A Passing Thought

We want, sometimes even expect, to be loved a certain way, but the people we end up loving won't always love us like we want or expect them to.

What do we do then? Do we leave them and find someone closer to our ideals? Or do we forgo our expectations and simply accept them? The essence of loving, I think, is giving. And accepting someone for who they are and not trying to change them, for me, is a kind of giving.

Fiction: The Wrong Girl

It never bothered him that she could not give him a sweet kiss. Her mouth always reeked of cigarette smoke and her tongue had an almost permanent taste of burnt tobacco. In all honesty, it did bother him a little in the beginning. She was, in every respect, the wrong girl for him. Nights and nights and nights he spent plucking and hitting the strings of his guitars, trying to keep her off the carousel of his mind. But she was one stubborn girl. Instead of dismounting the little white pony she was on, she clung possessively onto the iron bar sticking out of the its plastic body and refused to get off. She gave him a grin so impish he was convinced it was the devil itself that smiled at him. And it could have well been the devil or, probably, one of its subordinates. Like, for instance, an evil witch out of a fairy tale.

There was one thing he was certain of: she was no princess. Not even in her past life. She got off the car before him all the time, never giving him any chance to open her door. Once she came home late and half-drunk. “I’m back,” she said, kissing him lightly on the head before casually walking into the bedroom to sleep without showering. He followed her in and sat on the bed, leaning forward to smell her hair, only to frown when he realized that every strand stunk of smoke, beer, and men. She had been drinking again with her male friends—something he had straightforwardly told her not to do in his absence. But she kept doing it nonetheless.

He ran his hand across her bare arm and felt a familiar feeling of warmth circling in his chest. That feeling he hated just as much as her habit of burning sausages for breakfast. Speaking of breakfast, she rarely made him breakfast. In that tiny apartment they shared, he had to learn how to make breakfast for himself. She liked doing the dishes though. That, at least, made her a little useful to have around the house. The laundry she never did herself. Their laundry basket was split in two, their clothes segregated like recyclable rubbish. He sometimes did the washing for her but doing that made her upset. “Leave my clothes alone,” she said. “I’m taking them to the cleaner this afternoon.”

She liked to sing in her early morning shower. And he had become accustomed to waking up to the sound of water spattering down the tiled floor of the bath, drowning some of the lyrics of her songs. He sat in front of the TV and watched the morning news, waiting for her to emerge from behind the bathroom door and give him her signature smile—which was more of a smirk, by the way—before getting ready for work.

Oftentimes, she made him want to tie her up and keep her in their bedroom. To keep her away from her friends. To keep her away from her job. To keep her away from everything that had been taking her from him. She was his, he decided. No matter how hard-headed a girl she was, she was his. She, who made it clear to him that there indeed was a fine line separating love and hate. For he sometimes found himself hating her as strongly as he loved her. At such times he wished she would cry and tell him she was sorry for whatever wrong she had committed, but she never did. Neither did she retort to his threats of abandoning her. What she did was leave him alone to quarrel with himself, with his conscience. So that by the time he was done mulling over the incident, he was already blaming himself for being a selfish prick, when in truth he was anything but.

She knew him well enough, this little devil of a girl.

She was, in every respect, the wrong girl to fall in love with. But love was a trap—a deep dark well he found himself plummeting into one summer day, when the air was still and moist. There was sweat on her brow and dust on the sturdy leather of her shoes. Her mouth reeked of cigarette smoke even then. He knew because he stood so close to her in the train, her chest almost touching his—something that should have bothered a normal girl.

But she was no normal girl.

She was, even at the very beginning, a very strange girl.

And she could have well been a witch. For she had him under a fucking love spell. No matter how many times he tried to walk out of her life, he kept finding himself stepping back into the flat they shared. For the life he was escaping was not just hers alone.

Even that, they shared.

