"If I was just a stranger living in your street, would you have taken the chance to know me?"

Its times like this that I wish we all had thought bubbles over our heads.

But then again, if we all had thought bubbles then we’d all have to be honest. And if that happened, then the human race would be dead.

Civilization cannot exist without a little hypocrisy. Imagine what would happen if we all said the things inside our heads.

…

The topic for today’s post is “an explanation”, composed specifically for my cousin. Though if you’re not my cousin, you might as well read and learn: learn a little more about me, about the things we say to other people, how what we say—though we might not mean it—affects other people, and how everyone does not have the same mindset.

For reference, please read the post dated “January 19, 2004”.

Done?

I can understand why anyone would an explanation after someone has just said that to them.

My cousin isn’t the most patient person in the lot. I know this because I grew up with her. Maybe not in the same house, but close enough to make some observations.

And just so I’m clear—I happen to think that being rude to salespeople is impatient. It’s not inefficiency in their part when you get to be an ass to clerks for more than three times in two months. You just cannot wait.

Moving on…

It was our agreement that all blogs written were supposed to be day specific. They are a collection of my thoughts for the day, mostly rants on the office, things that I watch or read, stuff that I find interesting.

They are my thoughts, and though I’d love to translate everything in my brain in written form, you just can’t do that. Which is why before I gave her the keys to my blog, I set up certain provisos:

You do not tell my parents. Stuff that is in here, I will tell them on my own. Though I think they’ve heard enough stuff about Robert Duncan McNeill to last a lifetime.

Read now, ask questions later. I am busy. I am leaving my job at the end of March, so I have to rush some of my assignments. I’m sure I can answer you, just not right now. I cannot assign all my energy to this one question—or questions—when I have other stuff that I am currently thinking about.

You do not judge. Everybody has their own opinion of you. The person writing this blog may not be the person you commonly relate with, which should be the case if you’re my relative. As far as I know, my cousin Lianne is the only person who knows a little about the “me”.

All questions should be posted in my comments box. Or if you don’t want to be so public—since I’ve just found that other people do read my blog—you can send me e-mail and we’ll talk about it.

I let her read this blog because I wanted her to know me better, because often times I think she still sees me as this snot nosed brat of a 12 year old girl.

I thought that maybe now, as grown ups, we would be able to communicate better.

I mentioned once that my relationship with my cousin is like the Romanov Archives: it’s old, it’s hidden, it’s bitter and sensitive, and no one ever really likes to talk about it.

It was a great day when my cousin added me on Friendster, and it was a great day when she chatted with me on Yahoo Messenger.

It happened when I was going through a lot of difficult things in my life. When I had a permanent falling out with my best friend and I didn’t know which people to trust. When I thought this incident would cause me to lose my friends, but instead I regained forgotten ones and ended up strengthening my bonds with the ones that I currently had.

My mistake, I think, was thinking that the Kodak moment was going to last forever. It actually lasted what, 2 sessions?

I’m not that optimistic. I believed it when my mom told me that people do not change overnight, and as a student of human behavior you understand that certain things are just part of a person’s personality.

When the fuzziness was beginning to wear off, I cut my losses and just thought “well, we’re just too different.”

Which means, had we been neighbors, the most interaction that the two of us would be getting is exchanging baked goods for Christmas.

We’re not friends, which is alright since we’re already relatives and that’s so enough for me.

I was dumb enough not to edit that January 19 entry out of there, since I should have had enough foresight on how she would react. After all, our previous chat sessions have indicated that some things never change.

…

I suppose I shouldn’t even be surprised when she got upset when she read that, and tried to get me to tell her what I thought. Tell her an isolated incident and she’d shut up.

I never thought you could be badgered through Yahoo Messenger, but those damn pop-ups can be annoying. And when you have big bosses behind your back, it’s hard to hide the blinking box of Yahoo Messenger on your task bar.

Although I must say that the incident this morning is a classic example on why me and my cousin do not get along.

Before I go this…I asked my friend Sally for advice on how I should write up this post. I told her I was thinking of a polite way to go through my blog when she asked me “why?” since she obviously wasn’t nice about it in our chat session.

The one thing I can be is “blunt”. As I’ve written in my previous posts, I’ve stopped taking shit from anyone. It’s the legacy from my nervous breakdown. After 20, I told myself I would never let anyone walk all over me—which is why we didn’t speak to each other for two years.

