Goddess, I Am.

Here’s one for laughs. This is the fancy schmancy marble marker of our fancy schmancy condo’s fancy schmancy club house.

You’d think they could at least spell check. Who says the Renaissance produced geniuses?

I suppose we ought to be thankful that whoever wrote this doesn’t write skin id reviews for a living. (Or at least, we can hope so.)

NOTE: This post was inspired by Riva’s Thanks to Barok English.

When you love someone, you deify him. To what degree is relative to the extent of your passion. Nevertheless, to you he becomes a god, giving him the power to lord it over you should he so choose. For the most part, a good man wouldn’t – at least, not consciously or maliciously. But almost inevitably, he will, as men are wont to do upon attaining the esteemed status of pseudo-godship – all because he is loved.

How does one deify a mere mortal? One builds him up; first in one’s head, then in the heads of all and sundry who care to listen. And though the latter might not embrace such worship with even half the same ardor that you devote to it, you do. You only see the good that evokes your passion, and never the bad that could actually make you see sense. And what a folly that is because that is where your downfall begins.

When you love someone, you strive to become compatible. And because you’ve been told that you can never change your lover, you endeavor to change yourself. Indeed, there is no harm in such a cause, especially if it is for the good of, not just your love, but of yourself. And so you find yourself giving up this and sacrificing that until one day you wake up and you don’t know yourself anymore. You don’t know what you’ve become, how you got there, or even why; all because such a drastic overhaul of your “self”, of your “being” was achieved for the wrong reasons: not for yourself, but for the pseudo-god who you so desperately wanted to please, but who, more than likely, would never ever be pleased.

Nothing is more guaranteed to wake you up out of your rose-colored stupor than a stranger looking back at you in the mirror, and you start to realize that if you were so wrong about yourself, then perhaps you were also wrong about the lover you have come to hold in such high regard. And then you look back and realize that the pseudo-god isn’t quite as divine as you thought. You start to grasp the magnitude of his indifference – the indifference that was always there the entire time, but you deemed it natural in his seeming superiority to you; a superiority, I might add, that you bestowed upon him in the first place. You start to see the disregard, the disrespect, the dishonesty, and all other manner of painful truths that only the most honest of relationships can discern. You see them all, and suddenly you’re disillusioned and jaded, and you don’t know what to make of it.

Still, when you love someone, you try to make it work. So every time there’s a problem (and at this point, you’re already honest with yourself enough to admit that there are indeed problems), you find yourself conceding to keep the peace, to keep the status quo intact. This is because even though in your eyes he is now just a man and no longer a pseudo-god, you still do not love him any less. If anything, you might even love him more in this newfound attainability.

So you concede, and all is peaceful until the next conflict when you will concede again and again and again in a never ending cycle of concession for the sake of love and harmony, regardless of who is in the wrong. But when you really think about it, how long can you concede? How long can you give in? How long can you keep apologizing for wrongs that you did not do? Everything – and everyone – has a limit. Surely your ability to concede is no exception.

So now you’re faced with a dilemma. If you continue to concede until every drop of concession is wrung from your body and until every smidgen of apology is no more, the time will come when you’ll have nothing more to give. Inevitably, you can do no more than watch the demise of the relationship that you so painstakingly built.

On the other hand, you can resist taking the path of least resistance and fight for what you believe is right. You can attempt to make him face his inadequacies, instead of mollycoddling him and pointing out your own to make him feel good about himself. You can endeavor to put your lover in his place when he’s done you wrong, and force him into submission for you to finally receive the apology or the appreciation that you so deserve. This is risky because though there is a slight chance that you will accomplish your objective, it is exactly that – slight – and you may invariably do more harm than good, leading to an even earlier demise of the relationship. Is there even a path that doesn’t lead to the relationship’s demise? I do not believe so, for even those who stay together for the rest of their lives eventually die and become no more.

