color my sheep red

photo taken from agribusiness.com.pk. i love your flock, andrew jack

there it is again, looming over the waxen clouds is a tempest of new year’s resolutions. some people have started asking me if i’ve tossed anything into my bucket list yet, and the answer remains the same since the last few years: none. no resolutions of any kind, save for taming my appetite, which directly translates to teaching a venus fly trap to let a fetching insect fly by unconsumed. 

there are two things that i don’t like to do. the first is making promises, and the second is making plans. when my mother realized that all i ever did was to hide under my blanket with nancy drew and wrote on my journal, she swore i was doomed for life. so then she promoted herself to critic status about anything that concerned me and my life. i was expected to become a nurse like some women in my family, or good gracious, a banker like my father. right. my mother was busy rearranging furniture while i was eating my math book (true story). so plans and promises are like ketchup and mayonnaise on my burger—there’s an absolute absence of both.

while i’m not nuts about making new year’s resolutions, i’m glad that other people are. they magnet good energy, which i hope will last until the next weekend. i see that everyone has made grand plans of becoming better versions of themselves. if i had the least idea of how that’s done, trust me i would will myself to wake up as meera syal. or ellen degeneres. or lisa macuja. 

wait.

on second thought, i like the muffled, often invisible, bell jar-sucking and unhinged person that i call (ta-dah!) myself. 

what i want to do right now is to celebrate friendships, old and new, and want to start off by sharing a few things that i have learned about my connections with people in the last few years.

photo taken from imgio

     1.william butler yeats was right when he said, “there are no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet.” and when you meet ones that feel like the perfect kind of blueberry on top of your cheesecake, your gut tugs you so hard that you can’t help blurting out, “where the hell have you been?” beyond embarrassment. 

   
    2.friends who know you like his or her own soul will not jump at you deedee-style (dexter’s lab, yes?)  with “tell me everything that has happened to you since the last time we talked three years ago!”

i have a few good friends i exchange messages with every blue moon and my favorite ones are those that do not begin with “hello”.

to mention a few:

~ “i just cooked the best steak! i just know you’re gonna love this!” (last chat was about a “totally fucked up book” two months prior to the steak)

~ “was watching the moon and i thought of you.” (amazing. last conversation with this person was 17 years ago when chat didn’t involve the fingers)

~“what the fuck are these people on facebook doing?” (last chat before this one was four months old. absolutely love no hellos)

~”how’s my favorite chatmate? i miss sleep! ” (this one was unexpected and left me teary-eyed a bit because this person barely talked to me in college)

~”this made me cry! you have to watch this! i know you’ll looooove this! (video of a dance mob followed)

~”hi love.” (yes, needy me needs to hear it. you’re welcome.)

~”i miss your face!” (hits me from out of nowhere. i love that!)

~”you’re the first person i thought of today.” (cousin love, it is.)

     3.when you suddenly get a call from a friend you haven’t spoken to for almost two years from across the world, and instead of hello, says, “you picked up! i missed you! i’m pooping right now!” you know it’s genuine friendship. no inhibitions.  

     4.they know you’re a bipolar (mixed bipolar disorder, to be exact) and they stay. 

     5.they will eat fresh bananas topped with potato chips with you on some days.

     6.they pick up your call at 3am because you’re very upset or very happy for no reason.

     7.you start laughing or crying, or laughing and crying, again for no reason, and they don’t have to look up from their book. they just know you’re being you. 

     8.they know you’re onto something, like a mother anticipating poo from a toddler, by just looking at your eyes. i always get a “you’re-writing-aren’t-you-you’re-so-out-there-again” from my boyfriend. would also get this from an octogenarian, librarian friend i used to work with.

     9.friendship has no age. one of my best girl friends is 67 years old (my mother, not) and the youngest is three (my daughter) whose favorite four words for me are: you are weird, mother.  

   10.they say, “i’m here for you” and mean it. really, really mean it.

it’s the year of the sheep, and i’d like to color my sheep red. good souls, twin flames, start rolling in. my door is open. 2015, be mine, in whatever nice way you can.

A top Philippine women’s empowerment blog covering travel, style, fashion, opinion, latest trends, technology, events, manila, Luzon, visayas, mindanao, best asia blog, education

reading sylvia plath’s “the bell jar” unscathed

reading sylvia plath is like walking through a tunnel, where, instead of a bright, promising light, there is only an indomitable dark opening at the other end. but without a doubt, you experience an inexplicable warmth and beauty in her words even as you struggle to understand why death is a foreboding cloud that follows her around.

i’ve read a few of sylvia plath’s poems, and although i’m a reluctant fan of poetry as i honestly  grapple with words, symbolism and covert meaning all the time, i must say that she’s got me engaged in moments of uncertainty and bliss and misery. plath was a wordsmith who speaks directly to the emotion of every woman who welcomes groundless desolation into her life like it was an inescapable force.

sylvia plath, poet

in “the bell jar”, plath vividly describes, as narrated by her 19-year-old fictional self esther greenwood, what it’s like being in it—her invisible, perilous psychological bell jar. it is a suffocating place from where she is in touch with the world, yet has momentary hankering to be away from it. it is clear from the beginning of the novel that she suffers from the contradicting emotions of knowing that she should be celebrating her month-long stint in new york but is uncontrollably feeling the exact opposite of it.  esther says,

“i was supposed to be having the time of my life. i was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls...” and,

“i felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

the chapter on esther’s homecoming reveals her emotional descent through what seems like an eternal spiral staircase. i had moments when i couldn’t clinch a nail on what she’s exactly feeling and why everything for her seems like an endless pit. i have found her suicide attempts at first very pointless (although i would not dare say that there is such a thing as a meaningful suicide). a rejection from a writing course, the dearth of inspiration, and the general lack of meaning and direction in her life pushes her to believe that killing herself was the only way out of the self-perceived darkness engulfing her.

esther’s futile attempts leads to shock therapies and confinement to the asylum.

her narration of her life inside does not bellow in anger, and is even sometimes funny, but there is that calmness in her voice that makes her words melt on you. it can be disturbing and equally compelling.

the bell jar is the only novel written by sylvia plath, pulitzer prize for poetry awardee. her other published books are compilations of her poems such as ariel, crossing the water and letters home. plath ended her life when she was 30 years old following years of severe depression and a troubled marriage to poet laureate ted hughes. a few years later, ted hughes’ lover, assia wevil, also killed herself along with her two-year-old daughter, the very same way plath did. both women stuck their head into the oven, turned the gas taps on full and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. in 2009, nicholas hughes, plath’s son, hanged himself. he also suffered from severe depression. 

A top Philippine women’s empowerment blog covering travel, style, fashion, opinion, latest trends, technology, events, manila, Luzon, visayas, mindanao, best asia blog, bipolar blog

sylvia plath the bell jar poetry book review suicide depression ted hughes isolation