Okay Cupid, You're Fired.

Your only shot at love misfired.

Love is something I have spent days, nights, and every minute of my boyhood dreaming of. But that never comes true to real life. In reality, love has failed me dramatically. In the raw, I don't know what love means to romantic partners anymore: Do you cut each other's toe nails? Braid each other's hair? Tell each other's secrets to yourselves like you've just found that out about each other yesterday? Unlike the epics as with Romeo & Juliet, your romantic love could also be an excuse to hit the racks twenty-four hours a day- without leaving the room to breathe.

Most definitively, love, mostly marred by mishaps and impulsive behaviors, a notion for which has, thus, made life bearable for the last twenty-something years, must have also belied. Because between someone whom you love and the person who loves you back, there is also an irreconcilable strain that will always devour, reject, and taint that love.

The most tiring thing about love isn't how it eats into your time (or money, if you're cheap), but rather, it's how it eats at the good parts of yourself.

For instance, my first real affair with something long term, perhaps too long, was a memory constantly referred back to as a real exhaustive trip to hell. Fights, violence, abuse, repeat. What should have been a healthy display of my first time mutated into something of a catastrophe.  There were no proper villains too (except for the roles assigned to foreplay in the bedroom), because I played the devil's advocate in damning my own relationship. Routinely, every day became a revengeful plot biting into the crust of my crumbling relationship. The returns of that relationship were so diminutive, there wasn't any love left by the time we really hit if off because we have all but exhaustively toiled through every method possible to savage it.

What I lost then, mostly my esteem, confidence, and initiation to reboot, was surmountable to what I gained over a course of self-reflexive moods and emotional turmoil: an independence unparalleled to strength, but a fear of losing myself again.

Could you smell that? It's called Rejection.

Then, love rejects. Love, as I learned later chasing after my next relationship, rejects any rational thought. It made me reject my morals, it made me reject protection. It made me crave for danger, only to be torched by the stranger whom I loved, or thought I knew to love, who never quite make out to be who he used to say he would be. Foolishly, I plunged, made the same mistakes as my impulsive, hot-blooded, younger self did. And should anyone bemoan, "I told you so..." I bypassed and brushed their comments aside as grating to the ears. Did I feel rejected when I dumped the dud whose breath was next to a tropic cancer? Yes, I did, with every molar of my moral substance. (And no, with a god to thank for, I wasn't infected.)

Sure, relationships do give us a lot, in other words. And a hell more too for a reputation when it ends. Whatever you're known for, a reveal so personal only that person whom you used to share secrets with under a blanket of corny stars and daydreams would know, will become news inasmuch as a neurotic self-serving bitch who's also tormented by his own unhappy childhood.

If all that didn't already sound familiar, have you heard about the one where the blues belted a tune for a tainted love? Well, neither have I. But somebody should make that the anthem for jilted hearts by the bar. Whether you're having a scotch or a Broken Heart Martini, be sure to lend your ears to those who gripe about their awful encounters with those who, as you like it, won't stop at nothing to take you for granted. Gracefully, I would call those the sonofabitches who a take good man for a mule. They tell you they need you, but all they want are your benefits. At whatever they could get. I'm not speaking from experience, I'm speaking for a fact as scientific as psychotic disorders. (They probably wrote the lyrics to Crazy In Love.) Should you also ever meet one, lest fall in love with one, run the other way to the bar.

You, the lover, warrior against the odds, whose chance cards seem to stack against your shot at love, who try his best to find peace in love, and love in peace, are not an idiot. Like me, you are simply fed up with having your dreams shat all over. Like you, I'm just as earnest to try, without inhibiting too much by giving too little. And why should anyone hate himself for that?

What I learned from Uncle Harry, and possibly David Ogilvy.

The other daddy of imitable style.

Last week, Uncle Harry who had just turned fifty five turned in a lot of money for a new tattoo. (I blame it on age for the certain type of men who still eroticizes tribal art.)

Uncle Harry too bought a watch, a laptop, and an entire wardrobe of colourful suits that didn’t look as Italian as they should. As he beamed through his- also new- facelift over brunch, courtesy of beauticians and flash sale promos, he convulsed a cosmetic smile, leaned over, wheezed into my ears, and said, “when you hit my age, you would want to treat yourself better, invest a little.”

Coincidentally, I thought the tattoos looked sinister, the watch a rhinestone, and the suits an ill-fitted purple pin-up that made mauve look like a bruise. (As for the facelift, that’s an opinion reserved for critics who'd probably know better.) But ultimately, I was also missing the plot. Apace with a life renewed after fifty, he looked happier than any of us would with a few good purchases. And that if there were any paradox to age, it didn’t stop after he stopped being a teenager.

