and blowing off fireworks in the process.  

Moving.

With very little to do these days now that school is done and I am just sitting around waiting for my future-employer to process my papers, I spend most of my day sleeping, waking up around one or two hours pass noon.  I slide around in my sheets for a dozen-so minutes.  Then I muster the courage to pull my feet out of a pillowcase that I use for warmth and force both flat on the cold wood floors.  That is the biggest hurdle of my entire day. 

After I pull on my robe, everything seems to be just time fillers. Most days I just watch Korean dramas, American TV shows and the random Netflix recommended rentals in the kitchen.  Occasionally, I would run to the store, rub a bit of spice on a red slab of beef for the grill or drive out to do silly errands.  I find any excuse to leave the house before it gets dark. 

And these past few days, driving around St. Louis in the afternoon rain through the same routes that I have been taking for the last 10-ish year, something is gloomily telling me that I will miss this place.  Though I have never admitted to calling a city like such home.  With its silly racism and its awfully narrow segments of stolen cultures from the bigger cities overtaking the actual culture that is St. Louis, I am almost embarrassed sometimes when I tell people about this city that I inhabited for many years.  Yet, I get this weird feeling.  This worry when I think about moving for good to a new city.  The feeling is like…

You know when you spend your entire night up doing something incredibly stupid like reading a book, baking a cake, or wrapping your own wonton dumplings.  Or simply just thinking so much that you can’t fall asleep as you switch sleeping positions for the nth time.  Then you shower because you are too sweaty from the exhaustion of not sleeping.  You get back into bed and you realize that the sun is rising.  And through your curtains you see the sky turning a soft bright grey color.  You get this awful resentment of your inability to sleep but you relish in the warmth and comfort of your own sheets.  That incredibly knot in your stomach that tells you that you will miss most of your day and by sleeping you are abandoning certain responsibilities and daily adventures you owe yourself.  Yet the familiarity of your own bed and the fluffiness of your seven pillows stop you from forcing yourself down on the cold floor.  You want sleep but at the same time resent your bed for making you immobile. So you end up staying in bed awake debating and talking yourself out of the situation.   The whole mess is fine balance of the comfort of familiarity and the trap of being immobile. 

St. Louis is like my messy bed at the crack of dawn.  I owe it to myself to get out. Out of the Midwest, out of St. Louis, out of bed.  Most days I sit around waiting for a final end to a chapter of my life.  Most days I lose the battle between my wants and my bed.  And I walk around my house looking for pieces that I can take with me to remind me of my mom’s kitchen and the small house we grew up in.  Occasionally, I would try to drive around the city looking for something I can pack and ship to Seattle.  And in between, I just watch TV. 

Investments and returns.

At the end of each semester, out of curiosity, I would log-in to check my grades.  Whatever the screen reported would always have this lukewarm and haft hearted feeling that gives me nothing more but an urge to shrug.  However, the last 2 semesters have been pleasantly surprising.  As I study the repetition of A is each row, my brows would pull closer together in puzzlement and my gut would swell in pride.   And I softly whisper to myself: what the what!?! 

The classes this year has been harder and more time consuming than any other combination of classes I have taken on campus.  And I wonder if it is a sign of my maturity. A sign of my understanding of how classroom work. Maybe.  A sign of the progress of my intellectual capacity. 

As I wonder these things, my jaw would hang open and occasionally repeating "what the what" in soft monotone hums. 

Honest though, I think its cause I have different study habits.  The habit being that I study at all, do assignments and sometimes would skim the book before I head to bed.  I mean, I just put some effort.  Not that I am toting a wheeled bag full of text books around or anything.  Now, I live at home, am unattached in my social involvement, am distancing my sluttier, more outgoing days, and took a job with no responsibilities.  I have a lot of ideal and free time to do silly filler things like assignments. 

If I had a time machine and decided to take a trip back 2 years for coffee with myself, I would face a mean-ass punk who would look at me full of disgust.  And I’m sure I would get laugh at and slap around by the tan, blond b.  And the only thing I would have to cling on to my dignity would be my neat and clean repetitive rows of A’s.

After-all, most of the accomplishments that I hold high today are his doing.  And this me, with this new discovery of my ability to achieve in conventional ways, do I want to sit across from him giving him tit-for-tat? 

