Muffled Noise

…and I got the chance to get together with some of my best friends from highschool (the original “gang”, the ones I can imagine getting together with until we’re all old and gray). And if there’s anything we know about each other, it’s that everytime we meet we almost always have a weird, shocking or heartbreaking story to tell about out our lives. In particular, our love lives.

But that’s how it always goes, right? We don’t grow wise overnight, and neither do the people around us. So we’re “doomed” to go through (or suffer) these things a few times before getting it right. That’s both the danger and the beauty of it. We just have to take comfort in the fact that this world isn’t out to get us, despite how crazy a ride it takes us on.

Right after parting with them, I beelined to the bookstore and bought my second book of the year — He’s Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccilo. I tell you, this Greg guy is annoying as heck! He thinks he’s so smart just because he managed to get his act together and land a seemingly perfect wife. Tsch. And what I hate about him the most is that deep inside, I know he’s right.

And as his co-author Liz says, it’s hard to digest. I finished the book in a day (thanks again to Cat for recommending it!).

If there’s anything I want to get at, it’s this — in my opinion, the week before Valentine’s happens to be the most tragic time of year. I noticed that people tend to think of the bad stuff around this time, not the good. Why is that? Well, I guess you can blame it on the bookstores, the publishers, the authors, the ancient Egyptians and their crazy ideas.

(Advance happy hearts day!)

Yup, plane landed around 8:00 last night. The feeling of seeing family again was as awesome as I expected. I gave mom the present I’d bought for her (a really nice bag) and we caught up on each others’ stories. It was a great reunion after a month there, and I should be relaxing now, yet here I am thinking of what’s up ahead.

It was my 4th time there. Hong Kong is nice and all, but after the tourist spots, I guess the normal life isn’t too different from life here at home. Sure it’s far more convenient and communication with most people is a challenge, but eventually you can’t help but see what used to be a “change of pace” as time away from family, friends, and things that spell comfort and familiarity to you.

But that’s life, and that time away isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In my case, it seems like a meaningful step forward, and the concepts of comfort and familiarity have easily spread to my other life in that foreign country. In fact it was never weird. And I wasn’t homesick per se. It was just different, and different isn’t bad.

Sure I miss people, it’s natural. And sure I think places I miss, paying with a lower currency, food that I grew up with, donuts at the ground floor. But when I’m there, it doesn’t feel like they’re missing from my life, just that I have more to that life now, and it gives me something to look forward to.

But up to half a year in Hong Kong, would I still feel the same way? I guess we’ll see.

And then I sat back, and started thinking. About that key, about that idea. I think we all know how it feels to be lost. I mean literally lost — in that moment you notice that you don’t recognize anything around you. Not only do you not know where you are, you also don’t know where to go from there, and even retracing your steps isn’t as easy as it should be.

People react different ways. Some spend half an hour figuring out what happened, some start walking to wherever, some stop to analyze, and some (like madmen) decide that they’re just taking the scenic route.

There came a point when the difference between the solution and the problem became relative. When to others, it became so clear and wide that it could not be ignored.

So who’s really insane?

She’s always right anyway, I just have some trouble remembering that little detail when things start getting ugly. I’m stubborn, but thank GOD I’m learning.

Wisdom = 1472138; Abby = 0

I’m gonna brave through this entry in this most inconvenient of times. I have a headache. Actually this headache’s been recurring for the past several days now. But I think this headache is just what I need to keep myself from throwing this post into the pool of drafts I have here.

Despite all the negative connotations that the word “stress” has, I actually appreciate its looming presence in the office. It keeps people on their toes, it keeps us from slacking off (well…) and it actually makes people more efficient. It’s tip-toeing the thin line between being deliberate and panicking. Between knowing you can get through it and just giving up. Maybe between strategy and recklessness.

But like they say, stress can bring out the worst in people. It can cause us to clash, to raise our voices, to stop listening, to close our minds and rationalize our doing so. It shortens our temper. It doesn’t just tire us, it exhausts us. Drains us.

I guess it all boils down to how you handle it. And how soon you realize three things:

It’s not always your fault or responsibility. So don’t try to do and fix everything.

In the larger scale of things, it’s really not that bad. When you walk out of the office, the world is still the same, whether or not you made that impossible deadline.

You can try, but you really can’t please everyone. So don’t worry about who gets upset.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I like the project I’m on very much. In fact I think that’s why I let it get to me. But I won’t let that get in the way. In the end, you just gotta do your job, stop fussing about the excesses, and do your best at what’s left.

Current music: The Fray – Over My Head (Cable Car)

Life has demanded a lot from me recently, in practically all aspects — so much, in such a short span of time. I know I’m not handling it the best way possible, but I’m trying. This isn’t one of the happier episodes in The Abby Show. Still, it’s not a bad one either.

You know the feeling, that you wish you could go back and redo some things in your life? If you’d only known that you were turning into someone else because you wanted to be accepted, no matter what you had to endure to get there. If you’d only known that five years later it would matter enough to break you, when you finally wanted to be true to yourself and other people.

And in the end, you realize that it’s nobody’s fault, really. It just sucks to be you right now. Maybe that’s a little too specific, but I’m sure you get the idea.

I’m going back to Hong Kong next Monday. Sadly, Hong Kong isn’t the exciting wonderland it was to me on my first trip. I remember the flight back from my second trip, and what it meant. I remember thinking that the plane landed pretty smoothly, but I guess that was just my imagination. I’d been imagining a lot of things apparently, and I wish I’d known sooner that that landing would change a lot of what I’ve come to know as… comfortable.

It sucks that I’m not given the right to react negatively like a normal person, just because I’ve never done it before. It sucks that I wasn’t even given an explanation before all this, I at least deserved that, if anything. Or maybe I was never really in the position to deserve it. I’d probably imagined that too.

So I’ll tell you what I’ll do — I have in my hand this Big Reset Button, and I’m using it. It won’t change how things were in the past, it won’t undo mistakes and won’t rephrase words already said. It won’t undo anything. But I’ll press it, and I’ll start over. I’ll take things as they are from now on, and I won’t look back.

I don’t even wanna get answers anymore, because in the larger scale of things, that was never what this was about anyway. Because we can’t change how we are. So it’s fine, as long as we can all respect each other, we can all sleep at night, and ultimately agree to disagree.

And move on.

It seems like it’s gonna be okay for everyone.

Current music: Jazz playlist on shuffle

So yeah, didn’t get to update as much as I was hoping to, sorry bout that. :P

Status as of this very moment: Tired, my back and legs hurt, sleepy, hair still wet, thinking about how perfect the music is for the night, a little hungry for some reason, enjoying the solitude, happy.

Actually it’s been an eventful and uneventful week at the same time. I didn’t go to Ocean Park again, despite being told that I should (and I’m pretty sure I’ll love it there), didn’t go to any of the pretty places I went to last time, no crazy video or stunt from us. But at the same time, there have been a lot of realizations, stuff for me to think about, that I don’t think I would’ve come to if not for this trip.

It’s funny thinking that those weird, crazy, perfect, funny circumstances you think only happen in movies have already happened to most (if not all) of us.

As usual, I won’t explain. I’m far too sleepy to come up with a good explanation anyway. Let me just say that I’m really happy. I can’t wait to sleep under these comfy sheets, I can’t wait for tomorrow’s breakfast, I can’t wait to see how things will work out at the office, and I can’t wait to go home. Life is beautiful.

Goodnight world. :]