Category: Thoughts

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Maybe one day I’ll curt my apparent lack of inhibitions regarding my emotions.
To expect anything but disappointment and despair will just lead me to misery.
People are all the same. Same shit, just different scripts.
Never changing, staying static to their ways.
All hypocrites.

Myself included.

Losing yourself

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How do you keep yourself from losing it? As in, preventing yourself from going off the deep end. Doing/saying/thinking things you normally wouldn’t do, under normal circumstances? What checks and balances have you set for yourself?

To not lose keys, many attach them to lanyards. To have bread not go bad quickly, many freeze them. To not oversleep when there’s an exam, many set up multiple alarms (though personally, I’d probably sleep through it all as it’s all white noise).

Now, in cases of pure emotion, whatever safeguard you may have created is thrown out the window. When we’re angry, we may say things we don’t mean. When we’re in a state of passion, we may do things we really shouldn’t be doing. Depressed, our will is sapped and nothing really matters, even the things that mean most to us.

But what I’m referring to is, for example, when you wake up, go to the sink and brush your teeth, groggily stare at yourself. Do you recognize yourself? Is what you did the day before to your standards? Your ethics? What you’ll be doing today? Tomorrow? Is this who you are?

Let’s say, we create a dish that has 4 basic ingredients:  angel hair pasta, chicken, tomato sauce, cheddar cheese. Sure, we can substitute the angel hair pasta with linguine. Chicken with sausage. Instead of cheddar, maybe use pepper jack for an added bang. It’s still our dish, but with a twist that, well, makes sense? Maybe, it may just be better than the original. But what if we instead of using tomato sauce, we instead use beef broth? Good, but now it’s more of a soup. What if we put….pineapple.

…no…just no…stop… (sorry to pro-pineapple on hot food people out there. I love pineapple though!)

And that’s sort of how we do things naturally, no? Our ethics may evolve over time. We may be wrong about something in the past, or didnt have the mental capacity to understand then, but we do now (…..like…pineapple….). We adapt.

But how do we know we aren’t changing too much? Outside of adding pineapple, which doesn’t make sense (yup), what if we added too much meat? What if we added brown sugar, it may become too sweet (one of the reasons why Italians despise Filipino spaghetti from what I heard). Who does the taste testing?

Will our friends tell us? Our significant other? Family? But can they? Should they? We know ourselves the most, no? While I agree that, there’s value to having perspective from the outside, the recognition and decision should come from within.

How do you know it’s still you? And how often do you check?

I reflect all the time. In cases of an impasse with a friend. Moving on from a failed relationship. Finishing a project at work.

My signature dish has 4 main ingredients, with many possible logical substitutions. We have that for ourselves, no? Maybe a list of X commandments.

  • Dont be a hypocrite
  • White lies are ok (usually)
  • Talk things out
  • Be loyal

We have our check boxes. For me, I run through my list quite often. Some days, far more times than what I had expected I’d have to. Some days, I do miss a box. I am human after all. It’s just my best effort to ensure all boxes have been accounted for every day.

 

How about you?

Slopes

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Some things aren’t impossible rather just not possible, for the time being. Can’t expect the output to be different if the inputs are always the same. Maybe all it takes is to simply change the variables.

Confusion on illusion

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These have been the most emotional 6 months of my life. What a roller coaster of a year 2018 has been. Got out from a toxic 3 years relationship, getting back into the MMO world, falling in love with someone from Australia and now trying to decipher if everything the past 3 months have been a lie or a delusion on my part. The full story of the girl from the land down under will probably be saved for a future post. Right now, I’m just simply trying to figure things out, recovering from a recovery (yeah).

I’m someone who analyzes a lot. Sometimes, too much actually. In a social situation, I try and take an holistic view of things. Was I in the wrong? Could I have done something different? And if I did change something, what would the outcome be? Better? Worse? This is so I mitigate the chances of making the same mistakes in the future. Not like I’ll never make these mistakes ever again. I am human after all.

She told me she wished we never met.

Well, too bad. We did. And I’m grateful. But it bothers me why she would say that, actually. The people she has recently surrounded herself with are the very definition of scum. And until this very day, she believes I’m someone who simply talks to cute girls to get their attention. When reading a previous blog, she stated it was nothing but pure negativity and I truly, could not see where she’s coming from. I thought I understood her. Because she was a lot like myself.

And maybe, that’s the person I fell in love with.

The Japanese say we have 3 faces: one you show the world, one you show to friends and family, one you show to no one. The latter is the truest reflection of who you are. The thing is, while you may not show that third face, reflections of it can be seen from different angles, where you least expect it. But I’m not convinced there’s only 3 faces. That’s pure simplification.

Because people put a facade even to themselves.

We try to sometimes make ourselves the victim, that we’ve done nothing wrong. That it was the fault of other people. Maybe, we may paint colors on the portraits of others, colors that doesn’t exist in the spectrum of that person’s soul, yet we do it for reasons unknown. We tend to impose our own guilt or our own guilty pleasures onto others, knowing just how hypocritical it may be. And yeah, I was on the receiving end of all this.

The person who I was in love with have, for the past 3 months, painted this color of a womanizer on my spectrum. Literally, there have been stretches where I talked to no one except her and yet, it ended in her believing in that. It’s not only me she tells this to. She’s told it to others, so I feel like she truly believes it. And yet, she pretty much is the definition of what she hates. She goes around and chats it up with other guys, knowing full well they’ll start to like her. She surrounds herself with liars, cheaters, and people with the lowest ethical score. And yet, she wishes she never met me?

Maybe, it’s because I’m a reflection of the good in her that the bad has since washed away, or at least buried. We all have different sides to our personalities. I can be extremely lazy, very promiscuous in certain scenarios. My good side, that I’d like to call my dominant side, usually catches me before I spiral out of control. The thing is, she’s doing a lot of things that goes against what we both hated:

  • No effort in relationships
  • One sided knowledge
  • Surrounding oneself with humanity’s turds

I feel like, she is far too smart and ethical to seriously believe her own words. She’s experienced way too much to think so. But maybe, I was the blind one. Maybe this was her all along, and I didn’t think of it much because I liked her. I accepted her flaws but didn’t know just how huge they were.

I feel like, I let her down to be honest. I did promise her that I’d be as brutally honest as I can with her and yet, I held back. When she kept going out of control promoting her guild, I felt she was over-doing it. She was already tired. I told her, but in a passive way. I felt she was getting power hungry but never truly expressed it. Maybe being called a “Queen” was getting to her head. Royalty is pointless, in-game and also in real life. Blood doesn’t make a person a good person. She chases random people, literally, and in many ways, proves the gossip about her is true.

I don’t understand. We aren’t talking, and probably won’t ever again. As someone who hates unfinished business, this will forever linger in the back of my mind. What was her problem with me? Why did things go south like this? Was she just delusional? I feel like, I was a conquest/temporary fun that went wrong with her. She wasn’t supposed to catch feelings for me and yet she did. Maybe this has something to do with it.

Life’s hard. Confusing. But it doesn’t have to always be. Sometimes, we just make it so.