• Home
• About

Earnestly Speaking

• I have been, and always will be your friend

  02Jul
  Categories: Musings, Personal Comments: 0
  

  Image by palestrina55 via Flickr

  When my entanglements ended, as was their wont, I would sever ties and walk away.

  It seemed pointless to ‘remain friends’ or ‘keep in touch’.

  It’s over. Go.

  Yet now I find myself eating with and greeting old lovers.

  There is no self-consciousness.

  No need to play act or pretend. No anxiousness. No fear of being left vulnerable.

  It feels so good now to leave behind expectations, recriminations, real or imagined sins.

  “Remember this and do not abuse it,” I said to one last night. “No matter how angry I might get at you I will never stay angry for long.”

  There is no talking about the past.

  We move forward as former intimates getting through the rest of life as friends.

  It is far too easy to mistake physical proximity with real intimacy.

  I believe the truest connection between two people is one forged with care, effort and honesty. To genuinely have real affection, to give real consideration is far harder for some than stealing a kiss or moving in the dark.

  There is nothing to hide. Nothing to be afraid of.

  Not anymore.

• Pimping for a cause: Guys I know that you should date

  16Jun
  Categories: Fun Comments: 10

  As many of you know, my love life is best described in gamerspeak: EPIC FAIL.

  I think my friends deserve better luck than I’ve been having so I feel it is my civic responsibility to tell you about the awesome single guys I know. Or at least the ones who won’t kill me for extolling their various virtues here on my blog. Don’t worry, girls, just volunteer and I’ll do a post about single girls. But I know the girls I know would unanimously vote to hire an assassin to delete both my blog and me off the face of this earth.

  “If you know these awesome men, Erna, why aren’t YOU dating them?”

  There’s nothing wrong with them, per se. The dating thing isn’t happening because:

  1. We’re friends, hello? Almost incestuous, that.

  2. The person is practically family. See also reason No.1.

  3. Perhaps we did date or attempt to but it didn’t work out. But those kind of details are things that I won’t blog. Respect for privacy of the individual. (Also, person(s) would kill me)

  For inspiring this idea in the first place, I will first talk about Jon Chew.

  

  You might have seen Jon in the recently staged series of short plays, Stage Therapy. I do not get why Jon hasn’t had a date in ages.

  He’s:

  • cute
  • funny
  • ridiculously talented on stage
  • is great with words
  • sensitive
  • a good listener
  • an amazing friend

  http://theadventist.tumblr.com/

  

  Now if I pimp Jon, I can’t not pimp one of his best buds, Greg. OK, when I first met Greg I wondered if he was gay. Second thing I thought was “My, what a big chest you have.” But beyond his incredible buffness and how cute he can look in glasses (I’m shallow, sue me) Greg is also:

  • thoughtful
  • romantic
  • incredibly driven
  • musically inclined
  • has the kind of deep voice you want to hear read bedtime stories with

  http://gregorychang.wordpress.com

  Also, good news, girls: he’s straight. Really. No, I’m not going to make sure for you. Volunteers welcome.

  Calvin’s my kid brother/agony aunt/writing conscience all in one. How I met his mother is hilarious…and not fit for this blog. Ask me about it in person.

  Moving on – what’s there to like about Calvin? Among other things he is…

  • witty
  • thoughtful
  • patient
  • a born writer
  • devoted
  • fiercely loyal

  He also has the gift of making you feel perfectly at ease. Occasionally he can be obtuse but that is, methinks, a decidedly male trait. sigma83.blogspot.com

  

  Sani is everybody’s favourite teddy bear. You won’t know it until you’ve worked with him but he’s an almost inexhaustible force of sheer thespian energy. And it’s easy to love Sani because he’s:

  • kind
  • affectionate
  • super conscientious
  • accepting
  • passionate

  When he cares about someone, he’ll go the absolute extra mile for you. Why girls put up with all those ‘not into you’ jerks when they could have someone as loving as Sani I don’t know.

  • No blog, not yet but we’re working on it.

  

  For a young’un, he’s got a mind so sharp you could cut diamond with it. Patrick is an aspiring writer who writes funny satire at cadraver.net. When not scaring off people with his metalhead tendencies and lame ass cornball faux lines.

