don't panic if your rug (or pug) starts looking like you

Ever notice how things around you start having your essence without you even trying? Okay, that sounded weird. Let me rephrase. In Chinese, there’s a saying that sounds vaguely similar to the American one of “birds of a feather flock together.” But more specifically it means something more like, “Things tend to look like their owners.” The most common example used to illustrate this concept is how dogs often look hilariously similar to their owners (whether it’s in that same chubby face or wire-like hair). It wasn’t until I moved into my studio apartment in NYC that I realized how true this was, because everyone who ever visited always remarked, “Wow, this place is so…you.” I’ve gotten that vague, I guess, compliment many times before. I’ve given it out several times myself, and most often in the context of shopping with a friend, as she drags out a frilly blue and green splashed dress hanging pitifully on the hanger and beams eagerly at me for my approval. And I say, “It’s very…you.” Which translates to, “I’d rather be shot than seen wearing it but it sure looks like something you’d wear.”

After my fourth trip to the most crowded IKEA in the world (Brooklyn), I still wasn’t sure that all of these boxes were going to somehow magically become my dream apartment. It was the first time I ever got to design a whole apartment by myself (granted it was just a studio). Up until now, I had only gotten to stick dozens of photos onto a blank dorm wall or buy the purplest sheets I could find to brighten up the tiny room I rented during my last stay in NYC. I had spent hours poring through Pinterest for “Tiny Studio Design Ideas” and even had my boyfriend use a farncy software to digitally recreate the space, so I could imagine all my furniture in it and assign colors. I was determined for it to be more mature-looking. No more paisley purple lamps or roll-up Audrey Hepburn posters. It was going to be mostly cream and grey (that’s adultlike right?) with pops of my signature purple (which is more like a deep magenta). I grabbed and heaved furniture into my cart, mentally slapping my hand away from the less “mature” items (no, I don’t need that pink vanity) along the way. And a week later when my apartment was furnished, thanks to my boyfriend who is now an expert at building IKEA furniture, I finally got to see everything at once. And I noticed that sure enough, paisley and more than a few pops of purple, managed to sneak their way in. When I complained to my boyfriend that maybe we need to exchange that furry purple pillow for something a little plainer he said, “Why is it a bad thing that your apartment looks like you?”

Then I realized, it isn’t. Try as I might to decorate my apartment to look like something out of Pinterest, the hand and mind behind all the decisions still belonged to me, and that could never be ignored. As I took another look around at the cozy gray couch, soft cream carpet that matched the curtains, faded gold coffee table and dark purple pillows, I realized that more than just any individual item, the whole apartment had come together to reflect me. When I began furiously pinning inspiration on Pinterest, I just clicked whatever appealed to me on the whole, based on whether the picture of that room felt comfortable to me, like a place I would want to lay down in. What I hadn’t realized was that I had a very specific “feel” in mind that I wanted to recreate, and it penetrated every furniture decision I made. Cozy was definitely a priority, but I was never one for antique-y, rustic-looking things. I did, after all, grow up in a big, bustling city, and so modernism was a close second in priorities. I realized that I was largely influenced by the home I grew up in, a living room with lots of light and cream couches with moss-green rattan chairs and wooden accents. Then my second home evoked modernism with its sleek corners and interiors, but every item was either wood or cotton so that the apartment never felt cold. So subconsciously, I too veered away from cool grays, black and white designs and blinding white lights.

My apartment simultaneously paid homage to my parents’ aesthetic while staying true to my personality. I’m someone who is at once lazy when it comes to doing anything that requires physical strength and yet am very anal about my surroundings being just the way I like it. This is why a rustic, thrown-together kind of apartment would never work because part of its aesthetic requires the “not trying too hard to stay neat” feel. Lazy as I am, I can’t stand a mess as much as any anally retentive germaphobe, but the other hand of the spectrum, I can’t bear a sterile, modern apartment that only maintains its look by having everything be just so, and in its proper place. These uptight environments often give off a cold, touch-me-not glare that I also don’t like, because, well, what’s the use of throw blanket if you can’t use it?

