Timing is another BIG issue. If your times never sinc, if you and the other person aren't single and looking at the same time, it will never happen. It doesn't matter how perfect you may be for one another. That person may even be your soulmate but if one of you is not at the same place at the same time as the other, it will never be. It's sad when you think about it. It means we are all leaving our life, to chance. It's like we're not choosing the person to spend our life with, it's like we're letting life choose for us. When you think about it, it's like an arranged marriage....lol. So many of us settled for whatever or whoever was there, instead of choosing the person we want to spend the rest of our life with. I know i shouldn't generalize and say this is the case with everybody, but it seems to be the majority of people i know. Very few actually married because they mutually chose to be with the other person. Most people i know are with each other by default. Pretty sad.
I don't know, but for some reason all the men i have loved and have loved me have been trapped in these "default" situations. And what's worse, none of them had the courage to leave or to change. I am realizing that fear of change is sometimes greater than love. There's a saying in spanish " la costumbre es mas fuerte que el amor", which means habit is stronger than love. I have never heard a more true statement!

Thoughts about love...

I was just thinking and pondering about the irony of love and life sometimes. I think it's amazing how many people are married to the wrong person. How many people out there live their lives loving another while married to someone else. I wonder what keeps these people in these loveless marriages. I wonder what keeps these people from following their hearts? I know the answer. It's fear. So many of us live in fear and that fear impedes us from living our best possible life, from pursuing our dreams. Why do so few people choose to follow their hearts?? It seems like so many of us sabatoge our own lives by making stupid life decisions that lead us down unwanted paths. There is one man from my past who often comes to mind when i think about all this. He was an amazing man. Deep, sensitive, passionate and beautiful. I don't think he ever knew how amazing he was and i regret not ever telling him. I often wonder what could have been, had i told him. His deep emotional turmoil lead him to sabatoge his own life, which he did by marrying a woman he did not love. He has lived in this loveless marriage for years. They now have two children. I have observed these types of situations for years and it has often astounded me as to how this happens! How complacent we are and how easily we adapt to unhappiness!!!! I believe it is the fear of being alone that leads us to settle and cheat ourselves a great life and true happiness.

mis romances

So..... the thing with Gabriel and i was incredibly romantic and though the attraction between the two of us had grown, nothing ever happened. The company ended up moving the office to a seperate location from the shop which meant we would no longer see each other. I also discovered that Gabriel already had a girlfriend which explained why he held back. I believe it was then that the trend started. The trend of somehow ONLY attracting men the were already taken! From then on, I was cursed. 95% percent of the men that would pursue me from then on were either married or in a relationship! Perhaps they were men who were unhappy in their relationships and saw me as a breath of fresh air. Who knows. All i know is that it happened A LOT. To be honest, it's happening to me again, but i choose not to talk about that yet. THAT is where this whole story is leading to.

So i carried on with my life. Seeking adventure and new experiences. During this time I attempted to go back to school but didn't even make it thru the semester. During my short stint in college i dated a young man in one of my classes. He was nice, charming but something just didn't click with us. Whatever. Nothing lost, nothing gained. At this point i was starting to get a little anxious. Where were all the single guys? ...lol. At about this time i was often hanging out with my partner- in-crime- cousin. When she and i were together i felt like i could live in the moment and not think about my problems. Perhaps that is why i enjoyed being around her. It was the only time i felt "young" and carefree. At that time her older sister shared a house with a co-worker. His name was Tony and he was, how should i put it.....HOT! That's the only way to describe him. He was tall, fit and rough around the edges. A cross between a fireman and a construction worker! Anyway, they were strictly roomates. Nothing going on there. I must admit that when we met him my cousin and i were a little intimidated by his good looks. Over the days following we spent a lot of time at their house. Tony's longtime friend, Russell, also shared the house with them. We were at their house every weekend grilling or listening to music. It was fun. Much to our dismay we found out Tony had a girlfriend which he brought to the house one of those weekends. She was nice, i guess. Friendly, whatever. However, they made an odd couple. She was not particularly charming. She was slightly older than him and you could tell, even though she in great physical shape. She was also not very pretty. Actually, not at all, which is surprising considering how attractive he was. I don't know. They were just like apples and oranges. It didn't seem like he was in love with her either, which is why i didn't let that dissuade me from flirting with him. We enjoyed flirting with each other. There was definitely a mutual attraction. We ended up making out one night. It was great. What can i say? It's great to finally give in to that attraction. We kissed all night and he was a GREAT kisser!!!

