[update] so far, it's been a blessedly slow day;
... And for that, I am grateful, because it means I can actually hear myself think in the morning (besides, all creaky and whatnot from last night's yoga session so I'm both functional and not-quite; oh, to still be at home and huddled under the covers). :)
Okay, before anything else: A Recap
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Hung out at Buko with Dione alienenoid and Alex. :) Dione and I have been trying to meet for about three weeks in a row now because she told me she'd give me her copy of the SIM where my poems were published. It was nice to finally meet up since the previous Wednesdays always had either her or myself other not being able to drop by or stay long enough for us to actually meet.
I kind of find myself still lolling a bit at the fact that we were all pretty out of it. We were pretty much just sitting at this little round table with our tea set infront of us and our blank expressions looking out at nothing in particular. Was introduced to Alex's Monique, who is a Literature student at DLSU currently working on her thesis. I won't mention what she's working on just yet, but I can say that I'm going to look forward to dropping by the Lit Department one of these days to read the finished copy. Her mentor is Ms. Lua, which is something we both kind of squeed over (and if Miss Shirley sees this, I will duck under the nearest rock and stay there).
All in all, a pretty low-key day. I caught a cab afterwards back to Makati and then grabbed the FX from there to home.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Work, work, work (which is why I'll skim over it) and then headed over to Taft for the second time in a week to meet up with Hope coffeebased. Hung out with her and Kam slpwlkngdreamer for a bit, listened to a reading of the infamous KITTEN TREE from the Vorkosigan Saga (which I need to read -- and SOON) and then discussed ideas for a story collab between the three of us (that kind of sounds grammatically/linguistically wrong).
Hope and I lingered for awhile after Kam went off to teach her class, I got to finally catch up on the latest bits of ALON (it is an AMAZING story, and one day it will hit the shelves and be read by more people |D), which in turn, prompted more gleeful squeeing from myself. Afterwards, I went home the same way as the day before: wash, rinse, repeat.
Friday, February 12, 2010
There is a most brilliant restaurant at Shang. It is called SANGO, and I first heard about it from Bunny soloproject, who had declared that it had the best rice burgers this side of the Metro. Neither myself nor Pamchumylove izkariote (who also praised the rice burgers as beyondawesome) had been aware that the awesomeness was not just confined to Rockwell's Powerplant. :) We had our dinner there. It was a dinner well-spent though you won't ever catch me ordering Orange Milk Shake ever again.
Last Friday was a good way to end a fairly trying week. No, the days before and the people I hung out with weren't a trial, banish the thought. I've just been significantly tired lately. While I normally declare that I am functional even with just four or five hours of sleep under my belt, I will admit that with me running around a bit more frequency than I have in the last year, my body has been craving the kind of rest that I am not entirely sure I know how to acquire.
I have this quiet not so quiet now, obviously suspicion that while I have been crashing repeatedly, I haven't really, significantly crashed. My brain is taking a lot longer than usual to shut down, which means my body often beats it to the punch in the race for sleep. It sounds weird, but its the closest way I can describe how I've been feeling. Its like I'm worn (and have been told that I look such), but my brain isn't registering the kind of exhaustion my body is feeling.
In any case, spent the initial afternoon catching up with Pam at the Starbucks at Shang's ground floor. We talked for a bit, she smoked, she made it a personal mission to enable me (I will see to my rp apps this week, I swear) and while I would like to say that I put up some resistance, the moment we started running down the list of strong, female characters that I could play, I raised the white flag and agreed.
(I turned away from a lot of the things I once enjoyed doing over the last year, and its been something of a slow uphill battle to get back into the groove of things. So as much as this way of putting it isn't exactly the most positive of ways to phrase it: if my enthusiasm has to be fanned to life by someone else's for awhile, I'm okay with that. It is good to feel excited over the prospect of playing again, especially since this kind of playing involves actually writing.)
