The tragedy continues...

Forgive the impertinence but I never believed when it was written that ‘To whom much is given, much is expected.’ Take for instance the case of work supervisors. In the past five years that I have been torturing myself in the office I have known only one supervisor who works herself to oblivion. She usually puts life and work in the same equation and is worthy of more than a lifesize molded gravel and sand in Luneta. Then came the nightmare. I was taken under the wing of a non-Filipino boss and as soon as I put that I-need-not-soften-my words-to-get-my-message-across smile it was immediately wiped off by the you’re-just-a-Filipino-staff smirk by my supervisor.

Of course it would be self-aggrandizing to claim that I worked myself to death (because i am still kicking!) in an effort to empty the well of work, so I won’t claim that heroic attempt to salvage the Filipino pride, or the hardworkers of world, for that matter. You can not salvage something which can not be killed.

Suffice to say, that even with so much effort to remain a wallflower, well, at least a useful wallflower, I can not seem to stop myself from getting into sticky situations. The tragedy is, even if we argue black and blue that the there is no such thing as a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, she would insist that the I haven’t looked that hard. Yup, digressing again. Anyway, the meaning being simply that the powerful, always defines, the powerless is defined (citation forgotten).

As a lowly employee everyone would think that I am mentally challenged, never mind that everyone knows the boss is utterly exasperating in spelling and doesn’t have an inkling of an idea when it comes to human relations. And we take this everyday in our own country – from institutions where human rights, equal opportunities are the rah-rah slogans. Everyday, I take crap from people who’d find even a way to blame adam and eve for the tiniest of mistakes, who thinks that a diploma sealed with the empty airs of some US University is worth more than a UP tracing paper bought cheaply at the shopping center. Forget that the word following has no plural form no matter how many numbers follow the colon. I am flabbergasted, disillusioned and has lost whatever faith I put in social justice and I no longer believe that the world is round. To whom much is given, much will be given more, so workers of the world unite… my apologies to unforgotten sources of these quotes.

Yup everything here is quotes. But who cares?

...serial tragicomedy

I am one of the slaves in an international organization meatgrinder in the country and somehow that statement seems cold, callous and unpatriotic way of describing our beloved Motherland. So on the risk of sounding overly parochial, I’d say, I work here in our Motherland, the Philippines (and still that statement has an overly dramatic ring to my ear). I wish I lived in the days when Henry Ford’s workers are able to buy what they manufacture with their salaries. Forget that you have similar drab colored cars and always seem to be in a funeral convoy. At least he knew what fueled consumption behaviour. The glory of capitalism.

Fortunately for capitalists and anti-capitalists, we live in an age where the dividing line is similar to sotanghon – thin and translucent - where everything is interpreted on a level of metaphors and everything revolves around the meaning of meanings but oh, Wendt would object and say that ideas, institutions and material capacities would always determine who eventually determines meanings, and in the end, power. Meaning then becomes a non-issue– it becomes a given. My apologies to the constructivists. We no longer discuss metaphors, we bleed ourselves dry to interpret meanings - meaningless and colorless statements become subject of endless debates. And we’re not even on the same dimension. Going back to the context of a workplace, and on the risk offending the sensibilities of avid readers, I’d quit writing disjointed stories and get down to the gist of an ephemeral assault... maybe later?

Tragedy of the (un)commons

Around 1960’s Garett Hardin specifically used the same phrase to describe the problem of free-rider in public goods. He has nothing to do with the rest of this article. The title just seemed to have attracted my current mental state. So econ majors, I am not going into the lengthy details of the herd story and try to go around in circles with the hope of convincing you through my lame arguments. If you put economists in one room, they may not be even agree on a single thing , so I won’t even try.

I would’ve want this column to be named high blood because I am precisely at that state but I have not reached that age when it is fashionable for me to mull over the atrocities of daily existence with such relaxed musings, resigned expression, tamed activism topped with we-can’t-help-it shrugs and deep exhales. I am at an age where signing up for friendster is still reasonably tolerable (even with studio-shot photos complete with silly hats) but at that point where forwarded if-you-don’t-email-this-you-die chain letters would go directly to email trash bins without having been slightly pillaged. In short, I just turned 26. Never mind the connection.

