I was sitting in mass today and I got to thinking about something somewhat related to my last entry. I stopped writing that entry because I just didn’t know what to say. I had no conclusions and I didn’t want to make excuses for myself anymore. Now, I think I got it and simultaneously, I’m beginning to see one of the more practical uses of having a journal or web log.
I thought: my goals were different last year. My dad and I are alike in one defining way. The way that I tend to sacrifice the things that I have going for me for whatever I feel like pursuing at the time, my dad has a tendency to commit to things that he considers better alternatives to what he really wants. If my dad wants liempo for dinner, he’ll convince himself that pork chops are healthier because they have less fat. When he’s eating the pork chops, he’ll remember that he likes the fat and he’ll spend the rest of the evening complaining about how liempo tastes better than pork chops. Usually, we’ll end up getting with pork chops for dinner within the same week. Now take that little quirk and multiply it by a gagillion. We’re not just talking about dinner anymore. We’re talking about hundred-thousand peso televisions, we’re talking about buying cars, designing our house and recently, whether or not it was a good idea to move here from Canada and whether or not we should go home, now, more than ten years later. But this isn’t a “bash my dad” entry. Reading what I just wrote, you might not get why I think my dad and I are so alike but actually you have to see the difference before you can appreciate the likeness. The way that we make all of our decisions from the trivial to the life changing may be different but the results are the same. We always end up regretting them. We both have a quirk, we both know about our own quirk and we both persist or rather give in to what we each think is the best way to make decisions. We know it, we see it coming, and then we choose to ignore it.
In a way, looking at my dad has taught me a lot about myself. In fact, what I do is exactly the opposite of what my dad does. Instead of settling for something I’m going to regret settling for, I opt to take the best that I can have without looking back. If you pull a string to tight, it will snap, if you don’t pull it enough, it won’t play. Unfortunately, my only encounter with Buddah is was from the movie Little Buddah starring Keanu Reeves back in the day so I can’t double check that quote but I’m pretty sure he was talking about some kind of instrument.
Blogs are hard. I can’t stay coherent and spontaneous at the same time. Without planning the whole thing before I even get started.
Now that I know that my dad and I are exactly the same in being completely opposite, every frustration I used to feel about my dad’s little problem, just became a frustration of my own. My shoulders are beginning to weigh down on me.
