Being back at Friendster, flirting in my head and kamoteng-kahoy anecdotes

I've made up with Friendsterblogs and now we're back together.

I admit, maybe most of the time, it was my fault because I was impatient with him while he, as always, was stubborn and refused to budge when I asked him to align my photos at the center and not at the left, forcing me to make my paragraphs improperly captioning the next photo. He also refused to provide me with enough space in between my paragraphs even if I've been repeatedly asking him to. So, I finally said, this isn't gonna work and we decided to cool-off things for a while. I started seeing Blogger who was such a WHORE and brought strange anonymous know-it-all men into my life who made me feel violated and only pissed me off royally. So, I figured, Friendsterblogs was as good as it gets so now, I'm back with him and it might take some time before I post here again.

It is afterall taxing to manage all my blogs in Friendster, Blogger, Multiply and do all this without my own laptop nor Internet access at home.

Obviously, I'm addicted to blogging and have started to think of them as a better venue to pour my unrequitted love and obsession than men.

I think I need help.

One particular blogging episode that miffed me was when an anonymous blogger (what the heck, his name is hugh7) had the nerve to comment on my own personal opinions regarding a certain post, correcting certain grammatical errors and spouting information he most likely downloaded from another Internet site. It was either that or he was being too defensive about being uncircumcized and spend hours online fostering his fascination with his own penis by researching it on the Internet. First of all, I never made any assumptions that I was a master at all things surgical or penis-related. Second, I certainly do not take a lot of things seriously, hence, my life and why I am still not married (LOL. Just kidding) so this reflects on the things I blog about as well. Third, if I had wanted to provide a vast of educational information to the readers of my blog, I would have hit my library of medical books, researched more and cited my references as well. But I don't, because if I had to do some major researching for a certain blog topic, then I'd rather spend that precious time reading about Internal Medicine and acing the daily 25-point quizzes. But the truth is, I blog for the mere purpose of having a venue to relax from the bore that is my life and to just be able to voice out my own personal opinions. I do not want you to suck the fun out of my blogging by correcting me and citing historical and cultural facts that praised the uncircumcized penis. I do not want you to tell me I'm wrong because last time I checked, this is MY blog and I am after all entitled to my own opinion.

Besides, if I wanted someone to fight and argue with constantly, then I should have just gotten back with my ex-fiancee, Mr. WrongAtAllLevels.

But enough about hugh7, he's so not worth all that writing space. And don't bother looking for that post and his comment, I've already deleted it. I cringe at the audacity of him sharing precious writing space in MY blog and I hope that would have been that last I hear from him.

I've also started another anonymous blog that has became my own hideaway for posts that have been occupying my thoughts and should never be verbalized in public (or at least not, if there was anyway that my name and picture would ever be linked to these. LOL), what I really think about when some people ask my opinion (and not the sugar-coated half-truths or vague replies which they probably knew but didn't want to hear) and amusing anecdotes regarding the tragedy that is my dating life. God forbid that anybody significant (in other words, ex-es, previous hook-ups, people I work with, my parents) actually connects that blog to me.

Thank God to free Yahoo! mail. Muwahahahaha (my lousy attempt to do the creepy evil laugh).

To my ex-es and the guys I've dated before, don't panic. Your names were not mentioned and I was nice with my posts about you. Or at least, I tried to. Surely, some things are just too funny to not be written about in its most ugliest detail.

It was all part of research. Trust me. *wink, wink*

But enough about blogging (which has been eating up a majority of my study time nowadays, hence, the barely passing scores I get after Doc Mimi's Internal Medicine quizzes). I've also been trying to search for a nice quiet Internet Cafe that allows smoking (Yeah, yeah, I know. I should quit. Yadayadayada... But I have my most profound thoughts while I'm smoking and I write better with one hand on the keyboard and the other, holding a cigarette). My old trusty Internet shop had stopped allowing smoking a few months back and I've been suffering through writing posts in my bedroom and lugging my heavy laptop instead to school for the free Internet access. It's starting to do quite a number on my back and I don't think I can take anymore of this.

