Moneymoneymoneymohhhneyhhh…mohhhneyhhh

After Helga’s birthday dinner (our youngest turned 8 today), after oranges, ice cream (Nestle pops for us, brazo de mercedes for helgy and fro- they LOVED it. it’s super sweet but sans the chocolate toxic to doggies) and over tea, my family and I had a bit of an A-ha moment. Granted, it was only A-ha to us. To the rest of the world it is a known fact. We were daydreaming- out loud and at night- about all the places we haven’t yet seen but would love to see. We have Europe pretty much covered. North America, too- although by that we just mean the US, but no one seemed to express a desire to visit Canada. I have some parts of Asia and Australia down, too. As our passports will attest, we are not exactly travel-deprived, but all the same, there is still the rest of the world. Central and South America. An entire African continent. Talk inevitable leads to HOW and HOW predictably leads to money. So our A-ha moment was this: Money does make the world go round. What had been obvious to everyone else seems to have eluded us all these years. Yes, we’d always had a taste for the fine things in life and while we knew that the fine things are not without cost, acquiring wealth was never considered a priority. We were never raised to aspire to make money. When my brother and I were in school, there was never any pressure to major in something that would secure us a well-paying job. Study what you love. We were always of the follow-your-dreams variety. I wouldn’t have it any other way, of course, but a slight emphasis on money-making couldn’t have hurt either. In college, while I was enrolling in classes like Taking Shakespeare’s Word for It and The Politics of War Crime Tribunals, I was not above scoffing at the Bulgarian Economics majors, voluntarily submitting themselves to semester upon semester of monotony and misery. I would smugly tell myself, I’m making the most out of a liberal arts education; I study whatever I’m passionate about, who can be passionate about numbers and graphs? I wonder who’s smug now. My editorial job won’t buy me a cruise any time soon. Earning 70 grand a year as a Wall Street financial analyst, one of my Bulgarian friends probably could.

I have friends all over the world. I mean that in the literal sense. A whole bunch of them are backpacking across the continent of their choice. Their facebook albums remind me that, at 24 , now is when I should be doing the same. Money makes the world go round. It also makes going round the world possible.- perhaps even the purchase of a designer bag or two along the way.

i want to be bad.

i've always had a fascination for bad boys and party girls. books, movies, and TV are rife with the stereotype. leather jackets and leather pants. motorcycles. tattoos. weed for breakfast, cigarette for lunch, alcohol for dinner. black eyeliner and blood red nail polish. the boys brood, the girls are heroin chic. both the bad boy and the party girl are always a little bit of rock and roll. kate moss is the queen and pete doherty the king. they hate authority and authorities hate them back. in high school they skipped class to smoke up in the bathrooms. in college they skipped class to smoke up in their own rooms. they come in different varieties and varying degrees, but you get the point.

i think my fascination for the "bad" stems not from wanting to be like them. or wanting to be with them. it's really more of a twisted curiosity of what makes them them. what makes you live so much in the moment as to have complete disregard of the future? as someone who analyzes, overanalyzes, thinks, and overthinks most anything, living life at the whim of your most basest instincts is a mystery that is perpetually intriguing to me. at 23 i have discovered and resigned to the fact that i do not have a wild child's bone in my body. can't say i haven't made any feeble attempts at being one though. here are a couple of examples:

attempt #1: hitch hiking for weed at 17. it was easter sunday. a south african, an american, and i were in pisa and bored out of our minds. we had planned on staying for 4 days but on day one had discovered that all pisa had was the leaning tower and pretty much nothing else. we get a call from a friend whose dad owned a house somewhere in the middle of tuscany. come, he says. it is only a 2-hour trip from where you are and there is porchetto (a bland, italian version of our lechon) and my uncles and cousins have a weed garden. they are here, too, he says, referring to the 3 guys he always hung out with. and so lured with promises of pot and boys, the south african and american dragged me along. as instructed, we took a train to a town called orvietto. it was all good except what we were told was a two-hour train ride turned out to be five. we get off the train, called our would-be host, telling him, we made it. how do we get to your house? weelll... actually, he said. my house is still 2 hours away but there are no trains to there. take a bus. and so we went off into the streets looking for buses only to be told by strangers that this was italy and neither buses nor cabs run on easter sunday. that's how we ended up hitch hiking. it wasn't as bad or scary as i initially thought and 3 cars and 4 more hours later, we were finally where we needed to be. after having gone through that much trouble to get here, the south african and american smoked up with a vengeance. the house used to be part of a commune. dreadlocked musicians played the drums and guitar as barefooted, long-skirted girls danced around a bonfire. it was an atmosphere quite conducive to getting high. i had never smoked a joint before, and when they offered me one, i thought, hmm... maybe i should try it. after all, this is what we traveled 9 hours for. well, it took me all of 5 seconds to say no. no inner struggle, no flipflopping, no maybe's, just no. i knew that one puff would be perfectly harmless but i had heard that pot was something "bad" and therefore, something that should not be done. in my mind, it really was as simple as that. that night, as all of my friends got high on pot, wine and life, i watched, ate some porchetto, and tucked all of them to bed. needless to say, the only "bad" thing i did that night was go to bed without brushing my teeth.

