From This Day Forward

“When a couple gets married, it isn’t just their lives that are thrown into chaos. 

For Nicholas and Nala’s wedding, there’s the mother of the bride who is forced to face her failed marriage; the mother of the groom, who revisits the past – and an old love; the bride’s best friend who has lost the only boy she thinks she will ever love and with him, all her happiness; the bride’s cousin who fooled around with her boyfriend’s best friend (who inconveniently turns out to be the groom); and the groom’s sister who cannot understand her brother’s choice of a future wife. 

 Surrounding the bride and the groom’s happiness are the heartache, joys, hopes, dreams, and realizations of the people who care about them. It makes you think: does everybody get a chance at happily ever after?”

I’ve read only one other book – in full – by Ms Marla Miniano before, Table for Two. I had enjoyed that immensely, especially because of its interesting narrative and the premise of a single place being a silent witness to so many broken and mended hearts. So, I decided to get myself a copy of From This Day Forward. I had intended to read the book in two days, to give myself ample time to sleep the way I know I’m supposed to. I broke my body clock again though, as I knew I would.

On Ordinariness

A few months ago, my roommate L and I had a memorable conversation about someone she knew. This acquaintance apparently referred to herself as someone very ordinary, someone very normal, and L simply couldn’t understand how someone with potential enough to earn a spot in the country’s top university could ever be so unambitious. At the time, I agreed with my roommate fully. What was, after all, the point of working hard, studying hard, if our only goal was to be? There had been, back then, only obvious goal for me: becoming extraordinary, immortal.

As I was wrapping the new books I bought earlier though, I came to accept something I had always known, something I’d perhaps always considered for a very long time. All the books I had bought, all the books I had read as of late, were chick lit. The kind of reading the me of four years ago would scoff at for being so unabashedly cliché and mainstream. These were the books I was willing to go hungry for, the stories on which my sanity depended on. The semi-adult in me conceded: I was just an ordinary person. There was not much that singled me out from the average single young woman on the street – except maybe, I had messier hair.

The thought doesn’t even bother me that much anymore.

Recent Events, February 2013

Am blogging for the sake of blogging - go, me! It's been a month since the last time I wrote for this space of virtual pseudo-property, and while much has happened, there's not much that can be put into words. Chos.

Here are some pictures that I hope are capable of summarizing what I've been distracting myself with lately:

 

This was taken just earlier, 12. Feb, when the UP Deutscher Verein or the UP German Club, of which I'm a member, hosted a literacy program in New Era HS. Auf Deutsch. I must have had a virtual nosebleed - teaching high school students is so challenging! The batch salutatorian - who, with a little push in the right direction - might turn out to be an interesting specimen for Blair Waldorfs in the Philippines, was in my study group. She was not impressed that I did not know what the German word for Hamster is. (It is, by the way, (das) Meerschweinchen.)