-=the daily grind=-

Actually, I have yet to encounter wounds that don’t. Granted I might be wounded now somehow but I am very sure I’ll get over it. We all do even if we refuse to admit it.

I have been thinking of my relationship with my mother lately. It’s kinda weird, she has always been in my life, and there were many, many times in my teenage years I thought this wasn’t a good thing, but now I’m getting around to accepting that she does have a purpose in my life, and this seemingly random occurence — that I was born to her — is a carefully thought out gift for both of us.

And I am slowly coming to accept that we are alike in many, many ways. You know in high school she was also that student council president? And she has a fantastic set of friends too–her high shool friends are NOT a boring bunch. She has a life of her own. My dad has always said she could be more "domesticated" (she’s always out of the house, either in Church, attending to the business, or going to Batangas/Tagaytay with her posse). She’s straight to the point and can be very critical. When I think about it, a lot my insecurities stem from her comments from long yonder. I don’t remember when she said them, I don’t remember how, but till now I feel their effects. Only now do I look at her (and take her comments) with more understanding. Motherhood is a very complex phenomenon and she did what she can they best way she knew how.

Last summer I saw my sister in action as she single-handedly raised her two kids. The whole experience scared me shitless. When I got home, I immediately informed my best friend that no, I won’t be having kids, ever. It’s too much work and they hardly appreciate what you do. And it just takes so much away from you. Life as you know it is over. They take center stage in your life which made me think, she they be all there is in your life? The obvious answer is of course NO.

My mother, just like my sister, has her own life. Even before she gave birth to me she was already a whole person, with a history, with past hurts I will never completely know about, dreams she will never see fulfilled. But little by little, in our Monday morning ritual of her driving me to school, she shares her those with me. It’s hard to digest at first that my mother is a separate human being, but now I try to be thankful everyday that I grew up, am still growing, under her influence.  I have lost count of the times I wrote about her in my journal in utter anger, horror, pain. I don’t remember how many times I complained to my friends, even to my sisters, on how she just doesn’t get me and how we can never ever agree on anything. But now I feel the wounds slowly healing. Time has soothed my injured recollection. Believe it or not, I can even find humor in our everyday interaction. Just this afternoon I was convincing her to have her eyebrows tattooed. She said no because, get this, after "researching", she found out that skin sags faster as you get older so she doesn’t want to get them tattooed today only to have them cutting across her eyelid in a year or two. Hahaha!

Let me end by saying "give your moms a break!" We have to make peace with them one of these days. It is one of the most freeing decisions I’ve made when I decided to understand and accpet my mother instead of fighting her off or insisting one day she will realize everything she did wrong and apoligize. For all I know she has looked back and made amends with herself. She’s an imperfect mom just as I am an inperfect daughter. But she is still my mother and I her daughter, and I know I still have much to learn from her as she from me. So here’s to mending bridges and finding a friend in your mom.

So it’s been 2 weeks since my last blog. What happened to me in those weeks of silence? Well, my mom bought me a laser printer!!! Wahoo! It’s so pretty. I’m so excited to set it up in my room later.

And of course it was Eunice and Kim’s birthday party last July 16. I saw Karlin and June there. God, how I miss high school. Karlin even made me cry. It’s funny how when you think you’re just about at the end of your rope, you see people who remind you of your best self. It’s like life telling you, hang on, it’s okay, you’ll get past this. And then the band played "Galileo" and partly due to my barkada’s prodding, I joined them for my umpteenth musical debut. In the words of Trisca, "sige na, mambully ka na!" Teehee.

Tomorrow I’m going to have my glasses readjusted. The lense grade is too low for me now. Hohum. I have such a normal life.

Jeff Buckley You are 66 deep, 30 controversial, and 51 nice!

A beautiful heart but a soul as deep as an ocean. There’s a reason why everyone loved Jeff.

I am Jeff Buckley?! Whatever happened to Jim Morrison? We have the same birthday!!! Fart, at least I’m nice. I’m 86% nicer than most people and 89% more deep. Naks.