  • terrifyingly intelligent
  • nice-looking if you’re into 6” tall, half-Swiss mixes.
  • speaks German
  • has nice, longish hair you could imagine playing with
  • intense
  • spiritual (and inside is a good ickle choirboy who’ll take you home before curfew)
  • a good boy in a bad boy package. Do you see any problems there? Nope, neither do I.

  

  This guy is arguably the most famous of the lot. I kept seeing his name everywhere and then met him personally – presenting Nick Dorian the thespian, everyone!

  • he sings, oh God, he sings!
  • talented photographer
  • absolute sweetheart
  • gives awesome hugs (second best only to Sani)
  • ALSO: most likely to hold your hand and tell you things will turn out all right even when his day’s been super crap

  Please, Nick, just why are you single again?

  http://misunderstoodcreature.blogspot.com/

  I think I have done the world and these fine young gentlemen a favour. If my mangled corpse is found somewhere, you now also know where to look. Hopefully their love lives will improve and not become the stagnant, festering cesspit mine is. I hereby declare that I have done my civic duty to spread joy or at least ensure people I know get laid.

  So I get first dibs on living vicariously through your retellings.

• We play too many games

  14Jun
  Categories: Musings, Public Relations Comments: 0
  

  Image via Wikipedia

  This is not a post slamming gamers. I’m talking about different kind of games. The games we play at work, when dating, with our family members or our friends.

  In an ideal world, communication would be direct, clear, honest. But we hide behind a lot of subterfuge, sending mixed messages and complicating the simple.

  We put on facades, execute overly contrived strategies and in the end, we get so lost in the games we play that we forget and totally miss the objective.

  I can safely say I didn’t play any games when I was on a casual ‘lunch date’ today. We talked, it was good conversation and it might just end there for all I know. Other women might play bait/switch, make gestures showing interest and all that. I leave those kind of games to insipid women’s magazine relationship articles. It was simple today. He talked, I listened. I talked, he listened. At the end of it, I was direct and clear (I think) and told him “You can call me if you want.” That’s exactly what I meant. If I thought he was boring/scary/not someone I’d see again, I’d have said thanks for the company. And left it at that.

   

  Work is a different story. The communications field is a tricky minefield where strategy and approach is always bandied about. How do we make the client see that our counsel makes sense? How do we convince media our client has something to say? The direct approach, I find, isn’t always the best. Different landscapes and people require different tactics. Sometimes it’s the iron fist in the velvet glove. Sometimes it’s outright flattery. Sometimes I need to play the personality card or the ‘I scratch your back, you scratch mine’ game.

   

  If I see it as a game, work is a little more enjoyable. But at the end of the day, there are real things at stake – reputation and revenue. Work may be a game but it’s a serious one. I’m still learning the rules as I go along but I’m finally, finally catching up.

• When too many worlds collide

  11Jun
  Categories: Personal Comments: 0

  Some people separate aspects of their lives, compartmentalising to better manage them all. Work, family, religion – all have their different boxes and rarely intersect.

  But sometimes you can’t help when your personal life spills over into work or vice-versa. The results are never pretty, though.

  Nearly 4am in the morning and I’ve just experienced that collusion.

  Does it feel this way when a truck runs right into you and you’re numb from the shock and the pain?

  Will it make it better to have the truck driver visit you in hospital or while you’re doing physical therapy?

  I wish the truck had just run me over so I wouldn’t have to feel anything for anyone ever again.

• I still feel the same

  08Jun
  Categories: Faith Comments: 0

  Was it just a few months past that my heart kept me up in the middle of the night, whimpering into the stillness?

  Now it is still late and I can hear it humming.

  My heart’s learned to sing again but nowadays it sings for just one.

  “I have never left. I will never leave you.”

  I sacrificed my broken, contrite heart and You have taken it, when I should have left it in Your keeping all along.

  Through all the pain, through all the darkness and the uncertainty, You have taught me that You are more constant that any human soul could be.

  Whatever happens. You are still my God.

• Really just being me

  06Jun
  Categories: Uncategorized Comments: 0
  

  Image by Paula G. Furió via Flickr

  Was bemused as I listened to a client talk about online personas and the “Online Me”.

  On the Internet, I’m fairly comfortable because what you see there is me. Unembellished, with no pretense or affectations. I prefer not to use handles and when it comes to my online identity, I want the first thing that comes up when I’m Googled to be something that came from me.

  Now, in real life, it’s slightly more complicated.

  The Internet strips me of my facade and lets me bare what I am at the core. Something that I can only define with one word: me.

