Believing Like Charlotte
Still can’t seem to stop thinking about my Sex and the City season-marathon last week, but the cafe mocha at SBC is sure to stay on my system even if I want to remove it already. What should I talk about this time (before sleep creeps on me)?
Love.
Yes, love. Over the years, people on all walks of life talk about love and we can notice that each person has an experience of loving. I have experienced love and being loved in return. 29 years of being in love was kind of a roller-coaster ride for me, but it all came down to three words that best described it: I AM (WAS, WILL BE) HAPPY.
Like a roller coaster, love is a mixture of screaming up and screaming down situations. As soon as the ride continues to exhaust us by our screaming mania, people watching from afar will notice how fun it is to have that coaster-ride. Then even with all the screaming, as soon as the ride stops, we will keep coming back for more.
Just like Charlotte York-McDougal-Goldenblatt in Sex and the City, despite having three single friends who talk about how great a single life could be, she still believed in love and marriage (even after a divorce). Once an Episcopalian, she was been converted into a Jew, because her then-boyfriend cannot marry someone that was not Jewish. She took all her strength to finally bear the fact that she could not celebrate Christmas anymore—all because of love. I could not imagine renouncing my beliefs just because this certain man would not want to marry me for my religion. But come to think of it, if that would sustain his love for me, would I do it?
How do we sustain love then? How can two persons be in love for the rest of their lives, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, until death would part their ways? Should they gamble on the idea that sickness is equal to health and being poor is equal to being rich when it comes to love? How then could these two persons maintain the “zza zza zzu’s” of passionate love? Is it just about trust or is it really about believing love in its entirety?
If we would want to sustain love, therefore we should believe in the One who created it, then! How else could you understand a thing if you didn’t know where it came from? We ought to define love in so many ways, may it be friendly love, puppy love, romantic love, motherly love, fatherly love, great love, one true love or first love but sometimes, it was not enough. We tried to figure out love in relation to our experiences but if we did believe love was out there, then we should believe in the One who created love and how HE actually defined love. Did we really ever think of that? How did God define love? How could God sustain love?
I pulled out a necklace (which was given to me on my birthday) in my drawer and stared at it for a minute. While staring at it, I remembered a song. Maybe with all these thoughts in my head and these questions blazing my mind about love every now and then, I feel like I should somehow tell myself to JUST believe in love (and pray to God for it), like Charlotte did.
By the way, the song reminded me to believe in love because “it is the one thing that has gotten us this far.”
(note: as you can see, I have questions in this article, so if you have thoughts about love then, feel free to make a comment or even answer them in any way you can. Thanks!)
I Just Had A Bottle of San Pellegrino, Then I Realized…
After watching season 5 of Sex and the City, I grabbed two oranges to eat. I am not deliberately starving myself; I just had this mood of eating only fruits for dinner. While munching on a piece of orange, it suddenly dawned on me this thought about one of its episodes. Carrie Bradshaw had observed that despite us having an amazing life and a fabulous career, we tend to focus on one critic against us. Just then I remembered an experience I had a few months ago…
Facebook has its way of connecting people (well, Nokia has that motto, originally), and my best friend had added some people into his account that he thought he knew. One girl, added him to make friends with him, apparently had gone beyond the limits of actually making a comment in one of his pictures. To my surprise, it was the picture of me and my best friend the day my mom was hospitalized at Asian Hospital. Lo and behold, the message was like this: “is dis yur yaya?” (English for: “Is this your maid?”). Well, as a mature person, of course, that was not intentionally done (or maybe it was? Right?) but sometimes, when a picture reminds us of a very hurtful incident and people will just make fun of it, I guess it would be a normal reaction to raise the flags up high and say, SHUT UP?! All it takes is a chicken to produce an egg, by the way.
Thanks to my wonderful best friend who had told me all of the good things in me and to knock my head off and say, “Cmon! Forget it and move on!”, since he also had made everything under control, eventually. But you see, all it takes is just one bad comment to literally brush all of the marvellous traits you have. In that case, now I can disagree to that.
To make the long story short, evidently, this girl was connected to some group of people who were once a part of my best friend’s past life (it was obvious by the way, it seems funny to me though, why do all the trick and waste time?). Since I am known to be a bitch-computer-geek, I saw the connections, thanks to the internet! So to speak and repeating it again, all it takes is a chicken to produce an egg, by the way.
I, for one, had to be partly blamed because being the sensitive girl that I was, I reacted unwisely to that situation. But experience told me that to be a fool, you need another fool to complement you. To be destroyed, you need another person to destroy you. To be slapped in the face, you need another person to do that. So you would not be fooled unless you let yourself be fooled. You will not be destroyed unless you let yourself be destroyed. You will not be slapped in the face unless you stop the hand at once. If an allegory will find its way to this, there would be no egg without a chicken (there would be no chicken without an egg).
I was raised by my dad and mom to be mature, to be sophisticated and to have good manners all the time. BUT…sometimes, the fruit falls far from the tree especially if the wind is too strong. The fact that experiences teach us a lesson, let us learn from this: in order to tell the whole world what you have learned about, you have to go the extra mile for that. Even if it is way beyond what is expected of you. You see, I have learned that always, IT TAKES TWO TO TANGO. An action will likely to have a stimulus whether it is good or bad.
