Life and Lemons

I applied for ESSAYS.PH with this, and I got conditionally accepted months ago, only I was too lazy to go to the interview. Total fail. Maybe I can try again, if they accept writers like me who only want to write in the comfort of her limp computer chair, a mix of Kpop, Brandon Flowers and Eraserheads playing in the background.

“The writer’s new best friend: Blogging”

It all began with Dear Diary, and ended with Love. Fast forward and Carlo is left behind in advertising history, and the scented gel pen is replaced by Netbooks and color-coded QWERTY. The blogs now reign, as world culture as we know it migrates into cyberspace.

The movement makes sense. As multinational companies shift to online resources, and iTunes legalize download-whoring of music, the typical pedestrian with two thoughts to string together want cyber-exposure too. Networking sites used to be able to address this need. But then Friendster became passé, and Facebook and Twitter do not care very much for litanies. Thus, the blog.

Simply an online journal, the blog is the new medium for the written word. Corporations use it to foster relationships between employees, enrich corporate culture, even as to act as a sales and customer service platform for clients. The new, proven effective leg of advertising and marketing is the blog.

Personal blogs on the other hand have a wider, more varied scope. The owner can talk up commentary or news, freeing a stream of intelligent opinion into cyberspace. More popularly, though, the blog is the new favorite medium for expression. Talk about your horrid day, that job you hate, the thumbtack stuck under your shoe. Talk as if anybody cares.

For the humble writer, the blog makes for a sound outlet, and an efficient one at that. The appointed topic is unhindered, unlimited by an editor’s pressure. This freedom allows free pickings on the subject matter, sans the worry of the target market. In cyberspace, every topic has an audience, even conversations about pickles. Also it deletes the middle man, allowing the blogger to furnish his views straight to the public.

And there goes the stress of finding a publisher. Blog sites actually have a ‘publish’ button, and clicking it feels so satisfying. A few seconds later, your short masterpiece is available and ready to be Googled. Since blogs are editor-free though, proofreading becomes a required skill. But this is more of a prerequisite rather than a con, unless of course the writer doesn’t mind a grammatically-embarrassing post.

The most unique thing about blogs as a writer’s outlet though, is its interactivity and availability. The comment box at the bottom is the pull. Anyone with an email address can react, violently or otherwise, and it is these opinions that feed the writer’s libido. It gives the feeling of relevance, even likeability. At the very least, an entry at the comments section means the blog is being read, and not treated as SPAM.

And for the lucky few blog owners, after relevance comes popularity. Many blogs—and transitively, their writers—gain mainstream recognition, even a cult following. Their names become reliable seals for fashion news, techie expertise, political opinion, and academic pursuits. Their blogs are followed and each post anticipated, getting real-time opinions. They get cyber-groupies, and for the writer of today, that is the most exciting kind of by-line.

The online writer can type ‘Dear Diary’, fingers flying over the keyboard as the reflections of today’s eight-to-five school day flood his head. Someone from three continents away may mistakenly type a keyword and click the URL. He will read and comment, making a published writer out of the blogger.

Valentine’s day was Tangled movie date day with my sister. It was a fun movie (Rapunzel’s bipolar tendencies were precious), but the Sprite stock and the constant un-ladylike guffawing lead you straight to the ladies’ room after the screening.We were lining up to the cubicles when my sister’s dulcet tones floated above the din:

“GAH!! I LEFT MY ROSES!”

And by roses she meant the two now wilted stems she got that day, given by her harmless-as-a-fly boss to all of them single lady employees as a Valentine’s Day token. Sweet guy.

“Idiot,” said I, cue eyeroll, and proceeded to line up to ease my full bladder. Moments and a nudge of guilt later, I came out of the cubicle and stared at my sister, catching her saucer-wide puppy-dog eyes.

Heave out a sigh: “Fiiiiine, let’s go try to get them back.”

And so I crossed the crowd lining up for the next screening, my sister closely shadowing me. I explained to the nice lady arranging the 3D glasses, “Erm, we left flowers inside..” and she was kind enough to let us through without another word.

We trotted inside in the glow light darkness. At the foot of the stairs, I held a hand out to stop my sister. “Stay there.” I thrust my bag to her chest. “Hold this.” Sight trained on our seat (way up in Row R in the theater’s steep staircase style seating), and off I climbed.

The janitors, the only other two people in the hallowed halls, curiously watched my quick tedious climb. As I landed on Row P they asked ever so politely, “Yes ma’am?”

Clutching my chest, I choked out,“Flowers…”

The two scrambled about at the word, whipping out flashlights and training the beams of blinding white lights on the empty seats.

“It’s only two pieces…” I clarified in a small voice.

They started ducking under seats, crawling on the soda-strained floor, and then, “Here ma’am!”

