I know I should be writing more and not just copy-pasting things from Thought Catalog. But my words have been failing me lately and Thought Catalog has been spot on a little too much. Does that count for a win-win?

I write so I remember. So here is me remembering. Dig in.

***

Be My Boyfriend

Jul. 6, 2012

By January Nelson 

I feel like I’m dead most of the time. Actually, that’s too harsh of a word. “Going through the motions” would be a more accurate thing to say. Less dramatic. Less of a cause for alarm, right? The “hilarious” part is that I don’t even really know that I’m going through the motions until something wakes me up. Only when I feel alive do I realize I had ever been dead. Isn’t that typically the way though? Sometimes you don’t even realize something is dirty until it’s been cleaned. Then you’re like, “Oh, I guess that’s the way it’s always supposed to look. Who knew?”

I won’t lie to you. This is about a boy. It always is. It will always be about a boy. Wanting, needing, getting, and eventually losing. The second I met this boy, I knew he was going to be an important part of my life. I rarely feel this way so when I do, I pay attention. I listen to myself. I investigate. “Who is this person and why do I think they’ll matter so much to me?” It’s so uncommon that I ever feel compelled to really get to know someone. I’ll meet them first and if we develop a good rapport, that’s great. If not, okay. It wasn’t meant to be. But with some people, I feel like I’m meant to know them and will pursue them relentlessly. Is this weird? Do others experience this? It makes me sound creepy. I swear I’m not. I just know what I like. (And it’s easy to know what you like when you seldom like anything.)

So this boy — I want to date him. I want to know his childhood secrets, his best friends, his family. I want to sit in his room and just absorb everything I see. I want to be a detective and look through his stuff. They’ll help give me clues as to who this person really is and provide me with shortcuts. I want to take care of him. Seriously, I want to take him in my arms and just… help him. I want to put his head on my chest and lay in bed with him and turn everything else in the world off so we are the only ones who are vibrating. I want to fall asleep with you in the backseat of the cab and I want to make you cum and I want you to know that if you ever happened to choke on a sandwich alone in your apartment and die, your body wouldn’t just sit there for days like a lonely, sad, single person. I would find you immediately. (SIGH, ROMANCE.)

I know I sound ridiculous. Maybe I’ve watched too many romantic comedies or something but I don’t think that’s exactly why I’m turning into such a pile of mush. Having a crush, potentially loving someone, is, like, the great equalizer for humans. We all act the same way, we all think the same sentimental crap. I’m just the one who writes about it.

Simply put, I want to make this dude into my boyfriend. I want to “wife” him up, as they say in 2012. I want to be his motherf-cking plus one. And you know what? I think I actually have a good chance of making it happen. I have a good feeling about this. There’s a tingling in my bones. I feel misunderstood 99% of the time, like a misanthropic nightmare, but I think I may have found someone who’s tuned into the same frequency as me.

Life feels easier to go through alone. I know many disagree and while I’m the first to admit that I’m not the happiest person ever, I still honestly prefer being single to settling with someone. I’ve done it before and it feels awful. Like someone gently dragging you across hot concrete. I’d rather be honest with myself than dishonest to another person. I don’t have it in me. Maybe I did when I was 19, 21, 23, but not anymore. Now I can only love the right ones. The only problem being, of course, that so few are actually right.
But not you. You sir are just right. And I just can’t wait love the hell out of you.

Joe's abs

I think I was one Facebook when I saw Six-Pack Abs in 12 Weeks| Yahoo Health. It has 2 of my favorite words, abs and Yahoo. So naturally, I have to click.

When I did, this was what I saw. Everybody, meet Joe's abs:

Photo credit: Yahoo Health

Great job to Joe for doing this in 12 weeks!

But on another (more important!) note, how come I find the rightmost photo the least attractive? I mean, I get that 5.5% body fat is noteworthy. But Joe's face (yes, first name basis kami haha) appears a little too gaunt for me. Does it follow, that when you lose the fat you lose the chest hair, too? Yes, that's me trying to be funny.

My best bet is Joe Week 1 or Joe Week 8. A little more cheek never hurt nobody :) Or I may be a teeny bit biased cos of the scruff?

Which version of Joe do you like best?

Just a Reminder

One day, I found Maria Popova and Brain Pickings on the internet. It was a happy day. Brain Pickings was kind enough to give out free subscriptions to a weekly newsletter sent to my email.

A few days ago, it sent a list of the 10 Best Books of 2012. One of the books on the list was Tiny Beautiful Things. This is a quote from the book author Cheryl Strayed aka Dear Sugar of The Rumpus.

