Behind the Scenes

I had a productive shopping spree yesterday at Powerplant Mall @ Rockwell yesterday with my brother and my mom. To put a wonderful end to a great shopping spree, we went to Chelsea Market Cafe at The Fort to eat dinner. (http://chelseamarketcafe.com/menus.html)

I got to taste two very interesting dishes. The first one is risotto balls. It is made up of sticky rice used to make risotto, rolled into a ball coated with breadcrumbs, fried to a crisp, and filled with cheese inside. It was heavenly.

The second one was chocolate dipped crispy bacon waffles. The bacon was fried (or baked, I’m not really sure) to perfection, making it really crispy, after which the top half was dipped in rich chocolate. The combination of sweet and salty was perfect for the palate.

Okay, enough about the food, since that is not the purpose of this blog entry.

While having dinner, I could not help but overhear the conversation of the couple over at the next table. (The tables were very close to one another and not because I was being a busybody!) I am not really sure how the conversation started, but somehow, they ended up talking about how people make choices. The guy made a very good point. He said, “Often times, we don’t know what we want, we only know what we don’t want.”

It made perfect sense. This is so true, especially for us fresh graduates trying to look for a job, or high school students applying to university. We are given so many choices and we try to pick those that we should apply for, and almost always end up applying to a multitude of unrelated positions. Whichever one we get is irrelevant, as long as we get something.

We begin to settle. We no longer want to think about what we really want to do. We are ready to do whatever job it is that we don’t mind doing. We all have a mental list of things that we really don’t want to do, such as be a construction worker, a clerk, a cleaner, and all those dead-end low paying jobs. We will accept everything else.

I guess it is true when my friend told me, “ I really respect you. What you are doing is hard, but at least you know what you want to do. Most of us don’t even know what we want.”