Still Bangkoks Pouring Rain

Somehow the rain now reminds me of Thailand.
The storm today brought back vivid memories of my trips. The islands, Bangkok, it was always raining or at least it seems it always was.

The people there have a sixth sense when it comes to the weather. But of course they should being that for many of them their livelihood depends on being able to sell their wares out in the elements. The ratio of street vendors to actual shopfronts is amazingly huge. Very few can afford to have an actual locking door or inner sanctum to their shop so the streets are packed with street vendors.

I remember one late afternoon Samantha and I had returned from a small trek that we had taken to a temple north of Bangkok. We had decided to sit in a small restaurant (restaurant meaning a place that has a kitchen housed inside a building but still no aircon, no bathrooms, nothing fancy, and most of the seating is on the patio/sidewalk) have a cool drink and talk about our trip to the temple. We had just returned from the Tiger Temple, Wat Pa Luangta Bua Yanasampanno Forest Monastery, in Saiyok District of Kanchanaburi Province. To be exact. ;) I really have no idea where that is but I do know where the website is so check it out if you're interested. http://www.tigertemple.org/Eng/ cut and paste yo!

Samantha had walked with the abbot and one of the tigers as they were escorting the tiger back to his digs. There is a picture of her doing it. One of the few i managed to save from her pyschotic need to erase all pictures starring herself. It had been raining at the temple. Usually the tigers were lying around sunning themselves in the heat but because of the rain they were up and pacing and quite interested in what was going on. The cubs in particular were fun to watch. They were trying to attack the raindrops as they plopped in the puddles and mud around them. They were very cute but lets keep in mind here that these tigers were on 10ft chains and we were sitting on makeshift benches 25ft away. No walls. No fences. Just 30 or so chains holding the 30 or so tigers to their particular spots. Interesting experience to say the least. We had a lot of fun.

So later that day, Samantha and I were sitting at a red plastic table on the sidewalk of koh sahn road sipping our drinks (I think she had a Pepsi and a watermelon shake while I had my usual mango shake. Shake meaning fruit and ice blended, no dairy) and talking about the tigers and the rain and our upcoming flight down to the islands. As I looked around I noticed that most of the street vendors had started to pull out plastic tarps and were rigging them up over their stands. It had been raining up north but there wasn't a cloud that I could see in Bangkok. About ten minutes later the sky opened up and threw down a massive amount of water. It rained for 4 or 5 hours, only slowing down to a drizzle by the time we fell asleep.

I vividly remember the smell of Bangkok in the rain. The feeling of walking between the stalls on the sidewalks under the rain tarps. The air was sticky and hot, so heavy it felt like a physical presence. There was almost a claustrophobic feeling because of the tunnel like atmosphere that the rain tarps created. Every once in a while there would be a break in the tunnel, people crowded around it, either waiting for a the rain to let up or taking in as much of the fresh air as possible before pushing back into the next section of souvenir bliss.

The air smelled like a mixture of spices, rain, incense, sweat and depending on where you were standing, garbage. But every now and again there was the scent of sandalwood oil coming from one of the massage parlors or the smell of fried spring rolls and noodles. The stalls were an eclectic combination of goods. Small brown wooden frogs carved by hill tribe people that make the exact noise of a croaking frog when you rattle a stick down the ridges down its back were sitting next to the newest burns of American music. The people call out to you in English offering deals and bargains for tailor made suits and ballgowns. Tuk-tuk drivers hollering "50 baht! Tour of city!". Beautiful Thai girls dressed in short skirts and tube tops passing out bright pink and yellow flyers about the hottest new dance clubs and drink specials. Just an everyday night in Bangkok.

That is what the rain in Arizona makes me think of.

We Follow Our Heroine...

The last few weeks have been trying.
It seems to me that the more I try to change particular things about my life the more they bite me in the butt later on. I'd like to claim that I am innocent but I must admit to being present at the helm of my own well being. I might be emotionally freaked out and oblivious but it is still me guiding my ship.