Men

My twenties were the most significant and formative years of my life. Everything that happened to me during that time shaped the rest of my young life. Everything I am living now is a result of those years.
Amazingly, up until that point i still didn't know what it was like to be in a "relationship" with someone. When i look back now i realize how severely depressed i was! It's crazy but it seems to me like the instability in my life and the instability of my emotional state kept me from having them, just like it kept me from getting through college. I guess that makes me a bad multi-tasker. The depression kept me from moving forward in my life. All I was able to manage, in my moments of lucidity, were little flings here and there. Most of them were insignificant as most flings are and a couple of them were long complicated flings that ended abruptly for some reason or another.
When i was depressed, i couldn't attract a fly with honey! But when i wasn't depressed, when i was myself, I was unstoppable! I was again that passionate, girl who loved life. Though those periods of being "myself" were short lived, they are the memories i have of the adventure and romanticism of feeling young, attractive and enjoying the admiration of the opposite sex. Those are probably my best memories and I am incredibly thankful i have them. Those memories are what make life beautiful; even if they were just flings or ended up in heartbreak. Falling in love or in lust is beautiful, passionate and makes you feel ALIVE!!!!! I don't know if it's like this for everyone else, but being in love is when i am MOST alive and at my best.
When i was about 21 i worked in the filing dept. of a company called Decorative Specialties. They were a very large kitchen cabinet manufacturing company. That was my first "real" job since i only had a part-time mall job while i was in court reporting school. At Decorative Specialties there was a young man that worked in the factory where the actual cabinet doors were made. His name was Gabriel and he was a young, shy mexican with big beautiful bedroom eyes. Typically, he was not my type; we came from completely different worlds! Let's put it this way... i didn't even know he existed even though he would often go to our office to make copies. It's sad and a bit elitist of me but i just thought of him as a "mexican guy".... meaning the immigrant kind who speaks little or no english and works for minimum wage. Sadly these are the marginal people of society who we often overlook or don't even acknowledge just because they are not one of us. Even though i don't feel this way, at 21 girls are dreaming about marrying a doctor or a lawyer or something conventional like that. Especially if you were born in this country, which i was. So needless to say, i hadn't even noticed Gabriel until he noticed me. It was Halloween and I was dressed like a sailor, not by choice. He had been watching me as I was carefully walking down the stairs so my sailor hat wouldn't fall off. I didn't notice him until i was about half way down but the way he was looking at me almost stopped me in my tracks. Wow! The combination of his eyes and his smile was lethal! By the time i was reaching the bottom of the stairs i was blushing but trying my darnest to act aloof. So i made fun of myself in spanish which made him give me another one of his looks. I don't think he expected me to speak spanish.... and so fluently! He then followed me to the lunch truck and paid for my lunch. I didn't say offered because he didn't offer. He just took charge and paid it without asking for permission, which i thought was sexy. I graciously thanked him and walked away as i thought about how hot he was and why i hadn't noticed him before. Yowza!!! Well the rest of the story goes... this coy flirtation went on for quite a while. Every day after that point he would wait for me right by the door where he knew i would come in every morning. Every morning he'd say hi and we'd flirt in spanish. It was incredibly romantic. Because we were such an unlikely pair, no one around us ever caught on. The thought of Gabriel and I being smitten with each other would have never entered their mind! But love and attraction have no rules; well, with me, anyway. I came to the conclusion long ago that i don't have a type. When it comes to attraction i do not discriminate! I also realize that i'm very much like my father in that way. When it comes to girlfriends and wives my father has literally run the gammit from A to Z of different cultures, physical apperance and social class! He's dated women of the elite class with ivy league educations and is now dating a dirt poor, uneducated, illegal alien. Go figure! For me it's all about how a person makes you feel. THAT is the determining factor in my love or attraction for a person.

So here i was. 22 years old, living by myself; lonely and frustrated. Like i said before, i had all these goals and aspirations yet i couldn't seem to accomplish any. Between my life's circumstances and my emotional state, achieving those goals seemed impossible. It just seemed like every step i would take forward, life would pull me two steps back. I lived on my own therefore i had to provide for myself and to do so i had to work full time which i resented every minute of. I felt like it was my parents duty to help my attain my goal which was to go to college and get an education. In all fairness to my mother, she did try. I lived with her and her husband, rent free, for two years while i trained to become a court reporter. Unfortunately though my mother provided a stable home and financial stability, the hostility in that environment made it psychologically impossible to continue living there. My aversion for her husband overshadowed my desire to want to stay and finish school. Besides, i hated Florida. From the moment i got there i could think of nothing else than wanting to come back to L.A., my home.
So in my early twenties i lived in a constant state of frustration. How could i go to school and do all these things when I was barely surviving?? I felt like i was trapped in a vicious cycle i couldn't get out of. I felt like i couldn't move forward no matter how hard i tried. As i've mentioned before, my father was of no help at all during this time so it was basically me against the world. During this time my brother also just immersed himself in his own struggles. Miraculously he did go to school despite the lack of support. Talk about overcoming obstacles!!!! It takes a very special person to be able to rise above those kinds of circumstances. His resiliency amazes me!!!
... But despite my angst and frustration i made the most of my twenties. I did all the stupid things you're suppose to in your twenties after you realize you now have no one to limit you. I did, however, always know my limits and was careful never to go beyond them. One thing i never was, was self destructive. I never did anything that would make my quality of life worse. My expiramenting with drugs did not go beyond trying pot. I was very aware of how easily it would be for me to go down that road to ease the hurt and loneliness of my life....which is exactly why i stayed away from them. I did drink socially, mostly on weekends as most twentysomethings do. I also didn't sleep around; i only kissed around. My cousin Gabby was my accomplice for those type of endeavors. We were both young, single and enjoyed life even though we were complete opposites. Really, we had nothing in common besides the fact that we were related and the same age.