  In real life, too many people know or see different sides of me.

  To Irene, Anis and my juniors, I’m the dotty, overly but funnily frank grandma in a 30-year old body.
  To PR reps in my past life, I was the brutally direct, cold glacier that newbies quailed to climb.

  To my closest friends, I am the one who is accepting of their foibles as much as they are accepting of mine.

  To my lovers or significant others, I am the Stepford wife who would clean for them, wait for them, put up with all the crap I get from them and suffer silently till I explode.

  I am different things to different people and while I do have a multiple faceted personality, I also try too hard to be what I think they want me to be.

  My editor persona is not something my friends will see. She came about as a survival mechanism to get through the stresses of publishing. Editor Erna is insular, prone to keeping her own counsel (keeping other people in the dark in the process), authoritarian, scary when angry, suffers no fools and the only thing that makes her tolerable is the fingernail’s worth of writing talent.

  I thought I was comfortable in my own skin. What I really am, though, is someone who tries to change her skin too often. I want that to change.

  

• Tell me what I want

  05Jun
  Categories: Self-Organisation Comments: 0
  

  Image by rachel sian via Flickr

  After a long drawn out conversation over good food, I’ve realised that I need to start figuring out what I really want.

  Part of me thinks I should just let go of my wants and needs, hoping for the best.

  But if I don’t know what I want, or what I don’t want, I’ll end forever coasting on the seas of indecision.

  First off, what I don’t want:

  1. I don’t want a house just yet. Until I have enough of a nest egg, a mortgage is just too much commitment.
  2. I don’t want a relationship…for the sake of having one. Flirting is fine, random innuendo perhaps, but I’m not the naughty kitty always wanting to play when she sees an enticing bit of string anymore. Read into that what you will.
  3. I don’t want to be so swamped with work that I forget the commitment I have to God, my loved ones and the things that make me happy.

  What I do want:

  1. To figure out how best to serve with all God’s given me. Rather than beat myself up over and over again because I don’t feel I’m doing enough for God, I realise that maybe what He wants from me is just to do the best I can with all I can. Dear God, let that be enough.
  2. To keep writing and being a better writer, because above all things that is my true vocation. I can’t claim to make words sing but on good days I can make them hum in tune.
  3. To get to grips on my new day job and challenge myself to bring the best of what I am to the job instead of trying to be someone else. I don’t have to be a different person but just change the way I do things. David Lian’s been supportive, telling me to ‘just be yourself’. David’s not perfect but he takes his best traits and amplifies them enough they make up for any shortcomings. I’ll just need to remind myself that I bring a lot to the table too and I shouldn’t let my inexperience hamper my self-confidence.

  I want to be a good person and be good at what I do. That’s it in a nutshell.

• Workin’ that Guitar Hero

  29May
  Categories: Fun Comments: 0

  

  As if I’m not already obnoxious, the addition of Guitar Hero World Tour to the office Wii arsenal will give me more opportunity to annoy my colleagues.

  They should also ‘thank’ David Lian for persuading ML into allowing the purchase which will probably get more people playing with the Wii now. Of course, they’ll all have to get in line as I perfect the riffs for Living on a Prayer. Rock on!

• An unwritten love letter

  22May
  Categories: Personal Comments: 1

  Most times you write a letter to the one you love. But this time, I’m going to write one to explain why I cared for someone the way I did. Feelings, in an ideal world, don’t need explanation.

  Why do I bother? The truth is I did the person wrong by allowing people to think that he was the only one to blame for my heartache; that he was a cad, a liar and a waste of time. I still care about him. I still call him friend. He still matters to me and so this post is a way for me to set the record straight and try to make amends.

  When we met, we were both in the midst of separation. I’d given up on a man I’d loved for four years. He had his own issues to settle with the woman he was previously seeing.

  We bonded, of all things, over music. He talked about how much music mattered to him, how he’d taken a chance and just explored what possibilities it offered him. Music was, for me, my escape, my solace and one thing that kept me sane through a rough childhood.

  At a club, we heard a band playing the song from the movie, Music and Lyrics. He couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen the film Once. “Now THAT movie is supposed to be the musical of our generation.” He smiled. And shrugged. I decided right there and then that I’d show him the video clip of Once’s theme song, Falling Slowly.