HAH! was my internal cry of triumph. One janitor thrust the two dying stems at me, the red petals slowly and surely wilting to a dark purple. “HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY MA’AM!!” he yelled.

“THANK YOU!” I hollered back. And I started trotting down, hurriedly but carefully should I miss the small steps, a cheesy love song playing full blast from the HD speakers as I went. And I thought as I hurried to my waiting sister, what a fun Valentine’s day, though these flowers aren’t even mine.

My last reflection paper for school, and most likely the last one I will ever be forced to write for a grade. It was a good exercise on hindsight, no matter how much I cringed doing these assignments. It put into order my eternal musings, and I think I will continue writing bits of these, even if only as Notes in my iPod. These things are highly personal, but somehow I kinda wish people can see them and make comments. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just hungry now xD

When I was a kid I wanted a Barbie doll. I was very clear about that to my mother. I think I got her trademark grunt as a reply, or maybe it was a biting lecture on why sexist toys will do no good whatsoever for a seven-year-old girl. One day a roving encyclopedia salesman passed by our street, and next thing I knew a delivery truck was pulling over our gate, then boxes of World Book volumes 1-22 were littering our small living room.

I would have settled for a Play-Doh, I thought grudgingly as I arranged the heavy books. These hardly look like Malibu Barbie or any of her friends. As I was sorting the pile, I discovered five thin volumes of fairy tales that arrived in place of out-of-stock science books. With no new dolls to play with or clay to model into inedible hamburgers, I huddled in a corner and read.

It may not have been that moment, but that is the farthest one back I can remember. Looking back, that could very well have been a well thought out plan by my mother—bury me in books with princesses and witches and pretty drawings, to distract me from my coveted doll and from real life playmates who were knocking at the gate. She preferred having all her children inside her house at all times, that mother hen. Her plan worked though. I did get distracted, and it stuck.

Soon I graduated from fairy tales to pocketbooks, from pocketbooks to chick-lit and now to young adult, which I find oddly more relatable than those stories about posh/wacky girls in their fabulous twenties. Somewhere in the middle of that trail of fiction—some dog-eared and periodically revisited and consumed, others with spines hardly cracked open—, I deemed myself able enough to write a few paragraphs of my own.

I’ve been trying to recall when exactly that decision was made, that significant moment between me and my pen. It was definitely not in penmanship class. There was one English class though that stands out, one teacher in elementary that stuck with me. He was giving me consistently high marks for my essays, but he returned one persuasive essay with a note that read like a sermon: “you’ve done better than this.” I was hurt, embarrassed, and inspired. The 11-year-old me at the time though was just pissed. But I worked with a vengeance to prove that teacher wrong, and I maybe am still doing that now.

So I have found a hobby. That’s how I thought of it. Passion is a word indecipherable to a child, even to a confused adult. I only knew that English is a subject I liked even if the teacher is a Hitler. I liked doing my essays, though I would complain about them with my friends just to look cool and normal. As I read novels I would think—nose wrinkled and upturned—I can so write like this too. I swooned over Edward and Bella, editing as I read, thinking that if I had written Twilight I wouldn’t have gone on about the vampire’s perfection for three long pages, back to back.

I was only inwardly arrogant, of course. My pride was easy to hold in since I hardly talk; people hardly notice. But they have noticed my ‘hobby’ easily, and soon they were reaping a few benefits from it. My hobby résuméis long and rich in variety. I have edited term papers, helped write a thesis (and secretly enjoyed writing mine), contributed countless feature articles and even embarrassing poetry (they read as if written by a drunken person). I’ve done yearbook write-ups for three batch-mates and a friend from another school. I made them look good and yearbook-quality interesting. I knew I was not an expert and little if any of these will count as valid experience in the writer’s field. But I was proud of my work and my heart will do happy jumping jacks whenever I wowed my ‘clients.’ I was happy to do all these for them for free, with hardly any begging required from their end. They didn’t even need to bribe me with dirty ice cream or fish balls.

It seems like a perfect fit, writing and I. Writers usually live inside their heads, can have eccentric quirks, and prefer the solace of their notebooks (now laptops and/or iPads) over the noise of a crowd. It is impossible to write without quiet after all. I can check off these characteristics easily, even if that means admitting to my few weird tendencies (i.e. I itch if I am within range of bad grammar, and I often correct my friends as they speak. But I am terribly susceptible to typos). I think of Emma Thompson’s character in the film Stranger Than Fiction, living as a hermit in a stark white apartment with only a typewriter for company, hair disheveled and unwashed for days, like her crumpled clothes. I think, see that’s how a good writer looks like. She fits the personality perfectly. Maybe the higher the introversion quotient, the better the writer, but still that begs the chicken-and-egg question.