Seriously speaking, the chicken did come first before the egg but as soon as the egg was hatched, should there be another choice to procreate it? Take the chicken (the girl) and the egg (me) for example. If I were hatched, should I continue to produce more eggs in the name of revenge? Or should I just stop it from there?
I don’t know of other people who intentionally continue doing it in their own world, (now that is what I call a “chicken”), producing eggs of bitterness, in the long run, who will be there to make it all okay? Just yourself, right? You should be your own critic. Either you tell yourself you have been destroyed and let the whole wide world know, or you tell yourself you are a fantastic creature that will always be up for a challenge and win it!
I did the two. Now, I think the whole world might read this. Maybe I was also a fool to let another fool, fool me. Maybe I was stupid enough to let another one destroy me. But I am stopping at that. I realized that I need to learn. I have learned, and so far, I have learned the hard way. I am stopping the egg to grow into a chicken to produce another egg. My intention is to impart what I have reflected. My reflections told me that from now on, I am a brilliant woman who will always say, “I am up for a challenge with no one…BUT ME”.
I was supposed to have a glass of wine while writing this but since I needed to be healthy these days, opt for a bottle of San Pellegrino sparkling water, instead. Cheers!
Dramatis Personae…
I am an actress.
My life revolves around scripts, directors, lights, camera and action! I deal with co-actors and co-actresses everyday like crazy. In the morning, my script starts on an undefined prologue. Sometimes, I want to do an ad lib to every line the scriptwriter had written for me. But what can I do? I am only an actress.
You see, I am not a movie actress. I act on stage, where people can see me, where people can judge what I am doing and where people can see exactly what my face can utter at that very moment, beyond any words can imply. When curtain call starts, I have a cue on what to do, but my decision lies as to how my audience would react. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they smile. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they get mad.
On stage, I see to it to avoid looking into my audience’s eyes. When I do, I could feel deep inside that somehow, the character I am playing has happened to their lives. Sometimes I wonder what those eyes meant. Am I being judged by my capacity to act, by the character I am playing or by the way they really look at me?
Nevertheless, I love being on stage. The stage gives me many lessons I have always thought I would never be able to handle. The costumes I have worn come in different colors where I knew I have grown to, a lot. The props used to every act had taught me there are pieces in your life that needs to be recycled or to be thrown away immediately. Each character my co-actors or actresses have portrayed has presented a wonderful mixture of blending dialogues, exchanging conversations and executing emotions. In each play, sometimes there are two protagonists, one antagonist and other extras. At times, I can be the protagonist and many antagonists. There are also times when I have been forced to deal with a weak protagonist and I am the antagonist. But there are also times when I am the extra, having only one scene to act or being a prop wearing a big costume that covers every part of my body except my eyes. But as always, I have a character to portray. Oftentimes, the character on the script is a lot like me.
Life for me is a stage.
A never-ending act on-stage…
Le Kiss La Doleur Exquise
Being a writer entails many situations where every word can somehow create a vague meaning in your mind. Sometimes, it encourages you to find out every detail of that word but occasionally, the fuzziness of the jagged puzzle rambling through your senses is just one collaborative seduction of words.
Let’s take the words pain and pleasure for example. What happens when you talk about pain with someone who had just undergone surgery? Is the meaning of pain related to the pricking sensation felt right after the surgery? Ask then instinctively what kind of pleasure was derived from the experience of surgery? Is it because of the freedom from the illness or the freedom from worries made by the illness? But isn’t it that pain and pleasure almost always are both rivals in the marathon of life?
Webster’s Dictionary shows us that pain do comes before pleasure…in as much as we would argue about pleasure first so that pain may be understood or pain first so that pleasure may be enjoyed. In the beginning, also, on a Christian perspective, pain was made when original sin was done (because one is on the state of sin), but as time had gone by, the blessing of forgiveness from God perfectly describes pleasure (since we are on the state of grace). Painfully, pain comes first.
However, what we need to ask ourselves is what matters most between these two exquisite words? Is it the pain or the pleasure? No man could ever answer pain because, normally, people have negative reactions towards inciting pain. But take it from couples who pride themselves in engaging to an everyday argument. How come they choose to stay despite embracing the pain of “fighting”? Is it love? Is it that they just become numbed from the pain? Or is it really the pain that makes it pleasurable for them to stay?
Intimately speaking, then, when lovers engage in body-boggling, intense and sweltering sex, the moment when a man comes in a woman, it is painful right? How come everyone loves to have sex then? Is it love? Is it the happiness of connecting to someone you love? Is it the feeling of union between you and the one you love? Or is it really the pain that makes it pleasurable to have sex?
I guess for whatever reason or opinion one could have, what matters really is how we handle pain in all circumstances. The mere fact that there is pleasure afterwards will make it even more exciting and inspiring. Pain do comes first, but pleasure can follow pain immediately. We may never have to see pain in its most negative role if only we could focus on controlling its effects.
For all you know, pain might be pleasure in disguise! (but no one wants pain, definitely!)