attempt #2: after a few more failed attempts not very different from attempt #1, i decided that if i couldn't be "bad" i would get a boyfriend who was. i initially liked him for several reasons: his half-aussie,half-italian roots made for some good genes. he was an amazing soccer player, an incredible surfer. he knew how to paint. he wore designer shoes. his mom helped costume design for the matrix. i thought he was the paradigm of cool. then he told me that he used to be part of a gang and he once ended up in juvy. some jail time made him want to get out of the gang and his uncle ended up paying thousands of dollars just so he doesn't get severely beaten when he makes his exit. his parents never found out. after i heard the story, i liked him more and thought he was even cooler. dating him made me feel like i was fulfilling my bad boy fantasies without actually having to deal with one. i liked the fact that i was dating a reformed bad boy so i can pretend there was an element of danger involved even though there really wasn't. the problem with this whole scenario was that he was in this i-want-to-be-a-better-person phase and to go along with his new image, he wanted to be with me, the good girl. that would have been fine except that was all he saw me as. because of that, ironically enough, my dating a bad boy turned out to be some of the most boring 5 months of my life. i am with a good guy now and i can tell you that it's a whole lot more thrilling.

sometimes i wonder if i will wake up old one day and regret not having done anything crazy or stupid when i had youth as an excuse to fall back on. all my attempts to be "bad" were done mostly because i thought i should get all that out of my system while i'm young. but what if it was never in your system to begin with? i have nightmares of looking back at my life and lamenting at how unadventurous, safe, and sane my choices were. i imagined me telling myself, "i'm 60 and i don't even know what it feels like to be high." i thought about it and realized, yeah that sounds boring, but you know what? i think i can live with that.

addendum to previous post and other wedding-related issues

dan says i get really amped up about certain issues and all the useless rules the catholic church has imposed on weddings seems to be my chosen "amped upper" these days. here is my latest beef with them: i attended a wedding today and my friend, edwin and i noticed how weirdly overaged the coin and ring bearer were. these were kids who were at least 12 years old (though they looked 14) and were way past the age to be considered cute. i didn't get it. adolescents carrying a heart-shaped cushion with rings and coins just looked very awkward and very wrong. shouldn't there be an age limit for these things? apparently, some churches seem to think the opposite. you cannot join the wedding entourage unless you've had your first communion. next thing you know, they're going to require flower girls to present their marriage certificates, too. which brings me to my next point.

now this i can't blame the church for. i don't know who started it or where it started, but apparently, there is this new addition to the wedding entourage called the "little bride." everyone had already seen it at least once before but today was my first time and i'm not sure if i've gotten over it quite yet. the "little bride" is a little girl that is dressed exactly like the bride. that's it. she has no other duties but to look like a mini version of the bride. this was very disturbing to me as it conjured up images of 80s (and way before that, too) iran, afghanistan, etc where parents were marrying their daughters at a really young age and there were 9-year old brides all over the place. the ridiculousness and tackiness of this whole concept was compounded by the fact that the little bride i saw today wasn't very little anymore. i can kind of (kind of) see how adorable it would be to see a little 3 or 4-year old running around in a white gown and veil but this one looked even older than the ring and coin bearer. protacio, who made the bride's gown divulged that the little bride's measurements were bigger than the bride's. of course the bride didn't look like she'd gained a pound from when she used to be a model at 14 but still...

