Welcome to suburbia.

"This is your life, you made it this far
Welcome, you gotta believe
That right here right now, you're exactly where you're supposed to be
Welcome, to wherever you are."
- Welcome To Wherever You Are, Bon Jovi

When I'm feeling contemplative, I like to look outside my bedroom window and think about what my neighbours' lives are like. The reality of having lived my entire life in the same small suburb but not having fostered any close relations to the people living around me, is sometimes quite shocking.

When I was very little, my neighbour Bryan was my best friend in the whole world. We used to "play sand" everyday after school, until we were nine years old. Our parents used to worry about the mosquitoes biting our legs when the day turned into evening. We even made a hole in the fence separating our houses - from a small hole where we could exchange small buckets of sand until one day the hole was so big that Bryan climbed over to my house compound. One time, I was in such a hurry to play but he wanted to pee, I made him pee in the bush in his garden. LOL.

When I was ten, eleven, twelve, I used to ride my bicycle and hang out in the playground with the neighbourhood kids. But apart from exchanging sticker collections and making prank calls to friends, we never really got to know each other past a surface level. Bryan wasn't allowed to play outside his house, his parents worried too much. The one time he was allowed out, he poked a dog and it bit his leg - he had to go to the hospital, and he wasn't allowed out again. :(

Sometimes I wonder what my old friends are up to now... what is Bryan doing right now? Does he remember the years we spent playing together? Where are the Indian siblings I used to make prank calls with? Some people moved to different parts of the country, or abroad ... even I moved to a different part of the same suburb, and Bryan wasn't my next-door neighbour anymore. But even while he lives only across the street, sometimes the forty footsteps between today and fourteen years ago is too far a distance to bridge.

Vanity mirror.

"You are the smile in my joy.
The noise in my laughter.
My happiness.
I think I just wrote a Hallmark card."

I reckon every man, woman, and child needs a vanity mirror. We're supposed to love what we look like, including flabby bits or freckled skin - and then when we embrace that This Is Me, we go out and face the world with our heads held high and smiles a-winning.

Tabletop messages.

Today I was making some notes for my GRE prep, and when I moved my papers I saw part of my notes imprinted on my white desk. They reminded me of those afternoons I was in Form 2, and I saw something funny someone from the morning session had written on my desk. It struck me as rather serendipitous that someone sat in my same desk all year, except he or she was in the morning session of secondary school and I was in the afternoon session. I replied on it, because the idea of how paths can cross in these strange ways intrigued me. The next afternoon, the first thing I did when I got to class was look at my desk.

And there it was, a friendly reply scrawled in blue ink. I never met the person, but it was my tabletop-message-friend for the rest of the year. I remember the jokes we shared, the gossip exchange about morning and afternoon session ... and how it was a sort of magical friendship, because it was just messages on a school desk. Kinda felt like I was in Hogwarts. :P

The dreaded tech problem.

"Oh my god Mummy, I finally fixed the malware on Your Shopping Kaki!"
"Don't hang so many clothes on your wardrobe door, the handle will spoil."

 As much as I love blogging, technical difficulties have haunted my stress levels on at least half a dozen occasions. There was that time I moved my blogspot to a dot com site and it wiped all my blogrolls away, and it was 48 frenzied hours before we figured out how to restore the 2,000 links I had painstakingly built on my website over months. There was that time I couldn't edit my widgets on my laptop so I had to camp the computer lab on campus to do my blog work. And this time, there was some sort of malware or virus linked to YSK - and I had no idea how to fix it.

For a week, I dealt with readers telling me the website was showing a malware warning. But thanks to Cynthia, Michelle, John and a retired engineer from New Orleans, we finally found the problem - and I fixed it today!



One blogroll thrown out, but one website saved.

How is the weather.

"Me and you and you and me
No matter how they toss the dice, it had to be
The only one for me is you, and you for me
So happy together."
- Happy Together, The Turtles

Mosquito.

"What is this?"
"A mosquito bite."
"Why did you let a mosquito bite her?"

My grandfathers loved me. There was my mum's father, who bought me egg tarts every time I went to visit him. He's the reason why I love egg tarts - it's the one special thing that always reminds me of my grandfather. He passed away in 1996. For the past 12 years there's only been one person I've been able to call my grandfather, my paternal one. But my dad's father is in the hospital right now, and I don't know if his condition is critical... if he's still unconscious. He's aged a lifetime in the past few years.