Was Thompson’s character raised as a quiet child, growing up to find herself drawn to the solitary craft? Or did she find that she liked to write and adjusted herself accordingly? In my case, I know which came first. The encyclopedia versus Barbie episode was followed by many others. For one, in elementary I wanted to go to a Milo sports camp. I even dared to think of joining the singing/acting workshops at school, though I was devoid of the relevant talents. For a number of reasons, may it be financial viability or other plans for the summer, I was not allowed nor encouraged to join. Then there were the battles between parents and child about permission to go out or go to parties. Even asking to drop by McDonald’s for a sundae cone after school can be as difficult as getting Harry Potter’s Uncle Vernon to sign his Hogsmeade permission slip. I am embarrassed to admit that the same conflicts ensue now. Though I am in my mid-twenties, my mother still gets a bit enraged when I get home late from a Starbucks date with friends. She once told me, “kape lang pala gusto mo, ang daming kape dito sa bahay!” Her incomprehension of the social rite was amusing to watch.

She just has a different set of values, I tell myself whenever I bite my tongue from talking back at her, or whenever I blame her for raising me a shy, clumsy, physically-uncoordinated child. I think being socially wary herself, it was instinctual for my mother to raise her children the same way. Also my father was not one of the most outgoing or outspoken people in the world, so that didn’t help either. So for me, it was the personality first. Forced in the house for a huge fraction of the day, with the TV off and banned from Shaider and Bioman, I only had my pocketbooks as friends, and then my notebooks and pen. Thus writing molded itself to me in a natural course. I don’t think my parents planned this particularly; my mother just wanted her children to stay in the house so as to minimize all possible exposure to the evils of the outside world, like drugs and alcohol and party people. Extreme though her methods may be (they seem extreme to me), it worked. I am a good kid (most of the time), and I was, in essence, raised into this hobby/passion.

So now I can safely say that I can write all day and will only complain of carpal tunnel (apart from the inevitable writer’s block). Writing has been a terrific outlet on a daily basis, even more so in the dips and peaks in my life. It’s funny that when I am annoyed or strung up or otherwise feeling heightened, my head starts spewing out thoughts in English, when I usually get tongue-tied when I speak the language. These thoughts come out tangled and require some effort to organize, but my diaries read like emotional essays nonetheless.

When I dropped the habit of diary-keeping (there was the dilemma to burn them all or risk them being discovered, the horror. And I never liked to burn stuff), I turned once again to fiction. At the initial wave of my weariness at work, I started working on a novel, the first one since my pre-teen attempts from years back. It was inspired by this Japanese drama I was watching with a favorite friend, and I was pushed to start it by a mix of wanting to do something other than crash to bed after a long day, and my irritation that the lead girl character in the drama did not end up with the boy character that I liked. I started it in 2007, and sometime 2009 it was finished and after grueling deliberation, I decided on a title. These days I return to it, obsessive-compulsively editing it, trying to chop down chapters with a critical eye, since I promised myself I would write (better) than Stephenie Meyer. Sometime in 2009 too, I started another one. They said the best way to get over somebody was to put them in literature, so in that breakup year I tried that. It was liberating and therapeutic, but I have not finished that story yet nor am I actively working on it. I’d like to think that is more because I preferred to perfect the first one first and not because the second one did not meet its initial purpose for being. Finishing this second novel is also high up in my to-do list after all.

And I have decided. I am a writer. Writing is my passion. I want to write for a living. I have known this fact for a while, but I am only putting it into words lined up for action now. Then my mind is rushed by my worries, as it usually is when I make big decisions as this. I severely lack training, even more so time to squeeze this into this juggling act that is my life. And of course, the financial, practical consequences have significant weights too. Don’t they say that artists always starve? It might be an indefinite wait, that period until publication and the actual sale, if ever these events actually take place. But still I sent out those queries through email. When I got three reject replies back, I thought, “there, I am finally growing my writer balls and doing it,” while swallowing my stabbed pride.

So I continue with my novel, slicing up sentences and shifting dialogues, trying to find friends who would give time and discretion to comment the work with a critical eye. I cringe whenever I do this; whenever I share my work it’s like sharing a piece of my heart, naked and open for people to poke on. With this going on, I look through my bucket list and sort it out. I sent an entry to Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Youngblood section but it has been two Saturdays already, so I didn’t seem to have made the cut. I am going to send one article again, and more until I get published there before I am not young enough anymore to be considered Youngblood material. I also discovered these magazine websites that publish from contributors. I’m trying my luck there too, if only for the sight of my name in that glorious byline. The byline is the best one-liner ever.