I am the poster girl for escapism. I am to recite in Nego in a few hours and my horoscope says an authority figure will give me hard time (just to see what I’m made of) and instead of studying I post a message. As I write this Mario steps inside the computer room to make me chismis. He was with me minutes ago telling me to stop surfing and start studying but did I listen. Noooo. Now he’s telling me what to tell a girl so she can get, um, what she wants, um, from a boy. Teehee. Sounds like a very good plan.

So in my last minutes I’d just like to say we all have different ways of dealing with what must be done. Yes we all get around to doing it, but before we do, we paint our nails red (I had mine done yesterday, yummy), reshape our eyebrows, watch DVDs, eat, drink, plot, and the list goes on and on…Is there anything wrong about this? I personally work best in the final hour.

Last na to, tama na raw says Mario. Mag-aral na raw ako. I officially want to declare that I love Nego and Tax. So there.

Today my barkada’s going to Laiya, Batangas, overnight. Larla’s back for a few weeks and she brought her boyfriend, Rog, with her. So they will all be there to catch up with her and to get to know Rog better. And I’m here, stuck in Manila because *gulp*sniff* I have a Saturday class. It is Tax I. And later my nose will be bleeding out of sheer boooorrrrredoooom. It’s 1-4 pm, once a week, and I would’ve cut but you get call for recit only once a sem and it’s 30% of your godforsaken grade. So of course I can’t risk absenting myself and being called. I might as well drop the course if that happens. So there will be my barkada, drinking and doing whatever else they shouldn’t be doing, and I’m here, learning the principles of taxation. As usual I won’t be in the pictures and anything discussed will be hearsay to me. Huhuhu…

On to more positive things, I have been relishing my newfound freedom for 2 days now. It’s freedom from feeling generally sad and hopeless about where my life’s been heading. It’s has been two days of telling myself it’s not all that bad…actually it’s not bad at all to be where I am right now. Okay, wait, is it just me or was my breakfast spiked with Deprex without my knowing? Haha. But really, on my first day of freedom I bought a whole liter of chocolate milk (the full-fat kind) and drank it all by myself, and man did it feel great. When was the last time I had 4 glassfuls of chilled chocolate milk all to myself? I can’t remember. And then yesterday I had cake and eggplant parmagiana with one of my good friends here in law school. Yummy. We talked and ate and talked and ate.

Thank God for the simple joys of life.

Last night I had an epiphany after a long, long drought of not having any. You know how our pal, Soren, discusses despair — there’s despair of a person who knows not he is in despair and then there’s despair of a person who knows he is in despair, further categorized into those who think they can control everything in their lives and those who think they have no control at all. The safest manner to be in despair, I think, is to stay in the middle. Yes, our other pal Gautama had it right all along…the key is moderation.

I will not belabor the fact that we have all been rejected or brushed aside at some point in our lives. This is not a unique phenomenon, and in this regard Tyler of Fight Club is right in saying, I am not a unique snowflake. It is all that the human condition is about, to suffer and learn. But it still pisses me off.  The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off.

There are some things you can control, some things you can’t, and that time of the month will not help you any. Sometimes it’s hormonal, most of the time it’s existential and the key is, I think, to ride the wave. It’s somewhere between brazen knowledge and quiet consternation, just there, right between clutching power and control (at least of your own life) to your chest and wildly abandoning everything, throwing caution to the wind. Last night I learned to let go. Bahala na.

My friend, the Fuzzy, in one of our more significant conversations, told me that if you really think about it, 95% of what you worry about is not really your problem. It’s you parents’ problem, it’s your friends’ problem, it’s your school’s problem, not really entirely yours. And this morning I woke up with a renewed sense of selfishness. It should be me first, in all things, ME first. Forget that you can’t please everyone (to the guy in class who always comes across as a doofus for saying the wrong things in attempts to assuage I don’t know what), forget that you can’t make people love you (to It who’s officially not part of my life), forget even that everything will roll down from the white hills of beauty and kindness, to embrace you with open arms and pave the way to a bright, blindingly spectacular future (to the guy who, almost 4 decades later still thinks the world owes him favors), it all boils down to YOU. To ME.

So what’s the battle plan now. Me. Me. Me. Yahoo!