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.

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:

Finally, I love their new collection of blue furniture! I don’t think I ever noticed these blue stuff before!

Why don’t we have Ikea here in the Philippines again?

We do have Five Corners as the next best alternative, they import several Ikea pieces to sell here in Manila, I actually bought a couple of items from them in the past. But nothing still beats the real mall-size Ikea showrooms and warehouses that other countries enjoy. I remember my trips to Sydney, Los Angeles and New York included visits to Ikea, yeah, like a tourist.

We may be in Asia, alright, but why do China and Singapore have Ikea and we don’t??

Someone please explain this injustice to me.

Ohh whatever, I’m posting them now anyway..

..just to remind me that my toes and nails need serious pampering now and I need to make that trip to that pink magical place inside Beauty Bar shops, like, SOON-OR-ELSE.

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.

As I mulled over what happened there, just because I live to over-analyze things like that, I couldn’t help but think how I could have died that morning and no one would’ve known [insert sad background music here]. My family and everyone close to me would’ve been in church, I would’ve died alone, and no one would’ve known until my body was cold and decaying.

Yep. Leave it to me to have a minor alarm clock failure and end up thinking about my dead and decaying body.

What I’m really trying to say is, I’m finding more and more reasons to affirm my decision to bid good bye to this *cough* exciting independent life, the most recent reason being, not having someone/something other than an expensive alarm clock to wake me up in the morning and to check if I’m still alive and breathing. However shallow that sounds.

It served me well, this full, life-altering independent life I got to experience in my younger days, the first two years with housemates (what my Dad thought of as a trial period-slash-OJT of sorts) and the last two years on my own. Moving out of the confines of my parents’ house has taught me a lot of things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise, I always say. But now I have arrived at the inevitable reality that one can’t really live on her own too long. I suppose it’s different for everyone as far as the length of time it takes for her to realize she’s done with being solo is concerned, but I do believe that if someone must choose to live by herself, she would eventually need to either (1) share her apartment with friends; (2) get a dog, (3) get married; or (4) move back home. (Notice, of course, my gender bias.)

I won’t in a million years recommend that you get a home-based job while living in isolation and keeping a long-distance relationship at the same time, trust me when I say that these three don’t mesh well together — way too much self-inflicted isolation, lol. Still, under whatever circumstances, I know that independence has done me good. And now, I’m happy to have come to this point in my life where I’ve experienced independence to the fullest that I’m ready (and excited!) to come back home. I’m counting the days.

OAN, I’m selling some of my furnitures. You want? c”,)

Lastly, I really should update this blog more often.

But I realize now, as I’ve been spending more and more Friday nights by myself, that it’s not so bad spending nights like this just being quiet, watching droplets of rain trickle down glass windows while cars pass by in the background like little bokehs, and listening to the hushed voices of lovers and friends chatting inside coffee shops.

It’s Friday night, I’m alone, and I’m in love.

In love with life, in love with NOW, in love with the promise of things to come. I want to remember these days, these Fridays I get to spend alone. I want to dry them up, like rose petals placed in between the pages of a hard bound book, and preserve them until they’re old and yellow and forgotten. And then maybe one day, accidentally or on purpose, I’ll come across these memories, remember how it’s like, and laugh at the silliness of it all.

Tonight I realize that I need to chillax and learn to not be so afraid of being alone.

(Thoughts that are too long for twitter. Posted from my mobile phone.)

Photograph taken one October day at Universal Studios (LA), 2008.

Anywayy, J, M, and I — we love talking and analyzing movies (and TV series) whenever we get together, among other things. We can dissect Lake House to no end and still have more to discuss the next chance we get. Sometimes, we would talk about fictional characters as if they’re our friends, and contemplate about their fictional lives with a passion. And that’s just the thing with movies. They move us, wimmen (maybe not all, forgive me for generalizing), into feeling as if we’re somehow involved, making us analyze our own lives in comparison.

But what really makes me sad (or frustrated) about watching movies is the element of time.

In movies, 20 years is something that can be jammed into a 4-minute video montage ala music video. (Think Ellie & Carl’s life together, my most favorite 4 minutes in the history of Pixar). In movies, you only have to endure 2 hours to know what’s going to come out of a story. Letters sent back and forth over a period of three years while trying to keep a long distance affair (ala Dear John) are made to look endurable. Ten years in Carrie Bradshaw’s life becomes a mere 2-minute narration.

In movies, it’s easy to just insert a blank screen with the words “after [so-and-so number of] years”, and conveniently leave out those years off the story altogether. But truth is, that transition, that part which gets cut off from the movie, is the most agonizing of all.

I kinda feel like I’m in that part of my life right now — that blank screen. I know I’m heading towards my “somewhere, someday,” but waiting and working for it is soo agonizing that I sometimes wish I have a golden thread so I can skip through parts, or, just like the movies, pull out that transitional blank screen. Except that this is real life, and one life can’t be all defining moments happening one after another, it has to have the long monotonous moments in between too. I mean, sure I don’t want to skip through 10 years of my life and miss out on actually living it. It’s really just the transitions that make me anxious and impatient.

And this, my friends, is what I mean by Hollywood’s way of making me over analyze things. And frankly, I’m quite not sure yet if that’s a good thing or not.

Also, I blame this to the hormones, poor defenseless hormones. And the coffee.

I did write a birthday blog two weeks ago, but I posted it on a more discrete place, and well, maybe I’ll link back to it next year when I’m ready. Right now I just want an excuse to post these photos, hee.