So, anybody there who can recommend me to a nice Internet Cafe in Zamboanga City that allows smoking? I would be extremely grateful to you for the rest of my life.

Lovelife wise, TFO and I are still on but I seriously have to break things up with this guy. It's my fault, I think I'm bored and he's not helping with all these complications and stuff he has to make me put up with. I've also developed a stupid thing for this other chap and like any budding relationship I've gotten into, I've started flirting with this guy in my head, making up conversations with him and thinking of witty seductive lines I can use the next time I see him, and then clamming up and smiling like a half-brained dimwit infront of him.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. (Viciously banging my head on the desk repeatedly)

If I lived in a perect world, I would have had no qualms about asking him out to this Sponge Cola concert which my aunt had given me two tickets for. But I don't so, here's to skipping that darn concert.

Crap. These are one those times when I wished I was in one of those long-term relationships that I wouldn't have any problem with dragging my boyfriend to anywhere I wanted to.

Board Review Classes and studying for it is still as boring as ever so I wouldn't want to waste precious Internet time talking about that. However, I'll end this post by a funny story regarding one time when Doc Rex was discussing anti-Hypertensive meds (or was that for CHF? Sorry, this is Ms. Poor Long-term Memory you're talking to here):

Doc Rex: There's another drug that contains nitrates and is no longer recommended for use because it caused poisoning. I forgot what it was. Anyone?

Classmate: Ahmmm... Kamoteng Kahoy (Cassava)?

You don't get it? Guess you just had to be there to enjoy it.

Status: 27, Single

Yes, I am 27 and single.

Some people have been asking me recently if I have a boyfriend. I think the answer for that would be yes, I do have a boyfriend. But why, you ask, do I consider myself single, if I am with someone?

It’s easier to tell people I’m single than to tell them I’m not. When you tell them you’re single, the only questions to follow will be “Why aren’t you married or in a relationship?” and you can just tell them, “I’m dating, nothing serious.” And your companion laughs awkwardly and proceeds to shift the conversation to another baseless topic like school or the weather. On the other hand, when you tell people that you have a boyfriend, a barrage of follow-up questions are sure to come up, like “Who is he?” “Do I know him?” “Where did you meet him?” “How long have you two been going out?” “Is it serious?” “So, when are you getting married?”

Ever since I’ve started seeing TFO, I’d been very ambivalent regarding my responses to those kinds of questions. It would have been okay if I was confident as to the status of our relationship, especially when the only person I’ve been brave enough to talk about him is JaneDoe and a few close friends from highschool.

But the thing is I’m not.

Oh, yes, I love him – he rocks my world – and I would like to think that if we had only met in different circumstances, at a different time, at a different place, then, he would have been perfect as THE ONE for me. But I don’t know if I am strong enough to make our relationship last, even if I know he wants me to. I’m not 100% sure I can give him that, especially since we come from different backgrounds (I’m a doctor, he’s a lawyer. LOL. Kidding! But wouldn’t it be great if he was? LOL), what we have is unconventional (I think the proper label would have been “It’s complicated”), it is not the kind that will last forever (I’m preempting an end sometime within the next two years or sooner, even if he always makes all this 5-year or 10-year plans for the two of us) and let’s face it, I‘ve been burned too many times, it’s a surprise that my jadedness has not yet affected our relationship.

So basically we’re taking it slow, just enjoying the moment, and I even if I know it will end someday, I refuse to think of the future. We have each other. That’s certainly enough for now.
But enough about the boyfriend and back to the woes of single-hood.

As a single and dating 20-something soon-to-be professional, I have learned that labeling yourself as “single” does not particularly increase your chances of finding Mr. Right nor the Mr. Maybes. It turns out that in order to do so, one has to first, be happy that he or she is single.

What? Happy to be single? You look at me with one eyebrow raised in suspicion.

You cross your arms and stare at me in disbelief. If singlehood is so darn wonderful, then why do we all want to date and get ourselves a boyfriend or a girlfriend?

Simple. Because most of us equate the singleness with loneliness.

When that should not be the case.

