Grown Ups.

I grew up a tomboy.

A real WWE shirt wearing, bandana wearing, my brothers Junko jeans wearing tomboy. So bad that instead of Tess, they called me Tom for fun. secretly sometimes i liked it! why? i suppose it made me feel like i rocked at looking like a boy. It was no secret, i was born the wrong gender. I had two elder brothers and it just made more sense for me to have been born just like them. They got to stay up late and play soccer in the house..and have their own room.. and have triathlons and baseball in the park. They had a big huge group of friends and they'd all get together to play football. I remember wishing i knew how to play (or that i didn't secretly want to vomit every time they ran out of players and stuck me in the goalpost)

I remember cutting my hair almost to the scalp.. twice! I never became a lesbian. I just wanted to be a boy. It was very simple.

I had an uncle. The fun uncle. Everyone has one of those, no? He used to take us to the zoo, my cousins and I. The zoo, the birdpark, everywhere that was outdoors and cool, he'd take us. There was a fishing trip in Malacca. and I had been looking forward to it for months..and i remember the day my parents told me i couldnt go because i was a girl and too young and there would be no one free enough to keep their eye on me the entire time. I remember being absolutely heartbroken. I truly hated being a girl. in an obvious boys-get-to-go-to-malacca kind of way. I stayed home and i was so angry.

I've come a long way since then.. I grew my hair out and i liked a boy and i started wearing my own clothes.. It started becoming not so horrible and a little nice.

I keep alot of traits from then, nonetheless. I hate my breasts, I've always wished for the really tiny ones that cant really be seen.. I still watch wrestling, every week. I still walk like a boy and sometimes, talk like a boy.

I learnt to grow into the person that i am now, i learnt to love make up and doing my hair and dressing nice. I learnt to accept the fact that sometimes, boys are going to one-up me in certain ways,

i learnt we do it to them every day (:

I learnt that it takes alot of work and alot of strength accepting the things that have been handed to you. and all those years of trying to be someone I wasnt? and rebelling nature and God? It all only landed me right here, the girly cry-at-every-movie-i-watch person i am today. I think I've got a handful of people who love me for that.

It's so hard understanding that not everything is fair and right, and good people dont always win and I'm still working on that, but I still believe with all my heart that it's true.

xo.

Dear rain, please stop raining down so much.

Sometimes i wish i could tell you how awful you make us feel, all the time.

Like when you look in the mirror and all you see is someone too ugly to love

for too long

ugly on the outside, ugly on the inside.

Sometimes it would be nice to feel like the years we spend waiting around for you to be nice makes up for all the awkward moments, the unanswered phone calls, the nights we spend crying..

Sometimes you could pick up the phone and say "hey, i frieking appreciate you."

Thanks, for sticking around all this time.

Sometimes we cry not because we love you too much to hurt, but because we know we dont need to. We dont need to hurt over you. and we hate that. We cry because we hate ourselves. for letting anybody in the entire world make us second guess ourselves.

Sometimes you need to realise that two wrongs do not ever make a right, a lie will always be a lie, and lying so we dont get hurt ONLY hurts us more.

You need to see that if we're still here, after ALL THESE YEARS? It means we've accepted you, we're gonna keep trying to mould you cause thats all we can do, try. But we've accepted you cause if we havnt, we would have left. a long ass time ago.

Sometimes i wish talking to you didnt make me want to pull my hair out, i wish i could get at least a minute of the man i knew 3 years ago. Before you had me, before i let you ruin this, us.

Sometimes thats all we're holding on for, the person we knew back then. The person we fell for and the person that wanted us.

It all changes and it all hurts when you just...stop wanting us.

Sometimes i wish you could tell us you want to just go. Go away and never come back. Please. Because having you around like this feels like crap. All the time. Its a never ending spew of crap.

The Girl that reads

"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by God, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes."

— Rosemary Urquico

Mummy.

The Everydays.

Street Performer. He kept thumb-upping the camera. Very cool (:

Statue of MM @ Nativity Church. Also very cool.

Easter egg painting.

Amazing lava cake made by Zac Loo & Gwen

A little peek at my makeup table. A big fat mess.

Nativity Church

Pretty Kitty

What do you wish for?

Didnt we almost have it all?

It's been such a busy couple of weeks.

Really, all i want to do is build a pillow and blanket fort in my room and hide out for a week or two. I wanna read books and i wanna go on a holiday. I wanna stay in bed and snuggle.

I get so frustrated with the way everything is going. I could have done so much better for myself by now. I could have done more, studied harder, persued music.. i could have done alot. I didnt let myself and i suppose im paying for it now, slowly. I'm stuck at the bottom of the food chain and sadly don't see myself breaking out ..anytime in the near future at least. On a normal day i don't mind going with it.. sucking it up. But on days like today I just really really want to be free.

I really need to get this degree done.

A happier post coming up, promise.