Our second day of chatting, he suddenly began calling me brother and asked me if I would be willing to listen to what he had to say. More or less, someone who would be willing to understand him. Innocently I said, “Sure why not?”

Then it started to get strange, he asked me,
“Do you like me?”
“I just became your friend yesterday that’s a bit difficult to say. ‘Like’ is rather strong, no?”
“That’s cold. I feel really sad now.”

From then on, the chat just got… creepy.

In the past, I’ve always felt extremely insecure when people told me what they did for a living. “I work for CNN,” “I do online campaigns for Google,” or “I work for Microsoft.” Those types of phrases from people always made me feel so insignificant, in fact, when guys tell me they work at high level positions at bling bling companies I automatically process that as “I am way out of their league.”

However, this experience with this Chinese guy is making me feel a bit different. In the end, we are all human. Regardless of where one works and does, loneliness is universal. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on myself in the future. Perhaps by myself, I am enough.

I’ve always wondered if I really was one of those guys who are completely consumed by the internet, apparently I’m not. Now that the days have become warmer in New York, I’m seeing myself outdoors more and utilizing the parks that the city has to offer. On Friday I visited Central Park with Z and crowded was definitely an understatement when it came to describing the amount of people that were there. I suppose the digital age hasn’t completely ruined people’s need to see the sun or touch green grass.

Since Z had mentioned that he had never seen the Unisphere (It’s the symbol of Queens borough) before, the following day I took Z to Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Though it’s technically a few blocks away from my apartment the walk was rather brutal, but in the end it was really nice to be able to put my beach towel down and lazy around while staring at a huge globe. I took the photo below while resting:

They’re doing some sort of construction right now hence the fencing, as to what… totally beats me. Today (Sunday) I went with Scottie to the Sakura Matsuri at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden only to find that the cherry blossoms have all passed. Yet the horrible people at BBG still didn’t see any problems charging $15 per person. The trip wasn’t wasted luckily as Scottie and I had our fried chicken fix over at the nearby Popeyes.

After the disappointing visit to BBG but satisfying fried chicken run, we went over to Battery Park. While I was walking up the path and staring at the river I couldn’t help but think of how nice it is to just walk in a park. Sometimes in city life we easily forget about things like plants and water. We’re drowned in instant messaging, emails and various relationships that we forget to think about the simple things in life. This summer I’m definitely going to be outside more. I’m hoping that in doing so I can maybe come across a different meaning to life.

Scottie also mentioned to me about what life would be like if I had actually lived in Hong Kong. I’m not sure why but I had never really considered it as an option. Though at the same time, recently Scottie had also referred a job to me that is located there. It really got me thinking on how life would be if I really did get it. Somehow, I could only imagine things being brighter than New York. In all honesty, I don’t really have much friends in New York. The irony is, while I’ve never really lived in Asia, I have more friends in Asia than I do here. (Single people too) It makes me wonder, should it be time to think about leaving the USA altogether? USA- the place where I was born and raised.

With the Chinese speaking population, I’ve also begun to see the degradation of the Mandarin language in Taiwan. While it’s true that when I speak Mandarin, I don’t pronounce everything properly (Due to my southern accent) however today’s generation of kids seem to not bother differentiating between ZH and Z, CH and C, SH and S sounds. Coupled by the fact that Taiwanese girls seem to love to speak with high pitches and throw in baby talk, my question to the world is:

What is happening to language?

Why can’t we speak or write properly anymore?

The stocks that I have watched go up, the people that I watched take a risk on a guy and ended up marrying them, the friends I watched quitting a great job only to secure their dream job- the list simply goes on and on. Did others get the memo to take risks or was this a well-kept secret that was not revealed to me?

After learning that a friend from the past will marry soon, I’ve begun to think about my position with love again. It’s a vicious cycle, I think about it, I forget, I think about it and then I forget again… I suppose it’s only human to want to be loved. Of course this formula wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t pull out thoughts about my ex “Ben.” Ben, as my friend M suggests is the one that completely ruined me. In a way, he did ruin me. In another way, he strengthened me in the sense that after he broke my heart I was forced to examine myself and improve myself mentally and physically.