Saturday & Sunday, February 13-14, 2010
This actually a deserves a whole post of this own, one that will have squeeage and lots and lots of pimping of the enthusiastic sort. In a word though, my weekend was this: CHOCOLATE.
It will now be my personal mission to drag friends to Heavenly Chocolate at Roces along Tomas Morato. :) Its a whole new level of appreciation for this particular treat, I tell you. :)
I'm not entirely sure I have the words to articulate why the Thursday meets with Pam and yesterday's afternoon-bonding session with Faye - my Da, the person I've declared my third parent - have given me back something. I don't know what it is, but I know that it is something. Clarity, perhaps? Or maybe a confidence and ease in hearing my own voice, in trusting myself whenever I speak.
I've been thinking a lot about late afternoons at St. Scho. The ones I would end up spending friends at the gate, or much later, at our table at the Senior class' (our class) "Stones" -- to talk. It was all about conversations. Of sitting across one another or side by side to go from one topic to another, whether these be ills that had burrowed into the pits of our stomach or the hairline fractures in our hearts or whatever interested us at the moment.
I didn't really think much of it then, but in hindsight, me making friends on the fly at Gate 1 made me realize I was interesting enough as a person. That I had something to say or share and didn't need to feel afraid or hesitant to share it.
Its one of my fears, you see, one of the things that kind of worked its way into my brain. I never really figured I was interesting enough for the people who were immediately around me. That's kind of what happens when people outside of my immediate family, people I wanted to be close to, kind of find you uninteresting or just plain weird in your tastes. I was a geek and a nerd and I loved boystuff and girlstuff at the same time, which, was regarded as weird. I loved books, loved the worlds in them that held strange and beautiful things that didn't really exist in the immediate world. I was interested in sports that weren't available here. I found interest in things no one else found interesting.
I know I'm not that kid anymore. I've grown and I know now that I am interesting and the amount of people I have met, can call friends and interact with has sort of dawned upon me. A friend teased me a month or two back that I was "networking" again. I wasn't quite sure how I felt about the word "networking" because it sounds so painfully utalitarian, though that might just be me.
People interest me. There's so much you can learn from a simple conversation (like last night, Evi, one of Sammu's alluriel friends from Assumption and I were at Sam's dinner table talking about shows and books and sci-fi and fantasy and how she finds it hard to like comics because there's rarely any definite closure to a plot or arc, and how that made sense to me because in a way, its what's been irritating me about Marvel -- but that's a post for another time), so much you can get from an exchange of ideas and opinions and thought. There is something so... organic about conversation. And while others may say contrary, I haven't felt that lately -- not outside of a handful of people.
I still share the same fears as the younger me. It's just that sometimes it seems so much worse when compounded combined with stress, sudden onslaughts of social anxiety and overwhelming paranoia; because while I still feel like I'm an interesting person, there's a little voice that whispers doubts, that tells me, I'm not. Not really.
It's a matter of confidence, I suppose.
*
At my sessions with my doctor, we spend a chunk of time working through the hurdle that is me being able to talk to people, to open up, to feel safe enough to speak. We haven't gotten to the what-caused-it part yet, though I'm closer to that now than I was months ago -- but its a huge thing, to be able to not be overtaken by anxiety when faced with the prospect of sitting across someone and dipping my metaphorical feet into that metaphorical pool of exchange.
When she asks why I don't feel safe, I tell her I'm not entirely sure and she leaves it at that. Tells me we'll get to that eventually. And then she asks if this is wholly connected to me feeling that I can't speak and I say, "No. Not completely. Sometimes, yes, but not always."
In the summer before my sophomore year of college, Mom and I went to the doctor to have my throat checked. I'd signed up for voice lessons with The Company's Miss Annie Quintos and one of her concerns was that there was something wrong with my vocal chords; she was right.
While my vocal chords weren't the type to fully close, hence the breathy quality of my singing and my inability to prolong notes like a classically trained opera singer, the real reason the slightest exertion on my part would render me hoarse and near-mute was the development of nodules on my vocal chords.