On a marginally related note, sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to make that unique, indelible mark on the world that most writers worry about. In a myriad of writings and blogs and voices, why would anyone ever want to hear what I have to say? Apparently, this is a fear that goes through most people’s minds who ever considered starting a blog. A lady at my office who now is the proud owner of a super successful super-foods blog said to me, “Don’t be afraid to start one just because you think there are already thousands of them out there. What makes yours unique is you.” At the time I thought it was very kind of her to comfort me but it wasn’t till I looked around at my apartment that I understood the validity of that statement. No matter what I do, me, myself and I will always catch up to me, my quirks, my flaws, my talents, my voice, and for that, I have never been more grateful. 

hi, i'm lonely

When people hear that I’m an only child, their gut reaction is to think that I’m spoiled. But then, they ask if I get lonely a lot. I can’t say I’m a stranger to loneliness and having no one in the house for most of my childhood certainly didn’t help. But then I realized that loneliness is so hard to define. One day I wrote a short prose essay based on the mood of the song. I didn’t know what to expect from it and just let the melody and lyrics take me to a memory. It was of my parents rushing around the house in a frenzy, getting ready for work and neither of them acknowledged me. When I read this piece to my friends, and asked what was the primary image or emotion being conveyed, they timidly said it was loneliness. Then they said, “But loneliness isn’t an emotion, right?” As I looked back on my essay, I realized from a lackadaisical Atomic Kitten song, I have indeed created a portrait of loneliness. It occurred to me that loneliness is not something you can put your finger on and describe finitely. It is a baby waking up from a nap alone or a little boy having no one to celebrate his birthday with. Loneliness is defined by absence of something that should be there. Sometimes this comes in the form of the lack of someone to share an experience with; sometimes it comes in having too many people around but none who can relate. To me, it is in the lazy Sunday afternoons that I find my cat my only company because my parents have gone to work. I remember sitting in front of the television and watching the sun melt into red, then pink then purple and I kept my eyes on the TV so I don’t have to watch the sunset alone.

My inherent sensitivity to loneliness has convinced me that I will take my life before I turn 40, as most writers do from depression. It is also probably why I still find it painful to eat in public alone. I cannot stand lifting one single finger as a waiter asks “For how many?” as I get a table at a restaurant. And when I see others doing the same, one hand glued to the fork, the other to the iPhone to keep themselves looking busy, I hurt for them (even if they intended to be alone). I just don’t believe anyone ever deserves to eat a meal alone. It’s why the outcast in high school is often painted as the kid eating alone in the cafeteria. It evokes alienation, abandonment, loneliness. Chekhov said a lot of depressing things about life, but this one depressing quote is depressingly true: “The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.” Communication and reaching out to those around us is one of the most basic human functions, yet we can’t even do this right. No wonder our world is a mess. 

For most of my childhood, I knew exactly where I was going. I knew what my parents expected of me and how I was going to make it happen. When I hit junior year of high school, I wasn’t the brightest kid in the class anymore and I was going through a crisis. At the time, my favorite teacher, Ms. Chung, mentored me through life. One day we had to choose classes for the next year, and I was having a hard time deciding on which APs and how many of them to take. When I asked for her advice, she said, “Well, what do YOU want to do.” I stared at her for a bit like she asked a ridiculous question, and realized I didn’t have the answer to it. I knew the more APs I took the better, and I knew which ones would make my resume look good. But I didn’t know which ones I wanted to take.

Years from then, I can’t remember which APs I took but I remember her asking me that question and that was the knowledge I took to college. When my roommate began ranting about a messy situation she was meddled in and I sat quietly listening, the moment she was done, I asked her, “So how do you feel about it?” She looked at me with the same dazed expression I had and then burst out crying. These questions are so simple, so ordinary that we often take them for granted. Sometimes we forget that it’s all it takes to touch someone and show that you care. Loneliness is not something that people can emerge from themselves. By definition, it requires the presence of another. I’ve never felt comfortable telling someone I was lonely, because it would probably end up sounding whiny and contrived. I’ve come to realize that loneliness is not an emotion that can be outwardly expressed, and it often has no signs. And because it is defined by an absence, I just wished more people would be more willing to fill the emptiness with something as simple as a meal or question. Then maybe, just maybe, I’ll live past 40.

there's more to life than being happy.......?

