I got my 8 hours of sleep.

I woke up half an hour earlier than my normal time.

I had extra time to doll up today.

I had my one cup of coffee.

I had free breakfast in the company meeting.

It’s candy day today at work.

It doesn’t look like it’ll be a crazy work day, which is rare.

I will be taking a good friend out to lunch for her birthday.

I will be going to my company Christmas party tonight and for the first time in the years that I’ve been working here, there will be a lot of other young people like myself.

I will be going to an after-party with these young people.

I will get a taxi ride home, with expenses all paid for by my company.

I still think about my mistake this past summer where I broke my values and I still think about the hurt from this experience. No matter what anyone says, I still see the good in him but I also acknowledge the pain that he inadvertently had to cause. I still find myself reduced to tears and heartache here and there since then but today, I’m determined to be okay. Today, I’m not going to be so hard on myself.

It’s been 16 years since I last saw you. You don’t know me so you won’t recognize me but you know my parents. Recognizing you few days ago on the bus has reminded me of your story. You were a subtle reminder for myself to keep fighting.

Time hasn’t been always good to you, evident in the crow’s feet that is just beginning to form around your eyes, the strands of grey hair attempting to hide beneath your pitch black hair and your skin in the premature stage of aging. More importantly, I was reminded of your strength and what you’ve been through.

You lost your father when you were a teenager. Your youngest sister succumbed to breast cancer, leaving behind her less than two year old daughter and her five year old son. You yourself fought against breast cancer and won. Your young kids will definitely remember your triumphant strength. Your 91-year old mother and your seven other siblings must be so proud, not to mention your many nephews and nieces. In that 30-minute bus ride, you reminded me what it means to live and lost, then to continue living again, and to fight the good fight.

Admiring you from afar,
Jenn

You will have spent the night of Oct 24, 2011 wide awake, thinking how to write and what to write to you. So here goes….

In your childhood, you would have mostly lived with your head above the clouds. You would have discovered writing at a tender age of 8 years old, sometimes translating Chinese stories to English and then making your father read them.

Since 4 years old, you’ve had to learn about responsibility, often helping your parents with their business. By your teenage years, you will have learned the full-fledged meaning of going to school and working right after school.

A certain incident that you kept quiet for the first 17 years of your life will have crept up and it is not until the first love of your life that you begin on the path of healing. That love was genuine, intense, full of passion and dreams but lacked maturity to understand the scope of that intensity.

You will have a very supportive close-knit circle of friends who protect you, care for you and downright love you, through the big and the small faults. There will be a couple of apples that turn sour and you eventually give those friendships up because they don’t respect you in quite the same way you respect them. You will struggle a lot, internally, for a long time before you give them up.

By 18, you will have learned about death and Muscular Dystrophy altogether. The latter is experienced with increasing severity over the years in an immediate family member.

Your second love was good on the books and though he loved you well, the lack of connection was just too great, which led to its ultimate downfall. He taught you about roots, about family, about appreciation but all gets lost when you don’t love someone the right way or as deeply.

You made two grave mistakes that you never quite overcome in forgiving yourself, or accepting yourself after them. You became so forlorn and so distant from everyone for a really long time.

He left you with a lot of wounds, a lot of pain and you became increasingly broken over the years. You learned to shelter yourself for three long years, closing your heart to four other people who wanted to be with you, because you deemed protecting yourself to be more important than experiencing love. You thought you were spent but it’s your third love that you realize you had a lot more to give.

On June 2011, your world that you knew in your 28 years of life was no longer. You became so broke, so numb that never in your life had you wanted to run away, so fast, so badly. The God you half-believe in gave you the best and the worst presents in one summer. Or so it seemed at the time.

Your third love was clearly not right for your future but he was really similar to you, he didn’t look good on the books but you loved him anyway with an open heart and in all the ways you knew how. He gave and took away just as much. He said things and unsaid things just as much. He gave you hope and disappointed you altogether. In the same way he closed part of the past wounds, he also reopened them and led you to pain. It was pure romance, flighty and never tangible, cursed right from the start.

The first time was for being in love and loved in return, the second for learning how to love someone right, the third was loving someone with every fractured part of your self. Neither of the three were right for you, in fact, each one hurt more than your last. You don’t quite seem to love someone right at the right time.

By the end of the summer of 2011, your supposed best and worst presents left you so utterly heartbroken that it left you unmotivated to live, lost in your direction of life, shattered and left again to your own devices, to piece yourself together.

In time, you will see.

