The girls started having friends over again after two years of being by themselves. For dinner we had Korean BBQ because that’s the easiest to serve when you have company.

Hopefully, the kids will finally have face-to-face classes this coming school year. A lot of kids are having a hard time coping. My college-age nephew is one of them.

Because I didn’t take any sleeping aid last night (just to try), I was wide awake until 5 am today 🤦🏻‍♀️ and I wasn’t able to take a nap so I’m like… Whatever.

After 4 hours of sleep, I finally gave up and started attending to my container garden at 9 am. It keeps me grounded, it is meditative, and it gives me things to look forward to everyday. While I’m trying to fix my body clock (I can’t bike if I lack sleep or else might get into an accident), domestic and quiet pursuits like gardening would have to suffice.

I fear I’m becoming Emily Dickinson…Becoming more of a recluse as time goes by and whose existence is only proven by correspondences. She has lived the last decades of her life puttering around her home, never married, and shunned social interaction to the point that she spoke to visitors through the door.

Or I’m becoming like Sandra Bullock in the movie The Net. Come to think of it, I am living that movie. My colleagues for the most part have not met me personally or those who have known me have only seen me a few times in a year. I go in and out of our offices in different parts of the world without so much of a whisper. I do everything online, even ordering groceries and my medical consultations. I rarely have cash in my wallet nowadays, everything is paid by credit card or via QR codes/e-wallets.

Friends from 20-plus years ago find it strange that I’m so domesticated that they could no longer associate the hard-drinking, hard-smoking party girl of yore. I drove a truck then and my friends and I would park it somewhere and we would be drinking at the back of the truck. There was a time that I was so hammered that I drove home in first gear and a friend on the passenger seat was guiding me because I was already blacking out. 😂

Oh the folly of youth. You always feel like you’re immortal.

I was in this phase when I met the girls’ dad. The ex-husband didn’t think well of me before. I even wondered why he even bothered. It was really all a mistake, right from the very start. I stuck with the relationship to prove something probably. Pressure from my father probably. Pressure from my mother probably. Some friends from the industry asked why did it feel like as the date of my wedding grew closer, I looked like a bride who is about to face the firing squad?

I no longer bothered analyzing things. It’s done. It’s over. 17 years wasted. As Twin I said, it wasn’t all that bad; you had us. Yes, that’s the best part of that.

So it’s like I’m living a new life. I’m now the hybrid of my sensitive teenage me and the adrenalin-junkie 20s me. Let’s see what’s in store for the hybrid me.