Absurdly slow, extremely fast

9.17.11. Who likes to be both first and last; Absurdly slow, extremely fast? Who wants to see her future last; But lives not in the present but in her past?

Someone once told me that it doesn’t take a lot to know that you like somebody. You just, know. It’s that simple.

Last Sunday during lunch I asked Pops what he thought. He didn’t agree. Since he is the most important man in my life, I listened carefully to his answer.

“It takes time to build a relationship. It’s like planting a tree. You have to nurture it to assure its growth according to its natural process. There are no shortcuts” he says as a concerned father imparting wisdom to the heart of his youngest daughter.

I thought about it for awhile – about the boys I liked, the ones I didn’t and all the missed opportunities they all have in common. Aside from chemistry, time was always the other culprit. Lack of time to grow, to invest, to take advantage of, to fall, to give but never to take back.

We can never fully grasp the essence of time. It’s like trying to capture air in your hands. You can’t see it so you can only believe that you have.

Its omnipresent abundance overflows the past into the present, filling the future with a false sense of becoming. How do we really know which tense we’re living? Which air are we breathing? Regret, certainty or promise?

Are we foolish to think that time was ever ours when in truth all we can do is imagine how its presence feels upon the cusps of our hands. No matter how tightly we grasp, time and air will emerge into the night, stealing opportunity along with it.

Even if we clasp, our hands are not made to be perfect. Time, like air, will escape through the crevices of its asymmetrical embrace, mine in his and his in mine. And we never feel it leaving.

Perhaps liking someone is simple. But the time it takes to develop isn’t. Like or love is always a process. As my Pop’s said, there are no short cuts to see how deep it can go and it takes courage to accept the risk of believing rather than knowing what you wish would happen.

After 21 years I can finally say that a small part of me is no longer a coward.

I haven’t been very public about the last couple of months of my life. To say it has been rough in many different aspects is an understatement and I’m not obligated to share the details on here. But what I can disclose is that I was seriously seeing someone and unlike my past experiences, I could actually feel those roots starting to grow ever so slowly, but surely. After all it’s not how you started that matters, it’s how you feel at the present time that does.

It took me by surprise – the fact that there was this guy, that I could feel for him, that he entered into and saw my life in its humble entirety, and that it could end as intensely and abruptly as it started.

It took me awhile to take the risk and believe that time was on our side without knowing yet that it was never truly ours to give. Now I understand from experience that beyond the empty promises and honest mistakes, the only thing we can truly give is ourselves, no matter how small or big of a chunk it is.

Since time is infinite we’re never certain when it’s with or against us, or paradoxically both. It’s beyond us no matter how much we try to grasp it with our hands. It feels both absurdly slow and extremely fast.

But towards the end when you finally loosen your grip and let go, you understand that time and its duration is just an insignificant marker. It’s a way to keep tabs on a feeling that is supposed to be unconditional. Knowing that you planted and nurtured even just a little bit of yourself in the process makes all the difference, especially in the end.

Despite its unfortunate end, in my case, it’s as simple as that.

* Note, more entries on all of “this” soon.

Bitter sweet paradox

Loner vibes

For as long as my adolescent and emerging young adult self can remember, my internal struggles have always been torn between two extremes –  solitude and companionship. My dad’s explanation would be it’s because I’m a Gemini so the split personality of the twins does some paradoxical voodoo on my wants and needs.

It comes in phases. In order to keep my sanity and incubate my thoughts, I need to wander and muddle through my little world of independence and isolation. But I need friends and people to wake me up from getting lost and roaming out of reach. I need them to be there when I come back. Solitude is a bitter sweet feeling.

That’s why you need to have constants. The people you love and can count on through thick and thin. I’m blessed to have mine, but ironically they are the ones who aren’t, at least in my every day life.

Perhaps i need to redefine “constant.”

I love catching up with people just as much as I enjoy making new friends. We can pride ourselves in being able to talk like nothing has changed. But the truth is that beneath the gleeful kwentohans, the subtext is that they have. I admit that sometimes I feel slightly sad when I realize how independently we’re all living our lives. If constants are “constant” then they shouldn’t be catching up, right?

I used to wonder why no matter how hard I tried to change it, the struggle between solitude and companionship was always the case throughout high school and even now in college. I was always a floater — an individual who was there but never completely part of the whole. An outlier who deviates, even from even her own life.

