soopastryheart

Let’s be better people. Let’s be better planners and better follow through-ers. Let’s be better promise keepers. Let’s go on more walks.

Let’s be better friends. Let’s be better listeners. Let’s stop using our schedules as excuses. Let’s make time. Let’s meet for coffees instead of texting. Let’s celebrate our life choices instead of criticizing and/or comparing.

Let’s call our parents more often. Let’s not forget that they miss us everyday.

Let’s realize and accept that despite our situations or backgrounds, we’re not that different from each other. Let’s embrace the fact that our feelings, no matter how isolating they may feel, are universally understood. Let’s stop shutting each other out because it’s the only thing we know how to do.

Let’s count to three and calm down. Let’s let the small things slide. Let’s take deep breaths and let the anger subside before we begin spitting out words because words are mean and they can hurt. Let’s try to see things from the other side, from a different perspective, and then reassess.

Let’s put our phones away in the presence of company. Let’s put away our phones.

Let’s put more focus on our accomplishments than our deficiencies. Let’s be less vindictive. Let’s use skepticism and rejection as fuel to get us where we need to be.

Let’s save more and spend less.

Let’s stop being so hard on ourselves. Let’s stop lamenting over where we are in life if we’re not quite where we want to be. Let’s stop feeling sorry for our poor selves. Let’s stop blaming others and take responsibility.

Let’s learn to balance our lives better. Let’s stop telling each other that it has to be one or the other. Let’s understand that our lives are interweaved, and each strand can help us grow as a whole. Let’s believe that if you felt so inclined, we are capable of having it all.

Let’s forgive each other. Let’s forgive ourselves.

Let’s become better versions of us than the year before.

For the first time in my 26 years of life, I am not spending Christmas at home with the rest of my family, but rather, in our downtown condo. Don’t be mistaken; I’m not depressively spending it alone, as my brother is here with me. But nothing about this situation feels particularly Christmas-y to me.

Which is a shame, really, because I love Christmas. I love being home during the holidays, despite the fact that we never do anything particularly noteworthy or exciting. We don’t partake in super-special traditions; we spend it at home, with each other, doing the most mundane things. We have your average American dinner (with the exception of kimchi being served right next to the green bean casserole). We go to Christmas mass. We watch Honie open presents, while the rest of us open envelopes (Santa is pretty generous this time of year). In recent years, we’ve spent time watching stupid YouTube videos or looking at photos on Facebook. When we’re home, there’s always something broken (well, not so much broken as unfinished or incorrectly fixed by my dad), so we’ll take time repairing (or redoing) and attending to whatever is required. Bottom line is, nothing we do during the holidays is much different than what normally occurs when we’re all together.

Yesterday, in an attempt to revitalize what was left of my holiday spirit, Ki and I walked to Pike Place Market to look at the lights and festivities. I watched Home Alone in front of the fireplace, sipping hot chocolate (even with a seasonally appropriate candy cane straw!). Today, Ki and I went to early mass, and ate brunch with our Imo and Harmonie. We’re planning to Skype my parents and Honie later, which will likely consist of making stupid faces at each other and Honie warning us to have gifts ready for when we do come home (we’ll be there my dad’s birthday in January). I’m going to attempt to recreate our usual holiday dinner (obviously on a much smaller scale) for Ki and me tonight, and I plan on listening to carols the entire time.

But something tells me that nothing I do will lift me out of this Scrooge-ish hump, because nothing I do will compensate for the fact that I’m not at home with the people I love most. Honie and I are not creating a mess in the kitchen today making sugar cookies. Ki and my dad won’t be in the garage trying to figure out what’s wrong with the lawn mower. My mom and I won’t be planning our attack on the after-Christmas sales, or arguing about my lack of interest in becoming a domesticated female. One of our neighbors displays a 10-foot inflatable snow globe in front of his lawn each year, and dammit, I won’t be making fun of that either.

Call me a sentimental fool, but Christmas just doesn’t feel like Christmas when you’re not at home with your family. I hope this year will just be an anomaly in my Christmas history, and we can try this again next year.

Regardless of my sourpuss spirit, I wish you and your loved ones a merry one.

We were an unlikely duo. She had a separate bedroom for her Barbie dolls and a Dalmation. I wore shoes with velcro straps and was still trying to correct my tendency to write s’s backwards. Despite the differences in our cultural and economical backgrounds (with her blonde hair and my jet black, we were the spokeskids of diversity), and without ever understanding why or how we were attracted to each other (but really, is there ever a rational reason when it comes to kids?), we became best friends.