It's the most surreal feeling to sit in a chair and have a camera pushed down your throat. I remember being a little scared to look at the large flatscreen tv hung on the wall, focusing instead on the bizarre thought of: So this is what a sword-swallower at the circus must feel like. followed shortly by Ew. I'd choose the trapeze over this any day, and I *hate* heights.
The throat doctor told me I had two options. One was surgery (oh God, no. No thank you. Julie Andrews took that route and now her beautiful voice, while still beautiful, isn't the same one from The Sound of Music and Merry Poppins); the other was to be put on steroids for a little while and to not speak for two months.
Suffice to say the first few weeks of school were torture. I literally walked around with a pad and a pen, and was terrified I'd slip up and answer a question posed to me in that knee-jerk way that you don't really think about when you're not told specifically to not use your chords, period. Not even to clear your throat. I remember spending a lot of time worrying over that. I couldn't sing while washing dishes, and I know I cried myself quietly to sleep in frustration the one time Dad randomly came in and asked me a question and I had forgotten that I wasn't supposed to speak.
It's funny now. It wasn't then though.
I remember looking forward to the doctor's, "Okay, you can talk now;" and how it felt terrifying to talk again. How it took me awhile to relax into using something I'd actively taught myself not to use for two months.
I tell my therapist all this. I tell Da, I tell Mom. I haven't told Pam yet, but this entry might as well be that.
I tell them: Its like that. This whole thing I'm going through. It makes me think of that time.
It's LEAP today at DLSU and Mysterium is conducting a lecture. I'm still debating whether I should try to catch up to the 1pm class even if I only get off work at 2. Ontop of wanting to see how the students are taking the information Rob and the others are giving them, it would be a good opportunity for me to give Rob and Sarah the Christmas gift I got for their son, Coby. But I might have to bow out because while last night's yoga session has relaxed my body, I still feel as worn as I look and Mom's homesong already expressing concern that I need to go rest.
Will think about it. I've got all day to decide.
Be well, everyone.
N.
Okay, before anything else: A Recap
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Hung out at Buko with Dione alienenoid and Alex. :) Dione and I have been trying to meet for about three weeks in a row now because she told me she'd give me her copy of the SIM where my poems were published. It was nice to finally meet up since the previous Wednesdays always had either her or myself other not being able to drop by or stay long enough for us to actually meet.
I kind of find myself still lolling a bit at the fact that we were all pretty out of it. We were pretty much just sitting at this little round table with our tea set infront of us and our blank expressions looking out at nothing in particular. Was introduced to Alex's Monique, who is a Literature student at DLSU currently working on her thesis. I won't mention what she's working on just yet, but I can say that I'm going to look forward to dropping by the Lit Department one of these days to read the finished copy. Her mentor is Ms. Lua, which is something we both kind of squeed over (and if Miss Shirley sees this, I will duck under the nearest rock and stay there).
All in all, a pretty low-key day. I caught a cab afterwards back to Makati and then grabbed the FX from there to home.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Work, work, work (which is why I'll skim over it) and then headed over to Taft for the second time in a week to meet up with Hope coffeebased. Hung out with her and Kam slpwlkngdreamer for a bit, listened to a reading of the infamous KITTEN TREE from the Vorkosigan Saga (which I need to read -- and SOON) and then discussed ideas for a story collab between the three of us (that kind of sounds grammatically/linguistically wrong).
Hope and I lingered for awhile after Kam went off to teach her class, I got to finally catch up on the latest bits of ALON (it is an AMAZING story, and one day it will hit the shelves and be read by more people |D), which in turn, prompted more gleeful squeeing from myself. Afterwards, I went home the same way as the day before: wash, rinse, repeat.