This is what the universe will conspire with to help me achieve. I always say whenever me, myself and I have our in-head discussions, that the only thing I am sure of about myself is that I am tall, and that  I can write. People who know better will tell that I am raw, or that I sin with bad grammar and composition myself, but these are things I am willing to learn and develop, for now from mere experience and practice. As it is, it would have made a world of difference if mother had gotten me a Barbie doll after all. For one, I probably would be wearing a whole lot more pink. I wonder what would have happened too if those science trivia books were not out of stock. But I guess we will never know, and I am happy with the passion that I have grown into today.

Kudos to anyone who will actually read this until the end, other than my professor.

My father said this to me when I was in elementary school, a miniature me in my rumpled blue skirt and bleached white blouse, my bangs cropped short and uneven over my forehead. I stared at him in awe, sharing the dream. He would say this every time he comes home from Jeddha, in two-year intervals, and he would detail where the garage will be, and how my sisters and I will then finally have our own rooms. Despite my skepticism, I nod my head and find myself designing our two-storey house with him, the image in full color in our heads. My mother would stay in the background, grunting in reply when asked for her opinion. She keeps her attention on the vegetables she slices, chopped steadily and in measured pieces, the same way she organizes her life.

Household scenes like this make me realize, “how different my mother and father think from each other, their minds spinning like alien planets.”

My mother is a rock—strong and sturdy, and always constant. She has a sharp tongue. She does not swear but her words can hurt you, sometimes because her intentions are misunderstood, more often because she speaks the uncut truth. My sisters and I personally think she has a special way with words. The eldest in a brood of five, raised by a father with a gambling streak and a hard-working martyr of a mother, she was forged into an iron woman. My mother is the one who taught me A-Z and 1-10, the skill of waking up early in the morning (which I have not perfected), and the value of not turning on the TV on weekdays when I have homework to do. Having served decades of her life in a job with erratic schedules and promotions based on a master’s degree, my mother planned her children’s lives accordingly—all three will grow up to be professionals, work from 8-5, and get good steady pay.

My father is more of a dreamer, thus is what becomes of a boy whose idea of fun as a child was stealing mangoes from the neighbor’s tree. He was a farmer’s son, born somewhere in the middle of a large brood of ten. He, too like my mother, grew up to several meals of salt and rice. But he is unlike my mother in how she prefers a steady, sustainable life. Instead he sees the good things other people have and aspires to get them, not out of envy, but more for the betterment of his life, and when he had us, the betterment of ours too.

Thus the battle in our house—my father pushes us to try our luck abroad, mother argues for good jobs here in the Philippines. Father is in awe of the biggest, most robust speakers and the newest model laptops, while mother cherishes her small house, always purging it of junk, keen only for marble floors. Father dreams of his own business; mother scoffs at this, preferring her monthly income.

And so I grew up a mix breed. My iPod is my 5th limb, but I counted every penny when I bought it. I took up a business course so I can fit like a glove in the offices along Ayala. I am a brain that will not migrate, but I too am not satisfied with my corporate life and I plan for change. Common values emanate from both parents though. They sum it up well with their mantra, “we don’t have land to inherit to you, not a single penny to pass on, so do well in your studies, and as sisters, always help each other “.

These become the guiding principles of my life and (with much effort from my part to reinforce it) in the lives of my sisters. Different though all five of us are in the family, in shape and size, in minds and in personalities, we sail through every day with these general truths supporting us—that education and learning are the only things we have that will not expire, and at the end of the day, we always come home to our family.

But as life is not a vacuum, and days are not spent locked inside the house, I find myself also a product of things, people, and places that I encounter on a daily basis. Whenever asked to look back, I, the skeptic, always say, “at 25 years, what am I expected to have experienced?” But that’s just me putting the shields back on, and glossing over the things in the past that I do not want to remember, or do not want to dwell into.

At 20 years old, I was sadly but triumphantly leaving UP. I took with me my degree and my honors (grudgingly lower than my goal of a magna cum laude, but that was my fault). Even before graduation, I was already accepted into a management trainee position—the trendy and logical position my batch mates and I wanted. We were arrogant; we did not want to start at the bottom. We wanted to be managers in a span of months.

And so that’s what I did. After much unexpected hardship from the traineeship program, I came out a junior officer, with the fresh shiny title of Assistant Manager. That turned out to be the only shiny thing about the job. I was thrown into a big branch in the center of Makati, five people directly under me, at least five more also under my supervision with a workaholic boss that expects the same. I was forced to learn nearly everything along the way, since of course, as I should have been wiser to know, projector lectures and training materials can only teach you so much.