However, since this is not a discourse about my uncle’s sexuality (because that too depended on the position he was doing), I paused to suspect if there were really then a need for any material consciousness especially after those intriguing teenage years spent fussing over our styles (or a lack thereof)? In other words, do we really need anymore of this horse shit?

Advertising that sells.

Take if from advertising wizard, David Ogilvy, with his infamous red suspenders, “If you can’t sell yourself first, what hope do you have of advertising anything else?” No matter how justified some covetable items may appear to be, we buy into things because we also buy into an ideal beauty of our best selves. Fundamentally, we're firm believers in creating lasting impressions. Impressions then, like advertising, are a twinge that becomes immediately representative of who we are. And lest we be unkind to ourselves, we are also cocksure that looking good goes as far as communicating who we are in the most dignified, uninitiated way possible- through appearances alone.

Doubtful? Take a pretest the next time you trade truths in a game of “Spin the Bottle” and ask your friends what they remember you most fondly for. Chances are, reminiscent among those good times that have lasted through the days of your college-age activism, they’re not going to recount that time you helped the blind across the street. But rather, they’re going to recall the flip-flops and culottes you were wearing then that just got dangerously better looking with their third cocktails. Ironically, no matter how the fog thickens with vision (depending on the number of shots your friends take with their drinks), what you may have thus overlooked is how the subliminal impressions really are the most potent, least patronizing to reputation, and cruelly set in working memory.

That goes to say, for example, those of us who are too nervous about jewelry can, thus, never be too bold for gold. Slipping on a pair of gold cuff links during a reunion has the same lasting effect as, say, blowing the right instrument. If that’s not your shtick, try learning to play the piano. At 200 kilograms, the colossus has for centuries resonated with politicians, lovers, chamber guests, and every other general person who’s not allergic to a melody.  More importantly, as with creating lasting impressions, always remember to check for the time (preferably on your new dexterous Apple watch) amongst guests. And if they look unfazed, try telling the time with your shadows.

When Uncle Harry turnt the party with a purple suit at fifty five, turn it up a hundred degrees hotter, finally, by showing up in a shade of lurid pink. Should nobody gasps then, safely show up nude and warrant your own arrest- in style.

Learning To Relax

After listening to Skrillex, I felt a stroke go off somewhere in the branches.

It's hard to register that after almost three months of school, I'm still nowhere well-adjusted.

I kid.

I'm so put together by my assignments, projects,  quizzes, midterms, and incoming finals, that the thought of a semester closing in also puts me into a total blackout.

"What am I going to do? Who am I going to call? Without sounding invasive or alcoholic, when and with whom am I going for drinks? No, really." 

I've got a condition that's to be the stress responsible for my lack of care toward any holiday commitments; that is to say, I'm definitely doing a lot less "Let's catch up" during the holidays, because I'm just not that good with time.

I remember the first definition of time given by a high school tutor who, you guessed it, had no tolerance for tardiness. Mr. Tan, for the lack of originality to which his last name still escapes me today, had the discipline of a rod. He was a handsome man with strictures so unbendable it made an Encik squirm. That included (and never limits to) "no eating", "no side chatters", and "no excuses for feebly walking into class late". Not even if you had a broken toe. His no-nonsense disposition toward the uninitiated was so astoundingly astute, you just had to try him.

I remember coming in late once just to test the waters. And they were scalding. Drawing the lesson to a halt, I was shamed, berated, and alienated by grating words that never quite reconciled thereafter. What the class missed that day, uncompensated by my lateness, then made up for with an hour's worth of even more "hazing", was something I guess I'll never find out. In my orientation experience, that was pretty hardcore.

The point is, after years of chafing with Mr. Tan, I'm still not that smooth with time. The irony somewhere in its physics still baffles me. From coming in late, to showing up on time, to actually learning how to maximize it, depending on how you see it, will always be as malleable as substance that just slips right through your finger tips. (There's also a reason why I do not enjoy yoghurt, but that's another story for another day.)

I guess when it comes to having nothing to do, it's best to be away at a holiday, lolling under the trees, than fretting over how and when to make full use of your time.

"Always find something to do, don't just sit there and stare at your shadow!" was something my mom would used to remind me of. But even "You're going to get Alzheimer's!" doesn't taunt me to plan ahead for my term breaks. And if it were really all that simple, I would have also been exercising more, sleeping earlier, and learning to relax better. But that's just all theory now, isn't it?