I guess what set this year apart from the other birthdays was, this time, I wanted to lie low on the celebrations. And yes, contrary to the photos you’re seeing, I really did plan on just having a quiet day at home where I can work and contemplate on the past 27 years of my life (srsly), my only wish being that baby Isaac spent the day with me. But then my Mom, being the mother that she is (why thank you, mother!), couldn’t stop herself from preparing a surprise (and quick) birthday lunch for me, before she went out-of-town with some of our balikbayan relatives. Other highlights include dinner with Kuya Nate, Ate Imy & Isaac, the usual after-dinner coffee with Xai & Ivy, a bouquet of balloons delivered by Mark the latte boy, a pair of Nike slippers from my New Yorker cousin, a happy birthday serenade via Skype, and a humiliating photo album posted by Kuya Nikos in Facebook.

I can’t think of anything else I haven’t said already in my past birthdays, about growing one year older, leaving the past behind, being thankful for what you have, and how, when you turn a certain age, it would feel like your life is never going to be the same again. (Reading my old birthday posts, I find it funny now how I would say those very words every year!)

But ahh, a word to those who are turning 27, just.. keep it cool. When you reach this age, you will feel all sorts of pressure. See, your age is closer to 30 now, and if you’re like me who still doesn’t have a kid at this age, everyone will keep reminding you of your biological clock. Be ready to answer questions like, ‘when are you getting married?’ or ‘do you have a boyfriend?’, or ‘what are you waiting for?’, you’ll encounter lots of those on a daily basis. Prepare a standard answer, practice your smile. Keep your composure, there’s no need to feel anxious.

By this time you would have experienced how it’s like to have your heart broken, found success (or failure) in your career, enjoyed your independence, made countless of mistakes. That’s fine, what doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger, we often hear and say. At 27, you will always find yourself drawing strength from your past experiences and realizing that with God’s grace, you have, indeed, become a better person.

Sure, you will have to make decisions that will alter your life forever, but what I’ve come to realize is, whatever choice you make, or wherever God places you when you turn 27, you will be okay. Whether you choose to pursue your career, or settle down and start a family (or whether you’re already raising a family!), know that not one choice is better than the other. You will do fine, either way. And God.. God will remain faithful no matter what, you’ll just have to keep trusting and believing that He’s got the rest of your life in His hands.

And there I was by the couch, breathing it all in, enveloped by the comfort of the familiar, the peace that comes with being around family, love that needs no words.

Going home to an empty apartment, on the same night, was the perfect contrast. I dropped my bag by the couch where a bunch of other bags start to pile up. I stopped by the kitchen sink to wash dishes that accumulated over the past, okay, 3 days. I took out the garbage, checked if the doors were locked, turned off the lights. Finally, I dressed down to get ready for bed, and carried my laptop with me as I went. I knew then that it was going to be one of those nights I would lie awake in the dark wondering, “why am I living by myself again?”

I think this is my elaborate way of saying, I don’t want to be alone anymore.

Yep, that’s it. I could’ve just twitted that, huh, seeing that it’s under 140 characters anyway. But I somehow feel the need to explain that line to myself, hence this blog. (Sometimes, things become clearer when you think out loud.)

I feel like I’m starting to outgrow this independence already. Of course I’ll never trade the past 5 years that I lived on my own for anything. God has blessed me so much during this time — I enjoyed my independence to the fullest, found fulfillment in my career, traveled in places I never thought I’d see in my lifetime, learned to be accountable to myself.

But I think it’s time to come back home and spend time with my family now. I miss living with siblings I fight with, and my mom’s cooking, and the chaos that is our neighborhood in Caloocan. And I’m missing out on Isaac’s growing up, too! Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself by saying this, after all, I’m still not sure how I’m going to do it, I don’t even have a room there anymore, but oh well, I’ll deal with the logistics later on.

The countdown to my homecoming begins. (Got that, Mom? I’m coming home.)

And then New York happened in this life of mine. Shortly after, Sydney.

That’s me with my cousin Dots and my godson, Jonah,
on a hill overlooking the Sydney Harbor. November, 2008.

Just now I came across this post Ala Paredes wrote on her tumblr:

In the mornings, when I join the mad rush of people commuting to work, and I’ve been on the train for an hour on my long journey from Western Sydney to the North, I feel uplifted when my train makes its slow crawl across the Harbour Bridge as if it were holding it’s breath.

I see the metropolitan sprawl beneath me, see the Opera House, the ships coming in, and wide expanse of sparkling blue ocean kissing the horizon and think,” Wow, I live and work in this city. You’ve come a long way from day one, baby”.

..and I can’t help but siiiigh and wish I could write the same expression of love. I fell in love with Sydney when I was there in 2008. (New York was a very close second, ‘just thought I’d add.) And I can imagine how it’s like, that morning that Ala so eloquently described, walking around Circular Quay and seeing the Opera House as part of a normal day and not just some touristy thing to do.

I just.. sigh.. I want to live in a city I’m in love with and constantly falling in love with. And no, please don’t look at me like I’m betraying my own country. I don’t like feeling like this, too. I wish I’m not struggling choosing between loyalty to this city God placed me in and the curiosity that maybe He planted this aching desire in my heart and I’ve got to at least do something to pursue it.. It’s a daily struggle that’s tearing me apart every single day.

Please tell me I’m not the only one who feels this way. /rant