I had a wee break down last week. (I have to wonder if this has anything to do with the lack of drugs. I've been completely off of the anti-depressants for a week or so now. I don't discount this as a part of my teeny meltdown but I don't think it was the main cause.)

I don't know how much more abuse I can take on the subject of my ex. Its not that he's deliberately attacking me or even talking to me. We haven't talked since I kicked him in a sensitive area, told him to loose my number and never talk to me again. Needless to say we haven't kept up a pen pal relationship. But regardless I keep hearing things about him and about his life through other people.

I learned recently that there was a high possibility that david fathered a child while living with me. This is probably what started the blubbering and self abuse for me again. Not only did he not respect me enough to break it off with me before messing with other women but he didn't use any protection either. So much for all those people who told me not to worry about getting tested after he and I broke up.
What a terrible reason to say I told you so. (I must add that it is also probably not true after all for whatever reason. Confusing? Join the club.)

I think that it was the amount of disrespect that went into the act of his cheating that has been holding me back from somehow recovering. What did I do to deserve that kind of treatment? Why wasn't I good enough? Talk about a complex. Too fat? Not good enough in bed? Not funny enough? Or maybe its just him. Heaven forbid it has nothing to do with me. It's much to difficult to imagine that the entire situation had to do with his stupidity, immaturity, and all around sociopathic tendencies.

I think I'm tired of complaining about this subject in general. How long does it take to get over people? How long does your inner self carry the torch? Or perhaps its just that the torch that you carry gets smaller and smaller until you are eventually just carrying a lit match. I'm somewhere in between now. I know time heals all wounds but time is annoyingly slow when it comes to the subject of the heart. I wish someone would invent the 'get over your heartache quick' pill.

No More Drugs? Crap...

I am currently trying to wean myself off of the anti depressants I have been taking since before my mothers death. The idea being that I don't need the help anymore right?
This is proving to be more difficult than I thought it would be so pardon my rambling or lack of sense. Actually, that should be a disclaimer on top of my blog. 'May not make sense'

Things suck man. I have recently, after much thinking/crying realized I have an issue with men. Big surprise eh? I have had an alcoholic father (not so anymore I might add), 2 boyfriends that have cheated on me, and have witnessed a very unhealthy relationship between my mother and her pseudo boyfriend. Everybody has a problem with the opposite sex right? We all go through this kind of crap. Nobody understands the opposite sex. A known fact of life.

Now although it is not a surprise to me that women and men don't understand each other, I have come to realize that I don't understand myself when it comes to men. I have not realized how much I need men to notice me. I base a lot of how I feel about myself on how men treat me and how much attention I get from them. Have I always been this way?

In middleschool and partly though highschool, I spent a lot of time trying not to be noticed. Somewhere in the middle of highschool I started to want to be noticed.
This of course goes along with the pretty-girl/smart-girl problem that Jessay and I had. She was smart and I was pretty. Of course this implies that I was dumb and she was ugly. Great.
We have both had a difficult time seeing over these labels. Only recently have I realized that I may be on the short bus when it comes to this particular issue.

I need a lot of affirmation from the opposite sex. Maybe it has become worse more recently because of my experience with David. The cheating was, admittedly, quite a blow to the ego but it was the continued daily rejection on not only an emotional level, but a physical level that has stuck with me. I guess it is hard to understand that a person that was once so attracted to me that he convinced me to have sex in the strangest places (I won't elaborate), finds me physically unattractive and rejects physical intimacy with me on all levels. Logically I can look at the entire relationship in a whole and see that many things added up to the ending result. I was under a lot of stress, he was under a lot of stress, I was grieving, changing, etc. But the female, the woman within me, just feels the hurt of the rejection. He didn't find me sexy, attractive, or alluring at all. This might be why I jumped into the bed of the first male to make me feel truly beautiful after David and I broke up.

