And my blue room is waiting for me!!

It’s going to be one super busy and stressful week. I still have a lot of packing to do, calls to make, transfers to schedule, bills to settle, loadss of cleaning up, last minute shopping, changing ISP, aghhh. I just want this week over and done with already!

But I’m going to hold on to this picture in my head, my room waiting for me back home. And Mommy’s cooking. And Isaac being in the room just above mine. And being around human beings again! And yayy someone’s coming home soon too! <3 And and annnnnd, September is here can you believe it?!

Dude. Things are sooo looking up. :)

But I’m going to contain my excitement and go through my loooong to-do list now. Be back once I’ve settled back in.

I’ve grown to love looking at interior design magazines/catalogs and window shopping for furniture as much as I love shopping for shoes and clothes. In fact, I’ve invested so much on furniture since I moved out 4-5 years ago, and now that I’m moving back to my parents’ home (and to a smaller room space), I have to let a bunch of my *cough* investments go.

Imagine how I drooled over the 2011 Ikea catalog that came out just recently (Thanks to Mariel for the blog alert!). I have yet to get my hands on the real glossy thing (I’m counting on you, Mae, for my copy!!), but I’m enjoying the online version in the meantime.

I like looking at home office inspirations as I have been working from home for almost 2 years now. I always believe that one’s working environment affects productivity big time, one of the reasons why I rented an apartment with an extra room I can convert to a work space. These are some of the my favorite home office layouts in the Ikea Catalog:

When I discussed with my mother than I’m coming back home, we talked about constructing a home office for me — not a bedroom — thinking I could just squat in her room with her. But upon realizing that I have too many clothes and shoes and stuff to fit in her extra closet space and cabinets, we decided that the home office would now double as a bed room with a huge closet that can house all my clutter as well.

I love Ikea’s organized closets, but since we don’t have Ikea here in the Philippines, my Mom and I had a floor-to-ceiling closet custom-made back home that looks pretty much like this:

And of course I already said that I want my walls painted blue, and I want it vibrant/dark blue, not pale (because pale just won’t work with the dusty and polluted Manila air). Also, I want vibrant accent colors everywhere, pretty much like this room right here:

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I’m moving back to Caloocan in about *counting the days in my head* two weeks (wow, time flies!), and with the construction of my new room happening this week, I had to pick a color to paint my walls with. Why thank you, Carrie Bradshaw, for having such a fabulous (fictional) apartment for inspiration. Yesterday, I finally chose my color swatches, deciding on a color that’s familiar and comfortable, not to mention I love: Blue.

Check out these photos of Carrie’s renovated apartment in Sex and the City 2. <3 (Segue: are writers in New York City really earn so much that they’re capable of keeping a pad as snazzy as this one?)

My love affair with blue.

Growing up with two brothers, my juvenile interests leaned towards boy stuff — watching PBA, collecting basketball cards, playing roller blades, championing at pusoy dos, wearing lose shirts and baggy pants, and preferring non-feminine colors like black and blue. I was 16 years old when, taking over my Lola’s room in the second floor of our house in Caloocan, I decided that I wanted to paint the room blue. To be overly redundant, I asked my Mom to buy me blue curtains and blue bed sheets and pillow cases. Turning 18 years old, my parents threw a debut party for me, and it didn’t take me a minute to decide my color motif. Perhaps the only blue thing that I wasn’t crazy about in college were UP’s blue books, lol, can I just say that those little exam booklets were the bane of my college existence??!

Blue books aside, it came to a point when blue, to me, became a safe zone, hence, when I started moving out of life’s little comfort zones, I started exploring a bit on my color preference too. Pink, brown, red, green, purple — my color dateline, in that order, representing eras of my life. Invite me for coffee and I’ll share my color story with you. ;)

And now it’s blue again.

You know how it feels like when you’re back with an old love affair after exploring and testing other options, realizing that he is still the love of your life, maybe you didn’t even stop loving him after all? Forgive me for the tacky illustration, but that’s how blue is like to me. Home, puppy love turned love-of-my-life, the color that I want to wake up to in the morning, surround me the whole day, the last thing I see before I close my eyes. I’ve seen all the other colors, but it all comes back to blue. I can’t wait to see how my blue room is going to look (and feel) like.

I’m getting to know a whole new version of myself lately.

That version of me who welcomes the idea of settling down, who chooses the warmth of the familiar over the thrill of taking risks, who prefers being surrounded by family rather than party-loving friends, who labels things according to whether they’re temporary or eternal and chooses only those which will last.

Choosing blue, somehow, feels like a representation of all that.

And and and.. I’m doing that thing again where I over-analyze on trivial things like color preferences and being all melancholy again about getting old(er) and wondering again about things like, if they say quarter-life ends at 27, does this mean I’m, at this point in time, having mid-life crisis?

