27:
Purple Panda is out and ready for the world.
Here’s the deal:
-Soft launch happens now. I get the word out on Solitary Panda, and maybe even tweet some articles.
-Build my content until…
-April 29th, the official launch, and also my birthday. I’ll prepare something special then. And promote to the world. I will also kill Solitary Panda.
Thanks for sticking with me. Or not. 
In less than 2 days I will be doing a 10 day silent meditation retreat. I’ll be offline. Again. So maybe this is the wrong time to “announce” Purple Panda but whatever. I’m sick of it looming over me. And I’ll try to schedule some posts.
Here’s to my new venture…
Janet
26:
I feel depressed and low energy. I don’t know if its the shitty food I’ve been eating lately or what. I try not to eat much. But it’s all meat. All the time. And more and more fast food. With ice cream. The diet I’d like to leave behind. When I come back to my family I come back to this… And thus why it’s important to live an intentional life with your own place and your own set-up to cook your own food. I crave fruit. And vegetables. And light foods. And I need to take control.
I’ve never been a cook. And I haven’t had my own place for over a year. When I live on my own (but not entirely on my own because I’ve always had a boyfriend or roommates), I prefer snacking throughout the day, drinking fruit smoothies for meals, and carrots and sushi for snacks, so I never see how cooking meals for one person makes much sense. And I eat out a lot…
I have a secret about my nomad life style. I don’t always like it. In fact. Most times I don’t. I think I tend to romanticize “homeless nomad” and “professional hobo” a lot. As though it were this fun thing that makes my life so much more exciting. It certainly keeps me on my toes. That’s a good thing. The not so good thing is that I’m tired. I’m tired of having to walk around not knowing whose house I’m staying in next and I’m tired of feeling like a freeloader. I’m tired of being out every day in the hustle and bustle of a noisy city full of smog, overstimulation, and not getting the isolation time that an introvert truly needs.
I’m tired.
As I live this bizarre life, I have to laugh at how life once was. The complete opposite. A stable job. A long-term relationship. And a house with mortgage. That house imprisoned me and that job sucked my soul and now the other extreme of the spectrum just wears me out, too. I feel useless often. Especially without my laptop. Without work… I don’t have time to regenerate, and if I do, it costs at least $10 for a hotel room for 6 hours.
That’s my life.
What I need is my own place to rent. It doesn’t need to be much. I’m a nomad so I’m thinking crash pad more than condo. I can’t really afford a condo, let alone justify the price for the on-the-go lifestyle I lead. As long as I have some cushion to sleep on the floor, and an internet connection, I’m good to go. What I need is time to be who I am. Which is a traveling homebody. I know its an oxymoron. An adventurous homebody? Yes, really. I prefer spending weeks in my place without socializing much. It’s easy. But it’s also counterproductive. Back then in my “stable life”? I had no friends, and always stayed at home. That’s depressing too. Even for a huge introvert. My ideal would be a mixture of both. So that I could have a social life but rest and regenerate in between.
I’m resting now in Cebu. For two weeks I’ve been back with family. I come here specifically to regenerate because I know the Cebu life with my family is always the same. We don’t go anywhere and life is small. Occasionally, I go across the street to visit my first childhood friend whose married and has kids now and we have nothing really in common and nothing much to talk about but I go anyway. Just to be there. Just to check in. I’m working on a new blog project which I hope I’ll have the internet connection to fully concentrate on in the next coming months, but stability is uncertain. Life is always uncertain and when you live a lifestyle of uncertainty, instead of the fake “stability” you get with a house, husband and kids, it can be extra jarring, but also humbling and beautiful. I count my blessings more.
This life–my life NOW–is teaching me how to be social and I’m not even taking its bait. I’m retreating and getting cranky and feeling self-defeatist and emotionally eating and growing tired. What I need to do is accept the challenge. Find a place. That’s fine. But accept the challenge of a bigger social life and learn to enjoy it. Because this making new friends stint has never been my forte. Because I’m more of a wallflower than a socialite. Because I feel awkward. All. The. Time.
I need to get over it. Making new friends is the only way I’m going to be successful if I want to earn my own living. How can I ever make clients if no one even knows who I am, or what I have to offer? Friends are so passe. It’s hard to find the types of friendships an introvert needs. The friendships that go deeper than a facebook profile and the like button and a few lunch dates here and there. But connections and networking is in. I need to get in… Or get out.
16:
We met at the temple. Back when my head was shaved and I looked like a 12 year old boy. I would later call this stage of my life “the ugly phase”. Ten pounds heavier on my petite frame made me chubby and frumpy. In the confines of a monastery, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone, least of all myself.
“Joemar is here,” Dave told me, during one of our breaks. We were performing a graduation ceremony to showcase the arts, dance and Mandarin language we had learned in our four month monastery retreat. I had invited him through Facebook, where we initially met through Dave who told me about a crazy guy who was going to walk the whole island of Palawan. Something in me sparked an interest. Maybe it was intuition, although I was scared out of my mind to think I would actually do such a thing. But I added him, and we talked. And he came to see me. My heart smiled.