Last summer I spent four hours one afternoon, sitting in a faux colonial coffee shop with one of my best friends. She asked me, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you?” The question sent my brain into a frenzy and I felt a bajillion things pop up simultaneously, from the most recent memories to my long term goals, weighing them on an invisible scale. Then I said, “Which aspect are you asking about?” She looked at me knowingly, because we’re both INFJs on the Meyer’s Briggs test which, in normal people’s understanding means we’re both over-thinkers. Subconsciously, I always have a handful of categories I divide my life into: family, friends, work, relationships, my learning curve, health…and the list goes on. Every now and again, I assess those categories in ways not unlike a number scale to see where I’m at. Only when all or almost all of them are at high levels do I consider myself “happy.” But because of this insane standard, I rarely ever consider myself completely happy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t do this to myself on purpose. This happens at the back of my mind on its own, with its own secretary and everything. I’ve wished so many times this wasn’t the case so I could just feel happy without first consulting this list and double checking that the numbers add up. Even during moments when people should be happy in the most traditional sense—birthdays, theme parks, romantic dinners—I’d often find myself literally thinking, “Am I happy?” “Am I having fun?” Which, you know, immediately kills any semblance of a buzz I might have been having. There’s simply no winning with me.

The only time I think I came close in recent years was last summer when I got an amazing internship, I had just moved to New York City for the first time and got incredibly lucky with a gorgeous apartment and a roommate I am still good friends with till this day. I liked my job, I loved the city, my boyfriend visited regularly. My numbers were finally at some decent levels. I was happy. But as soon as that happened, in my characteristically masochistic manner, I then immediately felt terrified. No one is ever allowed to be this content with all aspects of their lives. In the wise words of Charlotte York from Sex and the City, “Nobody gets everything they want.” Being happy meant there was so much at stake, that there was so much I could therefore lose, and when that happens I would have to wait until the next rare moment, almost as rare as those meteors that fly near the earth every once in a hundred years, for all my “levels” to be “on par.” I was being utterly ridiculous.

I recently read an article in The Atlantic citing renowned Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. He said, “It is the pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.” The article goes on to explicate the difference between the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of meaning, the former requiring selfishness in order to maintain a satisfactory level for oneself but in turn is rendered less satisfied than someone who pursues meaning. The latter is often an act of selflessness, and the article uses parenting as an example. Parents are often not very happy creatures, yet their existence is meaningful because they must provide for another. But alas, even when these people were feeling bad, they feel more satisfied than those who lacked meaning. To once again quote Frankl, “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.”

I’m always at my most stressed when there’s something in my relationship with my mom that needs to be fixed, or when I have plans to apply to a bunch of jobs but all I do is just sit here. But when I finally have the chance to start doing something, start solving the problem, start learning, I feel…well, not happy, but a hundred times better. THEN, weeks, months, years from then, when I look back at myself trying so hard at whatever it was I was doing, THEN I feel…no, not happy, nostalgic; but I am happier in general for having gone through it.

Tolstoy once said that the happiest moments of our lives are the ones we’ll never remember. That’s because we were so absorbed in the moment, so utterly happy, that we literally didn’t have any faculty left to record it with our minds. I like that. I’d like to think that I’ve had a bajillion times that I was happy, but my overly calculative brain was just too busy to jot it down because maybe it was just too busy finding meaning.

you still can't make me go bungee jumping....

“Risk” is one of those words that plants varying images in various people’s minds. Some envision treacherous terrains like the ones so dramatically projected in war movies. Others see an alter and a naïve couple, wrapped in white and who clearly has no idea what they’re getting into. I used to be one of the former, firstly because I have been commercially subdued into thinking only the most dangerous of feats are worthy of being deemed risks and secondly because I have not been married and therefore have no need of being bitter…yet.

