Liv in a Life Well-Lived

Dear Sister, I couldn't get your question out of my head. You asked me, "What if I never find love?"  I remember having the same thought. Half of me dreaded it, the other half was steeling myself for it and saying, so what? Some ultra-feminists would say we are silly for even thinking we need to find a man. They confuse themselves with their liberal talk when all we mean is that, we want someone to share the love we have. And hell to it, but gifts are nice. period. But there is one thing that has kept hope afloat inside me all those years of waiting. By being very inquisitive, I have researched that in our mother's side, three generations of women (at the very least), found love one time, big time.  Our great grandmother fell in love with our great grandfather at first sight. Our grandmother only had eyes and heart for our grandfather to the point of running away with him at the age of 18. She was young when she found him, but they never left each other's...

There's about ten minutes left of my most awesome year so far. I have to be very honest here, I feel like I made comparable leaps and bounds the last 12 months than the last 10 years. I actually felt myself stretch and get uncomfortable until I got used to it, and suddenly, I grew, noticeably, incrementally. I am feeling a bit sad leaving 31. I have a fear that I will never be able to top this year. But another side of me is also saying, no, this is where it starts. This is where you woke up, and this is you stretching your limbs. Yet far to go, Liv. I just want to be able to look back, 5 or 10 years from now and remind myself that for better or worse, I was alive the last night I was 31 years old. And I was also grateful and hopeful and I can feel my core stabilizing again. And to wrap up my year of awesome adventures, I listed a few accomplishments I want to remember. To remind myself I am not a sell-out. To affirm that though I still daydream, I am also living my life as...

So I came upon a trend in etsy and amazon about ACEOs (see title) and ATCs. ACEOs and ATCs are artwork done in 2.5 x 3.5 inches of canvas/paper and was originally used as trading cards (much similar to baseball trading cards, but for artists). I figured I will try to make as many as I can, and it's fairly easy for me because I have that kind of short term attention span anyways. :D So here's some of my latest works. These can also be viewed on my other blog:  http://livbeeart.weebly.com/

At different points in my life, I wanted to be a nun, an actress, a maid, a teacher and a dolphin trainer. But in all points of my life, there is one thing I consistently wanted and that is to be a mother. I am at a point in my life though when I think that might be the one thing I may never be. My weight, let's admit it, will probably never go down south of 100 kilos. I have diabetes, and a history of difficult pregnancies in the family. To top it all of, my boyfriend still doesn't have any plans of asking me to marry him soon, and my chances are getting slimmer by the literal second. Sometimes I am angry at myself, for not connecting the dots about health and getting pregnant. Then I assuage myself by saying, I'm not financially ready anyway. This will be followed by a spate of resentment against my boyfriend for being so slow and contented while the one thing I want in life grows in jeopardy. It's not like I never discussed this with him. He's just too happy...

Cast of Hunger Games: Catching Fire I am biased. Way biased. No young adult fantasy could be as good as Harry Potter. Flawed as some characters may be in Suzanne Collins Hunger Games, the distinguishing factor of this series compared to, let's say Twilight, is the tight storytelling. The best thing about this movie is that it does not stray far from the book, so instead of confusing the audience, it actually serves as companion material to the book. Say for example,  I honestly appreciated seeing the film's idea of how the Dome looks like. I have to say it's even better than my own imagination's rendering of the Arena. Very few book-to-movie rendition can claim this, but the Catching Fire movie actually helps deepen the mythos of the book instead of distract from it. I also have to say that half of the reason why I loved the film was because of the heroine. Some people say Katniss Everdeen breaks the mold of modern heroines everywhere, but I disagree. Katniss...

Here's a window into my soul: I am the type of person who will not do something if I can't be the best in it. Some people actually exist who chooses to learn and be good at something even if they repeatedly fail at it. I am not one of them. Which basically explains my whole life. Which is why I know I am actually an underachiever, even if a few people may think otherwise. Gosh, even my parents believed it, i think. Case in point: If I took up a Math-based course in college, I will be lucky to generate a pass. But taking another course which has less structure in it can make me a magna cum laude. Maybe I shouldn't be belittling my past achievements, because let it not be mistaken that I didn't work for them. It's just that, I didn't work that hard for them. My sister always had an impression I never studied in college, which is of course a fallacy. But it's saying something that I can afford to read all the books I wanted and still get the grades. ...

Last night, I bought this book in an Islamabad old books shop for Pkr 595 (Php 250) in one of the many book shops scattered all over the city. For a nation that claims they do not like to read over much, they sure have a lot of bookstores. This particular bookshop though had a certain asset to it that very few bookshops nowadays can boast of -- a bookseller who apparently reads books. It helped he was a denim-clad, lion-haired, bollywood handsome young man with a fantastic smile. Upon entering his shop, an unusual conversation started --- unusual in the light of me not able ti imagine having a similar conversation at my local Booksale outlet in SM Fairview or any of the National Bookstores. Book guy (BG): I am glad you put down that book (referring to a bootleg copy of Dan Brown's Inferno I picked up only to check if it was indeed bootleg), it's a lot of talk, but not really good, eh? Me (trying to stay distant and still digesting the fact that apparently, cute guys ...

I write of books as I would write of an aging parent. With reverence, admiration, a lot of love, and a deep sense of foreboding at their possible demise. I have been raised by books as much as I have been raised by my loving parents.   I know all things are lost eventually, but mortality makes it difficult to accept that   a loved one who was so instrumental to your being alive could be lost. We have to wrestle the delusion of their invincibility as they take their last breath right in front of our eyes. So it was with me.So it is with books.   If you dig away at the layers of my humanity, you will find you won’t have to dig very far to find the solidified layers of lessons, values and stories that reading has given me. Each bone of my body has a patina of literature protecting it; a silvery sheen of extra strength that calcium or any mineral on earth cannot provide. With every book I have held, I have understood worlds. The firm hard covers, th...