What’s my point again?

Whatever.

Oh, and thanks, Carrie Bradshaw.

+ I hate it when I struggle for days trying to gather my thoughts and translate them into words and sentences, and then later on, reading about what’s going on in my head in other people’s blogs. YouknowwhatI’msaying? On the upside, now I only have to link to them and exclaim, “that’s what I thought!”

+ I was reading Ala Parades’ tumblr post, Let The Right One In, and this one word came to my mind as I finished off reading: Ahhh, VINDICATION. I mean, sure, Ala’s just another girl, and one can always say that this may not be the case for everyone, but it made me sigh in relief to know that hey, I’m not alone in wanting to feel needed. I’m not psycho, hooray! Admittedly though, (unlike Mae), I’m kind of the extreme version of that type of girl. The kind who, when in a relationship, lets the other person in too much too soon that she loses herself early in the process. Sure, I can take care of myself, I can easily adapt to whatever comes my way, and I have countless of dreams up my sleeve that I thought I can do without any help from anyone, more so from a potential boyfriend. But once in a relationship, I easily lose my grip on these things, carelessly let my guard down and just totally lose myself to the other person, which sucks, because when I start to realize that the other person does not really need me the same way, or that we’re not in the same page after all, then I start needing more, and well, everything’s just downhill from there.

I think I figured out what’s wrong in the equation. It’s not wrong to want to feel needed, or to expect your partner to need you in his life, or to lose yourself in him — those are, in fact, essential in relationships. I think what I missed out on is knowing/meeting/finding the right person to let in, the operative word being “right”, because letting one wrong person after another in is no good either.

+ I wish I have Ate Stef’s courage, sharing her breakup experience like that. I remember blogging something similar way back in 2007, and well, things like this amaze me. How easy it is to connect with people who share the same experience, and sometimes even with your 23-year old self. Break-ups may be ugly (I hate them, I don’t ever want to feel that sadness ever again) but, just as I blogged 3 years ago, I still believe that going through a break-up is one of the most (if not the most) liberating, life-altering experiences one can ever go through. It comes with the simple fact that when God allows something to end, it’s only because something else is bound to begin. And that’s kinda the part I love about break-ups. And whut, did I just use “love” and “break-up” all in one sentence?

+ My brother cooked his specialty Chicken Enchilada Sunday night and gee, as I munched on a plateful of that yummy stuff, I kept thinking, where did my brother learn to cook like that? Sure, he must have inherited his cooking instincts from my mother and my grandmother, who are awesome cooks by the way, but ohhh how I feel cheated! I mean, I’m the only girl among the siblings, and I seriously believe that I should be the rightful inheritor of any of their culinary skills, not my brother! I’m sometimes disappointed with the stagnancy of this life, I feel like I’m not getting anywhere! My friend Trisha, who’s in Sydney, used to just blog about random, girly, PMS-y stuff like I do, but now, her escapades to the culinary world are just WHOA. It’s awesome how her blog, Sugarlace.com in case you missed the link, has become a venue for some serious honest-to-goodness domestication. And I, meanwhile, am still blogging about nonsensical emo stuff. I am so envious. I have got to find something I can excel in. Maybe not cooking, but something. Anything!

7 things I love about this week:

1) Welcoming my beautiful nephew Robert Isaac to the family.

2) That he gets to inherit our Dad‘s name, Robert, that even if he didn’t get to meet him anymore, a part of his Lolo lives in him.

3) How “Tita Riz” seems to just roll off the tongue, I can imagine little Isaac soon saying my name and tugging on my skirt. “Tita Riz, I want ice cream.” “Tita Riz, let’s go to the zoo.” “Tita Riz, I wanna play plants and zombiess!” (Just you wait, kid, your Tita Riz will spoil you like crazy. And well, I’ll leave the disciplining to your Mom, Dad and Lola, haha.)

4) That he’s got all of us wrapped around his cute little finger without knowing it. He cries and everyone in the room panics, figuring out what he needs. He sleeps and we all silently stare at him like lovestruck puppies. He blinks and we all go “awww” with tiny hearts in our eyes. It’s kuh-rayy-zee what babies can do, when they’re not even doing anything at all!

5) That I got to take their first family picture, and that I was able to preserve love in a photograph. Definitely one for keeps. <3

6) That I’ve witnessed (over again) with my own eyes this beautiful thing called motherly love, something we often fail to appreciate because mothers are always there anyway. I can still picture in my head the look in Ate Imy’s face as she admires her son, and the twinkle in my Mom’s eyes everytime she speaks of her grandson. Priceless.

7) Finally, I love days when, not expecting anything, something beautiful happens (or someone comes along) and your life is never the same. Such is this week in the Sanchez home. <3

And so I pray for a life that’s full of days like these. Dear Lord, that’s all I ask today.