I would arrive home at 9pm every day an exhausted child. Work got easier to handle in due time; one gets used to routines and rules after a few months, more so after five years. And in that span of time, I picked up a couple of significant learnings—one, branch banking is not for me. I realized that whenever I am silently slumped over my reports and emails, and suddenly a client sits in front of me, disturbing my work. I tell myself I still have not internalized the whole point of customer service. But on hindsight, maybe I’m just not designed for it. I know now this is not the career path where I will flourish in, but still I smile at my clients every day, because I do not want to make the same mistake the 20-year-old me did. I am not jumping on the next big ship just for the sake of jumping. There are more important things to consider than good pay and a title. I have to not hate going to work, to be doing something I actually like for a living, and while I figure that out, I will be patient.

Work in the branch also taught me about people. The introvert that I am, even as a child I preferred the company of books to playmates, of a couple of close friends to a party-load of guests. But when flung in a sea of staff and customers, one is forced to adjust, and to adjust, also to learn. I developed my patience and my diplomacy. Such skills are required when a client is demanding an impossible transaction, or else nearly spitting at your face and you are not allowed to spit back. When the staffs start taking sides, gossiping and rumor-mongering, whether about their jobs or their personal lives, I as their officer, am obligated to stand in the middle and sort out the confusion. These kinds of episodes gave me a certain wariness over relationships. As much as I want to be the cool boss who is friends with the staff, there is a line to be drawn, and it is my choice how thin I will make it. These also taught me a good juggling act—balancing personalities unique from each other and so much different from my own, while maintaining good, if not even harmonious bonds.

I also learn more about myself and relationships outside of the office, in those treasured pockets of time between work and home. I am the type who once I make a commitment, I set it in stone. So naturally, I am the last person to know when something is wrong.

My first boyfriend was a classmate in senior high, and eventually (after he pulled some strings) my seatmate. In college, he was an Atenista and I was taga-UP, and thus we were only separated by Katipunan road. After I graduation, I was a bank officer while he lingered in school for an extra year. I should have noticed it by then. When he graduated, I was still a bank officer and he was heading one of their family businesses in Bataan. Quezon-City-Bataan can hardly be called long distance, scoffs my friends, but that is what we allowed it to be. I shouldn’t have been surprised with those two cold weeks, and then the text that followed, ending our seven-year relationship.

I was surprised I only cried for a month, and in short episodes too, not in long dragging days of depression and immobility. My sister would smirk and tell me, “You’re only pretending to be sad”. And I realized my logical way of dealing with it worked. In my head I kept rationalizing the clichés that were in his break-up speech—“we were growing apart”, “your life is heading in a different direction than mine”—and I agreed with them. On bitter days, I find myself thinking, “I should have broken up with him instead, and sooner.” But then it may be a good thing that it took me seven years and an imposed separation to see my co-dependency, the way I lived my life inside our bubble, devoid of close friends and much interests of my own. I am not discounting the things I learned from him though; we grew up together after all. I owe him my re-education in rock music, late nights in gigs, and a love for sweaters, among many others. But I came out of that relationship hungry for independence and for change, eager to build friendships and to feel new things, and aware that my life needs major reorganization. I am not jaded, nor will I allow myself to be cynical, but I will not fall for the next boy who sits next to me, at least until I have sorted out my own life.

Experiences such as these bring to the forefront the weaknesses that haunt me, and the strengths that balance it out. I had an epiphany recently. I was going on in awe for days at the Enneagram and how learning I was a ‘Thinker’ explained a lot of things, when I realized—I thought too much, and did little. I make decisions in my head, but they turned out to be only choice options, yet to be promoted to decisions, because I have not committed to them.

I was raised a shy person—a by-product of a disciplinarian mother, of not being allowed to play with friends as soon as the sun sets, of being told to choose books over TV and over people. Being an introvert I find that my advantages lie in my mind, like in how I like to read and how I excel in writing. I was one of the few who felt sad about leaving school, and I was labeled a geek (which I secretly liked). I also find that I observe very well. I daydream as a sport and like to watch people and situations, and I am surprised about the things I pick up from these. Given these, I find that I do not like an idle mind. I like to learn, whether from books or teachers, or from work or the TV. It does not have to be fundamental—my interests are hardly philosophical. But this good trait drives me to learn daily, and motivates me to attain better things and higher goals. This trait also helps me with people. Much as I do not revel in the company of a crowd, my observations give me social discernment, and equip me with tools to navigate around different kinds of people.

Then there is the corollary weakness that I was finally able to put into words recently—there is a disconnect between my brain and my mouth. There are times—too many instances—when I have things brewing inside my head that I cannot form into words, or explain in a way to make others understand. Often the statement comes out with lukewarm effect, the full meaning lost in translation and I get frustrated. I would tell the receiving party, “here, just read about what I mean,” or “let me write an email to explain.” This insecurity (there, I admit it) inhibits me from making a suggestion in a meeting, in raising a point in class, at times even in speaking out to a reckless taxi driver. Only recently, I decided to talk in class, and as I raised my small hand my heart was pounding painfully inside my chest, nervous at the small recitation. It is an issue of confidence, of fear of rejection and of being called out as wrong, and these are excuses to be weathered. I am forced out of my shell often by circumstances, by orders from the boss, the professor or the parents, armed only by blind courage and the desire to just finish the task. This is my Achilles’ heel, and the battle to arm it is ongoing.

