Not Cut Out For It

Drove to attend yet another mundane meeting at South Jakarta – I thought about how odd it was that I’d go through this length of distance, ugly road and all, to be in this small, secluded rectangular room discussing something that might or might not come to realization.

This reminded me of the satirical office joke email that my auntie sent me yesterday – regarding meetings as an excuse for people to impress others, to waste time and to make themselves feel more important as if they’re doing something grand). How ironic that my life is a living Dilbert strip – right down to its rotten corporate policies.

I couldn’t bear the thought of doing this for the next five years of my life, and I was surprised so many people would. But maybe it was because I never saw the importance of it – never really grasped the message that should be given, just like any other things in life in which I could always get the positivity out of.

In the end, it didn’t even matter. I’d put all the effort and hard work into something that was still ambiguous and pointless, for as far as I could see.

What did I want exactly? Respect? Appreciation? Admiration?

I visualized getting all that and yet I felt no change whatsoever. No excitement. No challenge. No self-development on my part. I realized that I would never be satisfied as long as I was still in that position, no matter how much effort I’d put in.

Maybe that was a good thing – pushing me to the very best. But then again, maybe I was just not cut out for it.

Get a Life.

My manager was giving one of those off-the-office chat this morning. I just arrived and was parking my car in the parking lot and she was parking right behind me and when I saw her (she was waving to get my attention) she gestured me to get into car, offered some cake (which I, without thinking, munched at it straight away), and then she started it off by saying that since this had nothing to do with work, that was why she didn’t want to have the talk in the office.

Fair enough.

So she said. Apparently, there were some people at work who thought that our behavior (that’s me and my boyfriend’s) was a little too demonstrative for their liking.

What amazed me was; why was this necessary in the first place? And why was she even listening to those idiots? She confessed herself she never actually seen with her own eyes, how demonstrative exactly. So I really couldn’t see what the fuss was all about.

We didn’t kiss. We didn’t hug. Ok there was one time where he gave me a little kiss, but that was a one off, and it was even only on the forehead, and then we agreed not to show any physical contacts whatsoever at work or during office hours (which I think is completely ridiculous), since I knew how people craved to gossip and to exaggerate one small little harmless gesture.

So the conclusion is so, so simple.

People are jealous.

They are so jealous, they have nothing better to do than to talk about other people’s private business because their lives (or love lives, for that matter), is so bloody boring. So fist-eatingly boring they think of me as this mini celebrity in which her life must be kept up to date.

Unfuckingbelievable.

So what? I must act like other ridiculous people who are too embarrassed to show their feelings to the person they love that they won’t even have lunch together let alone hold hands? I bet those idiots must be rethinking and revaluing their own relationships because they are comparing it with ours and what they find is not up to their liking. Yup. Their relationship is so dull and meaningless, and they hate it that other people are not as unhappy as they are, they feel the need to ruin other’s lives so necessary and imperative.

What is even beyond stupidity on their part is that by protesting about it, they’re actually admitting that their lives are so not happening and they don’t like it when other people have what they don’t have. Hey. News flash. Good things only happen to good people. Didn’t you know?

Honestly. People should get a life.

DX

I detest you
and yet I thank you

For if it wasn’t because of you
I would never have met him

But you’re killing me
Being with you is like being in hell

The becoming of you
Is the undoing of me

Is it time for me to leave you?
I believe it is so.

You’re showing me what is wrong
and what should be made right

It’s not you
It’s me

It’s time for me to go.
It’s time for us to go.

I move on.

I hope you will too.

I Wished I Owned Hallmark

That’s what I thought whenever Valentine’s Day lurks around the corner.

Just like Christmas and Easter and any other good old celebrational days, it’s like an excuse for everyone to be consumptive and buy the necessary items that are proffered around shopping malls right to our faces. It’s all pink. Pink teddy bears, pink heart-shaped pillows, pink decorations, fluffy, furry, soft pink everywhere.

Funny how love has become something so difficult for human beings to express that they felt the need to invent a day in a year to express it. Maybe because it has become numbed down to a point when it has to be brought back to life again, just to remind them all that they were still human with emotional needs.

I was never excited about Valentine’s Day. In fact it is just like any other day, in which I was totally cynical about it, saying stuff like “complete commercial exploitation”; thinking that the whole point of Valentine was to make people becoming more consumptive and making them buy stuff they didn’t need. I would never doubt that my opinion was truly correct, without hesitation whatsoever.

Yesterday was like any other day.

Any other day ever since I was reborn;
Where I don’t feel the need for a one special day to express what I feel, because I do it anyway.
Where I don’t feel the need to give something to my loved one, because the presence of him is already a gift of which I am thankful each day, each hour and each minute of it.
Where I feel complete, alive and truly blessed, no matter what my current emotional state is.
Where I am safe and sound, knowing that I am in the right place, and in the right moment.

Love is fluid. No cards, teddy bears or chocolate bars can ever express the true meaning of it – this, I am certain.

Marriage: Case Studies

Case #1:
A wife, a husband and a son.

The wife is a busy career woman with the position of a manager in growing company who works fourteen hours a day and only sees her son mostly during the weekend.

The husband holds a top position in a pharmaceutical company and works in Nigeria for three years to supply the family’s finance so that his wife and son could live a better life.

Wife chooses job over son.
Wife chooses financial security over husband’s presence.

Husband chooses job over his presence next to his wife.
Husband chooses money over seeing the growth of his son.
Husband chooses son over wife. Love priority switches.

Wife gives snide comments whenever there’s a successful woman who is past thirty and is not married. And yet her situation is actually worse.

Here is a married life with no husband and no time to take care of her son.
Here is a married life where the wife prefers financial security over husband’s presence for her.
Here is a married life where the husband and wife agrees that their union together doesn’t mean anything when it comes down to money.
Here is a married life where, frankly said, it could be just any man to support the wife, so long as he can finance the family, because it doesn’t matter whether the man is there for them, what matters is what the man can give.
Here is a married life where the husband and wife agrees that their love priority has switched down to their son, and that what they used to have between each other no longer exist.

I wonder whether they ever ask themselves if the whole thing is worth it.
I wonder whether the wedding vow that they’d proclaimed to each other [to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part] mean anything at all.

Case #2:

Newlyweds.

Wife feels sad every now and then but doesn’t know why.
Wife feels more insecure than before despite the fact that they just got married.

Husband is confused about wife’s insecure feelings.
Husband advises single friends not to get married.

I wonder whether trust means anything in this marriage. I wonder whether trust means anything in any marriage at all.

Trust that they would make each other happy.
Trust that they would be there for each other no matter what the circumstances are.
Trust that they are meant for each other and that emptiness is no longer.
Trust that when a man and a woman come together in a holy matrimony, they are no longer two in the eyes of God, but they are united as one.

“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.”
If a man and a woman fail to acknowledge the meaning of this simple phrase, then they have failed to realize the purpose of marriage.