Some Sort of A Crossroad

It's 2006 already and there's just a lot of things in my head right now. A new year is symbolic of being a tabularasa. Or it could be the other way around - you're stuck in the middle between the sweeping changes of the year that was and the year that it will be.

I feel a little of both. I'm certainly hopeful enough for a brighter future and a better me. I've already made my New Year's resolution and I'm slowly starting to try sticking to it. Nothing fancy or radically life changing - just the affirmation that I will start to eat healthier. That means lowering my intake of carbonated beverages and going back to my old work-out routine.

For the latter, read on...

Let’s start with December 30th. I hung out with my college friend Kim in Robinson’s Galleria. It’s been ages since I last saw that guy – prolly a year ago during Lance’s baptism (he’s the son of Racqs, one of my best friends during college) and he’s still boyishly cute. We thought about seeing a movie when I remembered that the Manila Film Festival is currently on going. Just for kicks, we decided to watch Jose Javier Reyes’ ‘Kutob.’

I hated the film right after the scene where the fortune teller foretold nothing but doom to the movies’ main characters. They showed a lot of the Death, Devil, The Hanged Man and the 10 of Swords. I read Tarot Cards and I am just outraged by the propagation of the negative stereotype against the art of Tarot Card reading. For those who would like to protest, I absolutely get the fact that that sequence of events help bolster the plot but for crying out loud, they violated a couple of Psychic Laws!

First one would be to interpret the cards in the most positive light possible. Why is that? More than anything, negativity sticks to the mind the most. If you tell someone that s/he will die, their minds would be focused on only that part of the reading. The mind is such a powerful thing, it is very much capable of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Death doesn’t mean just physical mortality but also the symbolic demise of ideas or things that don’t prove useful to you anymore. It tells the person to shed even negative feelings and excess baggage in order to start life anew.

The Devil is representative of one person’s shadow aspects – simply put, negative traits. Everybody has them since nobody’s perfect. What The Devil is trying to say is for a person to acknowledge that yes, it may be undesirable, but still the shadow traits are a part of your personality.

The Hanged Man, at first glance, looks as if the guy’s in a state of limbo. Quite the contrary actually, the halo around his head represents that he is tapping into wisdom and knowledge from the Powers That Be. He may look like he’s in an uncomfortable position being upside down and all but he also represents seeing things from a different perspective.

The 10 of Swords shows a man lying on the ground with 10 swords stuck on his back while the earth underneath him is soaked in his blood. Just like the Death card, the argument that one will perish soon or encounter an accident is very non sequitur. The true meaning of the 10 of Swords is recognizing that one’s state of mind might be fixated on living up to the ‘Victim persona.’

The second Psychic Law that has been broken – once you open an issue, make sure that you close it. The fortune teller in the movie just gave the main characters dire warnings of what’s in store for them. Should she have explained to them in detail what she saw in the cards, the characters would’ve been able to make wise decisions.

As the movie progressed, I forgot all about my irritation with the atrocity that the movie committed against the art of Tarot Card reading. I was taken aback when Kim tilted his face near mine and asked me if he could kiss me. I said ‘no’ and immediately turned my head towards the screen. It took me a while before I was able to answer his follow up question of ‘why?’ I told him that I’m already with someone and it just felt awkward from that point on.

When Kim asked me out, I assumed that it was a friendly get together. I guess he was assuming that it was a date. And he never asked if I have a boyfriend or not. I have a lot of guy friends and I’ve always been the touchy feely type of person. Could he have mistaken it for affection?

I would’ve loved to kiss him – if it happened 5 years ago. I had a crush on him but he was interested in someone else. A lot of things have happened to me over the last couple of years and that just changed everything. I’ve been with boys all my life and had been burned by them one too many times. If I could borrow a line from the Spice Girls’ song ‘Too Much’ - “I need a man not a boy who thinks he can.”

Also at the back of my mind – “What if I misconstrued Martin’s terminology of us being ‘in a relationship’?” That it’s merely friendship and not couplesville. Some of our correspondences are in Deutsch. I haven’t mastered the language yet and there are certainly a lot of underlying nuances that I don’t know yet. I mean, try searching for the word boyfriend/girlfriend (significant other) in Deutch and you get Freund/Freundin which carries the same meaning as ‘a friend who happens to be a boy/girl.’

I never really seriously questioned what the phrase ‘in a relationship’ means. That is, until now. I tried to clear it up with him right after I read what he wrote on our correspondence a couple of months back but nothing came of it. It just confused me even further what with a little language barrier. A couple of e-mails later, he started the practice of calling me with a term for endearment. The term of endearment in question is something that I use with my really close friends like the girls.

I became a tad bit paranoid all of a sudden since LDR (long distance relationships) don’t operate under the same rules as regular relationships. ‘What if I’m holding out for nothing all because of a wrong assumption?’ I’m much too afraid of what my karmic repercussions would be for cheating so I look but never act on it. If I did, would it even be considered cheating? I’m very much like a lawyer (I actually want to become one) – terms would have to be explained to me in detail just to be sure. I certainly don’t want to be caught in the middle or be in a compromising position. That’s what I feel like right now with ‘in a relationship.’

Just in this morning – ex-girlfriend (ex-significant other) Dani’s back in town and it looks like it’s FOR GOOD. Should I feel threatened?

Filler: My co-worker Angel asked me to help her set up her blog a couple of days ago. Now, she understands why I'm addicted to it. She's hooked into the whole writing your heart and mind out that she's resolved to create a new post everyday.

I'll write about what happened to me on the financial front on a later post. This post is too long already.