Floating around

I have given in to life’s little pleasures today.

I’ve never been good at compartmentalizing. As visual a person as I am, I cannot create a back burner in my head—to leave a stewing pan of what-ifs, must-haves, and to-dos. I always need to stir the brew now and to get a taste of it now—so that I know if it needs to be seasoned now. You get the point, fellow obsessive-compulsives.

But today I’ve given in to taking my time. Fell in line for an hour to pay one of my many bills. Two and half hours doing groceries, plus half an hour more waiting on the banks to finally go online. I walked from point A, arguing with myself, while taking the absolute circuitous way to point B. What could’ve been done in two hours flat, by someone who had taken his daily dose of vitamins after a full lunch or someone who planned his day really well, took me a full four hours.

And contrary to what my mother taught me about not spending anything on a Monday because you’d end up overspending the entire week, I bought two new cocktail rings, splurged on a purple pen—and please, let us not talk about my grocery shopping. Shopping on an empty stomach definitely leads one to get three bags of M&Ms when one would’ve sufficed. But my thought was, M&Ms will not rot in the fridge and I really wanted all kinds!

I’ve every cause to take it easy, wind down, and be less frantic—we just closed several projects, and finished a launch for another that we’ve been hatching, brewing, and obsessing about in the last few weeks. It’s been tough, tougher even when our house got broken into a few days ago after which I’ve kinda lost having that feeling of security. I had been a nervous wreck since. But as I’ve said in one FB post: Nothing can destroy our family’s spirit. Not the good-for-nothing burglar who by all accounts is said to be good-looking yet have chosen to simply take what we so worked hard for.

But today, I’ve given in. Stared into space while waiting for nine other people to pay their phone bill, nothing in my head except the mechanical voice announcing Customer Number Nine Zero Five Six Please Proceed To Counter Seventeen, interrupted only by two 40-something mothers behind me, who were guessing the number of Yellow Pages directories spent during Cory Aquino’s funeral.

I glided to the shops one floor down, tilted my head this way and that, while looking at rings presented by the lady behind the counter, talking time to tell her I’ve decided on the gray and the red one. Yes, miss, I’m getting both, I stressed rather leisurely. And I engaged in a rather odd conversation with the other lady I got the pen from, knowing that they are trained to give their little nudges if only to push the customer into buying.

And now, I finish off with musing about these little tidbits of the mundane. So what if there’s only a few who will actually read this post? I enjoyed writing this. I am writing to immortalize how today I’ve figured out where today’s goings-on stand in the grander scheme of things. I get it.

And while I usually end with a good closing with every post, now, I’m not sure if I need one. Can’t even think of one. What’s my point? Perhaps I don’t need to explain. Just need to let this fly by as another entry, while I savor my candy-coated M&Ms.

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Pictured: My artist mannequin