This morning she kept goading me for “an example”, not stopping when I told her that I’d have to remember some, and that I would get back to her later.

Did she listen? Not really.

When I told her that I couldn’t talk because I was in close proximity to the bosses, she just told me not to mind them and speak up.

All I could think of was “This is so like her.”

Sometimes I think her motto is “Don’t mind them, mind me first”.

She assured me that once I gave an example she wouldn’t ask me for any explanations, and I was dumb enough to buy that. Especially when the example was “Don’t bother getting me any gifts, since you can’t afford my taste.”

Things just sort of went down from there.

She told me that it was a joke. Hard as it may seem, I do believe that. Her humor may leave a lot to be desired, but this is her brand of sarcasm. She just thinks she can say anything because we’re family members.

We have this running joke in the UST psychology department, which is “Jokes are half-meant.”

There is always a reason why we say the things we say, otherwise you wouldn’t have said them. It doesn’t matter what you thought when you said them, because it might not be perceived the right way.

And believe me, coming from a person who has a reputation for being misconstrued (thank kahless I am not an actor) this is one lesson that I have had to learn. The hard way. Several times.

I told her that she should be careful with saying things like that, and explained that I wasn’t in the most receptive of moods when she said that.

Jokes can be a tricky thing. Unless you are sensitive enough to gauge the other persons current temperament, it’s not a good idea to say jokes like that.

You can’t go for the rest of your life telling everyone that what you said was a joke. In the same way that you can’t expect people to always think of things in your way.

When you say things like “You’re maid is prettier than you are”, it’s going to be hard to write this off as a joke. It doesn’t matter if it’s true, it’s just not polite.

Some things are just better off left unsaid. Had I said “You know what, she’s prettier than you are too.” I don’t think anyone would have bought it as a joke even though it was true. And by the way, just to be clear, I said that as an example.

Just to be fair though, I do admit it when she said that I take some things seriously.

I can be a pretty intense person, that’s how I am. I care about several issues, and I am very vocal about the things I am passionate about. I like to live within my experiences, get the most out of them be it good or bad.

When I was younger, maybe I placed too much importance on some of the things she said to me. It may have been difficult, but I could have walked away from a lot of the provocation that her jokes have caused me.

But now that I am much older and there are a lot of things going on in my life, I no longer have enough energy to put up with any of those, so most of the time I will let it slide.

I was not angry when I wrote that entry for January 19. I was irritated with myself and the day in general. I was a raw wire most of the morning and she was feeling particularly humorous when we had our morning chat.

It does somewhat surprise me that she still manages to get my goat, but after I wrote that I let go of most of the tension that I felt towards her.

Yet another example on how most people never perceive things the same way you do.

My cousin thought I was angry, that I was hurt, that I was blowing a lot of things in proportion.

It’s true that I felt insulted with some of the things she said to me, but considering the things I had to deal with that day—not to mention the things I have to worry about in my own life—what she said was the least of my concerns.

As per her usual reaction, she managed to let out some stray bullets, which I will answer to in this post.

I have no reason but to believe her when she says that she was, in no way belittling me. That she has never belittled anyone in all her life, that she has tons of friends of varying personalities, and they all love her and never once did they ever tell her that they felt like she was belittling them.

The problem is this: I am not one of her friends, and I can only be answerable to what I am feeling as a direct result of how she was towards me.

In a way, it was partly my fault if I felt like I was “belittled”. I was the one who allowed the kind of behavior, and had I tried I could have controlled how I was treated.

But since we are in the topic of being honest, I’d just like to say that it’s hard to be 14…and 15, and 16, and 17, and 18, and 19, and 20.

When you’re 14 and you just had an accident that gave you 2nd and 3rd degree burns in your arms, it can be hard to cope when your cousin compares you to a maid. It can be pretty hard to take “jokes” when all you want to do is crawl within yourself and just feel sorry, because the doctor has just told you that you will not make it to the swim team, and you will have to live with this scar for the rest of your life.

It can be pretty hard to be receptive to "jokes" at 15 and 16, when the combined stress of school, travel, extra-curricular activities and—sigh!—boys are weighing in your head.

It’s hard to be receptive to "jokes" at 17, when you are this mousy freshman in a new school, when in your high school you were this popular person.

It’s hard to take "jokes" at 18, when you are in school for 7 days a week, from 7am until 9pm, and the only thing in your mind is winning a debating competition. When the stress of wanting to be the best makes you sensitive to a lot of peoples criticisms.