And I wonder, who would laugh last? 

Minh-ing-ful Profile: Tina Li

In the last 3+ years, I have had to write many ample letters of recommendations and other miscellaneous nominations for Tina.  As her best friend, we both know that it would be up to me to accurately portray all the fine habits and strong ethics to award councils and other silly parties out there.  I remember corny comments like “friend, mentor” or “the ladder that knowingly drops when you fall into a ditch”… etc.  But I want to set the record straight.  She is the type of person that eats off my plate.  She is the type of person that would ditch me sometimes for the comfort of her Family Guy and squishy bed.  Tina is the type of person who says I am socially awkward when I am just being myself.  In honesty, she kinda irks me sometimes.

I remember a night about a year ago.  I took her out to introduce her to this new guy I am seeing and who I am totally crushing on.  I was hoping that she would be that good representation of who I am in class and intelligence.  She proceeds to leave the house in a see-through top… As the night continues, I would glance over to find her terrorizing young Chinese dancers and allowed them to grope her.  After a few hours, I found her lying on a couch outside the club rambling things off to this fine guy.  I had to take her home where I believe she almost puked on me.  Not the best image, I would imagine.  Significantly and strangely, I continue this routine with her.  Taking her to gay joints and allowing her the chance to terrorize poor young gay boys across the bar with her bodaciousness.   

Actually, I take her everywhere.  While in college, through most of my daily life on campus for the last 4 years, I needed someone.  I needed someone to go with me to my meetings. I needed someone to go out with me on Halloween nights when I hardly had a single gay friend in the city.  I needed someone to go with me to get my HIV test results.  I needed someone to go to lunch with me so I can crap about how unbelievably crazy the people I have to deal with is like.  And sometimes, I needed someone to sit at home in my matching robe that I bought for Steve, watch TV, eat my food and laugh at stupid romcoms with me.  All so that I do not feel so alone. 

Sure. Tina pukes.  Gosh knows I puked.  The see-through shirts were mostly my ideas.  The badly drunken ordeals must have mostly been my peer pressure to increase her tolerance.  And the plate eating, it’s probably because I started the tradition.  I guess I am socially awkward most times and she makes me feel kinda proud that I am. 

It’s weird that I know she will probably read this.  I think it’s my thank you for her being there.  I guess be both know that we are too asian and too passive aggressive to talk about real emotions like our parents.  But it’s what makes us close. 

I know it’s our last week together for who knows how long.  And maybe we should do something together instead of playing on our computers.  But why break a tradition?  Thank you, though, for the last 4 years.&  Don’t get hot chocolate on my white robe. Happy graduation.

Pre/Post Finals

 

And that is just one part of my life that I need to organize.  

In the present.

I’ve been told that I am the type of person who always wants to move to a different place and be in a different moment.  It’s mostly true. I do reminisce about the past more than I like to admit and am always dreaming about the future.  My mind has always and I think will always do as it pleases; I think to a certain point is satisfy me.  Maybe I am opportunistic. 

I’ve been trying to live in the present.  And the present has been finals after finals.  I roll out of bed most days for the last week around 11 or noon.  I sit at my kitchen table for the next 13-14 hours doing the combination of researching, writing, emailing and the gambit of social networking.  The early summer heat in St. Louis makes it possible for me to open the kitchen window and very rarely feel a slight breeze. 

I watched my fingers as I type, studying the layouts of papers across the cherry wood surface and cannot help it but travel back to Ho Chi Minh City.  To June 2007, when I was in a similar moment; looking at my fingers while I type in hopes of inspiration for what else to write and noticing the mess of student profiles and coffee stains my few hours of work caused.  It was the summer of my freshmen year.  These thoughts, strolling through memory lane, only reminds me of where I am and the small contrast of our lives: my present and past.  I try to think of my future in the same fondness. 

(Me in Summer of 2006.  Not much different from now.)

Instead of comfort, my stomach feels like as if a hundred espresso shots have been injected and I feel the adrenaline making me want to gag.  It gets worse when I think about driving across the water to work every day and driving home in the notorious Seattle mistiness. 

Then I try to focus on the present and my thoughts trail off once again to a moment somewhere in the past and to a possibility in the future.  Both thoughts make me happy.  And I wonder if I need to be living in the present all the time.  Is it so bad to live in a world of pasts and possibilities?  It sure does beat finals.   