  There was no intricate plan of seduction. No preconceived notions. Sure, there was subtle flirting going on but I’d just gotten out of a relationship. I thought that this new guy was cool and could be someone awesome to hang out with. We were like two kids together, talking about random things but mostly about music, or geeking out.

  But that all changed after I’d finished showing him the clip. It was just supposed to be us hanging out and me sharing just how awesome Glen Hansard is. Which he is.

  Still, two lonely people with a lot of shared interests cooped up together…stuff happens.

  But then, as we got to know each other, things that weren’t apparent from the start became clearer.

  He had a lot of past relationship baggage. He wasn’t looking for commitment or maybe if he was, it wasn’t with me. It was just a simple case of “He’s just not that into you.” You can’t force affection. So really, I couldn’t blame him even if I wanted to.

  At the start, he was keen and I was reticent. As time moved on, he grew distant while instead I grew fonder of him. Beyond his eccentricities, he can be affectionate, kind, careful and one of the sweetest persons alive. Intelligent, rather talented and dogged once he’s got his heart set on something. Though there were times I was hurt by his actions, I know beyond a doubt that he bore me no malice and he wished me no pain.

  He was there through one of the hardest times of my life.

  He gave me encouragement when life turned the tables on my complacency.

  He was my friend. Even if my other friends didn’t see that, I’m letting them see it now.

  Maybe he was just what I needed then.

  And my heartache over him ending the ‘dalliance’ wasn’t so much about him as it was about me.

  I took it personally.

  I felt rejected, unworthy, utterly incapable of sustaining a relationship. I felt that there had to be something wrong with me. That I wasn’t good enough. That I couldn’t measure up.

  A breakup isn’t the end of the world.

  I took it hard because I love to love. I love my friends like I do my family, my family more than all I possess and once I decide to love someone, I am a fool. I set no limits. And that means there are no limits how far I’ll fall when it ends.

  I’m tired, really. I had one relationship last five years. The last one lasted four. More than a decade of having my heart put through the dryer. Because I give nothing less than everything. After all, I have nothing to give but myself. I have no assets, no net worth. Nothing but a heart broken so many times it still hurts.

  So I give up and accept the fact that the dream is ended. If singlehood is my present and my future, then let it be so. Maybe God has other plans and if they don’t include my having a significant other, then I shall just say Not My Will But Thine.

  I still have my friends but sometimes, I cannot endure their pity. I can barely endure the assumptions strangers make. Enough, please. I have never prayed for wealth. Nor for fame. Never for professional success. Not even for good results at school.

  I have always been happiest being with the one I wanted to be with. Stupid, foolhardy romantic that I am. Simple pleasures. Holding a hand. Hearing a laugh. Stroking a cheek. Sharing a joke. Resting in the quiet. Feeling that right here, right now that I have all I want right then.

  You are here. All is well.

  And tomorrow, you will still be here.

  Men come, men leave. Maybe God is just teaching me that sad lesson. That though humans are fickle and inconsistent, He will never leave me. I will always remain in His love.

  So please, dear God, let that be enough.

  I don’t know you
  But I want you
  All the more for that
  Words fall through me
  And always fool me
  And I can’t react
  And games that never amount
  To more than they’re meant
  Will play themselves out
  Take this sinking boat and point it home
  We’ve still got time
  Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
  You’ll make it now
  Falling slowly, eyes that know me
  And I can’t go back
  Moods that take me and erase me
  And I’m painted black
  You have suffered enough
  And warred with yourself
  It’s time that you won
  Take this sinking boat and point it home
  We’ve still got time
  Raise your hopeful voice you had a choice
  You’ve made it now
  Falling slowly sing your melody
  I’ll sing along

• When only change can set you free

  17May
  Categories: Personal Comments: 0

  As a lot of you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time healing my battered heart. There’s been anger, recrimination and a lot of stupid going on. I’ve said stupid things, hurt more than I’ve helped, attempted to find solace in all the wrong things and all the wrong places.

  Where are things now? I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’ll always be broken. My heart will always bleed, my emotions will always hit me hard enough to bow my knees and I will still cry more often than not.

  But that’s okay. I’m tired of always putting on a brave front, letting people believe I always have it together when I don’t. I’m not always strong. And though there are times I like spending time alone, I can’t always do or be on my own. I need God. I need my loved ones. I need to allow myself to be weak and to believe that sometimes it’s okay to not be okay.

  Tomorrow is a new day and it will take care of itself. Thank God that every day, I can wake up and give thanks for a brand new day.