My story with Ben was a story that had happened about 5 years ago, it was a short-lived romance, though in my heart it felt like it lasted for ages. I can safely say that I was 100% happy during that year of talking to him. It was also after losing him that I had realized how strongly I loved him- to the point where it was driving me mad.

In many ways, I wonder if I could ever find that connection and happiness again. Ben has since moved on and is happily married to another guy whereas I am like the country that had lost a war and was never able to rebuild. I’ve had quite a number of dates between then and now- in fact a handful of guys had shown strong interest in me only for me to reject them. I really wonder if I’ve used up all my love cards. In Korean superstition, it’s a terrible thing to be able to win a huge sum of money through gambling or through the lottery because then, you’ve used up all the luck you would have used throughout your life. I wonder, since I have been in love twice in my life, have I used up all my loves in this lifetime?

I had a conversation about this topic of love with Marie back in January when we were all drinking at a bar in Hong Kong. She said something that shot right through me:
“Ekin, I think you just have not gotten over Ben.”

It’s been five years though. I don’t think of him all the time and I’m happy that he’s doing well and is very happy now but I still haven’t gotten over him? The fact that this question makes me falter a bit for the answer makes me really wonder if I have actually gotten over him or not. I’ve concluded that maybe these few years I’ve simply buried him inside my heart and simply chose not to acknowledge that he exists there. Regardless, I’m not sure what cleaning agent I could use to scrape him out of my heart completely.

I wish I could fall in love again. As the people around me pair up and marry, I start to feel very lonely. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I’m starting to worry that I really am going to be old and alone. It’s starting to get more and more painful to reject people that I’m not attracted to simply because I feel like they are the only people willing to love me.

Somehow, I just don’t want to settle. I want the connection. I want a guy where when he calls my cellphone, the sound of the customized ringtone I set for him makes me excited. I want to look forward to talking to him for hours. I want to be able to put my head on his shoulders and feel safe. I want to be able to tell him that “I love him.”

It wasn’t that interesting of a week however a few things did happen:

• I threw a birthday party for myself last Saturday. The turnout was not bad at all and to my surprise, I had a lot of leftover food. Thanks to all that took the time to show up and wish me a happy birthday. As well as adhering to my rule that all guests must wear a necktie.
• I’ve spent a lot of time with a guy named “Carl.” In fact, come to think of it I think I have almost spent every single day with him last week. I can sense that he likes me, however, I’m not quite certain as to what my feelings are towards him. He’s come over to my neighborhood, as well I to his a few times. He even stayed over my place one night however oddly enough nothing happened aside from heavy petting. There was a complete day that I had spent with him where he kept insisting I hold his hand and such in which in most part I would allow… for a minute before letting go. (I’m not one for PDA) When we had gone back to his apartment, more heavy petting and yet still nothing. It’s odd how in this generation, we start to question the other person’s sanity when they don’t initiate sex. In a way, now I can totally understand how many lesbians can breakup. Too much foreplay and talking and too little sex.
• Friday night I had dinner with Marg and then we went back to my place to play New Super Mario Brothers.
• Saturday I attended capoeira class as usual. Lunch with the lesbians and then we all decided to get foot massages. Definitely a great idea. Somehow, with my great luck the owner of the shop came out to massage my feet and really put force into it. While I was in semi-pain while getting it, my foot felt great after it was all over. My friend Toshi was having a going away party thing at 9 pm so I bummed around the city. Spent the a lot of time at Strands bookstore and then B&N bookstore. Did you guys know that B&N bookstore at Union Sq. stocks Chinese magazines? When I got to the bar at 9 pm, I couldn’t find my friend. The fact that it was a sit down affair kind of turned me off since I didn’t know any of his friends. After failing to find my friend, I decided to just go home.
• Sunday, I went to over to visit my neighborhood’s BJ and Best Buy with Marg. Now I’m thinking if I should get a membership card or not. The decisions!