So I cook

I’ve been cooking again.  Every time I find it hard to see ahead, I tend to go back to the kitchen and ransack my fridge for something that I can predict.  Learning how to cook much younger, I was told that the most important lesson for you to learn is how heat and meat dance together.  The amount of fire necessary for the meat to sizzle and sweat, a lesson I haven’t forgotten.  I know what would happen when I throw beef on the bbq.  Or mushrooms, tomatoes, or pineapples.

I believe someone is watching me from above as I cook sometimes.  I talk to my paternal grandmother and recently, my eldest aunt, when I cook.  I find that the time waiting I can say lots, as if the steam would carry my conversation up into the sky to them.  So beyond that comfort in predictability, cooking does for me what most people do when they pray.  I ask for guidance as I stir the noodles and stuff the hen.      

Lately, a lot has been happening to me.  With Steve, then my cousins, then my sister, then my mom, revolving through my daily life I haven’t had much of a chance to filter and really think about what is going to happen in the next step I take.  With doubts that I am slowly beginning to have about myself, I feel almost lost.  The first time in a few years now, I don’t see what is ahead or how I will navigate.  It almost seem impossible to get out of bed everyday cause I feel that much closer to the cliff and I have to make a leap soon. 

So I cook, longer and bigger meals.

Small Talk

Last night, I noticed something.  Its been weeks since I've had an enjoying conversation with someone.   You know that kind of conversation where there are no purpose, topic, or complaints.  Its not about work, its hardly about the concrete issues in our life, its just here and there.  There were jokes and sharing of interest.  We talked about my love of parenting blogs, our love for Carrie Underwood's Casanova Cowboy, the pleasure of inspiring quotes, and his tax-filing status.  Its like beginning to know a person all over again.  Even though you've known this person for over a year now. 

Then, as I am driving to school, thinking about work, mentally mapping out my day, and thinking of all the people I have to talk to, I realize I don’t talk to people.  I have not converse with someone for the enjoyment of it,  where my attention is committed and vice versa.  I miss small talk.   I miss the ease and lack of attempt. 

Small talk is what we call it.  A big help it does us.  Dale Carnegie is right.  I just forgot the shelf his wisdom sits on sometimes. 

1st time I fell in love.

Beginnings (Reposting from his blog) 

“Can you feel that?” you snuggled closer until I could feel the abnormally faster beating of your heart.

“It does that every time I am near you,” you murmured while at the same time putting the palm of your hand to rest on my chest where my heart should be.

“Your heartbeat is quite normal though!” you joked with only the slightest hint of an accusatory tone. You are perhaps wondering if I feel the same way about you.

Do you really wonder?

------

“How do you know that you more than like me now? Why do you like me?”

I liked your questions.  I didn’t answer right away deliberately.

These labels do not exist in discrete points. They are in a continuum with no marked transition. And while ordinarily Reason dictates to proceed with caution, and only to declare loyalty or affection when you are several spaces away from the grey area of shift - where colors are vivid but smudged, where sounds are loud but often cacophonic, where infatuation can be easily mistaken perhaps for romance - our particular circumstance calls for a certain amount of irresponsibility. As seconds are equivalent to hours, days to months, and months to years.

And why do I like you? How could you dare to ask the why really when all you need to have is the mirror that shows how enchantingly spellbinding you are inside and out. And though there is undoubtedly a deeper magic in all these, it is sacrilegious to allude to it now. It will unravel itself in time. To reveal this now would just be my final undoing.

------

This is the hand of fate. Slapping me. And I am offering the other cheek.

My Valentine

It was a typical plot line about not accepting your past in the last episode of Ugly Betty. As I am quick to judge the writers for bringing the cliché feel-good message up, I went to bed wondering if I had the same issues as Betty (yes, TV shows provoke deep thinking for me). Then, last night, I went to bed remembering my self-perception. I pulled out a bunch of old photos that I saved during the big cleaning—filled up a 20-yard dumpster of old un-donate-able things—I did about a week ago.

I smiled to myself seeing the pictures of when I first immigrated to America: bowl cut, hand-me-downs, dorky smile, over-enthusiastic about the simpler things in life. There were also a few pictures of when I got really chubby, really fast over my second summer back in Vietnam.

