Love in a shoebox

I haven't blogged much because I'm still enveloped in a hazy bubble of love. Almost 6 months have passed and I'm still floating on a cloud, scared that if I dwell too long on it, trying to capture my bliss in physical words, it would all dissipate. I don't want to jinx my happiness.

Life is good these days. Travel, taking time for myself, planning, and of course, love.

I'm moving to a new flat in a month or so and taking this opportunity to organize and throw stuff away with the idea that I'll eventually be leaving this city for new horizons. It's amazing how much one accumulates. I came to Hong Kong with 2 suitcases about 5 years ago and now, it'll take about 2 moving trucks for all my things. Ideally, I want to pare down my possessions by half.

While clearing out some shelves, I found my ragged shoebox of old love letters. I've written many posts previously about the fuzzy warmth of first love and how hard it is to let go but I thought maybe it is time now to shed this weight, figuratively and literally.

Reading old love letters is strangely sweet. You're reminded of your less-burdened/jaded/cynical younger self, and despite how terribly the relationship ended, you're reminded of why you loved that person once upon a time and how once upon a time, someone loved you enough to write you a love letter. Reading old love letters is also strangely intrusive. Seeing his handwriting, his terms of endearments for me, and the feelings that aren't for me anymore... it's as if I'm peeking into a life that isn't mine and was never mine really.

Why do people hang onto old love letters?

What I have learned in my twenties

A reminder to myself in the last year of my twenties.

1. Life really can be full of surprises, from the physical beauty around us to the surprising kindheartedness of people.

2. We can always hurt someone, often more than we realise.

3. Not everyone is like me, what I deem correct and true is not necessary the same for others.

4. People often mistake my passion for being stressful and intense.

5. It is always easier being honest, once I have been lied to by someone, regardless how small and seemingly harmless their lie has been – my feelings towards them change forever.

6. Fear is common in every human being and is often mistaken for selfishness or arrogance.

7. Reading results in a massive subconscious accumulation of knowledge never fully realised but continuously appreciated in the strangest moments. Reading also allows for a much needed rest from reality and refreshes the imagination with possibility.

8. Appearance is important. As much as I wish it weren’t true, how you present yourself is how you are judged, people are fast and lazy thinkers. The trick is to reflect your personality into your presentation and not appear superficial.

9. There are people who say many things and do nothing. I quickly lose faith in those people.

10. It is far more important to listen than to talk, as long as the other person has the same respect – because sometimes I need to be heard.

11. I love being on my own, but it is far from the happiness I experience being surrounded by people who sincerely love me. There is also no greater loneliness than spending time with someone who regards your company as insignificant.

12. You learn to love someone when you forgive all their faults.

13. There is nothing unusual about wanting a fairytale. There are those who have found theirs on this mortal earth and I want mine.

14. Hangovers will always ruin your day – unless you are happily in love and get to spend the day in bed with your lover who also likes bad TV.

15.Turning thirty is not going to be the end of my world!

Happy Birthday to me.

List taken from Dance Floor Tragedy.

a new year

At this cusp in time when the old year fades into the new, one is oft to slip into wistful reflection. Many of my acquaintances and friends are getting engaged or married or having children and moving on with their "adult" lives while I seem to float about like a wisp of cloud not willing to settle. I am envious of those who have found the other half of their heart and who have settled into white picket fences but yet there is a part of me that throws arms wide out into the wind to be carried away by the whispers of lands unknown. I follow the piper. I choose the mountain.

This past year I fell in love with Paris and experienced the beauty of India. Ever since I was in grade school, I have dreamed of those two places. It was everything and more. And then on a day trip to Brugges I saw a field of daffodils. There are perfect moments in my travels that can't be captured exactly on camera but I remember every detail in the picture the mind takes and carry it throughout life... like the splash of flower pots in a dusty hutong alley in Beijing, the blue sky reflected in a still puddle in Tibet, the indigo sunrise silhouetting the trees in the plains of Kenya, riding a bus in the vast vast desert of Mongolia with a little girl asleep on my lap... And the daffodils.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such jocund company: I
gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And when my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

~William Wordsworth


Bruges, April 2009

What if...

What if girls stopped caring about their physical appearance?

Maybe then the sides will switch and it'll be the boys who get all gussied up to attract our attention.

Sex and mind games

"It is fortunate that the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen."

~Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

This quote brings up interesting thoughts and could be taken many ways. We have to keep in mind that Darwin did live in the Victorian times, and history has always favored the thoughts of men. We're not called mankind for nothing. If you think about the history of the human race, it's very much men oriented. Women for many centuries were thought to be insipid, simpering ornamentation on a man's arm. But yet, if you look at nature and the effects of natural selection on evolution, especially in mammals, it's the females who usually 'shape' the evolution of males. They do this by selecting for the better trait or the better genes in their mates to pass down to their offsprings. This results in the exaggeration of those traits that have evolved after specific selection over many generations (i.e. the peacock's tail, lion's mane, antlers). Interestingly enough, research done have shown that females pick these traits not because it tickles their fancy, as pretty as that tail might be. But these exaggerated and seemingly useless traits that the males are burdened with could actually be the advertisement that they themselves carry the desired traits that are more fit for survival regardless of the burdensome advertisement. Not to bore anyone with the bio talk, the underlying point is that the genes carried by the male who caught the girl's fancy is actually more desirable and more hardy in survival.

So where does this put human gender evolution? Darwin assumes human females have selected for human males based on mental traits. This is sort of a contradiction to the hunter role that males traditionally take on. So in a way, according to Darwin, human intelligence has evolved due to male's conniving ability to convince females of their fitness rather than having natural selection naturally carry out it's role in selecting for the best adaptability to the environment. Darwin was seeing it as unfortunate that man have not evolved through sexual selection to possess the differential 'beauty' of peacocks since genetically, 'smart' men will have smart if not smarter daughters.

those three little words

When I was young, in the throes of those hazy days of first love, I verbally lived those three little words often. The idea of loving and being loved in return was intoxicating and that feeling of weightlessness? You really do float about in a love-induced stupor.

As I grew older and those three little words spoken in youthful fervor went the way of broken promises, the expectations increased. Rather than an innocent declaration, those three little words become weightier, attached with strings, strings that bind like a Mobius strip.

In all the relationships since that first heady rush, I’ve made a conscious decision not to use those three little words at all with any of the subsequent guys I went out with... Not even with the one I thought might have been...

Perhaps I should have.

Except that those three little words come with a sanctity that is lost in today’s vernacular of love and lust; we love and we hate as easily as a coin toss and we throw those three little words around like confetti into the wind. If I ever do say those three little words again, I would want it to stick for good… like superglue.

On the flip side, one can never say those three little words enough to family, friends, and a wee little cat.

wants

I want to start Tai Chi lessons again and move beyond the 24 forms.
I want to take dance lessons, ballet, swing, bollywood or maybe just bounce about.
I want to take guitar lessons and actually keep to it.
I want to finish my knitting and stitching projects.
I want to go climbing 3 times a week again and be able to do the Moonhill again.
I want to read the books I want to without feeling guilty.
I want to go to plays, music and dance performances, operas, concerts.
I want to spend a weekend on a LoTR marathon... the extended version.
I want to go outdoors and soak in the green.

I want to know how people balance working full-time, studying part-time with a life.

And I'll keep telling myself, less than a year to go now with my masters and then I will have my time back.