There are pictures that pop into my head in polaroid-like flashes when I think about my grandfather. The pen he always keeps in his shirt pocket. His grey-white hair that he combs back neatly with that small white comb every time he gets dressed. How I used to want to sleepover in my grandparents' house when I was little, but wound up crying in the middle of the night and my grandfather had to take me home to my parents. How he laughed on the phone when he called to tell me that I broke his bed when I led my troop of cousins to jump up and down on it, except it didn't break until my grandparents climbed into bed that night. He was never angry at me, never annoyed... I was always his first and favourite grandchild. I'm the one he wants to protect from being bitten by mosquitoes.

August Rush.

"Let's have 12 kids and name them after the months."
"And feed them dog food."
"Yeah dog food and water. Maybe if they're lucky they can get cat food with bird feed."
"Rabbit food may be cheaper."
"Or boiled rocks."
"Happy Valentine's Day, love."
"Happy Valentine's Day."

Watched August Rush with Willi today. Wonderful movie, filled with the kinda moments that make you feel warm and fuzzy and give you goosebumps. :)

193.

"I'm on my lunch break right now and I'm thinking of you. I wasn't hungry so I got me a strawberry milkshake from the health food store. It's yummy. I just took a pic of it to show you lol." -Note from Willi last weekend.

I'm working on my GRE test prep. He's watching a video of his late grandmother, his Tutu, before he sleeps. My hair is twisted up and clipped with my shower clip. I'm in my pajamas, because I'm always in my pajamas when I'm at home. I don't have any makeup on and I look as plain as I could possibly be, but he still thinks I'm beautiful. I look up for a moment from my crimson pink GRE folder and I see this wonderful guy with his simple needs and inspiring outlook on life, and I wonder if I will always remember how lucky I am. Will I always feel this in love, this inspired? Does anyone? I can't help but wonder... years from now, what will I be thinking when I read this blog post I wrote one hundred and ninety three days into this relationship?

The sound of the ocean soothes my restless soul.

"Love," Willi said this morning. "It's time to get up and do some work. The weekend is over."

"Forever alone."

Valentine's Day is coming up. My single/recently-single girlfriends are filling my social gatherings, Facebook, and Skype with nostalgia over ex-boyfriends, dream boyfriends, and as though they all knew each other, sigh in unison, "Forever alone."

If Harry Potter's worst fear was fear, every girl's worst fear might be loneliness. Of course, it is hard to be alone in this people-filled world - you have family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, strangers you meet in bookstores or yoga class who could later be your friends. But when this time of the year rolls around, it's hard to ignore Valentine's Day unless you live under a rock surrounded by more rocks. And just like people who are away from family might feel lonely at Christmas, people feel lonelier than they usually are.

Back in school, we had clubs that made everyone feel good by having "Friendship Day" celebrations on February 14th. We'd order lollipops to be sent out to our friends, so everyone kinda feels like someone cared enough about them to spend RM2.50 for a stick of candy with their name on it. But out of the ivory tower and with your life no longer scheduled according to the school bell, it's easier to feel alone.

"Remember when we first started going out, you used to say that I'm so easy to please. That it's so easy for you to make me happy?"
"Yeah. It's still easy."
"That was before we ever started fighting."
"So what if we fight? How often do we fight?"
"I want impossible things."
"What impossible things?"
"I want to never have to say goodbye if I don't wanna. I want your attention, like all the time."
"You want what every girl in the world wants from her boyfriend."
"Do you think we should break up?"
"Do you? I don't."

It's hard not to feel lonely in a long-distance relationship. Knowing someone you want to be with is across the world from you, that there are a million and one hurdles between now and the day you finally get to be with him or her. The day he doesn't disappear when the video call ends. I don't know who are the loneliest people on Valentine's Day - the people who haven't found the person they are looking for... or the ones who have, but can't be with them.

I'm lucky Willi is sure of what he wants. Because I can emo or pick fights or start on one of my I-think-we-should-break-up conclusions whenever we argue or if I don't get what I want - but he doesn't let me go into self-destruction mode. He wants to talk everything out, and I suspect may be the most important choice that keeps any relationship from drifting apart.

"I'm not a yes man. I'm sorry if that's what you're looking for," he said to me once. "I'm a I'll-stay-with-you-through-everything man."