Maria Popova writes:

The book, one of the year's finest reads in psychology and philosophy, is titled after Dear Sugar #64, which remains my own favorite by a long stretch. It's exquisite in its entirety, but this particular bit makes the heart tremble with raw heartness:

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.

When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn't 'mean anything' because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes.

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don't look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don't hold it up and say it's longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn't say for the rest of your life. Say thank you.

Christmas List

On Christmas Day, I found myself making time for me-time. Granted the first few hours of my me-time was with Mahal, it was still precious me-time nonetheless :)

I made my way yesterday to one of my happy places, Starbucks Temple Drive! I know it's "just a Starbucks" but I've made many personal breakthroughs (naks!) sitting in some of the (kinda ratty) chairs/cushioned seats! So this Starbucks will always have a special place in my heart :)

I intended to catch up on my reading yesterday and do my personal goal setting for the coming year. After some much needed sharing and catching up with Mahal, he left for dinner with his friends and I started making my lists.

So my Christmas List is not a list of 'naughty and nice' friends. I only call it a Christmas list cos I made it on Christmas Day haha. I finally have a Bucket List! YAY! I didn't know how exciting it was to write one until yesterday! And I know it's only the beginning. Now that I got the 'ball rolling' in my brain tank (bra! - haha it's always cooler said the Barney way) , I'm pretty sure I will be coming up with more things to do and more adventures to begin! So exciting!

My current list is at 50 things and I can't believe how psyched I am to start working on the list. I really believe it's true what they say, that the best way to get out of a slump is to start setting goals. It probably doesn't sound like me cos it's not fluffy and it's too stiff and straightforward, but it really works

Just some highlights of my list (and some really embarrassing revelations about myself), I apparently already know the names of my 4 children! I never pegged myself as that kind of person, but surprisingly, I am that kind of person haha.

That's all for now from me. Have you written Bucket List yet? From my heart to yours, Merry Christmas :)

This is why I love Chelsea Fagan. I think the best writers are the ones who not only write their stories but also write other people's stories with their own :)


Thought Catalog hurts so much, sometimes hahaha.

***

I Can’t Tell You

Dec. 14, 2012

By Chelsea Fagan 

Shutterstock

I can write about you in every forum except the one you might read — well, even then I might write about it, but I’d dance around your name like a fire whose warmth I want to feel without quite being burned. Yes, if you’re wondering, it’s about you. That open letter, that song lyric, that wink and nod in your direction that is not quite explicit enough to call me out on directly. I want you to see my words and be motivated enough in them to take the first step yourself because, no matter how much I want to burst into your life with the truth of exactly how I feel about you, I know that I am not going to.

You would likely be upset if you knew how much I thought of you, how much what you are doing with your life factors into my daily routine. The world tells us we are supposed to live in cold, disparate camps of “together” and “separate” — but what about those who fall into neither category? No, we are not together. No, there is no part of you that I can lay claim to and nothing I am within my rights to demand, but are we really separate? Is the degree to which you have touched my life unimportant because it hasn’t been sealed with some kind of title?

And “I miss you” — is that only appropriate to someone who has left, someone you imagine will come back or at least longs to do so? What about the people who have never fully entered our lives, who have passed by it like a shiny car driving just slowly enough to get a glimpse at the people inside? Are we allowed to miss someone whose presence we sensed in our very bones, someone every fiber of our body told us we should have reached out to but did not? Is there an acceptable way to phrase “a nostalgia for something that never quite happened,” or is that a sentiment which is relegated to the pathetic spectators of life?

We praise honesty the way we praise kindness, and a lie of omission is still a lie. So I suppose, by that definition, I am lying to you each day that passes in which I do not say “I think about you, I wish I could talk to you, I wish my fear was something I could put aside and forget for even a moment.” I don’t mean to lie, you know. In a perfect world, I would be the kind of person who feels something with great conviction and acts upon it with unerring focus, who is sure of themselves in a way that radiates confidence and puts others at ease. If I were this kind of person, I would have come to you so long ago. I would have told you everything I really felt.

(Yes, even about that one night where I told you I needed to talk and then let you go home with a “never mind.” You and I both know that what I wanted to say was “Every time I see you from across the room and don’t talk to you, it is a punch in the stomach which reminds me just how much of a coward I can be.” But who wants to actually say that to someone at a house party?)