Not every apology can be traded with it’s-ok. Not everyone’s story is worth discovering. Not every person you meet deserve your care and affection. The rosy-coloured glasses you see the world in is really not that rosy. You treat everyone with such an open mind that you forget people don’t see it the same way. You forget that as much as we believe love triumphs all, it doesn’t because it can inflict a pain far deeper than you ever knew existed. You forget that the person you’ve trusted your entire life can render you to question your worth, your meaning in life. You forget that sometimes you fall for the ones that are not worthy of your love.

You will have spent too much of your life letting people take away pieces of you here and there till there is no more to give and you are left utterly broken and empty. You forget that you’re supposed to make do with the short end of the stick that life dealt with, time and time again and to stop asking to be lucky. You will learn there is no selfless sacrifice because people are ultimately self-interested and would rather choose the easier way out. And a lot of people in your life are built this way. People will mistaken your strength, time and time again, they will think it’s bullet-proof, so they will choose to hurt you than themselves. You will forget that you’re ordinary, and that you’re not the exception.

Because you haven’t learned the difference between a truth and a lie. Because you let them in and let them rip you apart. Because you haven’t learned to protect yourself. Because you haven’t learned to be selfish. Because you believe everything people ever say. Because you haven’t learned to separate your mind and your heart, to stop seeing the world with your heart and to be realistic.

You have lost two people in the span of four months to selfishness, and although you have struggled on and off to be relatively okay, you are really not. You have slept for 10 odd hours in the past 3 days, the last 36 hours wide awake, feeling the full fledge of the losses, feeling either immense pain or numbness every couple hours. You have skipped work, you have skipped sleep, you have cancelled plans, you have dodged suspicions and questions, you have skipped meals and you have skipped studying. You have lost your motivation and your drive and in order to not let the other parts of your life spin anymore out of control, you will continue on, one day, blindly, because you know that this too shall pass.

You will pick up whatever is left and you will guard it more, you will learn these lessons and you will learn it hard. By the end of it all, you will never be the same.

Take utmost care,
Me

The general notion is that for any person to advance successfully in a corporate ladder, they have to be demanding, ruthless, make hard choices and sacrifice, usually at the expense of others; all the while, making ethical decisions and following the regulations of the firm. Likewise, for a corporation to be successful, it needs to be supported by the people who exhibit that type of belligerent yet ethically sound behaviour.

People make up a corporation and they run it, so in that sense, distinguishing a corporation as its own being is a front, a blatant excuse to separate a selected few human responsibility and for the corporation’s other employees and stakeholders to take the ultimate downfall.

A panel of selective human conscience make up the corporate conscience. There should be no distinction between the human and the corporate conscience; thus the panel of Board of Directors should be held accountable for their decisions and actions that conflict with the betterment of society. Instead, the government, for the most part, promotes the distinction, so that the selected few individuals benefit more from a collective shareholders’ investment in the form of bigger bonus payout, luxurious lifestyle, expensive flights for meetings instead of an increasing value of the stock and larger payout of dividends over a specified period of time etc. In the end, more of the corporate earnings end up being in a selected few individuals’ pockets rather than trickled into the economy.

Few societal members and some governments believe that in enriching our corporations, some of those earnings can seep into the betterment of the society, so they tolerate. They let the “conscientious” few of the elite make charitable contributions to the society while offering them generous tax shelters so that more shareholders believe in the goodness of the corporate conscience, and they are then more willing to invest in them. They make a few exceptions for big corporations in the hopes that they can produce more work for the economy. Then, you have regulatory organizations who monitor and hold the firm and its members accountable for any broken rules, or any ethically wrong decisions and actions.

In this struggle of the corporate vs. society, jobs are lost, purchasing power is decreased over time, resources become increasingly exhausted, eventually depleted over time, and the quality of living is diminished even more so. So people become angry, they fight back, they retaliate with war, with crime, with protests and those voices are only getting louder.

While the Occupy protests around many major cities of the world have the freedom to express their views, even so far as to inconvenient residences and societal resources, how productive will it be. The means values will have certainly be justified but in retrospect, will the end values be justified? Maybe but then maybe not either, although at the very least, it will have reawakened the conscience of the government, of the corporation, of the Board of Directors who run the direction of the company. The Occupy movements will have served, at the very least, as reminders for a collective conscientious efforts in the improving of our society and the betterment of people’s basic quality of life. That is the ideal anyway.

There were a lot of firsts for me this year so far, as a close friend pointed out back in August.

Clubbing: tried it, liked it and after a few fun times, it ended as spontaneously as it began.

Strip club, the afterthoughts of that experience were written here.