I’m not an optimist. In fact I usually belong on the other end of the balance. But for some reason, I’ve come to believe there is no such thing as a risk not worth taking. A risk implies possibilities. It implies change for the better or worse and it implies that there’s something to lose (Case in point, I did not say “something to win” like an optimist would have). And so I took a walk down memory lane and thought long and hard about what major risks I’ve taken that’s brought me here today. Interestingly, two tiny events that served as catalysts came to mind. It was completely out of the blue, that day I picked up a book entitled “Dear Rosie.” I was only drawn to the name (because it's mine) and its pretty pink cover with a mysterious doll as its model. Flipping through the pages, I realized it was entirely written in the form of letters and internet conversations. Intrigued by this particular style of presentation, I purchased the book without a second thought. I liked the book. And so, reading that the same author had written a New York Times Bestseller before this, I went ahead and read that too. Two years later, my parents and all my friends have read it and it turned up on the big screen. She is now one of my favorite authors. I don’t even know if I’m even allowed to classify it as a risk. I guess my opportunity cost would have been my time and brain space, but it’s not like I could sue the author and ask her for a couple hours of my life back. But what if I never picked up that book? What if I had read a different book instead? I didn’t know if it’d be any good, but it turned out to be a family favorite. And then there was my ex-boyfriend. He was just some random guy in my band class. That was the only class I had with him. He had a crush on me and I didn’t know. I was so clueless that I agreed to go to dinner with him as friends. I’ve only known him for two weeks and then he asked the question. I have only been single for two months, he’s younger than me, WHAT WOULD PEOPLE THINK?? I had every reason to reject him. But I said yes. He turned out to be one of the best relationships I had while it lasted. I put my reputation, my time, my heart on the line and I guess I was lucky it turned out favorably. But what if I had rejected him? Till today, I scratch my head at the thought of how these eggs ended up in my path. How I decided to pick them up, unaware of what creature it would breed. 

And true to my innate inclination towards pessimism, I’m not saying risks can’t lead to exposure to harm. My father liked to go car racing in a puny, majorly dense city and it cost him his life. But if he didn’t start car racing, he would never have enjoyed the adrenalin rush from his favorite hobby while it lasted. Was it a mistake for him to take up racing because it caused his untimely death? It is said that “only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” It is in our nature to relentlessly test boundaries because it is crucial to human improvement. For someone who’s a self-professed coward at the face of all things unknown, risk-taking is a frightening concept. So no, I didn’t brave a battle with some legendary phoenix in return for some bollocks glory, but in hindsight, I owe my greatest memories to these warm and fuzzy chicks I adopted off the road. 

who is she?

Last night, just before I lost consciousness to sleep, I saw myself objectively—what I’ve been doing, how I’ve been acting, how I dress, what I say—the way you sometimes look in the mirror and get surprised by what you see, and at that moment I realized that I didn’t recognize myself.

At a bagel shop many years ago, as I was waiting for a friend to join me, I overheard a man and woman talk over the tiny coffee table next to me. He told her that despite being worth billions of dollars, Warren Buffet still lives in the same home he grew up in and drives the same car for years, because he lives by the theory of congruency. That means every time he makes a decision, he makes sure that his choice is his, and his alone and that he doesn’t let the situation dictate his actions. He makes sure that he’s true to himself.

As a high schooler then, at a Christian school with friends who’ve grown up with me since Kindergarten, though this conversation struck me as fascinating, I didn’t think it applied to me because I have never had the opportunity to be anything but myself. If I tried to be someone I wasn’t, my mother, my best friend, my teachers would all call me out on it. They knew me inside and out—my horrible temper, my skin problems, my introversion—they could paint a picture of me in their sleep.