Perhaps it’s my fault that I project the image of being busy. Well, I am. Sometimes I think what people fail to see is the amount of time I actually spend alone, which I never felt was a bad thing, but neither is being a constant in the life of someone else. That’s why we like getting that text, that message, that invite that someone is thinking about you. The initiative speaks louder than words because it shows that they want you to be part of their life.

I’ve long ago accepted the companionship of solitude. Unlike loneliness, it isn’t painful and it’s part of growing up.  Actually, as a friend it has taught me a great deal. But it shouldn’t be the only one. Was it Levinas? or Heidegger who said that we are beings in the world with other beings. Life is meant to be shared with others. Don’t take your “constants” for granted.

With this one, I wont.

Put the real foot forward

My parents, loving each other at their best and worst

How does one start building a relationship that lasts, one that’s true, one that could possibly lead to an “i do”? The answer is by putting the real foot forward.

My parents just celebrated their 30th anniversary last May 16 while my best friend recently entered into her first relationship and is hopelessly in love with her boyfriend 8 years her senior. Although each of their love story’s take place generations apart, the curious similarity is that they both offered me the same (un)solicited advice on love, dating and finding the one.

It’s not about putting your best foot forward, they say. When the glass slipper fits, from day one you should have seen everything, the warts, calloused toes and all.

Given the traditional style of courtship in the Philippines this poses a problem. Guys shower girls with gifts and flirtatious praise while most girls passively accept, not daring to show their other cheek. Each are playing game. Each wants to play the right cards in order to get lucky in love or even lust.

This happens even with the complicated modern world of dating. In order to hook each other’s interests, make a good impression and find every possible connection from the getgo, both boys and girls project an image of their best-self. This is really only a glimpse or maybe even a highly glossy version of their real-self.

Later on is when they discover that prince charming can really be quite the ass or that the princess can be quite a bitch which is fine because there’s really one in all of us. It’s just a matter of finding the right bitch:ass ratio suitable for each couple.

Or that he has a lot of skeletons in his closet while she has skulls.

Or that he’s the neat freak and she’s the mess.

Well, you get the picture.

But if genuine love is about accepting each other for what we are and are not, shouldn’t our faults be on the menu even on the first date?  second date? third date? Or is that really too soon to stomach? No wonder dating is difficult and full of indigestion.

I don’t know how my parent’s courtship unfolded but I do know how my best friend’s has. She and her boyfriend fell because they were the real thing from the very beginning. No games nor pretension. It was more of a “This is who I am. You’re either in or out.” If you can’t handle me now, who’s to say you can handle me later on, right?

What's your love language?

Maybe this kind of intensity is not everyone’s style. Is it mine? Maybe. I’ve never even had a boyfriend or fallen in love, so who am i to say. But if two couples, who are generation’s apart, said the same thing on two separate occasions, then maybe it is in fact a universal yet underutilized truth.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s why the slipper is made of glass. When it fits you’re meant to see everything. So you better put the real foot forward, even in the beginning.

More thoughts on love, dating and singlehood here and especially here.

If conversations could kill

If conversations could kill its  death would be a slow one. Each word would successively feel its way deeper into the victim’s soul, touching a place in their heart that will never, ever,  forget and worse, will crave for in its absence.

As the conversation strings them along this ambiguous sensation we call a “connection”, be wary when it triggers a light headed sense of delusion. Because when that happens they’re left with a fate far worse than death — a limbo of wishful thinking.

You see, conversations are like hallucinogens. Conversations have the power to fabricate a world out of words, where nouns link common interests and adjectives exaggerate feelings. How do you draw the line between what’s real and misleading?

I think back and remember. I’ve been both the victim and the victimizer. What they both have in common, I recently realized, is a need to have something in common. No one intentionally plays either role, but when the conversation thins out and there’s nothing left to say, or worse to feel,  it unconsciously becomes obvious who was who. But you have to take yourself out of the moment to see that.

I’ve been both the victim and the victimizer, but never at the same time.  If conversations could kill,  isn’t there anyone to die with me?

No (wo)man is an island

I was both excited and anxious to write this article. Firstly, because it’s something that I know I can say a lot about so there’s that self-inflicted pressure to articulate everything that I wanted to say. Secondly, by doing so I was risking being labeled as that “Ultimate Single Girl” which might actually decrease my chances at a love life this year haha. Thirdly, I really didn’t want to come off as self absorbed.

But it came out just the way I wanted it to be, maybe even better. I think it’s my favorite article yet! And it made me really happy to get such a response from it. After all every journalist wants to be able to reach out to his or her readers. It’s awesome to know that people – single, taken, boy, or girl – can relate!