I very rarely reflect on my life in such a comprehensive, organized way as this, and looking through it I can only conclude that I am a work in progress. I am under construction, and I think that is the best way to look at things. Even when I start to live my dreams and achieve holistic happiness, I do not think it’s prudent to think of it as work all done. There must always be efforts to change, to upgrade into better versions of myself. And ultimately, this is what my past quarter-life has prepared me for—the achievement of Angeline Tria, 4^th Generation.

My 4G self will be a kinder daughter, who is more understanding of her mother’s temper and her father’s shoot-at-the-moon ideas. She will fight the Big C side by side with her mother, and be the rock she is expected to be, no matter this expectation remains unsaid. The 4G me will be a supportive sister, will hold in the primal instinct of indulging them out of fondness, and instead be the third parent that they need now that the first two ones are getting older. She will treasure her friends, as she is lucky to have stumbled upon real ones. She will be more honest with herself, and will let go off the delusion that she is fine with her job. She will be brave, aware of the value of each second, but will not fall into recklessness. She will not make excuses for her weaknesses, but will work to outgrow them, or if not, work around them. She will not overestimate her strengths, but will humbly improve them. Above all, the 4G me will no longer fear change.

It seems like a long way to go, and the road is never-ending. But these spikes and pitfalls of my short life have given me discernment over it, the skill (though still rough) to look at problems and situations and realize not only the silver lining, but the reasons behind them. This makes it easier to accept things to which I have no control over, and to move into the right decisions for things that I can control.

Thoughts of life and the future inexorably bring me back to my father. I know I do not particularly like two-storey houses. They have stairs which will almost certainly cripple a clumsy girl like me, and the two floors will be difficult to scrub. But when my father speaks of it that is his idealistic side talking, and he connects the big house to satisfaction and achievement in life, and happiness of the family living inside it. And so to revert to my discussions with my father, I too am now preparing to build a two-storey house.

***

When you study in a Jesuit school like Ateneo, they force things on you that you would otherwise not have experienced in a public, government-run school like UP (ah the liberty I enjoyed there). In Ateneo they make you think about your life, and claw up issues you work so hard to bury under layers of work emails, memos, cyber-life drama, and Kpop playlists.

But the end-product is graded, and thus, here is the result. Enjoy reading about the mess that it is my life. I truly am working on it 😀

Too Old for This.

At 25 years, I’m not supposed to be having a crisis. That cheerful experience is meant for my 50’s, when the son has met the traitorous friend that is alcohol, the daughter has started dating that boy in the ripped skinny jeans, and the husband makes less sense than my worth at work. But at 25 I’m only halfway there, and I wonder if I would even get to this more socially common crisis age.

It’s not about fear of dying, or dying young. I do not fear death per se, I realized only as I write this. Instead I fear death on a day before I’ve accomplished anything worthwhile. Not an original fear really, leaving the world with no imprint, an invisible man. Many lost men have wandered through this dark veil, the clarity of their lives obscured. But then, I wonder if I’m too young to even be bothering with such dark thoughts, or if I’m already too old to do something about them.

Mine wasn’t an extraordinarily exciting life, and the quarter-life feels so short. One vivid stream of memories that stick out is my left hand holding a pencil, a pen, and somehow always lucky enough to get for my efforts that gold star, that 90++, and then those 1.0s. I get good marks in English at school, and then on summer breaks I do not take my leave. I compile stacks of notebooks, filled with neat scribbles about people in my head, in well-imagined (at times emulated straight from Sweet Valley High and Unicorn Club pocketbooks) plots. I look back at them on the odd lazy day, and feel proud that I cringe only on the sappy love lines, and not on the grammar and composition. I would think, “not bad for 10-year old me”, tuck my notebooks in their special place in the shelves, and grin.

So I knew I was a writer. I knew that when I took journalism as an elective in high school, eventually graduating to features editor for the school paper, The Electron. I remember being allowed by my mother for a sleepover for the first time ever in my life. It was at my mentor’s house, and we were training for the inter-high school competition. I remember that long night, my ego bruised from red marks and relentless critiques on my work and the countless revisions I was forced to write. Come D-day afternoon I wrote my piece, and I remember, vividly, crying in the sink hours later after I came home a loser. But stubborn is in me, says my horoscope, and I said with set determination (albeit only to the mirror)—I can write well, that I am certain.

