Fe"breeze" and Memories

Scent is the most sensitive and effective of your senses to stimulate your brain to invigorate memories. My psychology professor has said people, adults in particular, will recall several details or experiences in their elementary school days upon entering the building. Smells can, and most likely will, stimulate your brain memory network so that you shall remember anything associated with this certain smell. Both desirable and undesirable recollections.


For me, this is Febreze. (Sidenote: I always thought that Febreze had the "ee" like breeze.) Meadows and Rain, to be particular. I sprayed this on my Tim Horton's uniform every day before I went to work in hopes that the mix of sandwiches, condiments plus eight hours worth of coffee vapor would have a harder time permeating through my apparel. It rarely worked, but I did it anyway. I smelled like crap for the entire summer of 2006-2007. 


Needless to say, it reminds me of my first boyfriend, DM. We worked at Tim Horton's together, and that's where all the romance sparked and... where my first kiss happened. *Heaves a sigh of diluted remorse*
What the bastard. He is incomparable to my present significant other, such that he didn't do nearly as much things for me (I don't think). Okay, I'm being biased. DM did a lot. But he also broke up with me, and is 90% responsible... or at least 80%... for me being the mess I am now. I'm afraid of "loving" again, assuming I know what that means, because I know how much I would be in shambles when I'm ripped away from loving and being loved. Back then, I thought I was the person to "rather have loved and lost than never loved at all". As it turns out, not so much. But at least now, I know what I'm getting into. 


I realize that I didn't think about DM for the longest time. The last time I recall having thought about him for more than two hours is when I last broke up with my more recent ex, DG. And I compared these two relationships, the beginning, middle and end, in their similarities and differences. That led to me miss DM, and realizing how much I felt for him than DG. And now, I also realize that I haven't thought about said summer for the longest time too. It's remarkable how many minute, insignificant details stay in your memory. Maybe it's this Febreze doing its job, but there are a lot that stand out. Would I be too explicit in telling them? Whatever, it's my blog and you have free will. 

• He kissed my cheek one day as he grabbed the pot of steeped tea and I refilled the powders in the instant French Vanilla/Hot Smoothie machine. He did it to surprise me, and he knew that he was breaking the rule. He commented on how my face smelled nice. (It was Olay moisturizer. I use it religiously. It really doesn't cause break-outs, though I am blessed with the absence of acne.)
• The way he stands. The various blue and white hoodies he wore. The way he paid for everything he ate, even though he was the only employee to have done so. 
• I had cut my arm on a fence while going to work, and he grabbed my hands and chided me for having been stupid and careless. He bought me an ice cap so that it would act as an icepack, even though I swore that actual ice from the freezer would be fine.
• You know that thing where two annoying-as-hell people tell each other to hang up, and the other tells the first to hang up first? The cycle is vicious and continues on and on until something, like an act of God, happens. Well, we did that. Several times.
• He phoned me, and we would talk for hours.
• We took three hours to walk back from our work to my house, even though it should have taken half an hour.  We watched the sunset and lied in the grass and held hands.
• So many more things.

Looking  back, I think I really did love him. I was younger, much less experienced, much less knowledgeable of the matters of the heart than I am now, but love is relative to each individual. If the same situation happened to me now, I would be more cautious about what I was getting into. But back then, I wasn't who I am now. And I was in love. As for IM, I guess I want to feel more than what I felt for DM to even admit that I am in love. 

Febreze is a bitch. I apologize for another Romance Saturated blog. 

My finger is healing, I don't like eggs, I found a love for Caramel Macchiatos (even though I'm paying an extra 40 cents for a layer of caramel sauce. But oh, oh, oh. It is so good). Also, while sitting in Starbucks, I realize it's more economical to order soy lattés in Venti sizes over any other; the extra charge is constant regardless of cup size. Bet you didn't realize that now, did you? While I'm on the topic, did you know that the majority of the world's populatoin is lactose-intolerant? Only European and some Egyptian areas domesticated (and milked the bajesus out of for centuries to come out of) cows, goats, camels, etc. Citizens of said areas flocked everywhere, and lookie now! Starbucks and everywhere serves milk. Soy, is the alternative, even though it should really be the default. 

