Please Leave Me Alone

‎"Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely--make that miraculously--fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result--eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly--in you."

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

I’m the leaf

I’m so tired.

contact lists.

these days, a new cell phone means a new phone book--a new list of names and numbers that you can access easily with the press of a button. many cell phone providers conveniently offer to reprogram the numbers from your old phone into your new one. having little to do while my family was partaking in the chaos of after-christmas sales, i decided to reprogram the numbers into my new phone manually.

as i went through the list, i noticed that there were several numbers that i didn't really need to store in the new phone. of course, there were the numbers of the acquaintances and the partners for school projects that i didn't really talk to after the first time i met them or we had worked together. but there were also the numbers of people who had at one time been my close friends.

i hesitated to let go of those numbers, i think because it meant that i didn't really foresee a time when i would try contact them, or that they would even try to contact me. i thought about things that kept us apart--distance, time, forgetfulness, school, differing social groups. and it was surprisingly disheartening.

but then i looked at what remained after i chiseled away at the old numbers in my digital phone book. i scanned the names, recalling the last time i had seen each person--maybe a couple of months, weeks, days, even minutes. i thought about the next time i would get a new phone and would have to select from this batch of numbers and decide which ones i would keep. i thought about the numbers that i would add in the future.

i guess what i value the most are the numbers that i had kept since my first cell phone: the numbers of my siblings, parents, and best friends. people who have supported me, loved me, taught me, made me laugh, kept me going--and continue to do so to this very day. and i felt pretty glad. i think that with time and change comes the need to let go, to clean out our phone books of the traces of people we've somehow lost touch with (or maybe even lost completely) along the way--but i think what matters is making the most of the time with the people who stay with you throughout it all; those people who are on speed dial, whose numbers you could dial with a keypad without having to check the number under their name. and with things like facebook, twitter, skype, and mobile phones, the connections we have with these people should be stronger than ever, even if we leave them to go to school or to go back home. and of course, there's always the chance that we could find ourselves reprogramming the numbers of the friends we once thought we had lost back into our phone books.

happy holidays, everyone! i wish you all the best in the new year :)

play me on wordswithfriends--username: cabanayan

whos granny smith where shes getting all of these damb apples.

This can be addressed. Something can be done. Just because you don’t see the future right now doesn’t mean you never will or that the future doesn’t exist for you. The very fact that you recognize that there’s something to see but you’re just not able to see it right now might mean that you were able to see it once before. It might not be the same future that you envisioned when you were younger, but it still belongs to you.

The future is yours. It won’t be perfect and it won’t be easy, but it has never left you. Never let it.

“My problem is, I don’t see a future for myself, and when you see no future it becomes easier to see the end.”

- It becomes closer everyday.