#granted i guess i could make the chilli monday. or wake up super early and start it before work

[six-of-ravens]

well, boss was reminded that Halloween is next week and we should do something fun, and now there's debate over whether we do it Monday (when one girl is away) or if we should come into the office on Tuesday, which like. yay fun party times or whatever, but also I had VERY IMPORTANT PLANS* on Halloween and I wanted to work from home :(

[quarantingz]

contradictions, bitterness & my relationship with coffee.

4 april, saturday

11.10am

Appreciation for the day: the sweet sweet taste of parallelism *not relevant, but I’ll explain it later*

As I sit on my dusty-green carpet in the living room, back soaking in the warm morning sun streaming in through the tilted blinds, I try to focus on the blank document on my laptop. Which waits wide-eyed and curious for what I’ll write today. As usual, I do not know, but as is the journey of life, we’ll take it step by step and see where we end up :)

Which makes me think about contradictions, and how this Saturday morning has been nothing but bittersweet.

At 7.30am my mum made the rounds of my sister and I’s bedrooms by bounding in and waking us up for our family morning walk. Her face plastered with a heart-warming large smile, much like a dog ready for a walk. Because I slept at 2am watching Triple Frontier on Netflixparty with B, I arose groggily, bitter, but also a little bit excited. I pulled on my tights, wrapped my coat around my shoulders and stepped out the door with my equally tired family members at exactly 7.57am. Out before 8am (gotta celebrate the small things right?), the air was chilly but incredibly peaceful. We trekked through Kepa Bush Reserve, a six minute walk from ours, and appreciated the quiet and beauty of nature in our five-person walking train. The walk was long, but oh so sweet, despite the initial bitterness of such an early start - especially on a Saturday!

As I taught my mum various stretches back home and bonded over how good it felt to feel the pull and release of our tense muscles and joints, the term “bitterness” sank in and I was beginning to feel super positive for the day ahead. However, this feeling of bitterness became all the more applicable as the morning drew on.

After making questionable banana buckwheat pancakes on my mum’s random and insistent request, I am confronted by the jumble and mess of my thoughts and words currently on my screen.

Let me explain. As the demands of work are put on hold till Monday, my house seems more alive and bustling today. Although my music is turned up to the max through my headphones, this and my concentration battle with the noise around me. It competes with my mum’s obsession with sourdough, which she intends to make into a pizza base (who knew!) for tonight, and consequently, the sound of her mixer and the clink of kitchen appliances. My dad’s tablet is also on full volume, the description of the production of rockets in Alabama completely capturing his attention. My sister also flits in and out of the ranch slider, tending to her newly planted snow peas.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a noisy and lived-in household, but to be honest, I wanted some quiet I didn’t know I wanted for today. This is where bitterness sank in. A mix of gratefulness that this morning was agreeable, but now too also disgruntled. I missed and craved the segregated spaces my family and I have created for the past two weeks. And can’t help but miss the quiet “work weekdays” - a time and space where my thoughts can naturally flow onto the page. But as my sentences stop and start, halt and jerk, super awkward and chunky on the page, I think about what a mess my mind feels right now.

Which is why as I sip my incredibly below-average instant coffee I heated up in the microwave for one minute because I poured too much almond milk and took too long to start this entry, I think about my friend, coffee. Or rather the timeline of our relationship. From the moment I first laid eyes on coffee, incredibly bitter at first, to our decade-long evasion of one another, mutual of course. And to our eventual and unlikely friendship presently. A story mixing bitterness with sweetness. What a contradiction!

Let me begin by describing what began with a hand-to-mouth, gag-like reflex, nose scrunched kind of relationship, I’d like to think coffee and I have a very different relationship now.

I now live for a good coffee, without sugar and chocolate (but still with milk, almond specifically) and it wasn’t always like that. I used to hate the taste of coffee - the bitterness. But now I like this taste and almost consider it a sweet taste. It doesn’t actually taste sweet, but maybe it’s the feeling it gives me. The hope and promise of a productive and wholesome day.

I think this is a lot like our relationship with people. There is always the promise of a good relationship and hope that it will be better than another, or the last, or just better than it has ever been. But like coffee and I’s, it is a process. You learn how to talk better, interact better, love better and most importantly, understand better. And somehow, we stop taking people in our lives for granted - instead, we taste and see the “sweetness” that they bring into our lives - whether or not we want it or need it.

It comes with time and it comes with a change in tastebuds - maturity. I feel like this can also be a constant and regular process which can repeat in a circle of dislike and like, letdown and hope, bitterness and sweetness, over and over again.

Once again, this is more of a mind-dump and me trying to articulate what my thought for today is. I guess what I’m trying to say is that relationships are like coffee. A wake-up call you could say. Something bittersweet. Note the contradiction. Note the oxymoron between the two negative and positive terms. There is a natural push and pull that we may feel towards people.

I’ve come to realise relationships can be contradictory. And that is because humans are contradictive in general. Our own feelings and moods are contradictory. Which affects how we interact, feel, see and act towards people and the world as a whole.

So as you and I know now (I’m trying to understand just as much as you), this entry isn’t actually about coffee or my love for contradictions. Maybe not even about people and relationships! But actually, it is simply about how messy life is. How confusing, strange, contradicting everything can be. For example, feelings of confusion and fear contradicting that of hope and joy - which you may be feeling during this time. Contradicting like my initial bitter relationship with coffee and now the sweet fondness I have for it. Like the word bittersweet. Like this morning…And there you go, we’ve come full circle!

I could leave it at that, but I think I will leave you, maybe even more confused than you started off as, with this thought:

Life is confusing and messy yes, but bittersweet, and that’s okay.

Because then it would be boring :)

* okay, now for that explanation you waited the whole blog to read: prior to writing this I read Paulz’ entry and couldn’t help but chuckle with glee that she too wrote about one of her “relationships” (specifically with sleep, nature and her dog - which you should go READ HERE if you haven’t already!) and the fact she went on an 8am morning walk today is just…a sweet parallelism - hehe, maybe I should write about parallelism next aye pal? - a

[9 april, thursday]

Thought about parallelism more today and the conversation we had about it pal...I think parallelism is so relevant right now haha, because although we clarified that parallelism means two things align, but do not touch, isn’t it funny that that is exactly how things have ended up? The fact that so many things have happened beyond our control, and have aligned with one another so well, BUT we haven’t been in direct contact with each other for the past few weeks (social separation and iso and whatnot).

And coz we’re allllll about diagrams now, here’s one for you:

See we’re headed in the same direction, things have aligned, but social distancing makes parallelism so fitting. Haha, random thought I know, but I think it’s so funny now that I think about it!