In 2009 there had been a guy that I had talked to for about 5 months. Towards the end of the 5 months I had begun to find myself growing bored of our telephone relationship. I was in New York and he was in New Mexico. We had finally met in September where he completely confused my emotions. He was a good catch in every way- smart, funny, considerate and easy going. Physically he was tall and masculine, the type that I adored. However when it came down to sex and connection I didn’t seem to feel anything. The sex didn’t make me yearn for more and the connection that I had felt, felt like that of a best friend. When he had finally returned home to New Mexico, we had a long conversation and I made my position as honest as I could. So honest in fact that when I hung up the phone and realized that I had rejected him, I felt as if I had knives jabbing my heart. For the first time in my life, I rejected someone and yet for me to reject the other person it in turn hurt me.

It hurt me because I was confused as to if I was doing the right thing or not. Clearly he was a great catch and yet it didn’t feel right. Why was I passing up on such a great guy? In the end, I know that I did the right thing. Mostly because I did in fact have feelings for the other guy and the fact that I only wanted the best for him meant that I couldn’t stay in a relationship where I couldn’t give it my all. It would not have been fair to him and most importantly, it would not have been fair to me.

Which brings me to my main topic- masochism. Yesterday, I was having a terrible day to begin with and brainlessly I was surfing the net. I surfed into the social networking website where I had met the New Mexican guy and out of curiosity I clicked onto his profile. His status was recently changed from “single” to “in a monogamous relationship.” My heart completely sank. When I had talked to him briefly this past November, his tone of voice had changed and I had wondered why. While I had been away from NY, I had mailed him a gift and also a Christmas card, but he had seemed nonchalant of the things I sent over and last night in front of the computer I had finally understood.

Just like that, I invited a flood of memories to enter my head. Once more I invited that same feeling of hurt I had the year prior to haunt me. My Mr. Not-So-Perfect has already entered into a relationship. The shock from this and stress from things that had happened earlier took a toll on me and I went to sleep early. I woke up this morning to find my head floating towards thoughts from the night prior. As the day progressed I finally realized that we need to stop our masochism. Things that happened in the past purely are just things that happened in the past. You make some realizations, you learn and then you move on without looking back. There’s no progression when we linger in the past. Rather than allowing ghosts of the past greet us and taunt us we should simply stop acknowledging their existence. How do we build and innovate when all we know of is the past?

I’ve finally come to understand that I am a person who is simply not capable of loving anyone. In addition to that fact, I’ve also come to realize that I don’t need anyone to enrich my life nor do I have to have that amazing partner. I think that all this time I’ve been blinded by the media telling you that you need to have a partner in order to achieve happiness. That, coupled by the fact that people around me show off their boyfriends and girlfriends as fashion accessories did not further help my situation of questioning where my particular happiness was.

In other words, I was confusing happiness with love- love, which is something that no longer exists in my heart.

There are many people that I’ve come across during my short years here on earth and I’ve been thinking that this status- the status of being single actually isn’t half bad at all. You get to have your variety of people and then by the end of the day, you return to a space that you have created yourself. A space that cannot be disturbed because you used your two hands to build it.

What I’ve come to notice is that I still haven’t come across building a beautiful space that I can call my own. I still feel very unattractive in many ways and I have a long way in improving my physical appearance. Career-wise, while it would be quite difficult for me to change I think what I will do is simply try. I’ve already begun my self-reinvention by gathering a to-do list for things that I’d like to have done once I got back to NY. I won’t put pressure on myself to complete the list, but once again I will try.

I’d like to reinvent myself into a person who is on top of the world- a person whom I could perceive as simply stunning.

It’s very uncommon for me to really feel anger towards friends however when a supposed friend consistently mistreats their friend that’s when I feel it’s a bit unforgivable. Today’s story? The inconsiderate friend.

HS was a girl whom I had known from English class back when I was in high school. Somehow or another, we had kept contact even after graduation and well into our college years simply due to our mutual interests in Asian pop culture. When HS abruptly moved to Taiwan (Due to a large sum of inheritance entering her family), we more or less lost contact. In a way, I allowed the contact to be lost because of the distance and also because being friends with her, there was a kind of pressure.