Really, there’s no reason for singles to be S.A.D on valentines day or any other day of the year. The pictures on my blog are out takes from my photographer Ean Dacay which I edited. Enjoy :)

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No (wo)man is an island

By: Rica S. Facundo

Despite a population of more than seven billion people, the world can get lonely sometimes. From time to time, we may ask ourselves: are we all really destined to be stuck on a deserted island with no one but ourselves to keep us company forever?

Within him or her is a paradise that is bound to be experienced with others. It’s wasteful not to share the view—an infinite horizon of beautiful possibilities, but not before it has time to let life form them first.

In my case, I have been single since birth. Over the course of my life, I have come across most if not all overused clichés and romantic justifications to explain my lifelong statuses – “when it happens, it happens”, “I haven’t met the one” and “I’m just not looking” may vary on the scale of cheesiness, but secretly, we know that a lot of them ring true to our hearts.

Obviously there many scripted lines found in the handbook for singles, ready to guide anyone interrogated with the infamous and sometimes annoying questions and assuming judgments about singlehood. Admittedly, I’ve used a fair share of them to defend and explain the different chapters of my love life myself (then again, who hasn’t?)

But now at twenty years old, an age of which most undergraduates are on their path of self-discovery, I have no readymade answer to give. That’s because in the face of this burning question, I realized that I haven’t really been paying attention. My life is narrating a different story, with the old script now irrelevant. Prince Charming is now a minor character and the fairy tale has now become reality.

Putting the ‘single and ready to mingle mantra’ and all the fun shenanigans aside, the footnote in every great single love story is this: It’s less about the single activities and more about the kind of person the single person becomes that matters most.

That’s when singlehood moves on from being a stagnant stage in one’s love life soundtrack to a single playlist that one saves for special occasions. Sometimes you’ll even overlook its existence, proving that it’s easy to forget one is single when one is busy enjoying the rest of life’s music. And that’s when you realize it doesn’t matter that you still are.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that all single people have boycotted relationships and continue to parade around in picket lines, holding signs painted with a big red “NO TO LOVE” to scare off every suitor that comes their way, or are unwilling to raise the white flag and negotiate the terms. After all, we are all human with hearts that love and a soul that gets lonely.

Single people, especially those in college, are actually saying yes to the biggest relationship of all time. It’s a yes to themselves, a declaration of which presupposes and enriches any future romantic or even platonic relationship with others. In the first Sex and the City movie, I remember the breakup line that Samantha Jones, a strong and vibrant woman who rarely commits to a life of monogamy, gave to her then- longtime boyfriend. Despite of her indisputable love for him, she said that she’s been in a relationship with herself for 49 years and that’s the one she needs to work on.

We learn in Theology 131: Marriage and Human Sexuality that a relationship is the best context for a person to grow and mature. Like what Samantha points out, a relationship with one’s self should still exist. Some are stronger and more evident than others which in the long run, play a vital role in determining the health of one’s relationship.

In M. Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Travelled”, he defines love as the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.  That’s why it’s a common misconception that love is about completing one another. Rather, it should be about complimenting each other which is hard to do if you start with a self with so many holes to fill.

So, if no (wo)man is an island then why is it that there are so many single people still lingering around? In my twenty years of experience, my answer is this:

You don’t need to be in a relationship to be happy. Initially that’s your job to fulfill. Instead, you can be in a relationship to become a happier self than you already are.

So when my sunrise meets his sunset, each of us painting the sky with our own brushstrokes of color, the image created will not be that of solitary islands, but of bona fide paradise—mine and his combined.”

That is the perpetual question

Overused cliches. We've all used them

Are you an island or a paradise?

A Blog Post for No One

Searching all my days just to find you. I'm not sure who I'm looking for. I'll know it when I see you. Until then, I'll hide in my bedroom, staying up all night just to write, a blog post for no one

Person: Rica, how many boyfriends have you had?

Me: I’ve been single since birth!

Person: What, WHY?!?! You don’t  seem like the SSB type…

Me: Uhm… (silence)

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had this exchange with people and until now I can’t come up with a satisfying answer to this perpetual why.

Recent events like discussing love in Fr. Dacanay’s theology class, my Toastmasters speech about my ideal guy, and most recently a secret revealed from the past has prompted me to revisit my past, think about my present and wonder about my future.