Most people that know me have probably heard way too often of the stories of you childhood in Vietnam but probably never heard about what it was like when I moved here. It is the typical story of an ethnic immigrant boy trying to adjust to a white-dominated Missouri county. Sometimes I was out-casted, my accent was constantly ridiculed and my obsession with my cousin’s big coats did not help me fit in with the other more-athletic boys. I remember how obsessed I was with my sister since I never really found a friendship that lasted during my tween years. Perhaps these stories do not make a fun and laughable evening and I wonder if I am embarrassed of the me that weren’t so sociable/flirty. But I do want to start telling them.

Growing u, even as a sorta grown-up, I have always been extremely critical of myself. But when I was looking at all the photos, I would give up a good meal or two to go be back in time for a day. Since this Valentines Steve is in Manila, I am going to spend all the love I would have given him on myself, with more old albums I have not yet looked at. Wine, chocolates and all.

A recruiter's worse nightmare?

As I am graduating, I am looking for a job. Funny thing is that, most of the people in my life just happens to be in the same place of transitioning careers. (You would think that since I am graduating, most of my friends are too... so not that funny...BUT actually, I dont have friends my age except for Tina... so it a bit of a coincident that they would be in the same change as I am)

The people I am referring too are the DIVAS in their prospective industries, people that people actually would pay good money for. (Not like a stupid college graduate like myself). So after a week of exhausting interviews, a Diva and I had a brief conversation. I thought it would be fun to post it, as I mentioned above, everyone is going through the same process.

Read, enjoy and hopefully take the stress/seriousness off things.  

ME: i like going on interviews

ME: they fly you out to new cities

ME: pay for your hilton

ME: and food

ME: sometimes you get a nice check

ME: for "appreciation"

ME: I want to go to interviews again just for that

ME: lol

Fabus Friend: yea...i like going on interview too

ME: but its exhausting after though

Fabus Friend: i get to feel like a miss universe candidtae

Fabus Friend: without the sash LOL

ME: like they ask you so much. and you have to use so much mental powerand social skills

Fabus Friend: Miss...Philippines!

ME: I KNOW!!!!

ME: what weaknesses

ME: do you see about yourself

Fabus Friend: yup

ME: “I love too much”

Fabus Friend: HAHAHAHA

ME: lol

ME: hahaha

Fabus Friend: it's like an intelligent date

Fabus Friend: u go in all pretty

ME: yeah and answer things and smile

Fabus Friend: and u try to impress

ME: and slightly flirt

ME: lol

Fabus Friend: HAHAHAHAHAHA

Fabus Friend: omg

ME: oooh

Fabus Friend: we're soooo gay

Fabus Friend: LOL

ME: and they pay for your dinner

ME: hahaha

Friends, just remember, don't put out or settle for a guy/gal/group that is not worth your Diva status.

Windows

I find myself staring out windows a lot.  In bed, I face the windows to look up at the sky trying record the sways of branches to assess the weather.  On rides, I look out to follow the electrical wires that travels from blocks to blocks.  I detect movements and watch people with the comfort of knowing that there is a protective barrier splitting me from them.  However, lately, I have been wanting to be apart of the other side.  I look out my windows sometimes and wonder if this is what I will be looking out into about a year from now, a season or a month even.  It seems as though the dancing palm trees I saw about a week ago took the place of the bouncing pine trees of my summer.  And now in their places are dried montionless evergreens.

On my 5am drive to the airport, I saw a bunch of students in their uniforms lining up to wait for Jeepneys to school.  I started to romanticize about the life they would lead from that moment.  They would finish their school day.  Maybe a lucky one would have a date after at one of the local malls, lying to his parents that it was a study group.  College, then a job, finally meeting someone, move into a small community of villas, children.  Each day beginning their mornings to the same windows, riding down the same streets, hearing the same sound of traffic, seeing the same people.  I wonder if the same people are looking at me, wondering about what will be outside my windows tomorrow, dreading the same images outside their same windows.

Its incredibly silly to say this at 21, but it’s a truth that I want my window to stop returning different images.  Leaving Manila this last time was a hard hit for me. Not that this time, its some sort of final farewell. Its actually quite the opposite.  It’s the fact that I know I want to go back that made it so hard. Manila has made me want to become a fixture next to the palm trees outside the windows.