I hadn’t spoken with HS for ages when suddenly this past Thursday night I received a phone call from her saying that she would be coming to HK the following day. Not only was she coming to HK, she had no place to stay and was hoping to stay at my place. It was a little inconvenient, in the sense that I wasn’t given advance notice and that I had made plans for the weekend but figuring that this was a friend, I really had a problem saying no. HS mentioned to me that she would arrive to HK at around 12 pm whereas I responded that I would be available after 3 pm. After I mentioned that I would figure out some sort of ideal lodging situation for her we hung up the phone.

The following day, at around noon time I receive no phone call. After I finished sending off New York friends to the airport express stop at 3 pm, I still hadn’t received any call from HS. In turn, I decided to pick up the phone and call her.

I immediately get pushed to voice mail.
So I did the next best thing- text message.

Almost every hour I would call her phone without any availability and thus I simply stayed at home waiting. At around 7 pm I finally receive a call from HS.

“Hey so this is HS.”
“Hey where were you? I tried calling you like crazy and couldn’t reach you at all.”
“Oh… my phone doesn’t seem to work here.”
“Why didn’t you buy a SIM card then?”
“I don’t know where to buy one.”
“At 7-Eleven! It’s so cheap, just like HKD$70.”
“Oh.. oh well.”
“Just buy one. Don’t be cheap. So where were you?”
“Oh we went to the big Buddha and then went outlet shopping in Tung Chung.”
(But you don’t think to call me to let me know you’ve arrived to Hong Kong?)
“Oh… wow”
“So how do we get to your place?”

So after explaining how she could get to my place, I wait for her. When I receive another call from her. This time once again from a pay phone.

“So we got to Central Plaza.”
“Ok, so you can stay there and I will pick you up.”
“I think maybe we could figure out where you are.”

So then I go on to describe the buildings around me. I mention to HS that I will leave my apt now to meet with her. As I walk along the path that she would have used to get to my building I notice that I do not see her at all. My brain thinks, “Oh shit!” At this point I am running all over the place looking for HS and her sister but do not find them at all. After fumbling around aimlessly for about 20 min, HS calls me again via pay phone and tells me that they will just wait for me at Central Plaza.

Though I was rather tired, I traveled with them both to Tsim Sha Tsui and had dinner with them. After our dinner we went over to Jordan to shop at Temple Street. At Temple Street, HS mentioned that at many stalls she wanted to buy some stuff. (Such things as T-shirts, little trinkets, notepads, etc.) Though in the end, she came out with nothing. It shocks me that she bought nothing as many of the items were not expensive at all with items being priced from HKD$20 to HKD$50. In the end, I turned out to be biggest spender in the group, purchasing 10 pairs of socks for HKD$100.

The next day, HS had left early so that she could have dim sum. I passed on dim sum because I really didn’t want to wake up at 8:30 am, as well as the fact that I’ve been feeling a little sickly these days. Thus, I slept in till 11:30 am. When I awoke, I found that my inside door was left ajar.

I had already made plans to have lunch and coffee with a net friend and thus HS knew to just go exploring HK without me. However what felt weird to me was that she never called once to check in with me. Being that we are in fact friends, I would have been happy if they could kind of let me know what their evening plans were and if we were to eat dinner together.

Not a single phone call.

The worst part was, I didn’t have the ability to call them to check up on them because they wouldn’t buy a SIM card. It annoyed me that I was saving them HKD$600+ for letting them stay with me in my apartment and yet they cannot even spend the HKD$70 so that they could at least be reachable. So that I could at least know that they were doing ok in HK.

By 9 pm I was in my apartment starting to get worried if anything had happened to them. At that point I received a text message from my friend letting me know that they were drinking in Central. It was either continue waiting for them in my apartment or just go meet up with friends in Central for a drink. I was angry so I decided to go drinking.