After the program, I came up to him and gave him a huge hug. I might be romanticizing in retrospect, but it seemed as if I had known him for years. Like those best friendships where no matter how long its been since you’ve seen eachother, you can always catch back up as if time hadn’t passed.
It’s easy being a loner. I’ve been a loner for years. I’ve felt alone, abandoned in relationships that didn’t work. I’ve lived my whole life solitary, in many ways. As an only child, as a panic stricken teen with social anxiety, and as an adult with a quiet disposition. So when I meet people that make me bubble with life and talk like there’s no tomorrow, I know its something special.
Our walk was magical. The Universe conspired to help us. After sharing a water bottle getting dirty with use and refilled by the native wells along the way, I declared that I wanted my own water bottle with ice cold water, while Joemar was craving beeko–a Philippine rice delicacy–the whole day. That very night, after finding a place to rest, Joemar offered his healing massage to a local he had befriended, who spontaneously gifted us with beeko and a 1.5 liter of ice cold bottled water. I was amazed by the synchronicity and humbled by the simple gratitude that comes when walking. Never knowing where we’ll rest from night to night makes a wooden floor and a warm family willing to offer their hospitality and food a welcome treat.
The first night under the stars, with a thin canopy of trees above us in the jungle road to San Vicente, we saw glowing leaves and foliage. It was just like Avatar. Drops of rain woke our slumber, and Joemar’s quick thinking survival skills had us relocate to a nearby area where my yoga mat and his malong blanket hung over two branches for shelter. It was pouring rain and the ground glowed florescent. We used eachother’s bodies for warmth and huddled together under the yoga mat. It was the beginning of our seduction. The jungle blanketed us with glow-in-the-dark leaves and seduced us into sacred sexual communion.
Eat, Pray, Love has been a big motivator in my journey. I read it prior to taking my travel leap and making the ultimate decision to free myself from stuff and become a nomad. Intuition knew I would do it, but it took awhile before my brain–the logical me–decided I was ready. As my journey wove itself inside temples, I witnessed my own postmodern awe at the resemblances of my life to Elizabeth Gilbert’s story. I knew I was having an Eat, Pray, Love adventure… I just hadn’t gotten to the love part, yet!
Love came sooner than I expected it. I wanted to love in whatever capacity I had. If that meant jungle and tropical beach flings, I was ready to accept it. After my five year failed relationship, I knew I needed time and space for myself–alone. I mentally gave myself two years to be by myself, learning, growing and being me after gathering the pieces from a quarter-life identity crisis. The jungle seduction was exactly two years to date from my life as a single woman. My break-up anniversary from 2008 which will now become my anniversary with Joemar from 2010. I manifested this.
Browsing through my own archives, I stumbled across a prophetic entry that talked about my capacity for love. I wanted to love in 2010, but I didn’t know how far I could take it. Mentally, emotionally, physically.
I’m not sure what [love] looks like, how far my boundaries can go. Is it merely friendship? Friends with benefits? I don’t know. Is it blow jobs and practicing deep throat and strap-ons? Is it wrestling and choke holds and martial art moves? 2am sex after an amazing day learning how to swim, hiking to hot springs, and sharing a banana leaf umbrella under tropical storms?
Later during our walk, we bushwhacked off the highway and sat under a banana tree to shelter ourselves from a tropical rainstorm, sharing one banana leaf like an umbrella.
Sitting on the beach one day and meditating towards the ocean horizon, I shared this information with Joemar and he said he had written something similar. He knew that he would walk with a girl and he had dreamed that things would develop and wanted to share a banana leaf with her under a rainstorm… Somehow, we both thought that banana leaf umbrellas sounded so romantic that we wrote about it before meeting. We manifested this. We manifested eachother.
It’s easy being solitary. It’s my disposition. It’s hard integrating myself and merging my life with another. Harder even still not to become the clingy girlfriend in a codependent relationship like so many times before. Relationships are challenging and I wasn’t sure if I was ready. It wasn’t easy to trust him because I was so weary of his motives as a “psychic”. He told me he had a vision that we would walk together. That he’d meet a girl at a temple. He told me I was part of “the Script”. I called him bull shit because I don’t believe in things like fate and destiny, but individual choice and free will. Maybe he was just pulling my leg and telling me things that sounded nice to impress me. I don’t know. I played devil’s advocate. It wasn’t love at first sight.
The spiritual and mystical circles are new to me, and my own spiritual growth has been accelerated to the point of being mind blowing growing pains. But in the end (the beginning), I knew I had to take the leap of faith and Trust. Trust him and his sincerity and trust that I was ready to be vulnerable again.
The people you meet in your life have something to teach you and in turn, you have something to learn. I knew that Joemar would have a lot to teach me, and intuition told me I should be with him but it took awhile before logic told me I was ready. In matters of love, logic can’t be trusted, because the language of love speaks from the heart. The language of love is the source of life itself, and finding love… operating on love will bring us closer to happiness and our greater selves. Trust your intuition and follow your heart and life will have more meaning. It brought me to Asia, it brought me to Palawan, it brought me to Joemar, and it’s bringing me closer to my ideal life each day.