When you love someone, you give him the power to destroy you. And until you start to accept love as it is – fleeting – you will find yourself constantly destroyed throughout your lifetime. You will only emerge whole when you stop believing in forever and start accepting that nothing lasts forever.

Indeed, when you love someone, make every moment count because that’s all you’re ever really going to get – moments.

Note: This was inspired by the movie ‘Becoming Jane’, an adaptation of the life of Jane Austen; hence, the slightly Victorian undertone (I imagine).

Disclaimer: Be warned! Not for the fainthearted.

I don’t photograph very well. I never had. Through the years, however, I have since perfected the angles and poses that enable me to be captured at my very best. Still, I’m yet to achieve a hundred per cent success rate, as is apparent from these horrid images:

Indeed, I do scare myself sometimes. Tell me, did I scare you?

NOTE: This post was created for the sole purpose of trying out my new plug-in’s photo caption feature. Said plug-in is now disabled, thanks to Wordpress’ new built-in caption feature.

Let me share the first ‘chapter’ of the book I hope to write one day. That is, if I can somehow make heads or tails exactly where I want to go with the story. Can anyone say, scatterbrained?

Meet Belen. Belen is a small (no more than 4’8″), rather chubby woman who looks forty-ish. She is, in fact, 29. She has very dark skin (particularly around the elbows), dark eyes, and very thick lips – characteristics that are common in the village where she came from, no doubt from obscure pygmy ancestors.

I’d like to say that Belen is a simple girl. Unfortunately,she isn’t. She likes to paint the toenails of her rather wide-spread feet red, and wear tube tops and blue eyeshadow. She has visions of grandeur that far exceed her simple upbringing. This dreams, or delusions, however you might see it, brings her to The City. In the hopes of snagging herself a worthwhile husband, she (rather foolishly) finds herself employed in a seedy bar on a seedy street in a seedy part of town.

Suffice to say, she didn’t find a husband. She did find, however, that the foreign customers who frequented the bar were far more generous than the local customers. It was then that Belen decided that she was going to marry an “Amerikano” (as all foreign men were known in that part of the world, regardless of where they came from).

So now Belen has a plan. After all, she’s not such an airhead as most people think she is. She is aware that she’s not likely to find a rich Amerikano to marry if she was a whore working in a seedy bar on a seedy street in a seedy part of town. It was possible, indeed, but it was highly unlikely, and Belen was not one to risk the odds. Belen figures that she needs a job that’s respectable, yet still downtrodden enough for a hapless Amerikano to want to rescue her.

With her limited skills and education, Belen finds herself working as a housemaid. She was lucky enough to find a job where there were no children to look after, as they were all teenagers, and to find an employer who treated her almost as a member of the family. Within days, Belen befriended the teenagers, learned how to use the computer, and discovered the joys of email and mIRC.

Soon enough, Belen had several “pen pals” (though she never did use a pen) – all of them foreign, all of them old, all of them wanted to “take care” of her. Belen immediately started enjoying the fruits of her labor. She started receiving packages from all over the world, mostly containing beauty products that were yet to start working on this little pygmy. She became a constant Western Union customer, receiving thousands of dollars in remittances from her many paramours.

And what’s a girl from an obscure province in the mountains to do with all that money and material possessions? Send it home? Share with her newfound family? We’d all like to think so. Unfortunately, the opposite is true.

First, Belen developed a drinking problem. Then, she started sleeping around with the various houseboys in the village, who, incidentally, she was spending for. Soon enough, her kind employer got wind of the situation and inevitably fired her.

Belen had no choice but to choose amongst her many “sponsors” to rescue her from her predicament. She finally settled on an Amerikano from Amsterdam. Bob (pronounced ‘Boob’, obviously not American) was 65 years old, divorced, fat, and had a bad comb-over. When he arrived in The City to marry her, his body odor struck her like a ton of bricks. But she figured he was old and was going to die soon, leaving her all his money.