I got to the bar at 10 pm and had a good time drinking with friends. At 11 pm I still didn’t receive a call from them and had decided I simply did not care anymore. At 11:20 pm I receive a phone call that didn’t come from a pay phone. (I later found out they called me from my doorman’s phone)

“Hey this is HS. We’re at your apartment right now.”
“Er… I’m actually out drinking right now.”
“Ha?”
“Um… what time is it now?”
“It’s around 11:30 pm.”
“I should be home at around 12:30 am.”
“Oh… ok.”

I decided to stay for 30 more minutes and then promptly leave the bar at 12. I think it was one of the first times in my life where I could still take the MTR home on a night of drinking.

As I enter my building the doorman looks at me and tells me that my friends were here and that they’ve been waiting at my door for a really really long time.

The following day we all wake up at around 9 am so that they could get ready to leave and pack. After they were done with their bathroom routine I went to take a shower. After I came out of my shower I saw that they had left my apartment, all their stuff was gone and once again my inside door was left ajar. After walking around my apartment for a bit I found a note by my couch.

“We went to the supermarket downstairs. Meet us there.”
(What the hell? You think I was gonna take an hour in the shower?)

Time then? 9:40 am. So I decided, I was going to take my time and play Farmville on my computer. At 10 am, I figured I should probably go downstairs. When my elevator reached the ground floor, I saw HS bugging the doorman about me.

“What are you guys doing?”
“Oh we were looking for you. We thought maybe you didn’t see the note or something.”

Last night I went to a karaoke bar called “Lab” with my friend Wallwall. While it’s not an elaborate bar nor is it really a bar to cruise what Hong Kong has to offer, I had a good time chatting with Wallwall while at the same time staring into space and watching other people happily singing Chinese pop songs. There were quite a number of times where I simply drank my drinks and went into silent mode all while collecting my thoughts. Such a habit, it’s quite typical of me when I’m drinking- I like to be left alone to my thoughts. There was quite a lot on my mind after I had returned from Malaysia… new experiences, new friendships, new relationships and also confusion with logistics.

My mind swished from thought “a” to thought “b.” At one point I was thinking if I was going about things all wrong and perhaps what was to unfold was very much wrong. I was thinking if maybe I was being too selfish with my own feelings and just enjoying something that I wasn’t supposed to enjoy. In the end, my heart decided that it was best to keep an open mind and a simplistic approach. I think when I overthink a situation it suddenly becomes very complicated when it needn’t be.

What I’ve come to understand is this… I’ve gained some strength and positivity since coming back from Malaysia.
I’ve rediscovered my own self-worth.
I am not insignificant.
I am actually desirable.

When I had found myself not posting much on Xanga (The site where I had blogged prior to this) I felt two types of feeling- a relief that it means that the “depressed” Ekin has left and that a chapter in my life can close. While I’m not sure whether or not I would return to Xanga, I’ve more or less abandoned the site to blog fully onto this site.

When I had first started blogging it was back in 2001. Everything was put up onto the web manually and it was a very tedious process. It wasn’t until I discovered Xanga where I was able to blog without the restraints of editing HTML pages and uploading them onto a server. After using Xanga for a while, I found myself addicted to the community it had. The fact that my voice was heard from different people around the world, my joy day-to-day had become reading blogs and finding comments left on my blog entries. Through Xanga I had found close friends as well as a boyfriend, but alas distance proved to be quite the enemy and all those things crumbled once natural human emotions had come forth. I started withdrawing from Xanga and not wanting to freely surf the Xanga community for fear of virtually “bumping” into the very people that I had used to be close with.

Fast forward to now, the Xanga community has changed much. Many of the bloggers that I had read either have stopped blogging or have closed their accounts. My entries no longer yield much comments and I no longer see the fun in surfing into “strangers” blogs anymore.

Most importantly, I’ve decided to leave Xanga to reclaim my voice back. With over 100 subscribers reading my contents, I find myself censoring a lot of what I really want to say. I no longer wrote candidly for fear of offending or depressing someone or not “entertaining” my loyal blog readers.

No more.
I want to be heard.
… and I want to be heard by you.

Photo: Taken in Thailand in front of MBK