Wish

The more I read tangobaby blogs, the more I admire her. I only know her from her articles but I get the feeling that she sees everything, including the boring activities of daily life as an art (or maybe there was no boring activities in her life?). She opens me to this other world that makes me want to try them, hoping that my life can also be seen as an art.

Since I read tangobaby, I read more and more blogs as a way for me to learn how to write and also to read their interesting articles. These blogs (people) opens me to the world of writing, words, poems, photography, and last but not least, through these people, somehow, I get the courage to express my feeling, my thoughts through writing. Neither shy, embarrasment, self-conscious, nor afraid that people will actually read it can keep me away. You can say I could have found blogs much sooner, but what can I say, my interest on blogs just materialize recently. I'm just glad I found it.

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Many years ago, a few months after I graduated from college and with the asset of a degree, a piece of resume, and much enthusiasm, I got my first professional job at a retail company in Chicago. On the first day, when my supervisor introduced me to the owner of the company, we chit chat a bit, introducing myself, life history in a nutshell, and he said something that basically meant that I was a young girl who was brave enough to move to US with my family almost 1000 miles apart and managed to get a degree and a job. Then he said to my supervisor something like "While you, where have you been (beside Chicago, maybe at best East Coast)?". Of course, he meant it as a joke.

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I don't know if my boss meant that comment he made seriously to praise me or just something to break the ice. But, today, as I'm writing, I remembered his comment and I thought that there's something wrong with it. As much as I would like to accept that praise, I never think of me as that brave (or at least the brave in the way I want to be praised for). I merely went from a developing country to the most developed and strongest country in the world with its facilities & support system that didn't exist in my country to pursue my education, in which 99% of the expense were paid from my parent's bank account. So, my job was to study and get the highest grades as I could possibly get. And that was exactly what I did, study and study, graduated, got a job...bla..bla..bla. That was the easiest thing to do (now that I think about it).

Of course, I managed to have some fun doing it and honestly, I like studying, I like school, I guess I could say that I'm one of those 'smart Asian girl'. At that time, I thought the fun, the experience I had was enough, considering if I had too much fun I would have to sacrifice my GPA and that was a bad thing to do. I don't mean that I regret my 'then' life and I don't want to use the excuse that I did this for my parent because at that time, that's all I knew and my parent never force me to do anything outside my will (thanks God for them). This is just a moment where a person remembers her past and wish that life could be different, wish that she had known what she should do at that time for herself.

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Anyway, to get to the point and to finish this long article, my point is that I am not a brave person, brave in the definition that I have tried a lot of things in my life, especially things that are outside my comfort zone, outside what I have known, outside responsibility & purpose, things that consist of challenges and present new exciting experience that satisfy my needs of living, instead of resulting in financial gain. So, again, this is the reason I also started writing, and hopefully this is the start of my new 'exciting' life. And I wish 5 years latter when I go back to this period of my life, I will see real improvement that make me really proud of what I am.