Since then, I think I've been looking for that feeling again. That feeling of being completely accepted physically. No comments on my weight, how much I work out, what I eat, the clothing I wear, how I do my hair, whatever. Not to say that David commented on all of these but between him and my father I certainly feel like an Orca when it comes to the weight department. Either way, the men I've been with since David have not complained about my physical appearance at all.

Conversely, I also have not been able to connect emotionally to anyone. I can go out, flirt, dance, have a good time, but I cannot give of myself. Josh says I've put a wall around my heart. Jessay says I'm protecting myself. Kim says I'm finally experiencing my twenties and having a good time. Erin called me a whore (but that's another story). Who knows what everyone else thinks. Not sure if I care.

So here I am. I can't connect emotionally to anyone or perhaps won't let myself. Screw that.
I am on the lookout for that affirmation of my physical attractiveness but won't let anyone touch my heart. It's like a strange drug addiction. Male affirmation makes me feel better but what happens when there are no men in my life? I'm stuck. So now I'm trying to wean myself off of anti depressants and male affirmation. This is difficult. I don't know how to do it. I feel my emotional growth has been retarded. I did it to myself.

Blah

I don't want to talk about things anymore.

Happy Death Day?

May 22nd. A day of importance in my life that I wish was not.
Today I sit in a small room at a secluded resort (I use the term resort generously) and write about my feelings one year exactly from the the day my mother died last year.

Weird. I don't know what I expected but I think it was something more than what I got. I'm not disappointed just curious as to what I really did expect today to be like. A relief of grief? A change of focus? A difference of...Feeling? I know those happen gradually but wouldn't it be so much easier if it could happen in a moment?

Last night my sister and I stood on the beach at 12: and thought about the past year. We talked about life, the changes we've made, what we want from the future. We talked about mom and that last night/week she was alive. We stood and watched the ocean at night and tried to understand where we were going to go from here. Other than back to phoenix I mean.
Samantha will probably go off to Durham and to grad school. I will....probably work at the bank until I figure out what the hell I'm doing with my life.

We are now off to the small 'town' to have a drink in honor of our mother who usually thought that having a drink was a good fix for a lot of things, that and alka seltzer.
we'll be home in a few days and life will return to normal. or whatever normal is.
When I left phoenix, Adam told me he hoped i found what I was looking for whatever it may be.
I'm not sure if I've found anything yet, other than a righteous sunburn on my back, that will help me come to peace with what happened with mom. But maybe, I was never supposed to.

They Fade?

Sometimes I think about days gone past. Days gone so quickly that I wonder if they ever truly happened. Moments that slipped from my grasp like water through sand. Moments that I wish I could remember with more clarity and give proper respect to.

I clearly remember some of the most painful things that have ever happened to me and yet I cannot remember with any resonance the first time I saw my little sister when she came home from the hospital, or how I met some of my best friends. But I can recall with aching intensity the face of my mother in her last hours of life or the last glimpse I had of my childhood cat being taken away to be put down. Why these memories? Why not I suppose...

I've been told these memories will fade as the years pass. Somehow the thought of that bothers me. Not to say that I want to remember these things as clearly in 20 years as I do today, but to wish for them to fade away (which I must admit I had hoped for before) seems inconsiderate to myself in addition to the memories. But, then again, the mind is a funny thing. Inconsistent and unpredictable...who knows what the future has in store.

MOM

Today I miss my mom. Don't misunderstand, I miss my mother everyday she's been gone but this week in particular has been difficult. I miss her laugh and the way she smirked at me when she knew I was trying to talk my way out of doing whatever difficult thing had presented itself. I miss her enthusiasm and her abundance of energy for random, seemingly boring tasks, that was usually rapidly spent after about an hour. I don't want to admit it but I even miss her crazy clothes that only she looked good in. The woman could take the weirdest of outfits and make them classy. I did not inherit that from her, though I'm pretty sure my sister did.

