Patience, my pwet

Happy new year!

I normally do a year-end recap, but right now I am so focused on, so manically juiced about 2011 that I can barely recall what happened to me in 2010 except in single-word snatches: resigning, freelancing, Beijing, Sonoma, San Francisco, and dreaming about, going for, and finally getting Europe. (Hmm, I just realized that half of these words are action verbs and half of them are places I've never been before. That can only be a good thing.)

Anyway, Amsterdam is just 12 days away, but it feels like the longest 12 days ever!

I don't know how you felt about the first day of school, but when I was a kid, my excitement about the start of classes drove me bonkers every single year. Going to National Bookstore to buy all my school supplies, covering my books and notebooks with ads torn out of Vogue, Bazaar and Elle (Claudia Schiffer's classic Guess print ads were my favorites), then with plastic, choosing and polishing my new black school shoes--all of the preparations for the start of the new school year used to just whip me into a frenzy of anticipation, like doing each of these little little things somehow brought you that much closer to the day you were so inexplicably excited for. 

That's the closest way to describe how I feel right now.

Except sometimes, all the preparations, every little errand from picking up the visas to seeing friends for goodbye lunches and dinners, seem to be just ways of filling time until we get on that plane and get this shebang started.

Let's go, 2011!

Just the two of us

When I was a little brat, the only thing I hated about the holidays was the inevitable deluge of visitors. What seemed like an endless parade of vans would disgorge relations or family friends from out of town, who descended upon our family as their holiday treat.

I especially hated when this happened on Christmas Day because it meant we couldn't open the gifts until every last visitor went away. Seeing that giant pile of unopened gifts winking at you until five or six in the evening on Christmas Day was just pure torture. Then of course there was all the noise (which we Pinoys find necessary to make holidays "masaya") and fawning and pinching that comes with all those people. My mom still has pictures of little bratty me clinging to her and refusing to talk to people. One look at my squelched-up tampo face and you can practically hear me begging her to just send all these people away.

Eventually either I got used to it or the number of holiday crashers dwindled (Christmas visitors, of course, being directly proportional to size of house and family income), but soon enough I got old enough to not want quiet holidays so badly.

Twenty-odd years later I finally, surprisingly get my wish.

Marlon and I had been thinking of heading down to Marina Bay for the New Year's Eve countdown, the only place where fireworks are legal in this country. But I hadn't been feeling well and the thought of massive crowds, an epic trek home by bus, or squabbling with half of Singapore to get a taxi afterwards struck me dumb with fear. So I stayed at home and rested. Which was... really, really nice.

Marlon and I cooked dinner together, which is something that always relaxes me and cheers me up. Our first Media Noche was simple -- we broiled salmon steaks in wine and butter, then baked them with a glaze of mustard and brown sugar.

While the fish was in the oven, I slipped into a nice long dress that I normally don't wear out, and spritzed on some perfume. Marlon put on a red t-shirt with a Chinese character on it that he hoped meant something like good fortune.

With ten minutes till midnight, the part of me that is secretly waiting to transform into my mother kicked in. I went into a table-setting frenzy, faint parental admonitions about making everything clean and shiny and fancy to welcome the new year echoing in my subconscious.

We cleared the dining table of the junk it manages to accumulate every so often to make space for some cream-colored hybrid carnations that Marlon had bought for me the day before. I set out strawberries in a bowl, lit a handful of tealights from Ikea, and turned off all the lights except for the Christmas tree and a paper floor lamp. Et voila!

We filled our glasses with sparkling wine (do you know you can't call it champagne unless it's from Champagne, France?) and clinked them at midnight, toasting to more adventures in the coming year. We said grace before dinner, thanking God for our blessings and asking him to make the new year kinder to those burned and scarred by the year that was. We dug into our salmon steaks in the candlelight, marveling at the fact that we had never had a candlelit dinner at home before.

And I realized it was the first time that I was welcoming new year without my family -- and as much as I missed them, that it was okay. Because this is also my family now.

Just the two of us (oh alright -- and the cat)... until further notice.

Have a blessed and fulfilling New Year, everyone!