and the beat goes on.....

I bounced back and forth between my parents for years.I had spent the last year of high school and the two years following, living in Miami with my mother. While i made great friends in Miami, the experience of living there was overshadowed the negativity of my home life. Unavoidably I had to live with my stepfather/ greatuncle as well! After high school I attended a vocational college for two years to become a court reporter. It would have been a good career but i was too homesick and too anxious to come back to California.

Unfortunately in returning to California i was faced with instability, once again. Since my parents divorce my father had offered no stability at all. He was never able to offer us any kind of fatherly protection in that sense. He bounced around from girlfriend to girlfriend and never quite planted roots anywhere. Until recently, that was his life... but i guess he made up in emotional and moral support what he lacked in financial and material support. In retrospect I'm glad it was that way and not the other way around! ....SO i bounced around for about a year from my living with my aunt to living with my grandmother until i could stand on my own two feet, which was about 21 or 22. By then I had gone back to being myself again. The best way to describe my early twenties is like the "Tale of Two Cities"..... it was the best of times and it was the worst of times. Though I felt very alone during this time I was also beginning to feel like a woman. I had developed into a self-assured young lady who was wise beyond her years and i used that to my advantage. I now understood the power of seduction and knew how to use all my womanly resources, intelligence being one of them. I was also now recognizing my physical attributes which for years i had tried to supress.

My current state of being

Well, it's been a while since I've written. I kind of got sidetracked by a chaotic couple weeks. My husband lost his job, my car decided to die therefore we had to buy a new one. My father moved back to L.A. and believe it or not there's more, but i choose not to disclose everything at this moment. All I have to say is that it's been a very eventful few weeks to say the least!

For the past week I've been feeling kind of depressed and confused. Confused because I don't know the source of my discontentment. I can't put my finger on it but the more i think about it the clearer things become for me. I have come to the conclusion that it's because I'm dissatisfied with my life; a feeling i keep submerged most of the time in order to not go crazy. It's a pretty sad and complicated situation I'm in. Lately I've been overcome with the desire to escape. I just want to leave and start a new life somewhere. I want to live the life I always dreamed of. Most of all, I want to be in love! I want romance and passion back in my life. When i speak of wanting passion and romance back in my life i don't mean because our relationship has grown cold and boring like many other couples out there. I say this because we've never had romance or passion in our relationship. There was never that passionate love. I was never "in love" and although he says he is or was, I never felt that passion from him. I've been in love before and I've also been loved. I can recognize a person in love a mile away! There is no mistaking it. It's the way they look at you; a combination of admiration and lust. That look is unmistakable and it makes me feel like I'm on cloud 9. There's nothing like being in love. For me it is the most beautiful and uplifting thing in life and living without it is torture. It's like not living at all which is how i have felt for a few years now. I feel like I'm am the walking dead just going through the motions of life but not really living.
But it's not only my feelings and my life that breaks my heart, it's his as well. I can't help feeling incredible guilt about my feelings about him. I love him SO MUCH as a person; how could i not? I've spent every day for the past four years with him. What i feel is great affection and a protective kind of love for him. Unfortunately that's not how you should feel about your husband. This is not the kind of relationship I envisioned having as an adult. In fact it's the total opposite of the kind of life and relationship I've always longed for. It's actually quite ironic that i ended up this way, being that love and passion have always been so important for me! The sad truth is that I've stayed with him because of the house; because i don't have the heart to leave him after all we went through to buy our house. If we were to sell now it would probably be at a loss not to mention the fact that his mother gave us the down payment for the house-- that's another 15K down the toilet and money he will never get back. I just can't do it. I cannot do that to him. The last thing i want him to do is suffer and if I were to leave him not only would his heart be broken but he would also be in financial ruin.
At this point i don't know what the answer is. Do i sacrifice myself for his happiness or do i end our relationship and put him through the unavoidable financial and emotional agony? I don't know. I don't know. The thing is, I don't even think he's happy either. He can't be. How can he, when our relationship is so bad?? Not only do we no longer have sex but we don't even enjoy each others company. We fight constantly, we disagree about EVERYTHING and not in a good way. This is very sad to say but i almost feel like I dislike everything about him. I hate the way he thinks, his general attitude about life and i absolutely hate the constant state of negativity that he's in. I have never met anyone that young and that hung up on little things. It's like he has the soul of a bitter old man and i don't know how to change that. My biggest mistake has been letting this go on for so many years when i knew in my heart it was all wrong. He is absolutely wrong for me. How did i let this happen? How could i stay with someone who doesn't make me happy; who's NEVER made me happy??!!!!

on the way to becoming a woman....

