Happily Ever After

And that should be, happily EVERY after.

After a great dinner cooked with special care by a special someone.

After two rounds of dark mocha consumed over four hours of senseless and non-meaningful but extremely fun powwows of bitching around with like-minded people.

After sex, most specially.

In between, it's an entirely different story.

The one thing my Papa taught that stuck (everything else was in one ear and out the other) is that we were not born to be happy. The bawling after coming out of that dark smelly place is ominous. Because life is sad and often scary. It sucks. It's unfair. So deal with it and get on. The upside, he said, is that whatever happiness comes our way is always memorable and will be treasured forever, and that I should seize the moment and make the most of it.

Of course it took me half a lifetime to learn that lesson, but I learned it anyway. And that was after years and years of trying to create, generate, and otherwise fabricate conditions for making happiness happen. Like the endless nights out, and cramp-inducing retail therapy. Like snob coffee and snobbier nosh. Like iPods and digicams and laptops. Like cars and condos (both of which I don't have, nyahaha). Like climbing up the corporate winding staircase (ladders are for laborers, 'chos!). And sometimes, like desperately seeking the ONE that completes me.

Futile. Because the happiest moments happen when I least expect them. Like while reporting on the elasticity coefficient in 4th-year HS Physics, my uhog ballooned and popped. So, okay, mucus has a high coefficient. Pure joy, ya? And boy did I seize that moment. And so did my classmates.

A little bit wiser now, whatever happiness comes my way I take. After, I thank the divine alignment of probability fields that made such moments happen. And when these alignments don't happen, I wait for the next. Maybe it will happen while I run up and down the winding staircase, or maybe when I buy a 150 ml Creed tester for less than two thousand pesos. Who knows? I don't.