At the end of every school day, we squeaked out “I love you” to each other (and with a hug to boot). When I moved away, we kept in contact via letters (yeah, remember those things with stamps?), a novelty which impressively lasted a few years before eventually coming to an end. I even collected each letter in a tin box, lugging it around with me through several moves before they too met their untimely demise (lost).

I moved and changed schools multiple times in my early years, a circumstance that denied me a companion I could call a lifelong best friend. Even when my family settled in an area where I would eventually finish middle and high school, the typical tenure of a best friend would last a couple of years, or whenever the differences in our interests and personalities became too severe to overcome. Even so, I cherished the ones who held the title, for however long that may have been.

As I grew up (err, grow up?), and as my definition of friendship evolved, I dropped the salutation of best friend from my lexicon. I have a number of close friends, but none that I consider the “best” as such a title suggests that one is greater than all others. Today my relationships with my friends vary in levels of vulnerability, history, and intimacy (some know all the chapters of my life, while some only know the latest issues), but I value each and every one of them, quite dearly.

But there’s always been this one particular friend of mine, one who’s heard more anecdotes about my family, seen more snot fly out of my nose (during regular nervous breakdowns), and known me better than any person (who is not me) really should.

We’ve known each other since middle school, a time where we shared the same weight and penchant for awkwardness. Our friendship remained solid through the decade that followed, which consisted mostly of an inordinate amount of poop talk and laughing at the irony of hating college, an arena in which we had both naively thought would be our saving grace. He held my hand through some of the lowest points of my self-esteem, and in return, I forced him to stop wasting his intelligence and time.

You see, Malcolm had always been the smartest person I’ve ever known – proven time and time again by his board scores, his IQ, and his ability to pick up shit on the fly that I spent an entire quarter learning. He could do anything he wanted, but he chose to knock me flat on my ass when he announced he would join the military. I got over the shock (and initial anger), and supported him the best I could. But understandably, with the distance and limited interaction, we grew apart.

So earlier this month when I received a text letting me know he was flying in the next day, I didn’t hesitate to respond back, What time should I pick you up from the airport?

But the night before we were to see each other, I felt an unfamiliar weariness. So much life had happened in this past year we’ve been apart: he had gotten married and become a father, and I had been picking up my life after deferring my acceptance to med school. We had been growing and learning, on completely separate verticals that I worried that our friendship had been negatively affected. What if we had become strangers, and our meeting would simply be an exchange of polite pleasantries and condensed summaries? How could we possibly catch each other up? How could we start? I couldn’t bear to think about the voids and nulls in our conversation, something neither of us ever experienced in each other’s company.

On the day of his arrival, I messaged him to let him know I was running late, and in response he let me know: No worries, I just took care of some gridlock of my own…out of my butt. My worries had been in vain.

And as you may expect of two people who were catching up on 12+ months of life, the stories came tumbling out, soaked in their usual profane vulgarity. There were no nulls, no voids, no discomfort, and absolutely no overcompensation of manners. And as we fell into our usual forms of multi-task communicating, which is to seamlessly carry on four topics at once, I realized how much I missed him being an active presence in my life. I was reminded of how much he meant to me, how much we had suffered and endured together to be who we were.

He’s being deployed to Afghanistan (seriously, I thought we were done over there) the day after Christmas, and with the addition of junior, I anticipate it’ll be another good while longer before we see each other again. But despite the bittersweet pull our brief reunion has had on me, I realized I didn’t wish for everything to return as they had once been.

Friendships are rarely able to keep their intensities. People move. People get married. People have children. People get careers. People have quarter century life crises, abandon all their previous plans and start over. With obligations to career and romance (and family), it becomes increasingly more difficult to find enough hours in the day for anything else. As a result, friendships take a hit. The closest bonds begin to dissemble, until they become mere footprints of a time when such duties and complications didn’t exist.

So what can we do? Blame people for growing the fuck up? Cry over the good ol’ days? No, we simply accept that friendship, like everything else that’s good and worthwhile, will continue to evolve. We celebrate the fact that we haven’t remained stagnant, the fact that we’ve finally gotten our shit together (or at least, in the right direction). We celebrate our memberships to adulthood.