Braindead-er by the day

I thought it might do my grumpy little self a lot of good to go out and do something different, for once, and I decided, spur of the moment, that it’ll be this summer or never. After this soul searching, I hope and pray that I’d have enough realization to stick to “things I’m supposed to do as a 23-year old”.

Since my braincells are taking a break, when asked for the reason in enrolling in “recreational” classes, I can not even compose a profound and noble answer like those of my classmates to satisfy my maestro’s need for self-gratification – you know how much teachers wanted to hear that reason for enrolling is because “we love so and so very much”. Instead, I ended up giving a not so intelligent reply of, “ I wish I know why”.

Even if I refuse to do much thinking, I ended up complaining the gullibility of characters in every sequel in the nighttime soaps I’m sure my sister’s just dying to throw me the vase or smash me in the head. I can’t sit in front of the tv and say nothing. Every night, I keep on promising myself not to say anything uncomplimentary but my mouth seems to have a mind of its own! And since I enrolled myself in a language class I used to take in the undergrad, my reaction every class bordered from sheer boredom to contempt for the professor who assumed we knew nothing. And so starts the supposedly enjoyable summer.

Summer of What Youth

So my summer swings from my classes to frequent drop-bys in my former work hole. Whenever I ask some of my friends for their work, they tell me everything’s fine, and start complaining all sorts of office blahs. Terribly so, I miss all the complaints. After how many nights regretting and not regretting that I quit work, I am suddenly uncertain where to go. I mean, while doing absolutely nothing has appealed me for a while, I realized doing nothing at all tremendously improves shopping mall’s gains at the expense of deflated brain cells and reducing one to a mere spiritual pauper. Spiritual pauper. And I’m supposed to be soul-searching. I worked three d!mn years for my personality to be stable, I mean I can look a person in the eye and say that I am contributing more to fullness of humanity than individuals my age, at half the price. You know, many institutions still believe that age must be relatively proportional to salary.

Once I tried inquiring about a dance lesson and about to pay the fee. A mother sitting next to me is patiently waiting for her turn to pay for her daughter’s tuition, I glimpsed the line next to age. It was seven. I was supposed to be having a dance lesson with a seven-year old kid! A good ego booster, indeed! I said bye-bye to a cool cool hip hoppy groovy summer. But I refused to be bullied into such “immature outlook”, so I started looking for other studios and (un) luckily, I found one. I also enrolled in a European language class to occupy time and so for the few weeks following came the unparalleled boredom of my life.

A couple of weeks after my good senses took their leave, I was constantly haunted by how much the no-particular-reason reply is keeping me awake at night and asking me where all these is leading to. Getting a life or being sick and tired of the real life? Amazing how real is used to convey a totally different meaning, hmn? If I had more sense, I shouldn’t have let my braincells take their leave and let life’s joke push me towards the dance studio and a language class. Now that they’re back, bored yet happy and refreshed, I think I can start some damage control on the way I play this GAME called LIFE. Now that my senses are back, I get to stand back a little and think over why I suddenly bolted out of the office door and came running into not-so-interesting classes. Rationalizing seems to be the best cure for my insanity.

Braindead-er by the day

I thought it might do my grumpy little self a lot of good to go out and do something different, for once, and I decided, spur of the moment, that it’ll be this summer or never. After this soul searching, I hope and pray that I’d have enough realization to stick to “things I’m supposed to do as a 23-year old”.

Since my braincells are taking a break, when asked for the reason in enrolling in “recreational” classes, I can not even compose a profound and noble answer like those of my classmates to satisfy my maestro’s need for self-gratification – you know how much teachers wanted to hear that reason for enrolling is because “we love so and so very much”. Instead, I ended up giving a not so intelligent reply of, “ I wish I know why”.

Even if I refuse to do much thinking, I ended up complaining about the gullibility of characters in all the nighttime soaps I’m sure my sister’s just dying to throw me the vase or smash me in the head. I can’t sit in front of the tv and say nothing. Every night, I keep on promising myself not to say anything uncomplimentary but my mouth seems to have a mind of its own! And since I enrolled myself in a language class I used to take in the undergrad, my reaction every class bordered from sheer boredom to contempt for the professor who assumed we knew nothing. And so starts the supposedly enjoyable summer.

Blind Curves...