Mom had the weirdest clothes...things that I never would have worn even if you'd have paid me. I remember being very young, 7 or 8 maybe, and watching her get ready for a party or an outing. At that time we were living in a big house up on mummy mountain and she had this huge bathroom and closet (I always tried to search for Narnia in that closet and got griped at many a time for grubby fingerprints on walls and expensive clothes.) The closet was always a mystery to me because of the amount of clothing inside it. Of course, taking into account that I was much smaller then and the closet seemed much bigger than it probably was. Either way, mom had lots of clothes. She had cool looking sparkly blouses with little things sewn on them that she told me were called sequins. I had a great love of sequins at that point in my life because of my mom's clothes.
Every well dressed woman had accessories to go with every outfit...or at least that's what I've been told. Mom had the most interesting belts, jewelry, purses, shoes, you name it. My personal favorites included the brass belt with the dragon clasp, the bright green sling back heels with butterflies that would fade in and out depending how you turned the shoe, and the bright pink leather purse, direct from the eighties. These were never worn altogether of course.
I yearned to fill that purse with my treasures for years...was never allowed to of course.

These are things I think of when I remember my mother. The impact of a brass belt with a dragon for a clasp is tenuous at best. For me my mother was a eccentric gypsy, a selfless parent, a doer of deeds, a procrastinator to the highest degree, a mover and a shaker, and the best mom ever. I miss the fact that she's not around to nag me into vacuuming the house or to complain about the fact that I never put my laundry away. I miss her tendency to fill the entirety of our fridge with condiments so that our fridge was always full but there was never anything to eat...unless you liked margarita jelly and pickles with a side of mustard (4 different varieties to choose from).

With Random Purpose: As Per Request...

How many of us search for acceptance in our lives? Whether through work, family, lovelife, friendship, or a multitude of other reasons, many of us are looking for acceptance for who we are. This has recently hit closer to home for me because of a betrayal of trust from someone I held very close to my heart. But for all the pain it caused, the betrayal went deeper for it showed me apart of myself that I had not seen, or perhaps, refused to see. I had, on some level, betrayed myself.

I once heard it said that the things we hate most about other people are usually things that we hate most in ourselves. Looking at the people I have chosen to keep within my nucleus of friendship, I realize that I have underestimated myself and my need for acceptance and affirmation. This is not something I admire about myself nor wish to deal with in other people. But ironically I have never noticed how much I require from the people in my life. This leads me to wonder how I became as needy as I am. Why am i so afraid that people I love will leave me? Did it spring from highschool? Grade school? My parents? I could blame a multitude of sources for a problem that, regardless from whence it came, is still an issue I must deal with and realize within myself.

To such an end, I must confess I have no idea how to accomplish such a feat. At this moment in my life I am trying to discover if there is another me that I can be.
I am experimenting with many things in my life to see what fits. It seems that for a very long time I have been too scared to try some of the things I've wanted to do. Fear of a lack of acceptance, or rejection has stopped me in my tracks too many times to count. My resolve has wavered like a mirage in the desert and like the mirage, disappeared upon getting closer to my goal (whatever it might have been at the time.)

My time is now for me. There are no distractions to put in the way in order to hide from rejection. I have been rejected by the man (perhaps boy?) i thought I loved and I have survived. I have dealt with the loss of my mother and the emptiness that goes with it and I am still surviving. I have tried to make myself a victim in one form or another and it feels false. Though I have lately been attempting to find any reason I can to avoid dealing with myself, there is no time left.

I have recently done things that the old me would not have thought of doing. Dated men I didn't know in Highschool (heaven forbid), had a fling with a man I hadn't known for very long and enjoyed it immensely for what it was, been to clubs and danced for hours without a care for how terrible i might have looked on the dance floor, had a few too many drinks and been quite thankful I had a toilet to go home to. I distinctly remember, on the night of my mothers birthday, declaring loudly to my close friends that I would never have salami and red wine together again as i was bent over the toilet at 3 in the morning evacuating said items from my stomach. Ah memories.