Initially I was going to write about the different famous figures I used for my ideal guy speech, but although that would be hilariously amusing (think Ryan Reynolds, Mark Zuckerburg, Obama,  etc) I thought that using some points from theology class could probably best shed some light on my situation. And since I have no idea how to make everything into a coherent blog post, I thought using bullet points to express these realizations would make more sense.

So,  first some points from Scott Peck’s article which struck me. It’s about “genuine love” and how it’s not the same as “falling in love” which will most probably reaffirm and/or enlighten you (as it did for me) from our tendency to romanticize this whole notion of love.

• Love is “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own and another’s spiritual growth“
• Genuine love in a relationship grows together with the rest of the world. It should be able to co-exist and flourish with other healthy relationships
• Genuine love is not driven by sheer emotion but involves real effort. It is an act of will and an exercise of genuine freedom for love is a free decision for which you are responsible and an act of will means you made a choice
• Love is not effortless. It is effortful
• Falling in love is a misconception about genuine love. It is not genuine love because it is an idealized state. It is not a free and conscious choice but a chemical reaction.
• Falling in love is a sex-linked erotic experience and invariably temporary which is why it’s not genuine

And lastly, the WINNER line which probably describes my view on clingy relationships and why I cringe at the thought of it.

• Girl:  I cannot live without my boyfriend! I love him or her so much
• Person: You are mistaken. You do not love your boyfriend.
• Girl: What do you mean? I just told you I can’t live without him!
• Person: What you describe is parasitism, not love.

So, really… in retrospect one reason why I could possibly not have found love in the last 20 years is the lack of will – on my part, or his –  in the rare occasion that I do feel compelled to (sex-linked, sheerly emotionally driven or not) of course.

Also, the guys that have excited me in the past did offer some kind of spiritual growth – conversationally and  intellectually, but I have yet to experience it emotionally, precisely for the reason stated above.  And will itself can be constrained by numerous other factors as well such as  previous baggage, timing, distance etc.

My friends tell me to be open-minded which I do believe I am. But my heart knows what it wants and only it can tell me when it wants to beat faster, not only in the “falling in love stage” but beyond it as well.

Frankly, I do want a boyfriend and I think it’s about time that I get one. But I do think that there’s a difference between wanting one and looking for one, which everyone automatically says you shouldn’t do because “it will just come.” Just because I want one doesn’t necessarily mean I’m desperately pining for one.

So, given this, universe, consider this my public declaration to you and my blog post for no one in particular. May the forces be with me this 2011!

Wishing upon a star

Reliability.

Irregardless of whether it’s as friends or lovers, having a spark with someone is  not enough to sustain and develop a relationship. Sometimes there is more value in the people who make an effort to show up than those whom you share a good conversation with from time to time.

We’re like stars in the sky. They only form beautiful constellations if you bother to see that they can.  If you don’t, then they’ll remain to be just points of light aimlessly floating around in the universe. You have to realize that there are some that you’re just not meant to wish upon but to admire from afar instead.

Books before boys because boys bring babies

Picture by Pia Facundo

I was cleaning My Documents the other day when I came across my old tumblr entry that I first wrote on word doc. Seeing as I am the single one out of a lot of my friends who are suddenly dating  now I thought it would be amusing to revisit possible reasons for my relationship status now.  At least that’s what I told myself not so long ago hahaha.  Funny how some things have definitely changed since then. And what’s even funnier is how some things haven’t.

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7B’s: Books before boys because boys bring babies

The last time I cried over a boy was in the 10th grade. It was minutes before the first bell rang and I was running towards the bathroom, not only fighting tears, but also the realization that “we would just be friends.” However his words seared and infiltrated through my heavily guarded heart and I lost both battles.

I wouldn’t call it heartbreak but probably my closest experience with heartache. Four years later and I’m still single since birth with only a few scribbles from my planner to remind me of a time when it felt easier to let my guard down. (Geez, dramatic and emo much? Haha)

Is it me or was it simpler to date/like someone back when we were hormonally imbalanced adolescents? Now that we’re older it doesn’t seem enough to make people make the first move, or even to reciprocate. Age and experience tends to give us more boxes to tick off in our check list to finding love. But deep inside we know that we never needed the list in the first place. So when and why did it get so complicated?

That was the last time I really liked someone and sometimes I wonder when I’ll find my heart in all sorts of awkward positions again. I’m not really looking especially now when I’m just learning to share myself with well… myself, what more with someone else? So, I’m in no rush.

But I know that when the time comes, whether I’m ready or not, someone will make me lower the white flag and wage in a battle that’s worth the fight.