I miss you, Malcolm. But you and I aren’t the same people we were just a mere year ago. We aren’t where we necessarily thought we’d be, but I like to think that we’re at a place that’s better, because despite all the unexpected changes we’ve gone through, we’ve become better for it. We know ourselves. And we know that the roles we play in each other’s lives can never be manipulated by even the most dramatic of changes. It could be another year or so until we see each other, and undoubtedly, we’ll have gone through another cycle of changes (but I swear to god, if I find out you had another kid via Facebook, I will kill you). But I take comfort in the fact that with us, no matter how much change occurs, so much will remain the same.

And that’s become the barometer in which I measure friendship – the ability to withstand changes and challenges, the miles of distance, and deficiencies in communication – and come out feeling something familiar, something indisputably and irrevocably solid.

Best friends for life. I understand that in its entirety now.

Among the many things Honie and I have inherited from my mother, none garners more envy than our hair. We have great fucking hair: it’s thick, shiny, low maintenance, and grows at a ridiculous rate. I once had a stylist, upon hearing my request for a bob, morph in to a crisis negotiator, becoming feverishly adamant that I do no such thing.

Did I mention it’s super thick? I’m talking use-both-hands-to-measure-circumference thick. It’s problematic because it gets intensely heavy – and it’s when my hair gets long and thick enough to give me reoccurring headaches that I finally give in and schedule for a cut. And with a throbbing scalp, I tell myself that THIS will be the time I bob it, that not only would it be practical (as it would remove all the weight), but a change would do me some good. I equip myself with photos of celebrities who spend my monthly grocery budget with one haircut, envisioning that it could be easily replicated at a laughable fraction of the price.

But in that chair, whether persuaded by the stylist or not, I panic and choke… and I leave with the slightest of trims, indistinguishable to anyone I don’t explicitly inform.

As expected (and as I come down from the initial new-hair high), I kick myself for giving up another chance to try something new, and wonder why I continue to do so, regardless of the fact that I felt so convinced prior to. And of course this line of questioning always leads to something that goes far past my split ends, into dark and crippling territory about everything I’ve failed to do. The truth is, I talk about doing a lot of things, but because of whatever reason – whether it be fear or missed opportunity – I simply, don’t.

You see, planning and talking about big change is super easy to do. You can draw out the most elaborate proposal, pump yourself up, and just as easily convince yourself that you are indeed, convinced.

But when it comes for time of action? Motivation and courage suddenly get sideswiped by reason and rationality: What’s the likelihood this plan could fail? Is it worth giving up everything you know and have? Suddenly, holes appear in that seemingly solid block of confidence of yours, and that’s when familiarity coaxes you to come back, reassuring you that what you have really isn’t that bad.

And in all likelihood, what you have probably isn’t that bad, and reason isn’t the enemy here. It’s reason that talks us down from doing impulsive things, like buying ridiculously expensive underwear (who’s really going to see it?) and getting a tattoo on your face (duh).

It’s reason that ultimately saves my wallet and prevents me from getting disowned by my parents. Reason saves me from getting haircuts that would make me look like a reincarnation of Dora the Explorer. Reason keeps me from making too many stupid and regrettable choices. Reason is what distinguishes me as a functioning member of society, and not, say, a sociopath.

So what’s with the guilt that comes with letting reason do its thing?

For me at least, it’s because I think that anything worth taking a chance must come with a high risk for it to be worth anything at all. I get so stuck in the mindset that change must come at big and bold intervals, something dramatic and drastic, for it to count as considerable change. And how wrong could I possibly be? Why do I think it’s so shameful to get layers than to chop it all off?

We get so bogged down with taking enough chances and not taking enough chances that we forget that it’s not one or the other sometimes. We measure our success and failures only when the payoff is severe and extravagant. We get disappointed and depressed when we set lofty goals, without putting in the work to make it attainable. We don’t give ourselves enough credit when we take those baby steps, because they’re not as impressive to acknowledge. We obsess over instant gratification and become shortsighted, until we lose all grasp on what we wanted in the first place.

We can’t appreciate the smaller victories until we redefine our perimeters for the word itself. And we have to work in conjunction with reason, so that we don’t sabotage ourselves from the get-go.

My bone structure does not and will not support a bob or a pixie cut, no matter how cute Carey Mulligan makes it look. This does not make me a chickenshit for not trying. It simply means I need find alternative ways to solve the objective, which was never to have short hair; it was always about making it less heavy, so that I don’t have to pull out the Advil as much.

And so I haven’t submitted anything to Esquire or Vanity Fair yet. But I’ve posted more blog entries in this past month than I have in the past three.

You’ve got to start somewhere, right?