It was my cousin Ace’s birthday last night, and we of course took the chance to celebrate and be merry!

slowdownmonday:

Hannah’s relationship with Adam hits so close to home that I’m practically watching myself dial that number of that guy who I know will never love me but for some reason just keeps pulling me back in, and it’s like I’m the one who gets up and has a lengthy conversation late at night with the boy who will never love me but we connect on some level that I don’t understand that I can’t help but think that maybe he could love me.

We all know this isn’t gonna end well for Hannah. We’ve all been there.

I hate this show so much. I love this show so much.

I think it’s become obvious by now that I do all my writing at night. It works for some people. Unfortunately, everything that I’ve been writing recently has been the kind of drivel that you would expect from some random twenty-three year-old with an odd sense of entitlement mixed in with guilt, and a whole slew of other things. And I don’t like that. I hate sounding like this, albeit somewhat anonymously over the interwebz. But I’m still trying to learn how to write for myself again, and I think this drivel is all that crap that I need to get out of my system, simply because I’d been holding an internal dialogue for too long.

You know what I just fully understood the other day? Women are crazy. And I’m mean all of us. I always liked to think that I’m one of the few ones that is able to dial it down from the other nutjobs, or at least hide the crazy from the world. Unfortunately, I’ve realized that since I’ve been single (and surround by couples) for a really long time now, my crazy has manifested in different ways. So it turns out, I’m just as crazy as the rest of them, but mine seems like it’s not there because the guys aren’t looking for the right kind of crazy. I’m a unique kind of whack job. I feel so special.

Now I thought about writing about the crazy. But then I thought against it. When I was in my teens, I would write about every single inane thing that would happen in my life, every miniscule thought that would pass through my brain. Well, I was told on a few occasions that my writing was good and they enjoyed reading about those things, but when I looked back and read some of the things that I had written when I was fifteen or sixteen, all I feel is utter and complete humiliation. It is only our generation and the ones that came after it that flaunts ever so eagerly the stupidity that we posses in our hormonal teenage years over a platform as broad as the Internet. The baby boomers had it good. 

Besides, I make it too easy for people to stalk me already as it is. Not that I’m saying that people do stalk me, but if ever anyone were to want to, searching my name would practically give them my life on a platter. Not good. Especially if I ever want to get employed or date someone respectable ever again. Or date at all, period.

But I will say one thing, though: if/when the time comes that I become serious with someone again, I’m going on total shut down. I am gonna hide the crazy for as long as I can. I used to believe that laying out all the crazy on the table was the best way to go, let him love the real you and all the crap. Yeah, well, next time I dole out the crazies is when I know for a fact that he loves me and that he’s stuck with me no matter what I do, for as long as I can help it.

I’ve been missing Singapore a lot lately. The last time I fell in love with a city was when I went to Hong Kong for the first time when I was 15. Granted, it was the first time that I had left the country, so I could have been just as enthused with a jar of dirt had someone said it was from a hill in Greece or something.

But there’s really something different with the way that I fell in love with Singapore. My first couple of trips there were spent mainly as tourists, seeing everything and visiting all these places, but it was in my last trip that I was really able to take my time, and soak it all in. There was a full day that I just walked and walked and walked by myself, looking at everything around me, and it was the first time that I ever really saw myself living anywhere else but Manila.

I’m a planner. I can’t help it. When I was 13, I had the next ten years of my life planned out. Well, it’s been almost 11 years since then and nothing, and I mean nothing, that I had planned then has come into fruition.

But that’s okay. I didn’t really know what I wanted back then, anyway. Who does at thirteen, right?

But the thing is, I’m not where I thought I would be five years ago, either. Or one year. Or six months ago. I’m in a place in my life where I didn’t even consider I would be a mere two years after graduating.

Maybe it’s that we put too much pressure on ourselves. It happens, I’m not the first 23 year-old to think that she was gonna be doing big things by now. We sometimes have to remind ourselves that those people who’d built empires by the time they were our age are more the exception than the rule. It’s not cynicism, it’s more acceptance that you’re not one of those people who are destined to be shakers and movers in their early 20s. Doesn’t mean you’re never going to be, but maybe I should stop kicking myself and thinking so-and-so would have done things differently and they wouldn’t be angry-blogging on freakin’ Tumblr at 2 in the morning.

I think I’ve lost my point somewhere.

I have a job interview tomorrow. I’m scared. I’m starting to think that I’m unemployable. Forgive the brain fart. Enjoy the photo.

Here’s something that not a lot of people know about me:

My loneliness is a friend.

It’s been around for as long as I can remember, this feeling. I think, in a big way, it’s the presence of this loneliness that has shaped the person that I am now. The loudness that I exude veers so far away from what goes on beyond the surface of what people can see. The loudness is what keeps me safe from being too vulnerable.

Growing up I used to confuse the loneliness with sadness. When I was a teenager, I used to make up drama in my head all the time. Teenagers do that all the time, for many different reasons; my reason was that I thought the loneliness that I felt meant that, for some unknown reason, I was sad.

There have been many times in my life when I thought I was in love. I’ve come to realize that I’m a tad bit wishy-washy when it comes to determining my romantic feelings towards someone, particularly because they can change in a snap second for reasons that I can never comprehend. But what I do know is that every single time I would sit back and try to revel in my complete and utter bliss, it always felt like something was tugging at my brain. I’ve described it in past writings as that feeling of “being up in the air, waiting to fall.” I now think that that feeling is my loneliness trying to remind me that it was still there.

But you know, I’m okay. Maybe someday it’ll be different, who knows. But for now, I’m okay.

Alana Noelle’s Springtime baptism, ceremony at Sacred Heart Church in Makati.

slowdownmonday:

Five years and counting, and our family just got a little bit bigger.

P A N X N A T D E D