There is no denying the wild horse in us, said Virgina Woolf. There’s more to the quote but that’s the part I like best. Essentially, the quote is about passion which means it’s about feeling things deeply which means it’s about having a heart. Most of the time, I don’t think people feel things to their full extent and I blame that on a lot of things, mainly fear. We are afraid of being vulnerable, and of being too much. Also, we forget how to feel things. Like many things growing up, the permission to experience true emotion is trampled out of us from a young age. It’s hardly appropriate to be fully governed by emotions after the age of two.
(more…)Author: Kazandra Pangilinan
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Whisky, Whisky, Whisky
In sophisticated settings, people are always drinking whisky. It’s a real grown up drink: the classy men and the alluring Anna Kareninas of this world drink whisky. So do larger than life people, and people who are falling in love, and young and stupid people. It’s the type of drink I imagine writers drink, the bohemian ones who smoke a lot of cigarettes and never sleep during the night.
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Change
Everybody knows that change is inevitable but somehow it still manages to take us by surprise. When I woke up this morning it was cloudy, and then it was pouring rain, and then it was hailing, and finally it was sunny. Each time the weather changed, I looked up from my computer screen in wonderment. I thought for sure the sun would stick around this time; I thought for sure the rain would keep on falling. The sky looked so certain, and confident, and set in its ways. But it changed all the same, unexpectedly and loudly and quietly, all in the span of a few hours. ‘That’s Edinburgh for you,’ people say. Yes, but it is also people, and plans. It is also everything.
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Dreams and Disappointments from 22 Year Old Me
Journal Entry Written April 15, 2014
Yesterday, I had one of the biggest disappointments of my life. I wanted to apply for the perfect marketing job at the Vancouver Canucks but when I pressed submit on my application, it said the job no longer existed even though it said “applications accepted no later than April 14th.” Ya snooze, ya lose, I guess. But boy, was I crushed. I really thought I had a chance at that job.
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An Ice Cream Cone
On the first day of spring, I bought myself a cookie dough flavoured ice cream cone. I almost didn’t. I almost kept walking past the shop, and round the corner, and all the way back to my apartment. But then I thought, why not. Why not get an ice cream cone when it’s beautiful outside, and it’s Saturday, and I would love nothing more than to sit on this bench and join the millions of people, somewhere in the world, probably eating ice cream right this second?
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Dinner Party
I have a dream. Covid restrictions are over, and we’re allowed to see people again, and I can host a dinner party. That’s it; that’s my dream. As soon as the world goes back to normal, I don’t want to jump on a plane and travel somewhere far away: I just want to have people over, and take their coats, and sit next to them in my living room, drinking wine and waiting for the moment to announce that dinner’s ready.
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A Man Painting a Sign
On today’s walk, I saw a man painting a sign. He was old, maybe in his fifties or sixties, and he wore the typical white pants as he stood on a ladder with a paintbrush in his hand. For half a second, I was insanely jealous of him. I thought nobody in the world could have a more noble job than painting signs and making the world a little brighter. Nobody else in the world could be as happy or fulfilled as that man. He is the person I want to be. He climbs down the ladder, goes home, and probably drinks a beer, and doesn’t care what anybody else thinks about him.
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A Mess
My kitchen was one humongous mess the other night. I may have been more clumsy and careless than usual, but basically everything that had the potential to spill actually did. There was milk on the counter, and broken egg shells, and spoons on the floor, and an ever growing pile of sticky dishes in the sink.
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Being Young
I have this weird obsession with being young and staying young and preserving childhood the way some people preserve peaches. Maybe you do too. In movies, which is where I got most of my ideas about how people are supposed to act and how life is supposed to be, teenage girls always seemed to be obsessed with getting older. In a heartbeat, they were willing and eager to cast everything around them aside for bigger and better things.
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Things I Learned Growing Up 