Blogging with my Heart at the Tip of my Fingers

I always thought there was wisdom in what my former boss would often advise me about my blog. Remove the “icky stuff”, try not to be too personal, be more informative, less heart. Believe me, I tried.

The problem was, I wasn’t quite sure I could blog if not driven by an overwhelming emotional force, i.e. unexplainable loneliness I often blame on hormones or quarter-life, uncontainable excitement over a new gadget or an online shop I accidentally found, or strong feelings for something or someone I was momentarily crazy about. Hence, I continued blogging with my heart on my sleeve (or in this case, at the tip of my fingers).

And I like it. I like clicking the publish button after pouring my heart out on a post. I like that this blog has become my stage quiet corner in the internet where everyone is welcome to drop by. I like that through it I get to share trinkets of my life to, not only my mother and a bunch of loyal friends, but also unknown readers, strangers, and kindred spirits who landed on these pages in search of some form of comfort, or inspiration, or maybe company.

Point is, there was just no way I could blog without giving away a tiny portion huge serving of my heart. Otherwise, it wouldn’t at all be.. me.

And it served me well, this heart-blog, my therapy of sorts. Being a blogger for about a decade two decades now, it just doesn’t feel right anymore to not have a little space on the web to fill with the big and small things happening in my life, albeit the sporadity of my posts, if sporadity is even a word.

On the downside, I’ve come to acknowledge the fact that publishing your thoughts on a public venue such as this makes them somehow irrevocable. I happened to have blogged about things I now wish I could delete, thoughts I’m not anymore proud of, stories I don’t want to remember.

This is the part where I confess to editing old blog posts, deleting unwanted names, sometimes even deleting entire posts altogether just because they make me cringe, as if the act would really take those parts off my past completely. I know it won’t, and Marian said it best when she said that maybe we’re not supposed to erase old scars. Still, it’s a guilty pleasure I couldn’t quite explain, and an awesome way to (uh) kill time, LOL. Please tell me I’m not the only one who’s doing this.

More than a year ago, when I spent a weekend in Cebu with Joni and Mae, while lounging in the infinity pool at Shangrila Mactan, I told my girlfriends that I grew tired keeping tabs of names and monthsary dates and stories of guys I date. (Not that there were a lot.) I told them I was ready to keep just one name in my heart, to make kwento about that one guy, once and for all, for the rest of my life. I don’t know if J & M remember, but I like relieving moments like that, especially now that the time has finally come.

If you’ve been following my blog/s for the past couple of years and have read some boys’ names here and there, or maybe even seen a photograph or two, well, forget all the other names except this one:

David John.

From here on, he’s the only boy I’m ever going to write about.

And from this point forward, I’m not going to be afraid of blogging with my heart.

Blue has always been my color

I’m moving back to Caloocan in about *counting the days in my head* two weeks (wow, time flies!), and with the construction of my new room happening this week, I had to pick a color to paint my walls with. Why thank you, Carrie Bradshaw, for having such a fabulous (fictional) apartment for inspiration. Yesterday, I finally chose my color swatches, deciding on a color that’s familiar and comfortable, not to mention I love: Blue.

Check out these photos of Carrie’s renovated apartment in Sex and the City 2. (Segue: do writers in New York City really earn so much that they’re capable of keeping a pad as snazzy as this one?)

carrie-bradshaw

carrie-bradshaw2

My love affair with blue

Growing up with two brothers, my juvenile interests leaned towards boy stuff — watching PBA, collecting basketball cards, playing roller blades, engaging at pusoy dos marathons with my brothers, wearing lose shirts and baggy pants, and preferring non-feminine colors like black and blue. I was 16 years old when, taking over my Lola’s room in the second floor of our house in Caloocan, I decided that I wanted to paint the room blue. To be overly redundant, I asked my Mom to buy me blue curtains and blue bed sheets and pillow cases. Turning 18 years old, my parents threw a debut party for me, and it didn’t take me a minute to decide my color motif. Perhaps the only blue thing that I wasn’t crazy about in college were UP’s blue books, lol, can I just say that those little exam booklets were the bane of my college existence??!

Blue books aside, it came to a point when blue, to me, became a safe zone, hence, when I started moving out of life’s little comfort zones, I started exploring a bit on my color preference too. Pink, brown, red, green, purple — my color dateline, in that order, representing eras of my life. Invite me for coffee and I’ll share my color story with you. ;)

And now it’s blue again.

You know how it feels like when you’re back with an old love affair after exploring and testing other options, realizing that he is still the love of your life, maybe you didn’t even stop loving him after all? Forgive me for the tacky illustration, but that’s how blue is like to me. Home, puppy love turned love-of-my-life, the color that I want to wake up to in the morning, surround me the whole day, the last thing I see before I close my eyes. I’ve seen all the other colors, but it all comes back to blue. I can’t wait to see how my blue room is going to look (and feel) like.

I’m getting to know a whole new version of myself lately.

That version of me who welcomes the idea of settling down, who chooses the warmth of the familiar over the thrill of taking risks, who prefers being surrounded by family rather than party-loving friends, who labels things according to whether they’re temporary or eternal and chooses only those which will last.

Choosing blue, somehow, feels like a representation of all that.

And and and.. I’m doing that thing again where I over-analyze on trivial things like color preferences and being all melancholy again about getting old(er) and wondering again about things like, if they say quarter-life ends at 27, does this mean I’m, at this point in time, having mid-life crisis?

What’s my point again?

I forgot.

Oh, and thanks, Carrie Bradshaw.