Band-Aided Boo Boo and Overdoses of Chocolate

You do this: for every bad scenario, most people think of a worser scenario and self-compromise by being satisfied that the latter situation did not happen. If you don't do this, try it. You'll might feel pathetic in fooling yourself into feeling better about something you can't change, a shitty situation no less, but in the end you're happy and that's all that really matters. Kind of. (Let's enjoy the ability to be ignorant and leave my statement at that.)


So what happened to SH for this to be the topic of the blog? A cut finger. The ring finger, to be exact. It also happens to be the worst finger to be damaged. Try this: grab an table-laying object while keeping a finger extended toward the air. 

• Piggy #1: Thumb - a bit difficult, this is what cats must feel like. But if poor Piggy Uno was hurt, he'd be far away from harm. 
• Piggy #2,3,5 - Forefinger, Middle finger, Pinky - they are quite the independent little pigs! Look at them! All extended and alone in their liberation! 
• Piggy #4- Ring Finger - Look at that poor bastard. It bends with the goddamn Pinky. If Pinky was Holmes, Piggy #4 would be Watson; dragged behind the self-involved detective while he walks around alone as much as he'd like. Consider this: the Ring Finger is bigger than the Pinky, and surely a Doctor has more prestige than a Detective (Sherlock and Watson being a special case, but I used them in this example because I wanted to). 

Yes, I know it's about tendon connectivity. It doesn't make me feel any better about having a cut finger. Why? Because there is no alternative happiness-generating worse case scenario! I realized this while I took a shower. I figured that there ought to be another finger that could be causing more trouble than this one, alas I did the finger-bending exercise. Conclusion: nope, this is the worse finger to have cut. Lovely. 

In other news, I recently discovered the mystery and enigmatic characteristics of Tim Tams. I didn't know what they were until a friend told me that we had to eat them! We have to make hot chocolate and have a Tim Tam Slam! It tastes like an orgy in your mouth! Dumbfounded, and trying not to look like a noob, I was (perhaps overly) excited. We go to their house, and we did it using chai tea. It really was an orgy in your mouth, not going to lie. But that's because I had one.


Today, I had four. And I feel really, really sick. Essentially, what happens is that the hot beverage you drink will be soaked up be the flaky cookie, and the heat of this drink will slightly melt the layer of chocolate in the center of the Tim Tam. (God, please just click on that link up there so I don't have to sound moronically stupid and lacking in detail.) If your beverage is hot enough, the entirety of the treat will feel like a chocolate fondue explosion. (If only orgies were as delightful as chocolate fondue explosions, right?) In any case, I feel sick.


So far, I've shared this orgy-hybrid-explosion-by-virtue-of-chocolate with two friends: JT and EF. Neither of them were in the sweet-tooth mood, so I'm disappointed that my newfound love of Tim Tams(minus my present wariness of them) wasn't shared. JT's older sister told me that she thought that they were only sold in Australia. I crinkled my eyebrows and questioned her knowledge of social events (she practically lives in a cave, excluding the fact that she's building a solar car in her engineering extracurriculars). "Well, I just bought them from Superstore... I guess they're not only sold in Australia anymore...?". 


As it turns out, having done some Googling with my aroused curiosity, Tim Tams are only sold for five months of the year in North America, from November to March. Why? I don't know... maybe the exclusivity of the product makes it more alluring to customers? The dynamics of marketing are not my forté.


Rant:
What is with all these photos posted on Facebook? Do people need to do a photographic documentary of their parties/hangouts/clubbing/dinners/EVERYTHING? Are they posted up to prove that these individuals have a life and that they actually have friends beyond Facebook? The vast, vast majority of these photos are not appealing - most of the photographees do not know that the photographer is being a flash-happy creep. And yet, tags are still intact, and inside jokes are abundant. See the following*:
Person A: "Oh my God, where are my shoes?!" HAHAHAHA, oh you!
Person B: Did I actually say that? Wow, we were so fucking drunk!
Person A: No kidding! Love youuuu! Got to do this again soon! 
Person C: This is so funny! Do you always get like this when you girls are out? Where was this at?