Spontaneous and adventurous trips, one which involved the VIA Rail across the southern parts of Ontario, the other delayed flight (almost cancelled) on Porter Airlines, 18-hour Greyhound bus ride from New York to home, and winery in Buffalo. All of which were with great company and great food.

I absentmindedly opened up my heart to someone, under the not-so-ideal circumstances and like all matters of the heart, never at the right time. We were both swept away which rendered us to be careless but like everything that is ideal, the reality will be the triumphant one in the end. I am disappointed at our fractured relationship right now but despite our cordial mess, he helped close a lot of the open wounds from my past and for that, I am still thankful. I am entirely positive that we will find a way to mend ourselves and our roles in the other person’s life eventually but until that civility and middle ground meets us, I will keep him in the private and the quiet sanctioned corners of my memory.

Stronger relationships. I have a deep appreciation for the friends in my life, most of whom have seen me through the worst and the best of times. When somebody I held so dear in my whole life broke a part of me this summer, I had a few friends who allowed me to be emotionally reckless, picked me up right after I gave in to my sorrows, called and messaged once every week to see if I was alright and if I was safe. I had siblings who took care of me and protected me in every way they knew possible. For those people who continue to come through for me, once again, thank you for the kindness you bestow upon me, time after time.

With all that reflection made, there’s a small disclaimer missing in my friend’s observation of my 2011 though and that is, whatever goes up will find a way to come down. As my best friend always say, I seem to go through more than other people our age and while I don’t completely disagree, there’s a certain sense of self-satisfaction that I can see through these obstacles and feel more experienced. Nonetheless, I will continue to fight the good fight and see all of the new lows as an opportunity to learn and grow even more.

Yesterday has proven to be one of those times, where a sharp tremor just can’t translate into words, words that can mean something later on but a lot of sentiments have just been tainted, broken, castrated and emasculated by one single act. It’s so broken, in fact, that I’d rather handle any pain I’ve been through in my life more than 10 times over to trade for this one.

People, of any relationship you have sacredly associated yourself with or been given to you, are more than willing, more than ready to throw their life away for that one single selfish, savage, vulgar act.

Then to think about every person who’s walked into my life and tried to make me believe the bad and the reality of this world, just rang true. Then I wondered how I carried on with my life, thinking that I was the lucky one when the darkest shadow was just lurking at bay.

There are no small pockets of perfection in life. I just wished I could find a way to remember that and make it stick.

The stage is set, it’s a little dim in the room and there are a lot of people coming and going between the entrance door and the many tables and chairs set up for the customers. The bartenders are wearing black-and-white stripe shirts, black pants and taking orders (and asking for tips). There are also a few bouncers in the room shuffling the customers, slowly moving them from the back to the front, making sure everyone had a seat and a view of the stage.

There are a lot of women, very happy women, in the room, with the odd addition of some men who were obviously coerced into joining their female friends. We were told at the entrance there would be no use of cameras or cell phones, which was briefly reminded to us when we were sitting down and our friend was checking his blackberry for a measure of escape, along with drowning himself in alcohol and music in the room.

As we were soaking in the environment of the room and settling down, suddenly, one very muscular man wearing only orange Diesel briefs with blue trims approaches a bride-to-be at a table beside ours. A rather good looking, 6 feet tall, muscular man with a very solid set of pectoral development and six sturdy packages of abdominal muscles.

All bouts of giggling and screaming ensued in our immediate surrounding except the lucky bride-to-be, who by now has her right hand in her face, embarrassed but still facing the man’s lower body. The tall and almost-naked man, Shawn, was busy, in more ways than one: his right hand in his briefs doing the vertical oscillations in an ever-so-slowly increments of movements while the rest of his body moved in a wave-like manner, teasing the bride-to-be who has covered her face with her hands and shaking her head by now.

Somewhere in the background of noises, a dance show was starting on the stage, not that any of us were paying attention when there was a better show off the stage and a better look of everything. A very clean, pristine picture of an otherwise, slightly wimped result of the vertical oscillation. Shaved, by the way, if you must know.

At some point in his tease, Shawn’s vertical hand gestures had become more rapid that his briefs came off. The surrounding screams and cheers only grew louder as did his tease. He proceeded to spread the bride-to-be’s legs apart, and knelt down in front of her, so they were face to face. More hand stimulation followed. After which, he stuck out his tongue and pretended to kiss her, stood up, turned around so she was facing his buttocks. He danced some more and sneaked a gentle slap on his right cheeks.

