Monday, April 30, 2012

The One That Got Away.


It was my first year in Melbourne and the university. It was like being back in your first day of primary school. Except that we came into the start of Semester 5, which meant that everybody knew everybody else, and we were intruding into a very large clique. The new kids on campus.

You were either crying secretly (young adults are not allowed to cry openly), wishing that you were back in the comforts of your home some 6,300 kilometres away, or you were wide-eyed and overly friendly, trying to win the trust of the suspicious natives. Most of them were so cemented in their respective circle of friends that we built our own clique, at least among five or six of us who had come over.

We started making friends cautiously among the more welcoming ones in our batch, and inevitably it was the Asian group who started to open up their circles to welcome us in. (Like attracts like, I guess. I can't explain why I only have a handful of non-Asian friends here in Australia).

The boys who had come over with me were soon becoming fast friends and we spent a lot of time together over meals and holidays. We talked about everything under the sun, and as always, the topic would always fall back to the one subject that freshly post-adolescent boys talk about - girls.

I had barely noticed any of the girls in our batch (no, not because I was looking at the boys, idiot. *flashes wedding ring*) because I suspect I was being overwhelmed by everything else in Australia - living away from home, trying to find accommodation, figuring out how to best budget my money, trying to keep my head above the water with my studies and learning to make new friends. Romantic love is always a luxury, something to be pondered upon and nursed only when you have kicked out of survival mode.

My friend, on the other hand, whose eyes were always roving around everywhere except the blackboard during lectures, started pointing out some of the more attractive girls in our batch. He mentioned the name of a girl who I knew about and shared a class with, but had not thought very much of, until, well, he said she was quite pretty.

Here's the first lesson - sometimes something, be it an object or a person, can pass unnoticed and does not carry any special value until someone else you trust has said Hey, look here - this is valuable. That's the premise of Facebook, I guess (hopefully that's how you got here).

I started paying attention to her a bit more in class, and, against my better judgement, struck up conversation with her. She seemed friendly enough, and quite readily chatted back. Our conversations grew longer and easier, and her eyes seemed to light up whenever she laughed.

Or that's how I saw it through my rose-tinted glasses. (Rose-tinted glasses - distorting reality one delusion at a time. Get yours now!)

I waited until right after my exams before I made my move. We were migrating as a student herd away from the examination hall, all of us chatty and elated that the exams were finally over with the mid-year holidays to look forward to, when I popped the question - 'Urm, hey, do you want to go out for coffee some time?'

Her girlfriends around her did the 'Oooh...' thing that adolescent girls do when a guy asks that question, and she was caught off-guard, but managed to regain her composure and stammered out a cheery 'Urm, yeah, sure! Here's my number!'

I smiled to myself, secretly fist-pumping within (self-five!), and we parted ways, with me walking with a particular spring in my step.

But...

There's always a but. I played it cool (looking calm on the outside with all the eagerness of an puppy with ADHD on the inside), letting a few days slip by during the first day of holidays before I finally made that call to her.

It was an awkward first conversation over the phone, filled with enough small talk to drown a Smurf before I ended the conversation with the primary intention of the call - So, when's a good time for us to catch up over coffee?

Silence.

Here's some excuses I've prepared earlier:

'... shopping with my sister on Chapel street for her wedding dress...'
'... then lunch with friends tomorrow...'
'... catching up with some other friends on Thursday...'
'... rearranging my wardrobe on Saturday. Been putting that off for awhile...'

I know when I am getting blown off. We ended the conversation pretty quickly after that, and so I put down the phone with a sigh.

Something moved in me that day, though. Maybe it was the fact that I was now in a new country. It's time to turn over a new leaf, to be brave, nothing to fear but fear itself and all that, and I decided to try something that I had never tried before in pursuit of a girl - persistence.

The very next day I call her again and say, Hey look, I would really love to meet up. Why don't you tell me when's a good time.

She panicked this time, pulled out her Book of Excuses again, and flipped right to the page marked 'In Case of Emergency, say this...'

'Yeah, I'm not sure but I definitely won't be able to do this afternoon, because I'm going out to lunch with my boyfriend, right, and then we are going to...'

She kept talking nervously after that but it was all just in one ear and out the next.

Boyfriend. Right.

All my brittle newfound determination and dogged Salesmen-of-the-year-like persistence suddenly just gave way beneath me.

What happened to me for the next six months I can't explain to you. The pain that I felt from that girl's rejection, a girl who I knew barely anything about and who, if I really thought about it, meant nothing to me, was almost physical in nature. Her unattainability had suddenly made her even more desirable and me more miserable.

It is never in my nature to ever come between a couple, and so I gave her up there and then, standing on the sidelines instead, eating tubs of ice-cream and singing myself to sleep with self-pitying renditions of All By Myself on my pillow wet with tears.

Okay, so it wasn't that dramatic but it hurt. A lot. Significantly out of proportion to the situation. The old Self-Esteem took a downright beating. But Time is kind, and a great physician of all hurts, and in about six months I was finally able to let go and move on.

Sounds like a long time for someone I barely knew. Here's the second lesson - love is a crazy, inexplicable thing. The matters of the heart are beyond the laws of arithmetics and reasoning. But if you're really, really lucky, and you wish really, really hard, one day you will meet someone who will give you the ability to look back at life - and love - and laugh.

With relief.    

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Other People's Stories: (Nearly) Taken in Thailand

My friends, a wonderful married couple now, recount a time when she was almost kidnapped in Thailand, a country they still visit almost yearly.