Here, you can see that Person C is the awkward one: outside the in-circle, does not go out with the in-circle and does not know the locations at which the in-circle do their in-circle-ie things at. In reality, everyone minus Person A and Person B are Person C. I'm Person C most of the time. And I rant about it here.
Case and point: camera innovation has made me, and I'm sure very many others, annoyed at something insignificant. Back in the day, photos had to be dropped off, developed and picked up, and batteries had to be physically replenished. Now, not so much. Memory cards allow us to have redundant amounts of those godforsaken "random pics" in their "random" albums. Rechargers allow batteries of another sort to allow the bloody camera to function. I wouldn't have anything to rant about if cameras were the old type, because people are way too freaking lazy to scan all their photographs, having dropped them off, developed them, and picked them up. This sequence of steps is too strenuous even for the most narcissistic of us... I'd hope.
I'm a hypocrite too - I take photos and I'm in the said tagged photos. HOWEVER, I do not condone them. 


I'll be sure to have more to be an ass about by the next post.


*The spelling and grammar of the conversation do not reflect what normally happens. It's me being proper in English.

I'm Listening to a Podcast and I Need A Break from Myself

"Caring about someone feels amazing," - EF. It doesn't feel like it. Does that mean that I don't? I fear and I have fear, I have anxiety, I have reservations and I am reserved. 

When all is said and done (and evidently feared and reserved), I really want IM to be here and not on vacation in another continent. It's not that I don't want him to be gone, for he has retain his values and nurture his vivacity for travelling and adventure, but I miss his voice and his face and his hugs and his kisses. I miss him being here and protecting me. 

(For the record, I don't know which of the two following personas are the lesser of 2 evils.)

Rational ShufflingHard Talking: 

• It's a new relationship. It's perfectly normal to yearn for your boyfriend. It's the first time that the two of you have experienced a significant (though it's not really significant, it's only fourteen days, deal with it) time period away from each other. 
• Again, it's two weeks. You need to study your ass off anyway. Remember that math assignment deadline waiting for you today at 11:59pm? Or that psych assignment, or biology lab, or all those ungodly exams lurking behind 2 weeks of the calendar? Yeah, get on them. Now? Please? Stop this goddamn blogging, Jesus.
• You're probably fucking menstruating anyways. Eat some chocolate, don't watch any chick flicks, go to sleep, go shopping, go to Starbucks, do anything. Listen to a podcast. You'll get over it. You're being silly.

The Actual/Stupid/Emotional ShufflingHard Talking:

• He's not here. The mirage of IM&RM is relinquished. I'm left with me and this fucking Rational ShufflingHard, and everything is apparently crumbling down. What's scary is that I care about him. It scares me how much I care. It's hard to not say those Huge Three Words back to him. I don't want to get hurt again. I think it's too soon. 
• It has barely been two months. There hasn't been enough time for any red flags to pop up. With DM and DG, red flags sprung up every so often. Have I grown immune to seeing them? (No, I haven't. I am not the kind of person to not think.) Or have they gone past my radar? (He's 100% effective at passing his parent's lie detecting abilities.) Is it because I do not trust him? That I haven't had enough time and/or experience with him to cultivate trust? If so, then why is this even an issue?
• Maybe it's because I don't trust him with any part of me. The difference between platonic relationships and romantic ones is obviously the exclusivity of the latter. There's no one else to turn to if your significant other is lacking in something. A person's friends are not necessarily similar - in fact, they are often somewhat a juxtaposition of each other. The sum of one's friends is a support network. The sum of one boyfriend or girlfriend is a support pole. You can only love a person romantically in this exclusive way because there's only one of them to love. Friend-wise, this is not the case. I speak as though this is my first relationship. I speak as though I've never been in love before (..."love" is an ambiguous word. I think I was, at least). 
• I don't want to get hurt. But I don't want IM to hurt me even more. I don't want anything to change, and I know that it will inevitably.
• I fear commitment/loving because I know it's all going to be for nothing. This is why it is scary for anything to start happening. I'd be my own hypocrite.