But I have long since accepted that I am a coward of this nature, that I am happy to write letters to myself instead of sit down with the one person who needs to listen. I will listen to music which at once dulls the more acute pains of not having the courage to be honest with you and allows me to imagine the life I could have if I did. I will lie awake some nights, looking at your name, only a click away. I will hover over your name and consider writing you, finally getting everything out that I feel dirty for not having said, and accept that even a flat “no” is preferable to hanging suspended in the unknown. But then I won’t, and I’ll pretend as though it never crossed my mind. And you will ask me how I am at a party some day, and look at me as though you really want to know, and I will say “I am fine.” 

I think I'm in-friend love with you

I can't even begin to describe how awesome and spot on and amazing this comic is. GALING! I claim no ownership of this material. You may find original source here:

 

http://www.sadiemagazine.com/issue-no-11/arts-letters/comic/i-think-i-am-in-friend-love-with-you

 

May we all find that friend :)

 

****

 

Issue 11  •  Summer 2012

 

I Think I Am In Friend-Love With You

Written by and illustrated by Yumi Sakugawa

A friendly reminder from your nieghboorhood tollgate

Last Friday, we drove down to several places in the South for business. Our last stop was Binan, Laguna. I made my way to the tollgate of the Mamplasan exit, ready to hit the Northbound lane. I pick up my toll card from the window and lo and behold, some wise (extra cheesy?) words from your neighborhood toll card:

Love is a battlefield
GET SOME SCARS

Yown.

Thirsty

Philip Yancey on one of his encounters with Henry Nouwen:

"My one extended conversation with Nouwen came just after he had returned from San Francisco, where he had served for a week in an AIDS clinic... He told me what he had seen in the Castro district... Young men were dying everyday, and thousands more walked around terrified that they were carrying the virus. Even as shops displayed gaudy T-shirts and sexual products ranging from the playful to the obscene, fear hung like a fog over the streets. Not only fear, he said, but also feelings of guilt and anger and rejection.

In the clinic, Nouwen listened to personal stories. "I'm a priest -- that's my job. I listen to people's stories. They confess to me." He told me of young men banished from their own families, forced to hustle on the street. Some of them had hundreds of partners whom they had met in bathhouses, whose names they had never learned, and from one of those partners they had contracted the virus that was now killing them. Nouwen looked at me, his piercing eyes bright with compassion and pain, "Phillip, those young men were dying -- literally dying -- because of their thirst for love"... The accounts all had in common a search for a safe place, for a safe relationship, for a home, for acceptance, for unconditional love, for forgiveness.

...Through Nouwen's eyes, I saw a new way to look at such people: not as immoral and ungodly, but as thirsty -- as people dying for love. Like the Samaritan woman at the well, they had drunk their fill of water that did not satisfy. They needed Living Water. After that conversation with Nouwen, whenever I encountered someone whose behavior offended or revolted me, I would always pray, "God, help me to see this person not as repulsive, but as thirsty."

The more I prayed that prayer, the more I began to see myself on the same side as the one who had repulsed me. I, too, have nothing to offer God but my thirst. Like the elder brother in the parable [The Parable of the Prodigal Son], I can never experience the cleansing flow of God's grace or enter the family celebration if I stand outside the banquet hall, arms folded in a posture of moral superiority. God's grace comes a s free gift, but only one who has open hands can receive a gift."

                                                                                                                       (from Soul Survivor)

The kinda love you hold out for :)

From the movie Juno: Juno's dad on love - a little more graphic than usual

The 30-day mental fast

What is a mental fast?

A mental fast is a detox to the mind, the way a physical fast is a detox to the body. I learned about the mental fast, one sunny day when I popped a Jerry Clark audio on my drive to Ortigas.

It sounds simple enough, just 8 steps. And it promises a great return in 30 days. With the physical fast, you withhold food from your body to accommodate a cleanse and to sort of reset your bodily processes. With the mental fast, this is what you do for 30 days straight:

1. No TV
2. No Radio
3. No Newspaper
4. 8 glasses of water, 30 minutes of exercise everyday
5. Avoid negative people
6. Associate with positive people
7. Read  inspirational, motivational books for a mnimum of 20 minutes everyday
8. Reflect everyday for 20 minutes.

Today is my third attempt at Day 1 (please don't judge meee.) To be honest, I'm doing pretty well on some things - radio, newspaper, 8 glasses of water, negative people, positive people, and reading. To be even more honest, these are things I've already been doing prior to the fast.

To be even more honest it's not funny anymore, I'm having a bitch of a time with the TV time. My shows and I go way back and in a twisted way, it has sort of become an emotional thing. Totally eliminating it from my daily diet is like going cold turkey on a longtime tobacco habit. It probably is more severe or less severe than I put it out to be, I have no way of knowing. But in any case, this is where I fall short.

Fourth attempt at Day 1 tomorrow? :)