But when I went to college, all of that changed. I wanted people to call me Rosie. Rosie never raised her voice, and for the longest time everyone laughed whenever she told them she used to have shouting matches with her parents every day. Rosie’s photos were always perfect, with great skin and tidy hair and perfect filters. Her friends in college looked up to her for skincare and makeup advice. Rosie spoke up in class and her apparent charisma landed her jobs at magazines. Most people would not believe that her heart would beat really fast before talking in front of big groups, even if it was just a group of friends.

And so, as Warren Buffet predicted, she finally hit a wall. At some point she stopped being able to make confident decisions because that voice that used to make her feel good when she made the right choice was no longer there. As I sat up in bed, wondering who I’ve become, I wondered if everything that’s changed is just a release of things I never got to do at home, that maybe I’ve just changed and this is who I am now. Maybe I splash purple all over my room because I can now while as my mom dictated the wallpaper at home.

But maybe somewhere along the way, I lost myself a little in the big race to land that fancy job ahead of all my high school classmates or become the most mature dresser of all my girl friends. Maybe that’s why I found myself just doing things and saying things because I thought I should, because that’s what was going to get me ahead and because that’s what people wanted to hear. Maybe that’s why when I sat down with someone over coffee, I found myself rolling my eyes internally at the things that were coming out of my mouth. Somewhere along the way, I had become Rosie and stopped being Rosana entirely.

 Two quotes stuck to me during this dilemma, one from (don’t laugh) Taylor Swift. She said, “Try everything, and the things that stick will become your style.” Someone else also said, “When you grow up, everything that you thought was just a bad habit, is just you.” So maybe, I’m just growing up, and feeling my way around the world, tossing out feelers and tasting it all, just to find out who I really am. Or maybe not. Maybe something did go wrong because somewhere in between, something didn’t feel quite congruent. But I want to find it again--whether that means going back or charging forward, I have no idea. All I know is I haven’t written like this in two years, and I’m writing now.

good girls, bad girls

It’s so much easier to walk with your head down than to look up and see what you’re missing, says the coward.

Exactly this same time last year, I mocked a close friend of mine for pursuing a life of boys and bottles all in the name of YOLO and prided myself in “knowing exactly what I was doing.” Today I’m realizing that whatever dosage of rationality I thought I relied on was more like morphine, so that it wasn’t level-headedness I possessed but fear of feeling at all. As two of my closest girlfriends were at the brink of a whirlwind romance, both dating unconventional, older men, they ran to me, hoping that I’d inject them with some reason. But as I stared at their terrified faces, I couldn’t help but feel so happy for them, because what I saw was exhilaration not fear. No, fear is the cowering, whimpy feeling I’ve been living with. So I told one of them, “There is no such thing as bad opportunities, only lost ones.” As I spewed “fuck it, you’re young” and other sorts of articulate encouragements, I found that I was no longer talking to them, but myself. I said to her, “10 years from now, if you asked yourself why you gave up on this opportunity to be with him, and you replied with these reasons, would you accept that?” Ten years from now, if I asked myself, why did you play it so safe those years that you should have flipped the world off, what would I have to say for myself?

The first year of college, I could blame it on being busy settling in, being sick all the time. My second year I was fighting to figure out my major. But now that that’s all said and done, what excuse do I have?

As I wait in limbo on three different jobs, I find myself terrified of making the “wrong decision.” I hate not having the next five years of my life planned out on paper, never mind this summer. I hate not being in control. I hate not feeling safe. I know that my job with a professor will gain me the most credibility as a reporter, I know that my job at a wine magazine looks best on paper, I know that my job at the girly online magazine will be the most fun. So I should pick the one that’s most important right?

The novelist John Barth was a professor at a college in upstate New York. The student movement was in full swing in the 1960s; riots, protests and strikes broke out at his college. A reporter asked John Barth what he thought of the protests. He said they were “important but not interesting.”

There are so many things that are important things in life, sleeping, working, keeping yourself alive, but they’re not necessarily interesting. Sometimes what’s interesting is forsaking what’s important, in the drunken, borderline hallucinatory escapades you embark on in the wee hours, in the jobs that barely bring a crust of bread to the table, on the cliffs that bring you so high that breathing, or lack thereof, could kill you. These are the moments that make life worth living.

