trivial post #8

I'm almost halfway through internship. Already took photos with a toga on. RSVP'd to the Graduation Ball. Celebrated the end of my major rotations. Kind of discovered that doing a Pedia residency is not such a bad idea. Yeah, Internship year seems to have gone by so fast.

So fast that I've only actually written three blog posts about it - holy cow! How could I have let it come to this?

I'm so sorry. I feel like every single blog post I've written in med school has started with some sort of lament on how seldom I've been updating this blog. Followed by a long period of me actually not updating this blog.

Truth be told, the idea of keeping a blog just isn't appealing to me anymore. I don't feel comfortable with sharing so much of myself on the Internet. Scrolling back through my college era posts, I can't believe how much detail I would share about my life.

I know nobody really reads my blog (not being humble; I legit can see the statistics, guys) but still I just feel awkward about putting myself out there. I'm a super reserved person IRL, and my friends know it takes a long time before I start to lower my walls. Dating does not sound appealing to me at all. I say "dating" here as in, dating around, not the mere act of going on a date. I hear all these stories from my friends who go on dates, and they sound just terrifying. Matching with someone, chatting up a total stranger, going to dinner somewhere without anything to distract you from conversation... God I feel nauseous just thinking about it. Opening up to someone is already so difficult for me, what more with the added societal pressures of having to be romantically acceptable.

The reason I brought up dating is that recently, my friends and I had a long discussion about it. Someone in the group was confused about whether to continue dating (or, playing the field, I think the young kids call it) or to just stop and be contented by his many platonic relationships. I mostly stayed out of this discussion because I'm sorely lacking in dating experience. And, as I've made clear in the previous paragraph, dating sounds like it sucks BIG TIME.

I've never actually dated anybody. Yes I have a boyfriend, and we've been together for a very long time. So long that his name comes up way too often in this blog if you search for it. But Rap and I didn't really date in the traditional sense (or the modern sense, for that matter). We became boyfriend-girlfriend first (on a lovely April afternoon in Laguna during our film group's retreat), and only a couple of days into our relationship did we go out on our first date (we watched The Hangover 2 and I hated it). Is that weird? To me it seemed only natural.

Before Rap, I'd had only one other boyfriend. He was from my (very conservative) high school, where the natural order of events was you became boyfriend-girlfriend first, and then you could go out on dates. Granted of course that he had asked permission (both verbal and written) from the girl's parents, siblings, cousins, teachers, principal, city councilor, mayor, governor, and Papa Jesus. And that he had gotten straight A's on his last exams, played the drums in at least 3 youth ministries, and was certified to be fully, professionally fluent in Mandarin. Anyway, so yeah, with this guy, we had also become an item first, and only thereafter did we start to actually go out on dates. Like most high school romances, this one obviously didn't last, but I'd say 1 year was a pretty good run for two dumb precocious teenagers.

Oh my gosh this has been a super long segue into the thing that I actually wanted to say from the beginning. Kind of actually lost my train of thought a little bit. But all of this is just to say that I really don't know how to date. As in, how to strike up a match with someone, ask them out, maneuver a conversation in a certain way to keep things interesting... Yeah that stuff still sounds terrifying. So I highly commend all of you out there who are on the dating scene. From an outsider's point of view, it seems daunting. And you all are so brave for putting yourselves out there, just a person, standing in front of another person, asking them to love you. Good job y'all. Keep up the good work mates.

Well, that's all the blabber I'm going to squeeze out of my brain hole for now. Just a couple of random bullet points to wrap this baby up:

• I randomly saw this genius piece of art on Facebook the other day. It's got that ugly-cool vibe that I'm really into now. Like, it's-so-ugly-it's-cool. This masterpiece is by Todoroki Tomohiro. This guy just gets me. 

• Last Monday I visited the Big Bad Wolf Sale, and I was a little underwhelmed. I didn't wanna say this on Facebook or Instagram because I didn't want to hurt the Wolf's feelings, but yeah I didn't find the selection too exciting. Maybe I'm just not familiar with what's hot in literature these days, but they didn't have what I was looking for and that kinda bummed. I think I still scored a couple of good finds though (see below).



Lol I was just so happy to be at the venue that I had to take this selfie even before seeing a single book.

• I got "Birth of the Pill," which is the story of how the contraceptive pill came to be. Non-fiction books are generally not my thing but reproductive health is, so I figure it's worth a shot - and my 290 pesos. 
• My next find was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Of Love and Other Demons." Easiest decision to make. Bestselling author + a synopsis that had the words "rabid dog" - I was sold. 
• My last find was the novelization of Marvel's newest character, Squirrel Girl. Also a very easy decision to make - I'd been meaning to read the Squirrel Girl comics ever since I heard about how powerful she was. But I'm not a comics person myself, so I thought that this novel (which is just the comic book sans pictures) was perfect.

• Many of the books I see in Booksale also ended up there, and the prices were kind of similar. But I still found myself wincing a bit at the P190 price tags. As a Booksale loyalist, I'm more comfortable in the 50 - 120 price range, so these books were all kind of out of budget. So I only got three of them. There were a couple of other ones that piqued my interest, but not enough to make me want to shell out another couple hundred pesos. 
• I commuted home after the fair. Two trains and a trike. It was a surprisingly pleasant experience.