Fast forward ten years and here I am a bank manager (see how it all fits?). I’ve been trying to work back how I got here, and I have concluded that it all started when we all gave up on my grandfather’s dream of having me as the doctor in the family. The dream died when my sisters and I caught dengue fever, then at the first wave of its popularity. That was my first conscious encounter with the needle, and my 12-year old self was bawling like a pig to the slaughter in the ER. Not something a doctor-to-be would do.

And so we hopped on to the next noble profession, which my mother hereby decreed as accountancy. But lo, the stars and the UP Diliman quota system did not allow that dream too. So after one year and a course shift later, I found myself in a class with Professor Solita Monsod, enrolled in Business Economics. My mother then graciously said, ‘ah, yes, this will do.’

Maybe, in hindsight, we can all blame my mother.

I went through college in the same fashion I did in my academic life—always striving for the top, with a slight competitive streak, and a teeny tendency for grade-consciousness. I had a boyfriend (that counts as a social life), I led my college organization (points for extra-curriculars), and so it looked very much like a well-balanced existence. My college academic life was led by one clear visual goal painted by my parents—a power suit in an air-conditioned office, preferably in a building with elevators. My father particularly liked the part about the elevators, which I think he connected to good pay. ‘The higher the lift goes up, the higher your wage bracket’, was his theory.

Can we blame my father too, for my life as it is today?

And so to a bank I go for employment. At the branch I forgo the elevator, but after six months of tedious training (hired as a fresh graduate) I was already a bank officer. It was a feat that made both mother and father, even grandfather proud. I work with numbers, which I learned in school that I am good at too. I perform the routine the bank has ingrained in my system through months of training and a few years of experience (i.e. punishment through hard labor). I smile at clients even when they scream insults at the bank’s policies and my intellect (which are apparently interchangeable). It is as the customer service code dictates. I monitor my endless work emails, and enjoy the exercise of composing and answering them. I earn a fair amount, and can buy most things I want. But always there are days, even long months, when I come to work bearing a tiny fire of a grudge inside, unable to feel satisfaction.

And I think: I am too young for all this responsibility, all the risk I absorb as a bank officer. And the days pass, watching me grow too old to do something I actually want. I allow this state, falling trap to the routine as I often do. It is comfortable after all.

Comfort, I learned though, follows the behavior of a killer rollercoaster. Slowly it goes up, until it reaches a plateau, then goes for a vertical dive.

Maybe if life is only one aspect, one can strive to be in complete satisfaction at all times, comfortable where they are. Let a person forgo romantic love, and still be happy. Let a person have a perfect family, and so what if there is no food on the table, and no dreams to be accomplished? Let a person live only for work and succeed there, not minding that he is alone, with no care for his family.

I was eating dinner alone, home late again after a hard day’s work and a hard day’s commute. I was musing about the problems I am encountering in my new branch, hating myself for bringing my cares at work to the dinner table. My mother walked by and casually said, ‘I felt a lump in my breast yesterday. Can you schedule a leave on the 10th? That’s when the doctor will confine me for biopsy.’ And off she went. I had to call her back so I can ask for details, stumped as I was for a quick second from the news.

Two things crossed my mind then—one, my grandmother (my mother’s mother) died of breast cancer. Two, I am not allowed to cry or show weakness, not in this house.

February 10 came and together we rode a taxi to the hospital. It was a long uneasy ride. My mother is not the most communicative person. She is strict and conservative, such that she was not someone her children can run to when they get a boo-boo on their knees, or to gush about their first crushes. Not without risk of getting a scolding. My sisters and I resented her for it, until growing up we realized that is simply how she loves, dysfunctional though it might seem. And so we sat in that taxi, and I wondered out loud if my father in Saudi even knew what we were up to, to which she gave a curt, ‘yes’.

It was easily the longest eight days of my life, and I can imagine, a thousand times more so for my mother. There was a distinct feeling of helplessness being in that small private room with her, both of us staring at the ceiling, merely drifting to and from sleep that night before the operation. The only words she said to me was, ‘wake up, it’s time.’ The nurses had come in and I realized it was morning.

I walked with the entourage of nurses as they wheeled my mother in her bed to the operating room. They stopped and scurried off, and I stood next to my mother, watching her continue tracing lines in the ceiling. I dared not hold her hand. Then the surgeon was there, and the nurses were back and they shooed me away.

The operation would take an hour if the lump is benign, two if malignant. I sat in the waiting room, surrounded by old women in wheelchairs and their escorts. I stuffed my ears and let Brandon Flowers sing to me ‘The World that We Live in’, my hands gripping the iPod as the old TV showed images I could not see. My sister arrived past the first hour. She had told our youngest to go straight to school, and then she sat there with me to stare at the TV in grim silence too. After the second hour she had to leave for class. And I was alone again, the noise of the nurses and patients coming and going driving a drill in my head. Why wasn’t anyone coming to talk to me? Was there a sign-up sheet I missed? My phone was getting flooded with texts from my aunts and friends to which I did not know the answer to. Finally on the third hour I got up, bile splashing in my stomach and approached a nearby nurse (in the least agitated manner I can muster lest I strangle her), who said, ‘Oh she’s in the recovery room. Go up to your room and wait for her there.’