A completely functional family never made interesting people, the same way calm seas never made good sailors. Safety only goes so far until it becomes the single most dangerous thing to live with. It is those nights that I don’t even have the energy to turn off the lights as I lay utterly exhausted on my bed that I feel the most accomplished. So how could I be content living my entire life, wide awake at night regretting all the things I haven’t done? It is these moments of exhaustion that make the weekends more valuable and vacations more worthwhile. Nobody enjoys a vacation knowing they’ve done nothing all year. So how can I expect a bouquet of happiness to appear without embracing the rain?

And so as I chew on this newfound realization, I’m struggling to figure out what I can do to make these last two years count. I mean, I’ve been working out and cooking, both of which are things every breathing mortal can do but I’ve only just come in contact with. And yes they’re giving me temporary satisfaction the way every one-paged writing gives me 36 hours of peace. But what I’m looking for is something to compensate for all the dance marathons and sororities I didn’t join, something that I can say, “SUCK IT BITCHES, I DIDN’T DO DRUGS BUT I _______AND FOR THAT MY COLLEGE CAREER IS COMPLETE.” Something to call my own, to exhilarate and exhaust me, something to thoroughly scare the shit out of me.

A relevant poem from one of my favorite poets:

Faces along the bar 
Cling to their average day: 
The lights must never go out, 
The music must always play, 
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume 
The furniture of home; 
Lest we should see where we are, 
Lost in a haunted wood, 
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good. 

~W.H. Auden

neverland, where are you?

As a kid, I never liked Peter Pan. The image of an immature narcissist followed by a brigade of species-confused babies and a fairy diva fighting an anticlimactic brawl with a deranged, pirate wannabe never appealed to me at all.  To me, Pete was just some guy who needed to get his head out of the mermaid’s lagoon and grow up. Ironically, as I grew older, Pete also grew on me. There came times when I threatened to burn my Chemistry textbook or cringed at the thought of paying my own bills. And those were the times I started looking outside my window, in desperate search of the second star to the right.

When I was five, I distinctly remember sticking my finger up in the air and announcing that when I grow I was going to be an archaeologist by day, figure skater by night and a superspy somewhere in between. But as the years wore on, the list became shorter and practicality took the reins. My head might have grown but my dreams have certainly shrunk. Adulthood perhaps will come bearing doubts and limits and have me scaled-down to fit an arbitrary frame, but sometimes that’s when earplugs come in handy. Pete says I can fly. All I have to do is believe. Oh, and with a hint of pixie dust of course.

If curiosity killed the cat, Pete definitely has blood on his hands. He never failed to be the first to follow the chicken tracks or peer through that window with a touch-me-not glare.  I used to take bubble baths. It was the sacred fifteen minutes of the day that I’d stare at the bubbles and wonder why they floated. It bugged me that I didn’t know but I figured Mommy would. She did, of course, and the answer was “they just do.”  I think I pouted, but that was about it. Years later, in the same tiled bathtub, I told my cousin of five the very same thing. I had a tingly feeling Pete was shaking his head solemnly behind my back, but I guess I’ll never know for sure.

I have three tests and two projects due tomorrow and I haven’t slept in twenty hours. I took a half an hour breather to watch a TV show while munching on cereal and I felt like a criminal. For some reason my biology notes kept flashing across the main character’s face. I still remember the good old days when the bell rang for recess and we trampled on our notebooks to race to the courtyard. Pete and I might have our differences but as much as I hate to admit it, he epitomizes concentration. Whether he’s hunting that ticking crocodile or stalking Wendy, he does it whole-heartedly and is fully absorbed—well, until he’s distracted by something else.

I’m never going to fully get along with that irresponsibly pompous child that Pete will always remain. But maybe he was exaggerated to be that nagging, massive, green fly that refuses to get out of my face for a reason. Maybe he’s that needed tiny voice that reminds us of the innocence, passions, and dreams of our childhood. And maybe, just maybe, he is exactly what every grownup needs.