But I am not these actions. I am a person who has hidden from these actions
as a way to stay safe. But I must now realize that I am more than simply what I do on the weekend or what I choose to spontaneously throw myself into.
There are things I want to do. Things that are important to my growth as an individual and a step in the right direction toward accepting myself for who I am.

"I deserve, we all deserve, to be accepted for who we are and to have a person that we accept whole heartedly" Having written this recently, I think I need to modify this in regard to myself. I need to accept myself before I find a person to accept me. How can I expect another person to accept things within me that I myself will not recognize as truth? If I have learned anything from my mothers death, it is that life is far too short to make a pretense of.

[That is what is going on in my mind David. Well, at least for now and on that particular subject. Enlightenling? Disappointing? Boring?]

Companionship or Compatibility?

I have recently begun to wonder which is more important:
Companionship or Compatibility. When our search for another person is driven enough, what are we willing to sacrifice within ourselves in order to achieve a compatible healthy relationship? There is a certain amount of give and take to any coexistence between two people. One might ignore an annoying trait within a partner because, on the whole, the partner is a good fit, so to speak. But when does it become too much. When do we start to ignore large glaring, perhaps negative, personality traits for the sake of companionship?

The world, or rather society, teaches us that it is good to be self reliant, self sufficient, self sustaining...Without need of another person. I feel this view is unrealistic and unkind. Though no person should be completely reliant on another (excluding children, people with mental incapacity, etc.) it should be a normal feeling to want to share the everyday mundane with another person. This need to be completely unneeding of any other entity is unnatural. Most cultures throughout history have acknowledged the need for human companionship in one form or another. People grouped together in tribes, villages, communes, even cults in order to maintain human contact. Those who were outcast or chose isolation in one form or another, often had emotional and mental repercussions.

Perhaps it is Valentines Day that makes me think this way. Singlehood looming over many of us makes this holiday feel like a farce and a depressing tradition. How do those of us that are not connected with a companion deal with the world at large on days such as these? Days that put into keen focus the dichotomy that society pushes on all of us. Be self reliant but not alone.
This in itself has made me realize that to be human is to want a companion. But while I may want a companion I have realized I am not willing to give up on the ideal of compatibility. I deserve, we all deserve, to be accepted for who we are and to have a person that we accept whole heartedly. The need to have a companion should not outweigh the need for compatibility within a companion.

Loneliness

Can there be true loneliness? How does a person define the act of being lonely. Without other people? Without interaction of intelligent or otherwise emotional viewpoints from another living being...This I cannot conceive.
Certain events in a persons life can lead to a sense of loneliness. The death of a loved one or a separation from another can give a person a feeling of being lonely.
I have heard people say, at one time or another, that they can feel lonely in a room packed with people. The idea of loneliness is confusing and hard to wrap ones mind around.

Consider the option then, that loneliness is a particular longing for one exact person or persons. The feeling of aloneness that comes from yearning for one person only. Seeing it this way, why do we long for that one person? What purpose or fulfillment came only from that person and that person only? How is it that with all these people around us everywhere we go, some of us remain feeling a sense of loss.

Perhaps then, one can try to reset or reboot their thinking. How to be without the people that cause the feelings of loneliness. Learing to be complete, or at least at home, in oneself without others may be a cure to this lonely feeling.

Then again, there is nothing rational and logical about human emotion. Love, anger, lust, loneliness...These cannot be rationalized. Instead, we try to remain normal(whatever that may be) and continue on to bigger and better things...But that in itself brings into focus another feeling without boundaries. Hope.

The Course

Everything in life is on a direct course to something. Sometimes the course may be twisty and full of road blocks, making the course difficult to find, but it is always direct. The focus for the future is and has always been tenuous and blocked by the here and now, feeding the course of life with obstacles and events that may confuse and discourage a soul. Without a challenge, and perhaps a dose of pain, we may never fully appreciate the path that we are on and how we became the people we are. This is life. Life is painful and difficult to look upon at times forcing the bravest of souls to cower under its overwhelming might. We live on.
This is what we all must continue to learn.

I cannot believe i actually set up a blog...