What I've Learned From The People and The Things I Love

The most important things we can learn in life are in the people and things around us. It can be found in the periphery – in-between classes while waiting for the next professor, in those moments while you’re walking from here to your destination, or in brief elevator rides. It can be found in the seconds right before you burst into tears, or in the recurrent beat of a song. In this ultimate age of epiphany, I have unearthed a treasure of discoveries from those I love.

Friends

“It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.” - MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

I am blessed with a multitude of friends. From them, I have learned that we have various friends for the various aspects of our personalities. The only people I am ever truly honest with [outside of my immediate family, of course] are my three closest friends.

Jiehan and I get along because of our tastes in fashion and the other superficial aspects of life. We have always been dedicated to the cause of popularity for popularity's sake. I have always been obsessed with the tangibles and the superficial. This may not always be understood by my more philosophical friends, but Jiehan does, and she indulges me. Being slaves to the retail industry, we bond in beauty parlors during hour-long foot spas and hair treatments, reading glossies, watching MTV and fashion TV, and frequenting night-haunts in plush clubs of our generation, armed with our chandelier earrings and excruciatingly high stilletoes. We also have an unbreakable faith in Chinese soap operas.

Marjorie, on the other hand, is my ally. We share principles in life. We wax political, intellectual, and spiritual. Our friendship was concretized in college where, side by side, we fought for our rights and stood our ground against people who did us wrong. We were not always successful, but we can say we tried our best. If I was a lawyer, she’d be the judge in my courtroom. If she was a nurse, I’d be the doctor in her emergency room. I’ve spent N-Thousand hours on the phone with Marj, talking about the philosophical implications of The Lord Of The Rings, and the possible life and times of Arnobi The Rabbit, the mascot of a junior supplement that comes with a leading newspaper here, and Paalle Bukhari, the man who faithfully served us soggy French Fries with Vinegar and Hot Sauce for most of our high school life. We spent several thousand hours more at the Sunken Garden of our university, lying on the grass, staring at the night sky, and weeping at our insights, new-found convictions, and lack thereof. It seemed highly unlikely back when we were 9-year-olds together in our grade school, but we now find ourselves always in the same country at the same time.

To balance this relatively good side of my personality, I have Jehanifah to help me disturb the peace. The only existence we know is in trying to fix something, some situation, some crooked idea or other. So that when we run out of things to fix, we inexorably destroy something, anything, in order to fix it. Jehanifah is my partner in crimes of passion, like when we stole romance novels from her sister’s collection and from this other girl who happened to have the book we’d been looking for. Much later, we would steal out into the night and belt out sappy songs at the local Karaoke bar with much fervor, boozing and burning sticks in-between songs. She and I suffer from – and revel in – the curse of friction, being too alike at times and too different at others.

I have learned that there is enough love to go around. When you make a new friend, you don't necessarily lose an old one. It's time we never have enough of.

… to be continued...