Life takes too many turns much too soon. In a couple of weeks, i'd be damning myself into a different direction and it rattles every fibre in my being - meeting new people, facing new challenges, sending my braincells in the unexplored realm and maybe, just maybe, finding my own happiness.

Chronicle of Boredom Foretold (with apologies to GGMarquez)

Hundred words are racing through my mind this very moment but one line keeps sticking like a glue - life sucks! Life sucks big time. If there is a case of sudden loss of self realization between adulthood rebellion and mid-life crisis, I just might label myself as that. Writing, as a way of exonerating this uncertainty over life in general, never fails to work its magic and God forbid, what Sean Connery in Finding Forrester applies here – that, “I am not writing for anybody but myself, ” or something to that effect. So, pardon the high-schoolish rants...

I am sick and tired of the rat race so I decided to break away from it all – work, grad school, anything that has to do with using too much brain cells. I was hit by a realization that what I have been doing for the past 23 years of my life is exhausting myself into getting a good education, good work and good life that even a weekend doing nothing depresses me. In short, whereas before, getting a life never bothers me, now it frightens the hell out of me that I haven’t been experiencing that much. Never mind that I am 23 and supposed to be pursuing and exploring the greater heights of my career (if there ever is one) or doing things befitting my age. Duh, who dictates what I’m FIT to do?

...my mind has a freezer

Somewhere in my mind exists a big freezer where I keep all these feelings wrapped up in foil-frozen - and when I have time or when I choose to have time, take some out, thaw them, dissect, then analyse. A delaying mechanism. I decided since I can’t remember when, that since my memory bank has limited space, I’d only keep those emotions which have been thawed and analysed from my emotional freezer. That way, I could prevent myself from feeling too much consuming emotions towards anything, you know grudges, hatred, etc., etc…

I got sick and tired of society and disillusioned with life so early and I am at that point where nothing could get any worse. There goes a half-filled freezer.Unfortunately, I seem to have more time filling in my emotional freezer than filling my memory bank. More often, the substance of those ‘frozen’ emotions would’ve disappeared, and all I’d be dealing with are the fragments of memories of how I felt about certain things. Of how I remember what I felt, what I should’ve felt and why. I keep on confusing the two and more often, my memory of things and people get mixed up in a clouded space.It is a form of adaptation in an environment that does not permit the musings of baser human emotions. Otherwise, I would end up being the discontented, whinny cry baby that I, at the subconscious level, really am.

Unfortunately, my memories are part and parcel of those emotions and with them tucked away in my freezer, I can not seem to remember things that would’ve comforted me that my years have been worth living. When I was younger and the preoccupation of mind is less utilitarian, I can remember having simultaneous feelings about things that I’d end up confusing myself. And although I can not figure out how I feel about things, I always remember how, when it rains, I feel a deep sadness which now that I am old enough to have figured life (yeah, right), reminds me of the first stirrings of melancholia, of how certain songs produce different sensations that I couldn’t almost grasp, and how deaths of so few among the seemingly hundreds of important people made me cry, of how the thought of Christmas routines send me to unparalleled elation.

Maybe it was because of emotions I ascribed to things, places and people that I have a crystal clear memory of what happened to my life in the previous years, what stirs the heart inspires the mind. And maybe the reason why I can vaguely recall what I did two years ago during my birthday was mainly because my mechanical brain will not digress and thaw those emotions, that my brain has become passive to life, that what happened is much more important than what I felt when it happened.

The reason, I think, why people lose their memories when they age is that their brain have become comfortable in dealing with the routines of everyday life, of going through the same path everyday. The mind reinforces what it thinks everyday and since I ascribe the same ‘contentment’ on the way things work everyday, my mind only remembers those things which are out of the ordinary, about things that evoked certain emotions. But otherwise, my mind is an ordinary empty shell. Sometimes I feel like am suffering from Alzheimer’s although I don’t think I’ve reached the age when I am a potential candidate for that disease. At times I can’t remember names, places, things and happenings and all I feel or I think I feel are sensations. And so at these times, I can hate things and people without remembering the reason why but most of the times, I find it emotionally consuming to feel anything at all, I get tired of feeling anything that I’d start filling in my emotional freezer. Its much better than carrying a load of bottled up emotions in my backpack. But I can only afford so much emotional freezers in my lifetime. Sooner or later, I’d have to clean up the fridge, of which, I know is getting filled-in pretty fast. Until then, I am contented with emptiness, or the blessed absence of pain, whichever is more convenient. I am an inveterate procrastinator, urgency does not exist in the realm of possibilities.