If only some people had stopped to understand that.

It’s hard to take "jokes" at 19 and 20, with your untrained mind trying to think like a criminal because you want to be a profiler. My teachers had warned me that this was a dangerous thing to do, something which I do not regret doing but had to walk away from two years later because staying in the dark was beginning to destroy me.



It was especially hard to be understanding at 20, when everything came crashing down on me and I felt like no one could help me. When the only thing you want to do is sleep and never wake up, because it was easier to dream than just deal with everything that was rushing up at you.

And finally, it was most definitely hard for me to accept "jokes" after my nervous breakdown, when I was just beginning to crawl out of my hole.

My cousin asked me how I could think that of her when she wasn’t that person and that I didn’t know who she was.

I suppose I could ask her the same thing.

What I wrote was just the tip of the iceberg. Did she see me as that person? When she made those “jokes”, did she know I was in trouble? Did she even wonder? Did she even care enough to suspect?

She accused me of always having a front, but growing up around her jokes, how can I not be on my defenses?

There are a lot of things my cousin does not know about me, and there are a lot of things I don’t know about her.

It wasn’t until after my nervous breakdown that I found out that I didn’t care that I didn’t know enough about her, in the same way that she never cared enough to know about me. And that’s okay.

Earlier, I would never have bothered if I never heard from her again. But recent events such as the one with Christine (former sorta-best friend) and the birth of my niece Sophia changed that.

If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t want her feeling any sort of animosity towards her aunt—certainly not on my behalf.

The past is the past, and even though some wounds still remain smarting, you learn to move on with your life.

If I tend to be too sensitive, then I guess I can be candid enough to tell her that she was, in some cases, insensitive to other people’s thoughts.

A joke is a joke is a joke is a joke until it finally hurts someone.

It’s hard working for your own money, it’s even harder when you don’t really like what your doing, which is why I found what she said insulting. Couple it with a bad day…then holy cow, let’s just take out a bat and get smashing.

My mother felt insulted for me, and my cousin was upset that my mom might be thinking she was a bad person.

For the record, my mother has her own opinion on how my cousin is. How she formed them is her business. I may have a slight influence, but I can honestly—HONESTLY—say that I am not the sole basis it.

…

I can be a bitch, and I know myself enough to know that. I can be pretty mean, and I know that too. I’ve insulted people and belittled people, sometimes intentionally and sometimes without meaning to—so I know what it’s like to hurt someone with a “joke”.

And I also have tons of friends, of varying personalities, who knows I can be a bitch, but understands that I can be a pretty good person too.

…

It’s sad that me and my cousin don’t know each other, and despite the years this is a lousy situation we are in.

And before I forget…

She mentioned something about me always saying thing but never really doing any of them. It’s off tangent (and a cheap shot, by the way) but since we’re being honest, I’ll address the issue anyway.

Yes, I can be a bit of a motor mouth. Yes, I do start things that I never finish. Yes, it’s not a good habit. Yes, I am trying to change that (I swear!)

But I’d just like to say that finding what you want for the rest of your life isn’t always an easy thing.

Some people are lucky enough to know their calling or careers at an early age. I envy that, because I had to go through so many things just trying to figure out where I was headed.

Growing up, I had to face certain expectations: from my family, my teachers, my friends. Some voices were louder than others, and for a long time it was hard to listen to anything else.

In the end, the only voice I gave importance to was the ones of God and me.

I could have been a lot of things, I was good at a lot of things. When I broke free from the idea of law school, I explored all of those.

I don’t regret ever trying.

All of my experiences has given me more fuel for my writing and made me a more rounded person.

It may look like a confusing life, but I can assure you that I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. I would have been a basket case had I just gone the straight and narrow and went from an AB pre-law, law and maybe went off to become a lawyer.

In the same way that I don’t think I would have liked it if I spent my life always being taken care of people.

These are two distinct roads, and there is nothing wrong with either of them, it’s just that one of them is not for me.

…

I hope that when my cousin reads this, she’ll have a better insight as to who I am besides the kid she saw growing up.

Sometimes, when you’ve been with someone a long time, it’s hard to see them any other way. I’m guilty of that with her too, but it doesn’t mean I am not trying.

We are different people. If we were neighbors we might never have looked past each of our fences, never taken the chance.

So it’s probably good that we aren’t neighbors. Instead were cousins.