Friday, February 12, 2010
There is a most brilliant restaurant at Shang. It is called SANGO, and I first heard about it from Bunny soloproject, who had declared that it had the best rice burgers this side of the Metro. Neither myself nor Pamchumylove izkariote (who also praised the rice burgers as beyondawesome) had been aware that the awesomeness was not just confined to Rockwell's Powerplant. :) We had our dinner there. It was a dinner well-spent though you won't ever catch me ordering Orange Milk Shake ever again.
Last Friday was a good way to end a fairly trying week. No, the days before and the people I hung out with weren't a trial, banish the thought. I've just been significantly tired lately. While I normally declare that I am functional even with just four or five hours of sleep under my belt, I will admit that with me running around a bit more frequency than I have in the last year, my body has been craving the kind of rest that I am not entirely sure I know how to acquire.
I have this quiet not so quiet now, obviously suspicion that while I have been crashing repeatedly, I haven't really, significantly crashed. My brain is taking a lot longer than usual to shut down, which means my body often beats it to the punch in the race for sleep. It sounds weird, but its the closest way I can describe how I've been feeling. Its like I'm worn (and have been told that I look such), but my brain isn't registering the kind of exhaustion my body is feeling.
In any case, spent the initial afternoon catching up with Pam at the Starbucks at Shang's ground floor. We talked for a bit, she smoked, she made it a personal mission to enable me (I will see to my rp apps this week, I swear) and while I would like to say that I put up some resistance, the moment we started running down the list of strong, female characters that I could play, I raised the white flag and agreed.
(I turned away from a lot of the things I once enjoyed doing over the last year, and its been something of a slow uphill battle to get back into the groove of things. So as much as this way of putting it isn't exactly the most positive of ways to phrase it: if my enthusiasm has to be fanned to life by someone else's for awhile, I'm okay with that. It is good to feel excited over the prospect of playing again, especially since this kind of playing involves actually writing.)
Saturday & Sunday, February 13-14, 2010
This actually a deserves a whole post of this own, one that will have squeeage and lots and lots of pimping of the enthusiastic sort. In a word though, my weekend was this: CHOCOLATE.
It will now be my personal mission to drag friends to Heavenly Chocolate at Roces along Tomas Morato. :) Its a whole new level of appreciation for this particular treat, I tell you. :)
I'm not entirely sure I have the words to articulate why the Thursday meets with Pam and yesterday's afternoon-bonding session with Faye - my Da, the person I've declared my third parent - have given me back something. I don't know what it is, but I know that it is something. Clarity, perhaps? Or maybe a confidence and ease in hearing my own voice, in trusting myself whenever I speak.
I've been thinking a lot about late afternoons at St. Scho. The ones I would end up spending friends at the gate, or much later, at our table at the Senior class' (our class) "Stones" -- to talk. It was all about conversations. Of sitting across one another or side by side to go from one topic to another, whether these be ills that had burrowed into the pits of our stomach or the hairline fractures in our hearts or whatever interested us at the moment.
I didn't really think much of it then, but in hindsight, me making friends on the fly at Gate 1 made me realize I was interesting enough as a person. That I had something to say or share and didn't need to feel afraid or hesitant to share it.
Its one of my fears, you see, one of the things that kind of worked its way into my brain. I never really figured I was interesting enough for the people who were immediately around me. That's kind of what happens when people outside of my immediate family, people I wanted to be close to, kind of find you uninteresting or just plain weird in your tastes. I was a geek and a nerd and I loved boystuff and girlstuff at the same time, which, was regarded as weird. I loved books, loved the worlds in them that held strange and beautiful things that didn't really exist in the immediate world. I was interested in sports that weren't available here. I found interest in things no one else found interesting.
I know I'm not that kid anymore. I've grown and I know now that I am interesting and the amount of people I have met, can call friends and interact with has sort of dawned upon me. A friend teased me a month or two back that I was "networking" again. I wasn't quite sure how I felt about the word "networking" because it sounds so painfully utalitarian, though that might just be me.