They were married in her village’s little church. It was the biggest and grandest celebration the village has ever seen – all paid for by Bob, of course. Three months later, Belen finally got her visa to Holland and off she flew with Bob, red toenails and all, to the land of long winters where she was to become the wife of a fat, smelly, old man, obligated to give him blow jobs, hand jobs, and heaven only knows what other kinds of jobs.

That was 10 years ago. Since then, Bob have had three strokes and is now permanently bedridden. Belen ministers to his needs, counting the days when Bob finally dies and she can have all his money to herself. He, in turn, is living the rest of his days happy that he found himself a good wife who’ll take care of him until the end. Everybody’s happy. Everybody wins.

So, am I going to be the next Candace Bushnell, or should I just give it up as a lost cause? Let me know what you think! I promise, I won’t cry!

I remember my last year of high school. While everyone else talked nonstop about the courses they were going to take and the universities they were going to attend, I did nothing. Oh, it wasn’t because I was a lazy slacker who couldn’t care less if I ended up selling my body on the streets. It was mostly because, short of becoming a porn star (seriously), I didn’t know what I wanted to be.

So I ended up heeding my mum’s advice and taking up accountancy, the same degree that she has. I lasted a full year before I conceded that I didn’t have a head for numbers. Because I needed a good excuse to transfer to my best friend’s university, I chose a course that was offered there but not in my then-university – journalism. I transferred too late, however, so I ended up taking a few unimportant minor subjects that first semester.

By the time the second semester rolled in, my family had already convinced me that I couldn’t possibly have a future in journalism. The future was in computers, they told me; hence, why I ended up taking up IT. Three very long and very excruciating years later, I finished the course and couldn’t be bothered to turn up for my graduation. I was just relieved to be rid of school forever.

Off to the job market I went, and because I spoke English with a passable American accent, I ended up working for a call center. This was the start of my love/hate affair with call centers. For 3 years, I ended up working for 2 of the big centers in my city and one “publishing” company that refused to be dubbed as such – a call center, that is. I also worked in a bank, at some point. The pay was crap and the work bored me to tears, so I eventually ended up taking calls again. I dabbled in technical support, sales, and customer service. Eventually, I worked myself up to quality assurance.

Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that I wanted to be a teacher. I applied for various training jobs, but always got turned down. I even went back to school for a spell to get a teaching degree, but ended up quitting in the middle of the term because juggling work and school was too exhausting for me. I eventually ended up in Thailand in some obscure coordinator job, and eventually to teach English where I was unceremoniously fired after my first week.

So where does writing fit in all this? I would say it was when I started blogging, but looking back, I think it was far longer than that. I kept diaries as a teenager. Eventually, the diaries became blogs. Back in high school, my best friends and I started an underground newspaper that everyone loved – everyone except our English teacher, that is, who promptly outlawed it. We also wrote a bunch of silly ‘novels’ to rival the Sweet Valley series in grubby, old notebooks that are now gathering dust under my best friend’s bed.

For the longest time, I’ve been having my love affair with words, and I just didn’t know about it because, to me, it was always just a hobby, something that came as naturally as breathing, and it was never really nurtured or encouraged. I didn’t even think that I was actually a good writer until a blogger friend of mine, who I was (and am) a huge fan of and who I respect most, told me that she enjoyed my writing. It was only then that I even considered writing freelance for a living. And even then, I could only do it part-time because I, like all and sundry, didn’t think it was a real job.

If I never left the security of the call centers, if I never had delusions of being a teacher, if I never got fired from a job that I hated every single day that I was doing it, I wouldn’t have had the courage to pursue what I love most. I wouldn’t be writing for a living, and I probably wouldn’t be happy. Indeed, I probably wouldn’t know who – and what – I really am.

Somewhere along the way I took a wrong turn that kept me from my ultimate destiny. But I found my way back, and I’m here now. I’m now where I’m supposed to be, something that a lot of people can’t say about themselves. And really, I’m not going anywhere. I’m here to stay.