Missing Photography

Having worked as a college instructor for four months, I haven't had a chance to take photos as much as I used to. When I finally took my camera out of the closet a few months after I started teaching, I found myself fiddling with the buttons--I've forgotten how to use it! I still knew how to turn it on and how to click the shutter, sure, but most of what I knew was buried under teaching methods and literary theories, I had to dig it out.

I miss photographing people. Now that I'm without a job, I guess I can practice again, I just have to find models and schedule fun shoots with them. I did have some chances to take photos last month, though. I asked some of my students if I could take their pictures and they let me. I want to do more fashion shoots though. And boudoir, because the first boudoir shoot I had turned out great, if I do say so myself. Too bad I don't have the raw files in my laptop. I want to post-process them again using a different workflow.

I hope I get to take photos again soon. For now, I'll just post a couple of photos I took last summer.

Hello, I'm Alive

As I should be.

I quit my job. Yes, the job I've dreamed of having since graduation. Well, I had it and let go of it, which is totally fine. I've gathered a lot of experience and memories in a short span of time, so I really don't regret anything. I'm going to talk about this in detail in another post. The semester is over, but I remain buried in work--marking exams and final papers, computing grades. It's insane how laborious a teacher's job is. And yet, we get paid a measly sum for all our efforts. Teachers are fucking undervalued.

I haven't written in so long. Work has kept me busy and so has my relationship, although I've only seen my boyfriend once since I last wrote on this blog. This, too, will be saved for another entry.

In September, my short novel, Home, was published. It's in digital format, but a book is a book, so there we go. I'm a published author now, I guess. It's been a month since its release but everything still feels so surreal to me. See, I've always wanted to be published, but never actually believed it would happen. I guess this self-doubt will always shadow me, so let's leave it at that.

So, anyway, I present to you my first book, ladies and gents.

Photo taken by me. Cover designed by Adam David.

I want to talk about Home for a bit, while I'm in the mood.

Home was originally fan fiction. I wrote it when I was nineteen and obsessed with the Japanese band Alice Nine, particularly with the lead guitarist, Hiroto. At first, all I wrote was slash, being a fujoshi and all. And then I saw a few fans writing het, so I decided to give it a try. Home was my first non-slash fanfic. I had a decent number of readers then (on LiveJournal, if you're wondering), and Home got good responses, so I decided to write more. I never finished it though. That's the trouble with me. I'm always so excited to start something, but never quite finish anything. This applies not only to writing, but to other areas of my life as well.

So, there. That was how Home came about. I'm a little embarrassed when I'm reminded of how obsessed I was with Hiroto, but that was what made this book possible!

I always tell people that Home is just a simple story of two people falling in love and all that, but I guess that's its charm? I'm not sure. A few of my friends have bought and read it, so have a couple of my Japanese students in RareJob. One of them, Misako, wrote a review on her blog and posted it, too, on Amazon. I cried when I read what she wrote, because my biggest worry was that I may have inaccurately written about Japan and the Japanese.

That's it, I guess. I don't know how the sales are doing, but I'm not really worried about that. Haha. All that matters is that it was published. I'm a published writer (even if I'm still not comfortable calling myself one. And mind you, this isn't false humility).

I recently started running. Sort of. I have this app on my iPhone called Zombies, Run! which makes running super fun because it lets you imagine you're in a zombie apocalypse! I don't understand my own fascination for the undead. But, really, if you're into zombies as well, you must try this. It's fun and it does what it should. It keeps you running! Or walking, if you're like me. I can't run just yet. I have to alternately walk and run, otherwise I'd faint. Right now, I'm using the Zombies, Run! 5K Training app, hoping that by the time I finish all workouts, I'm all set to run using the main app.

I also started doing the 30 Day Shred. I hope I can finish it this time, since I quit after four or five days the last time. Being out of work gives me time to do all the things I haven't been able to do, like exercising and taking photos and drawing. Hopefully, I could do them all again. Of course, I have to get a job eventually, but, to be completely honest, I have no definite plans as of yet. Que sera, sera.