Suffice it to say that the agony of that following wait bore the same weight. The next time I saw my mother her left breast had been removed, and days later we were planning her chemotherapy.

Our household underwent a major reorganization of sorts after that. That was only when I realized (shame on me, the eldest daughter) that we were lazy children. It was mother who did all the cooking, the laundry, cleaning the house, and it had to take breast cancer and chemo sessions for the three of us to pick up our load. Father arrived for his vacation soon after, but then before we could settle to a routine he had to go back to work, leaving us, his girls, to our own devices.

This happening might seem incongruent to my earlier premise, my ongoing crisis of life at work and life’s purpose in general. But life—faux philosophical as this may sound—is a tangled web of the things we do every day, and what we are to the people around us.

I muse about this often when I do the laundry. There is no one to talk to when I load the washer, and the water runs too loudly to listen to music. I scrub my mother’s uniforms and I tell myself I should find a new job that pays more, so I can pay for at least her medicine; at best, so I can tell her to quit her high pressure job and find a lighter load to ease her boredom. Or maybe I should stall my graduate schooling until the household expenses feel lighter. I think about my father, who feels lonely and distant, though he knows he needs to keep working where he is for all of us. I worry about my sisters too, close though we are, if they realize the gravity of mother’s condition, and if they have dreams of their own.

And what of my own dreams? After years of struggle I felt I finally found my independence, the ability, and freedom to make my own choices and do as I please (though with my mother’s voice still echoing in my ear). But these days it feels like I’ve lost a bit of that freedom again, and I feel tied closer to my family, with both positive and negative consequences.

I find my day sliced into four now—early morning for my chores, then a huge chunk of it sold to work, then at night it’s time for homework and to indulge in the little writing I can do, in an editorial, unpaid position in a small blog. My friends, on those few occasions I find time for them, scold me for stretching myself out too thin on these different responsibilities that demand different things from me. But I tell them, I cannot be selfish and not take initiative in our house. A cancer patient must not worry, must not be tired or stressed, thus I must be the one to do the groceries, check on the chores, and to supervise my sisters who sometimes seem to be growing up backwards. I cannot be selfish and not work hard in the office, when my superiors trust me, and my staffs depend on me and I depend on my earnings. And then I cannot be completely selfless too, and not pursue my studies when I have looked forward to this for so long; this is a standing plan. And please, indulge me my harmless vices, when I, as a fan girl, write until past midnight on WordPress, on things that have no relevance to the world at large.

So maybe I only lost one kind of freedom, and with that gained new responsibilities, and a greater control of my own life and that of people around me. It all looks like a shabby mess sometimes, when I take a wider perspective and take a peek at my world. There are things out of my control, but a lot within my grasp too. I cannot control my mother’s body, but I can take care of her and her family. I cannot force our youngest to like her course, nor can I magically make my other sister pass her board exams. But I can stand as firm support, and teach them the little that I know, and play with them the games only the three of us understand.

I cannot force myself to like my job, and there is only a certain amount of success I can claim for it given my lukewarm heart. But it is my choice to stay for now, not meaning I mean to be trapped there, not meaning I will choose to be too old before I act. All things will happen in due time, it is a matter of searching and working for the right moment, and the right opportunity.

I still believe I am a writer. I still hold on to that one ringing truth in the book the Alchemist, that “when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” My laptop is spammed with documents I’ve been working on for years, which will someday see the light of day. My old molding notebooks rest in my shelf, to remind me.
If there is anything to learn with experiences such as this, and with a few others brewing in my memory right now, is that change is permanent and imminent. This is not a fact of life to fear, because if an unexpected change bears upon you it only means you have the power to counteract with change as well. There is no one else to blame. It’s not about feeling too old or too young, that is only an excuse to justify inaction (though I still have to keep reminding myself of that, I need mental reconditioning).

And with that epiphany in mind, I know I will not die an invisible man. In the meantime, John Mayer’s song plays in the background, the main song to the soundtrack of my life that we shall call The Quarter-life Crisis. And he, too, ‘wonder(s) sometimes/About the outcome/Of a still verdictless life.’

And I sing back, with Karaoke fervor:

‘Am I living it right? Am I living it right?
Am I living it right?
Why Georgia, why?’
*****
References:
Coelho, Paolo. The Alchemist. Harper Torch, 1983.
Mayer, John. Room for Squares. Columbia Records, 2001.