Attitude

You kill people with kindness, hoping to create an alternative to the hostile environment; instead, it turns around to be an expectation. The surprise element is no more, and you either have to top-up your level of kindness or you kill the idea of kindness altogether. In my case, I pick and choose, because the virtue of patience has been thinned out and pretty much depleted like the ozone layer.

Candy day today at work and the following were my fortunes in my Perugia chocolates:

An ideal husband is unmarried. – [Yes, I’m likely to steal people’s husband and make ‘em mine. I know this sounds so wrong but there’s something appealing about a man who’s taken. I suppose it’s like this: if he’s someone treasure, then my savageness tempts and prompts me to steal. Fortunately, I have been on the other side so my logical side will calm my temptation. Haha, as soon as I finished the above thought, I realized I should add a very important disclaimer: not all men who are taken because I often ponder about their "good" qualities ]

Real friendships can be enjoyed in silence. – [If only this were true…haha…obviously this does not hold true for one of my very close friend. I’ve complained quite often that I want some peace in the car or on the trip.]

Loving a person right vs. Loving a right person

In the past year, I’ve given the above a lot of thought. Neither of which I have done successfully in the past. However, I’m attempting to do that now. It’s a start. I’ve learned that to love someone, it doesn’t mean you have to be with him almost all the time. To love someone, you can silently wish him well. You could sit beside him and not have to tell him how you feel. You could just give and not ask for anything in return. You could just listen to his life story, be inspired, acknowledge his faults and love him nonetheless. It really can be silently expressed.

In that coffee shop, I once told my best friend that I’m unable to love someone so innocently again, to just give without asking for anything in return. He said that it’s really sad. I said it’s realistic. It’s funny, for the rather emotional me, I’m always weighing the pros and cons when it comes to romantic relationships.

But I was wrong again. There was a special him that I’ve been loving the right way, even though we’re far from right for each other. The moment passes, but the feelings that lingered, I believe, made me relearn.

The guy on GO train

Every morning, I get on a specific cart of the GO train. For about two months now, there's this smiley guy who looks familiar to me. I'm not the only one staring haha because I can tell he's doing the same thing. Well, yesterday while waiting for the delayed train, he was saying "so busy" in Hakka to another guy who used to go to our restaurant. So I realized that I've met this guy when I was a teenager. It's kinda cool that I've seen quite a few of our old Hakka customers on the GO train. Even more cool that they recognize me and say hello. I used to know at least their last names but I've forgotten most of them by now. Sometimes I miss working at the restaurant. Anyways, one of these days when I muster up the courage, I'll start with a friendly hello.

Handle With Care

It's Sunday. I woke up early, read, cleaned, brewed my mid-day coffee and it's now my casual writing time.

I can't thank Eric enough for giving me Jodi Picoult's newest book, Handle With Care as a gift. The book was riveting, emotional, page-turner, and very informative. A lot of the perspectives in the book are something my family and I have certainly trod on and explored in the past. Willow's Type III Osteogenesis Imperfecta is nowhere near as drastic as Muscular Dystrophy - FSH. Amelia's emotional troubles are nowhere close to my personal struggles as a sister who witnesses physical, spiritual, emotional pain day in and day out. Charlotte and Sean remind me that there is no visibly bright black and white line for wrongful birth, abortion, and love. Charlotte and Piper's relationship is a reminder that anything can come in between of the best of friendship.

Despite all of those issues and some, does it mean we should stop living, put up a great wall and distance ourselves just because we've been disappointed? I used to be the kind of person who receives pain, and visit the pain until I grow immune to it. It's probably partly why some people around me think I'm forgiving. Nowadays, I inflict pain, or I turn my back on those painful familial relationships, romantic relationships or friendships not because I'm no longer brave, but because I've given up. I've given up on trying to get people to see the positive side and somewhere along the lines, I've given up on being optimistic myself. I've given up on people who don't try and meet me halfway. On a larger extent, I've forgotten that they too have a lot of struggles and choices to make. I've basically put up a white flag and didn't even call it a truce; instead, I've just walked away and told myself that the other party and I just don't click, will just not get along.

Basically, all the grey areas of my life, I've divided them into a black and white issue. It clears up the doubts and the questions in the attempt to rationalize the kind of person I am, the kind of person I want to be and the kind of people I want to keep in my life. Mark calls this my bitchy side, which is not a negative thing at all. I just think it's time to go about things differently than before, and I really don't care about what they think, or how they want to treat it. The way I see it, I'm not pushing people out of my life, I'm only making it clear that this is what I want. They can either stay in or stay out, it's really a very simple choice, much like I can stay in or stay out of their lives. For so long, I've catered to what they want, to go about things their way, that it's just time to change things around. The way I've handled things before, it was my choice before, just as it's my choice today to make the other choice.

Albert Einstein once said, "Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile." I'd rebut that and argue that a life lived for solely others is a life less worthwhile. The brittleness of human bond is just that, it doesn't matter how much you protect it, how much padding you put around it; it only matters to how much you want to accept it and take it for whatever value it's worth today.

The following are some quotes from the book that I felt were very articulate of human bond:

“I think you can love a person too much. You put someone on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what’s wrong – a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don’t even realize what you look like, how far you’ve deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.”

“Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect – I guess that’s where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who’s there to remind you what you learned along the way. And I think we were both wrong about something. People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.”

“Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between losing a best friend and losing a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumphs and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you’d start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realizing you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number. “

“Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.”

“But love wasn’t about sacrifice, and it wasn’t about falling short of someone’s expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.”

“When you think you’re right, you are most likely wrong.”

“Things that break – be they bones, hearts or promises – can be put back together but will never really be whole.”

“You can miss a person you’ve never known.”