So let's fast forward a little bit here....I was 9 when my parents divorced and there were a only a couple years of stability before the instability came. My teenage years were the worst. I bounced around between my mother and my father. I felt lost and frustrated. I wanted to conquer the world yet i felt immobilized, mostly because of my age. I wasn't old enough to work or have a car! That's also when my depression started. During those years i became very reserved and introverted. I guess i was internalizing how sudden and drastically my world was changing. A few years after my parents divorced, my mother married my father's uncle....which needless to say created a lot of tension in our family. It wasn't so much the fact that he was my dad's uncle, after all, my father had remarried long before my mother married my dad's uncle, it was the fact that he was a horrible person. It's funny but he was everyone's least favorite uncle. How do i even begin to describe the kind of person he is?...the first thing that comes to my mind is his negativity. He is probably the most negative person I've ever met in my life. He's the kind of person that exudes negativity. He was paranoid about everything, a miser, a control freak and worst of all, had an unpredictable temper, which always made me walk on eggshells around him. Basically he bullied my mother into marrying him. He threatened to hurt himself, then he threatened to hurt her or burn our house down. She married him out of fear. To me it felt like a living nightmare i couldn't wake up from. He was the opposite of everything I knew growing up. I wasn't use to living in a hostile environment. For christ sake, I never even saw my parents argue in front of us! It was absolutely alien to me and having to adapt to that type of environment was a HUGE shock and detrement to me. When i look back now it's NO WONDER I was a depressed teenager!!
But through it all I never lost my passion for life and I never stopped dreaming. As a child I was often called pretty or beautiful which i believed until i became an awkward teenager and felt ugly and unattractive. I also went through an awkward stage where i didn't want to be "pretty" so i did everything in my power NOT to be, which is something i usually don't even try to explain because i know people would never understand. Unlike most teenage girls, I made NO effort to try to look attractive. There was something that i liked about being unattractive and it's kind of hard to explain. I guess it was the challenge that i liked. After all how easy is it to attract men when you're physically attractive?? On the other hand, if you are a plain or unattractive girl and still manage to attract the opposite sex then that means you're something special! Very odd thinking for a young girl, I know but that's what has always set me apart from the other girls. I was defenitely an odd bird at the time. I dressed like a middle aged woman and listened to Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand while my peers listened to Nirvana and Pearl Jam. My interests at the time were theater and film. I was convinced I was going to either be starring in or directing movies, therefore, I was an eccentric 15 year old who knew more about film history than about fashion! I was also into vintage clothes before vintage clothes was considered cool! In that regard i was never a follower and I'm proud of it. Along with having sophisticated interests for a girl my age I also had sophisticated interests in men. I was very disinterested in the boys my age. Instead I was daydreaming of men like Cary Grant and Robert Redford...lol.
There's also a little anecdote i would like to share about this chapter of my life. An anecdote that is important because it's something i will bring up later. During this time I had very few girlfriends but there was a boy that i considered the closet thing to a best friend. He was about two years younger than me but also wise beyond his age; something that usually happens to kids who are faced with harsh circumstances in their young life. I guess it forces you to grow up faster. His home life was far worse than mine was. Technically we were related. He was my 3rd cousin which means his mother and my father were 1st cousins. I met him for the 1st time when i was 11 years old and he was 9. He had just come to the U.S. from Cuba and was meeting all his relatives, including his father, for the 1st time! For some reason, though he was significantly younger (in kid years)than I was and didn't speak English, we had an instant gravitation towards each other. I took him under my wing like an older sister and introduced him to American culture. I was still somewhat of a tomboy and we shared the same energy level and enthusiasm. He was extremely precocious, as was i and already at 9 was a great listener. We continued our friendship on and off all through my teenage years. During those awkward High School years, he was my best friend, my confidant. By this time he was also an awkward teenager. He was skinny and in the midst of puberty. He was no longer a high-strung and mischevious boy but a shy, sensitive and mature young man. I have to admit that from the beginning I took advantage of his sensitivity and his younger age. I seemed to like that fact that he was a little intimidated by me; the way he hung on my every word made me feel important and powerful. Very good for my ego.