There were six of us, right, and we were trying to get a cab to take us to our next destination. There were two cabs there, and so the three guys stood there negotiating with one of the taxi drivers while the girls were sitting in the other cab. 

There were two girls at the back while I sat in front, with the door open, one leg out of the car. That's when our cab suddenly took off, right, and I had to reach for the car door to close it! I yelled at the taxi driver to Stop!! Stop!! but he just kept speeding away. 

Yeah, we were like 'What the _?' when we saw the other cab suddenly take off, right? 'Cause we never told that guy where we were going.

Man, I tell you, that look on B_'s face was one I will never forget. She turned towards me, her eyes wide open and dilated with fear and she was banging both arms against the window, yelling out to me.

We hopped into our cab, and told him to follow the other cab. We tried to catch up with the other cab, but he was driving too quickly, and he sped through the maze of back-alleys and small lanes until we lost him.

We were yelling at our taxi driver to call his friend in the other cab. He rang the friend's mobile but the friend would not answer. 

All that ran through my head was like, Oh man, what am I going to tell her parents, man. 

All three of us girls were shocked, silent with fear and stunned to the point of being unable to react. 
Yeah, you know what saved us? 

Thailand traffic.

We were caught up in a jam on a main road, and saw our chance to escape. We bolted out of the cab, and threw some baht onto the seats and just ran and ran, through like, eight lanes of traffic. 

We finally found a landmark and called the boys to come and get us. 

Thank God, man. I shudder to think what the guy's intentions were for us. 

Yeah, so, travel tip for Thailand. Make sure the guy is always the first to get into the cab, and the last to leave. I heard about a guy who was loading their shopping into the taxi's trunk when the cab took off with his wife in the backseat and she was never seen again.

These things are rare lah you know, but...

His voice trails off, and his eyes peer into an alternate universe for a moment where the girls did not escape, and he shudders a little and shakes his head back into a reality where she is across the table from him, smiling.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Rainbows, Unicorns and Light Sabres.

So a friend was sitting down with some girls at dinner the other day, and one of them asks, 'So, what's a good pickup line for a guy?'

That immediately put my friend deep into thought, and after much consideration he said,

'Tell him you love Star Wars.'

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We were having a discussion yesterday, this friend and I, when the topic came onto girls we used to like. We chanced upon an attribute that these girls used to share - guyishness.

Now don't get me wrong. I am a man who loves it when girls celebrate their femininity - the touches of make-up, agonising over their clothes, accessorising, melting over animals or pretty things.

What exactly is guyishness?

When I look back at my previous relationships and women I have been infatuated with, one theme seems to come out - they thought like boys. They wouldn't agonise if they didn't hear from you for a day, they weren't afraid to get themselves dirty and sweaty chasing the soccer ball around the field or rock-climbing, they weren't afraid to laugh out loud at irreverent jokes. A girl who insults me back in good humour when I throw one jokingly at her has won my heart.


Hell Hath No Fury 

It breaks my heart sometimes when I hear stories from my girl friends about how life was like back in their schools, especially if it was an all-girls' school. In a boys' school, when guys disagree, they tend to confront, whether in shouting matches or coming to blows, and then it is over. In a girls' school, vengeance and jealousy is a slow burning process, spanning days to years, filled with scheming, passive-aggressive bullying, mind games and alliances designed to alienate, embarrass and destroy.

I see some wonderful women who carry these scars into adulthood and it makes me want to go back into their past and throw their tormentors into shark-infested waters.

I don't understand what it is that makes this mean-spiritedness and cattiness acceptable behaviour. When Taylor Swift deals with this issue in her song 'Mean', my strongest impression is that she probably wasn't singing about boys.

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Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so decent, such regular chaps;
Ready to help you through any mishaps;
Ready to buck you up whenever you're glum.
Why can't a woman be a chum?

                                                       -Professor Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady (1964)

This rant from the old musical My Fair Lady suggests that this observation, although misdirected with sexist overtones, is not a new one. Perhaps the cry does come from somewhere deeper.

So what makes them so attractive? Perhaps it is the observation that women who think like guys are easier to get along with and are quick to forgive. In a selfish way, they will probably share a few similar interests as well, which means a better chance of time spent together. Ask any guy whether they would like a girlfriend who is a gamer and see how many of them will tell you no.

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At the risk of losing her as just another 'one of the guys', we have to remember that at the core of every woman is tenderness. She still wants to be won over, loved and treated right, but she doesn't need you to be her knight in shining armour cantering in valiantly to save her from All of Life's Problems.

Because she's got this, thank you very much. And it may be you that needs the saving.

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I read somewhere once that women feel more in love with their partners when they see them help out with the housework or with the kids. (From the annals of the scientifically-researched and clinically-tested Woman's Day magazine) I must admit I felt a similar surge of love the other day when Karen single-handedly assembled some furniture for the home (while I worked hard on the Playstation 3...

...no, of course not! What kind of a husband do you take me for?!)

(I was actually sleeping.)

I wonder if there are more men like me out there in this day and age who feel the same way about wanting women who are not girly girls. Perhaps in a deeper subconscious level, it may be a matter of natural selection.

I know the issue of sexuality and gender roles is such a gray one, but take it from me how you will. I am, after all, not exactly the manliest man - cars fail to excite me, I love my computer games, sports are to be watched and talked about, but not played in real life. I sing love songs, cry at movies and write blogs. How I ever got married is beyond me.

Which brings us to the next question. What kind of guys do girls fall for?