People interest me. There's so much you can learn from a simple conversation (like last night, Evi, one of Sammu's alluriel friends from Assumption and I were at Sam's dinner table talking about shows and books and sci-fi and fantasy and how she finds it hard to like comics because there's rarely any definite closure to a plot or arc, and how that made sense to me because in a way, its what's been irritating me about Marvel -- but that's a post for another time), so much you can get from an exchange of ideas and opinions and thought. There is something so... organic about conversation. And while others may say contrary, I haven't felt that lately -- not outside of a handful of people.
I still share the same fears as the younger me. It's just that sometimes it seems so much worse when compounded combined with stress, sudden onslaughts of social anxiety and overwhelming paranoia; because while I still feel like I'm an interesting person, there's a little voice that whispers doubts, that tells me, I'm not. Not really.
It's a matter of confidence, I suppose.
*
At my sessions with my doctor, we spend a chunk of time working through the hurdle that is me being able to talk to people, to open up, to feel safe enough to speak. We haven't gotten to the what-caused-it part yet, though I'm closer to that now than I was months ago -- but its a huge thing, to be able to not be overtaken by anxiety when faced with the prospect of sitting across someone and dipping my metaphorical feet into that metaphorical pool of exchange.
When she asks why I don't feel safe, I tell her I'm not entirely sure and she leaves it at that. Tells me we'll get to that eventually. And then she asks if this is wholly connected to me feeling that I can't speak and I say, "No. Not completely. Sometimes, yes, but not always."
In the summer before my sophomore year of college, Mom and I went to the doctor to have my throat checked. I'd signed up for voice lessons with The Company's Miss Annie Quintos and one of her concerns was that there was something wrong with my vocal chords; she was right.
While my vocal chords weren't the type to fully close, hence the breathy quality of my singing and my inability to prolong notes like a classically trained opera singer, the real reason the slightest exertion on my part would render me hoarse and near-mute was the development of nodules on my vocal chords.
It's the most surreal feeling to sit in a chair and have a camera pushed down your throat. I remember being a little scared to look at the large flatscreen tv hung on the wall, focusing instead on the bizarre thought of: So this is what a sword-swallower at the circus must feel like. followed shortly by Ew. I'd choose the trapeze over this any day, and I *hate* heights.
The throat doctor told me I had two options. One was surgery (oh God, no. No thank you. Julie Andrews took that route and now her beautiful voice, while still beautiful, isn't the same one from The Sound of Music and Merry Poppins); the other was to be put on steroids for a little while and to not speak for two months.
Suffice to say the first few weeks of school were torture. I literally walked around with a pad and a pen, and was terrified I'd slip up and answer a question posed to me in that knee-jerk way that you don't really think about when you're not told specifically to not use your chords, period. Not even to clear your throat. I remember spending a lot of time worrying over that. I couldn't sing while washing dishes, and I know I cried myself quietly to sleep in frustration the one time Dad randomly came in and asked me a question and I had forgotten that I wasn't supposed to speak.
It's funny now. It wasn't then though.
I remember looking forward to the doctor's, "Okay, you can talk now;" and how it felt terrifying to talk again. How it took me awhile to relax into using something I'd actively taught myself not to use for two months.
I tell my therapist all this. I tell Da, I tell Mom. I haven't told Pam yet, but this entry might as well be that.
I tell them: Its like that. This whole thing I'm going through. It makes me think of that time.
It's LEAP today at DLSU and Mysterium is conducting a lecture. I'm still debating whether I should try to catch up to the 1pm class even if I only get off work at 2. Ontop of wanting to see how the students are taking the information Rob and the others are giving them, it would be a good opportunity for me to give Rob and Sarah the Christmas gift I got for their son, Coby. But I might have to bow out because while last night's yoga session has relaxed my body, I still feel as worn as I look and Mom's homesong already expressing concern that I need to go rest.
Will think about it. I've got all day to decide.
Be well, everyone.
N.