Abstraction from the freezer

My rational self has taken its toll like a curse, for years and for endless moments on days to end, I keep thinking about things that I should be thinking about - work, what I’d do the next morning, where I’d go tonight, how I’ll empty the well of work that seems bottomless. My preoccupation with the routine of living life, that is, of being routinely 'rational' has eaten all that is supposed to be what artists call ‘creative juices’. I bore myself with writing technical reports, that’s what I do for a living, boring myself, maybe until my last breath. And since I live a very ordinary life, the kind of life that makes me even doubt of my own existence, I do not have anything interesting to write about except maybe, when at sudden bouts of clearheaded drunkenness, I find the world a little bit bearable. Then my diary gets a fair account of my mind.

At long periods of ‘normalcy’, I can’t imagine things and my mind is confined within narrow technicalities of executing tasks in the rigid, mechanical life that I am used to. The mind that should be left to wander traverses the same path everyday so much so that the unfamiliar recesses of consciousness are left idle, barren, unexplored. I can not go back to that road, or at the end of the road as often as I used to, new patches of grass have sprouted, animals scattered all over the place that makes me uncomfortable. It’s like being in a familiar place but seeing different things, different people, something happened and it creates that uncomfortable feeling as if the place have known you all its life and yet treat with the same aloof disregard as everybody else.

Existential Preview

At the end of third year, while I was pirouetting, doing all kinds of tasks and losing my temper at the snap of a finger, I considered it was time to go. I don’t believe in keeping a job for the sake of keeping a JOB, so when I started dreading doing what I used to love doing, I started saying my goodbyes. I told myself that if I keep such a demanding job, life will really start at forty. By then, I will surely be too grumpy and grouchy for any saints’ patience that no one would want to accompany me in “getting a life”. They thought I was bluffing and for a time, I wanted to get away as soon as possible to prove my point. But to avoid appearing a pompous plutocrat, I stayed the requisite period for them to find a replacement.

While working for a development institution has hammered in me a noble responsibility of thinking for the “less fortunate individuals” (hah! condescending) I became too emotionally involved with work, not knowing where my personal life starts and my where my work starts. For a time, I confused friend with officemate, officemate with confidante. Though this worked for a time being, and helped me through my rainy days, I woke up one day and found out that life and friends may not necessarily be synonymous with WORK. I learned that while I can have friends and develop a good relationship with officemates, I should learn to keep a decent distance for my sanity.

For a time, my disengagement syndrome was masked by the vitality of school, etc, the etc taking up more space in my journal, but at the end of the semester when it started to wane, I had the sudden urge to do things I never got to do when I started working, problem is, I never knew what they were exactly. That was when I started enrolling in all sorts of classes. I thought my senses have completely abandoned me but I woke up this morning, they’re suddenly waking me up to pick LIFE from where I left it, enjoy whatever is left of the summer. Though I had to pay a high price to gain the lost momentum and had to endure the embarrassment of missing dance steps and mispronouncing all the words, I had to pick up the lessons from the riotous maze of life. Though I can not put an adage to what I learned, I get the feeling I am finally accepting that I cannot just throw away the 17 years of good education and pretend to be somebody else and do something without any purpose, whenever I feel like it. I have to face the responsibility of creating more positive externalities, otherwise, I shan’t be able to forgive myself for sitting idly by and letting life’s course take me on . I suffering from temporary messiahnic complex, i know, i know...

Frozen not stirred

At times, I feel that I do not own my mind, as if its just there to complete my human side, that I can not make it think of something other than the things that I keep thinking everyday. As the theory of reinforcement would no doubt suggest(whatever that is), the more I keep thinking about these things, the more my braincells get comfortable with the rhythmic ‘functional’ tasks. It can not be bothered to deal with the senseless feelings of loneliness, solitude, sorrow, love and other such rumblings which ironically sends one to heights of unearthly happiness and overflowing inspiration. I ran out of inspiration to appreciate and embrace life. I seem to have ceased feeling anything but numbness...