speaking of models, the bride was a model, the groom was a model, the bridesmaids were all models. it was like sposabella (a bridal fashion show) or some shoot for wedding essentials. thank God for the few oversized ones in the entourage that were thrown into the mix. they made the thing look more real. i am happy for the newly-weds because their kids are never going to be fat or midgets but how is the average appearance of the world's population supposed to improve when attractive people will only reproduce with their kind? share the wealth.

on a less cynical note, i bawled at the pretty couple's wedding today, but it wasn't my fault. the groom started it. i never used to be affected by weddings. all my friends would get kilig (giggly is the best translation i can come up with) while i would sit and beg for the whole thing to be over so i can get to the reception* and eat already. today was different. my friend, ana, says that it's not mental but just biological. as a girl (or a woman, if you will), you reach a certain age... i can't even make myself finish the sentence. i am officially a marrying age. best wishes to all my friends getting hitched soon, but man, are you guys not freaked out? i'm freaked out FOR you. good luck with that.

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* receptions are called such because it is when the bride** and groom*** receive their guests. why do we do it the other way around? the guests always sit around waiting for an announcement asking them to stand up and applaud the newly-weds about to enter the room? more wedding planners should read "miss manners"
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** and *** did you know that you are only supposed to say "best wishes" to the bride? "congratulations" are only meant to be said to the groom

hair philosophy

i got a haircut just the other day. normally, it is pretty uneventful. i decide to get a haircut, set an appointment with tito albert, show up for said appointment, leave feeling very much like the same old me. you see, i'd always had long hair. and up until the other day, hair cuts really were just hair trims. maybe 2 inches is too much. take off an inch and three quarters. is that just an inch and three quarters? it looks longer to me. my hair doesn't look too short, does it? it's fine? you can't even tell the difference? ok. phew.

the other day, however, was different. not my usual inch and three quarters, but a foot. i, who have always always had long hair, could suddenly feel the breeze on my neck. the decision to do it was long and dramatic. i told my family. i told my friends. i told my boyfriend. i told even my newest acquaintances. dan, my boyfriend was the most eager, sending me links of different short hairstyles i might like. my dad was instantly open to the idea. my mom needed a little convincing but she eventually decided it would be a good thing. my friend, sam, showed her support on my facebook wall. everyone else kept asking are you sure about this? how short? THAT short? i can't really picture you with short hair. i'm sure it'll be... fiiiine, but think it through, ok?

and i did. i thought it through. perhaps i may have even thought it through too much. something about hair does that to you. an ear is just an ear. a nose is just a nose. an elbow is just an elbow. a foot is just a foot. hair is never JUST hair. when natalie portman shaved her head for V for vendetta, we said to ourselves, she MUST be a serious actress to go that far for a role. when britney did the same, we all thought (rightly, it seems) that she had not only lost her hair but her mind. keri russell chopped off her locks and felicity tanked. ashlee simpson dyed hers black and suddenly, she was no longer jessica's sister; she was her own person. sports teams get the same hairstyles as a sign of camaraderie. sons shave off all their hair to feel one with their moms who are losing theirs from chemo. heck, even rapunzel found the love of her life because she decided to grow her hair long.

my point is, hair has become this all encompassing symbol of many things to many people. it is not just an extension of our scalps, but of our minds, our hearts, ourselves, and our loves. am i listening to myself right now? i am doing exactly what society does about hair. we philosophize about it.

naturally, that's what i did pre-haircut. it went from, will short hair make my face look fat to: will short hair change how strangers perceive me and will short hair make people take me more/less seriously? i decided that what is considered conventionally beautiful was long hair. (name one shampoo commercial featuring short-haired girls. people with short hair may not use as much shampoo, but they use it nonetheless, you know?) i took it even further. i said to myself that getting a haircut would mean that i have freed myself from caring about whether people think i'm attractive or not. and then all of a sudden, it was a challenge. am i brave enough to do it?

and so i did it. at then end, it was no longer a question of whether i was sick of my long hair and wanted a shorter cut for a change (what i've been telling people). i did it just to prove to myself that i COULD do it. and when it was over, well, it was, quite frankly, anti-climactic. i had short hair and that's all there was to it. i thought about the different steps i used to go through to get a hair trim and realized that although the first and final stages were a little more drawn out this time, at the heart of it, it was all the same. i decide to get a haircut, set an appointment with tito albert, show up for said appointment, leave after an hour feeling very much like the same old me.