Valentine's Day is equivalent to an twisted monster's pink-fused-red vomit.

God, I hate Valentine's Day. I also realize I don't blog much anymore. I lack time nowadays; the boyfriend variable extinguishes my time to:

1. Blog.
2. Fret about anything blog-worthy. Kind of. I had a crazed day at the mall (and a week compiled of me leaning on tables and tapping my fingers in my conundrum of my lack of Valentine's Day gift IDEA) with a couple girlfriends, WRM and SN, where I had worked 5 hours in the morning having woken up at an ungodly 8:15am. Did I mention that I've woken this early exactly twice in the past two months, or that I didn't fall asleep until 6am? Plus I tripped on hard, cold, unforgiving concrete last night and I have a hand-sized bruise on my left knee to show for it. 

Although really, if I was naive, I would say that Boyfriend cools my head down, and helps me sort out my troubles and he's really a therapeutic tool of sorts (who buys me flowers and chocolates and etcetera). But no, I'm not naive and I still have a hot head and my troubles may as well be as organized as the summation of China's landfills. But he makes me smile and it's amazing how he laughs at something no one but me would understand. By this, I mean the awkward and/or random things my digressive mind generates on a routine-basis. In any case, he makes me happy. It's incredibly random and spontaneous and irrational how it all came and continues going together for he and I.

However, it is important to point out I have a problem with Boyfriend (henceforth dubbed IM). Take this anecdote as an illustration of said problem. As I was shopping for the Twisted Monster Pink-Fused-Red Vomit holiday, WRM suggested that the present could be a nice picture frame with a nice picture of he and I in it. I was besought with myself, speechless in how I do not like that idea. I was basically thinking the following: "What the....". I didn't even finish off with the usual swear word. When I untangled my thoughts, my repulsion to that idea is that the gift would represent just the two of us. Enclosed in a frame. Just the two. And nothing else ever. The frame is like this little metaphorical constraint of everything. I mean, hello? There's nothing in there but our heads! ENCLOSED FOREVER (-ish)! So when you boil things down, I have commitment issues. Not that I'm a philanderer - of course not. It's that I don't want my heart to be broken. And loving him would be step one to that place of darkness. Committing to being with him is one of the preceding conditions that must be satisfied in order for the entire process of unconditional happiness to feeling like individually ripping your ribs out. In any case, yes. Commitment issues: I have them. It never occurred to me before today, actually. I just knew that I edged away from him a lot, that I don't reciprocate his "I love you"s, and I feel that it's rude to not say "I like you too". He knows that I'm not ready. And he doesn't push for it. Randomly out of nowhere one day, he asked "do you think that you'll ever be able to say it back?". I think I would be more likely to say it than not, and I told him such. He is okay with that. Why is he so forgiving of me for this flaw? This flaw of mine where I throw anything breakable into an underground, bomb-proof safe box. If we swapped shoes, I wouldn't be able to handle this flaw. I would leave, forget about my investments and go about being content with what investment potential I have remaining. (Metaphor alert! Investment = everything given by one party in a relationship for the relationship to function. Digression: I should make a metaphor dictionary full of this kind of goodies.) I am always my best protector, but I am only occasionally my worst enemy. So whatever it is that I'm doing is my best bet... even though I can see the potential of this viewpoint changing. I don't know. Don't listen to me.

In any case, I bought him a black sweater. I like boys in sweaters, so I figured he would be extra dashing in it.

In other news, Lululemon has this: http://shop.lululemon.com/Classic_T_II/pd/np/490/p/1757.html shown around its store. Yes, that sweaty, ugly hockey man with a bad dentist represents Canada. What. The. Fuck.

I'm exceptionally proud of EF. Love her.