I have a friend, who I’ve started calling JaneDoe in this blog, who frequently laments about her singleness. She has been with this guy, Chauvinistic Asshole Who Thinks He’s God’s Gift to Women or CAWTHGGTW (but I think we’ll call him CAW, for short), on and off for eight years and she wants to finally get out of the relationship that continually sucks her every being. The catch is, she will only do so IF she finds someone better first. So, she tried being single for some time and of course, failed in every aspect, and so, until now, she’s still continually letting CAW screw her and destroy what measly number of neurons she has left.

Here is how she failed.

In order to make other people notice that you are date-able, you have to create your own inertia and momentum by having a life, being sociable, taking care of your own interests. When I was in between boyfriends, I always tried to have positive disposition, studied harder to get fantastic grades, enrolled in a gym to look better and feel better, took up new hobbies like blogging, kept myself busy etc. The more I had going for me, the more people notice and the more they became attracted. You start emanating a certain kind of energy that people of the opposite sex will simply gravitate to. People now have to work harder to catch up with you… because you have become to them, a challenge. Suddenly people notice that you're a catch! People know somehow that you're not willing to just settle for something, that you're willing to walk away from a situation that doesn't work out for you - and that willingness to walk away says everything they need to hear about how you view your self-worth.

That confidence translates into respect. And a man only respects a woman who respects himself.

JaneDoe did none of that.

She felt embarrassed about being single and analyzed everything to death, never allowing herself the feeling of single-hood completely, never truly enjoying the happiness of being single. She was afraid of being alone, of not getting married by the age of 30, of losing someone that good-looking. She was contented to fill the void with nostalgic memories of how he used to love her and transfer the love-that-was into the emotional emptiness that his selfish love-for-now could only give. She attracted only a limited number of prospects and half-heartedly entertained them, frequently finding fault in every guy, comparing him to the perfection that was CAW, shoting down one prospect after another before he even started. She sticks it out with CAW, bearing the scars of war well, the emotional bruises, the constant pain, the tears she held back. She chose to stay in a relationship that does not even make her happy anymore, for she felt that it was better to be with someone who only used to love her than to not be with him at all.

I don’t wanna say that JaneDoe has completely lost respect for herself by being unable to walk away from CAW and for continually letting her world revolve around him. I don’t really blame her. I think that at some point or another, the fear of being single and alone engulfs us so badly that we choose to stay immobilized in situations that do not particularly make us happy.
It’s not easy to take that first step and conquer that fear.

But once you have and you give yourself the chance to learn to be at peace with your “single-hood,” it doesn’t really take long for others to notice and revoke your status from “Single” to “In A Relationship” once again.

Just speaking from experience =)

---- Certain parts taken from Dating Dummy’s What I’ve Learned (So Far)

I am just crazy about Dating Dummy’s blogs and I just finished reading his entire blog as far as 2004, the past two days. Of course, the fact that he is cute helped a lot (Or at least, as far as from what I’ve seen through his pics wherein you can’t even see his face completely but the half-nekkid ones were just hot, hot, hot!) although very much taken, as noted from his latest post. It’s so nice to hear about bloggers who write about their dating experiences and finally finding THE ONE through the same blogosphere as well… Why the hell am I not meeting more intelligent witty hot guys in my area who write blogs in their spare time? Seriously!

Being the Literary Idiot

The Big Read claims that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Take note of the following 100 books listed below.

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I’ve read 24 books, although I cheated and included those which I’ve seen through a movie rather than read through a book (I won’t tell which ones, though. LOL... Memoirs of Geisha wasn’t one of them. I honestly did read the book about three years before I saw the movie). Perusing through the list, I noted that there were a lot of books in here that I’ve always wanted to read but haven’t had the opportunity to do so: like Catch 22, Wuthering Heights, Sense and Sensibility, Gone With The Wind, Les Miserables and Persuasion and Love In The Time of Cholera (it’s because of the Serendipity-fan in me). I’m still waiting for anybody willing to lend me their copy.

Anyone?

*tagging Karen, Zion, Nina, Teeza, Tine, Pam and Ailyn, the only people I know who are not afraid to blog… --- Inspired by Michelle of doctor(squared) “The Big Read”