Shawn’s tease ended with a kiss on her cheeks, and one of the girls from the party group proceeded to pay him his dues. The exchange ended and so did the screaming cheers. A very unwelcome break really because it’s just quiet, with the exception of the music in the background. Until the next meat came along or the next set of group who were willing to pay for a more personal dance.

The repetition of these movements was harmonized all across the board with the private dancing at least, ranging from 1 song to 30 minutes and between $10 to $70.

At some point of the night, I started checking out everyone’s expressions in more details. The girls on the receiving end generally had a stoic expression, resulting in the physical animation from the men who would work harder (no pun intended) and make use of anything to generate a pleasure from them. Shawn, upon my several observations and who was on demand for a few times on our side, had a very disconnected expression when he did get a response. However, when he didn’t get a response, he would work harder, even resorting to making use of whip creams. Oh, and high-fives were exchanged among the almost-naked men when there was a success.

It’s great that the physical body can be a facility for people to make ends meet. I mean we use our hands, our legs, our head, even give up blood to provide or create a well-being for ourselves but at the same time, there is this dichotomous side where the reproductive organ should be used to procreate, to be an expression of connection between two people who love each other or between consenting people who feel the need to have a physical gratification of some sort.

I do appreciate that it’s an inexpensive way to rid ourselves of social responsibility or responsibility towards their partners. But, what’s the point of looking when you’re not allowed to touch and not allowed to connect with each other physically? Might as well invest in someone who can give you the full package, decorated with lavish expressions of love and gestures of a possible future.

(Possible spoilers ahead…)

A lot of people can’t understand and don’t condone with the values in the book/movie. I’m not with them. At least not in its entirety.

Sometimes love is what it is, in whichever way it comes and we have to seize it. We have to find it and not settle for it. We have to recognize our own love and the other person’s love in order to take the next step. I understand Rachel and Dex well. I understand why they both didn’t voice out their love for the other in the early years. Fear of rejection can and is a great battle to fight against. I understand why they both acted on the opening, on the chance when a little of their own truth shined through. Albeit, many years later and at the expense of Darcy’s. I rooted for them the whole time.

I have never once felt sorry for Darcy. Perhaps it’s her character. She makes it almost impossible for Dex to talk or be a man on his own. Her friendship with Rachel leaves the latter to be excluded instead of a mutually inclusive one. Darcy’s selfishness is a barrier to love and many other things. It’s not that she deserved what was coming to her. It’s just her character and habits make it hard for someone else to look past it. Not impossible, just really hard to look past it.

Love requires listening. It requires intuition too. It builds character and requires us to be constantly in-check with who we are. Love should bring out the best potential in each other and not meet their character potential halfway.

I don’t condone cheating but then if we were so lucky to be greeted with an even better representation of love, how can we deny that?

The end result of it all is that I’ve (very) reluctantly decided to sign my life away because in not doing so, I will pay a higher price in the future. Perhaps, I don’t visit doctors often enough but I’ve forgotten how irresponsible and how much compassion has been lost in our system.

Without going into the details of my health, I spent about 15 minutes with a specialist and another hour to do paperwork. Aside from the time set out for payments, I spent a chunk of that hour signing many different papers allowing my doctors to be free from being held responsible if anything should happen to me during the surgery, including death.

I understand that in signing papers like that, it will give my doctors the peace of mind to do their job, without fearing the possible lawsuit. However, what is there to guarantee that they will do their best in saving a patient’s life?

Is this the healthcare system that our society should value or continue to aspire to? Being buried in the administrative paperwork when it comes to the valuation of a human life? No one is held responsible but then no one can do their job to their utmost potential either. Doctors are so busy infiltrating their time with paperwork and patients are so busy with making someone pay. The system, instead, watches out for the post-medical care rather than the during. We’re distracted with so many of the possible outcomes that we’ve lost sight of what’s important.

It all began when we were at the parking lot of a convenience store, and we were getting ready to leave for Mark’s birthday. We: Mark, a leng jai, Ames, and myself.

Mark, upon finding out that I was driving the older family car, insisted that he was not going to sit in it because it might fall apart partway on the highway. I was a little taken aback at him for his lack of humility, his superficiality and materialistic nature. Then, I angrily told him to find his own way to go to his birthday party. Suddenly, I remembered that I was to pick up Amy as well. I quickly gave her a call to tell her I will be there in half an hour.

When I went to the driveway, the car was nowhere to be found. I called my little sister for help. She then said that she had taken the car apart and put them all in the laundry.

I woke up, looked at the time: 6:43 AM. I was supposed to sleep for two more minutes before the alarm was to ring.