Perfumed Nightmare

House-isms

2010-03-02T14:06:00.000+08:00

Some of my favorite House MD quotes.

You're nuts. You're going to be miserable, at home, at work, somewhere. The goal in life is not to eliminate misery, it's to keep misery to the minimum.

You're good. Don't screw it up just because you're miserable.

Because I'm interested. When I'm interested, I describe the things that make me interested as interesting.

He's a happy idiot. That screws with your world view. There's something freeing about being a loser, isn't there? Why are you afraid to...?

You're a bureaucratic nightmare. You're a chronic pain in the ass. And you're a second-rate doctor at best.

You have three choices in this life. Be good, get good or give up. You've gone for column "D". Why?

You were doing better before you had a good idea.

You don't want to face it any more than my patient does! Dying's easy. Living's hard!

Christmas : Province Version

2008-01-16T11:11:00.000+08:00

The past few weeks have been wonderful. Unlike my "no-cook", boring life in Manila, my life in our sleepy province is the exact opposite - we still have no fastfood restaurant, so we really have to learn how to cook but no one still wants to eat what i cook; we only have one internet shop and it closes at around 5pm which is a good excuse for not having read any work-related emails; and we have no "entertainment" venue so people are very creative when it comes to inventing occasions to celebrate. Some of these i was also creative enough to escape, especially the weddings when i know that people will be making a big fuss of my unmarried state blah blah blah. I already have a standard reply when asked when i'm getting married, "perhaps tomorrow, its already getting late," then i'd smile and stare at my watch then excuse myself to find my missing sister. Its the best technique so far so i always ask her to sit away from me.

My little cousins have this curious habit of pointing at one another while sobbing barely understandable he-snatched-my-toy rants so I also did a lot of refereeing and broke the rule on chocolate bribing to settle the riot. I still believe that, for sanity's sake, children should be taught to walk by the time they're 7 ...with the onset of reason.

Anyway, during quieter times, i finished Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, both by Khaled Hosseini. Both are moving tales set in Afghanistan but i especially liked Kite Runner, perhaps because of its appeal to emotion hahha. It's not Nobel Prize writing material, and sometimes, i can't stand the use of he-killed-the-engine phrase. I don't know, perhaps the maggot in my brain causes it to short circuit when i read that phrase. But his style makes imagining all too easy. A Thousand Splendid Suns is better read in cheerful mood, i shouldn't have read it over Christmas. Its a bit too Hollywood-ish in style .I was just telling Kate that it's like titanic - its cinematically good but i won't subject myself to another seemingly endless tale of tragedy. Kite Runner's tragedies are, in most cases, unexpected, which makes it a bit more interesting. Maybe the appeal of the unknown?

We're now back in the office and last week was adjustment period again. Day 2 and i started hearing complaints of headaches, muscle pains, back aches and whatever possible aches. Kate said that this year, our sign is one of the few "unluckiest" so she's been feeding me many information to break the curse . Horoscope is one big business but it's still fascinating how people react to predictions.

Getting sober - Laotian style

2007-10-31T20:24:00.000+08:00

it's one of those trips that drives you nuts.

after a gruelling 12-hour trip of changing planes and waiting at the airport, a few days of adjusting to the "early-retirement" working hours, and enduring the probing glances of DOE (dirty old expats) i am finally coming to a drunken realisation that my life will always be a series of tragecomedies. i live on pure luck.

i always hated dining alone, i always feel so pathetic i'd rather work while having dinner than be alone staring at my food for at least 1.30 hrs. i can't take my meal faster than 1 hour lest i'll be suffering from a bad case of indigestion (believe me its not a good sight). here, in the taylac, i am forced to dine on my own and much as i want to have food delivered in my room, the restaurant doesn't have a room service. how nice...

so i have to endure the puzzling glances from the other tables of DoE. most of the DoEs here, by the way, have asian "companions" and they're not socialised into thinking that a girl of similar race can actually WORK!

Insults - from another blog

2007-05-31T17:19:00.000+08:00

read this wonderful blog with a collection of classic insults. read on...

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
Winston Churchill

"A modest little person, with much to be modest about."
Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."
Moses Hadas

"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know."
Abraham Lincoln

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
Groucho Marx

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend... if you have one."
George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second...if there is one."
Winston Churchill, in response

"I feel so miserable without you, it's almost like having you here."
Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others."
Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
Paul Keating

"He had delusions of adequacy."
Walter Kerr

"There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure."
Jack E. Leonard

"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt."
Robert Redford

"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge."
Thomas Brackett Reed

"He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them."
James Reston (about Richard Nixon)

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"
Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts...for support rather than illumination."
Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
Billy Wilder

Flying thoughts Vol 1

2007-05-30T12:48:00.000+08:00

May 2005

I took the photo of my empty coffee mug while waiting for the flight to Siem Reap amidst the hustle bustle of old Korean excursionists, poker-faced Japanese businessmen and urban techies in Phom Penh. If I die and become a coffee cup at the airport in my next life, I’d roll myself over with that cinematic slow motion. Of course, I’d pick the right sentimental idiot who’d be so dam sad he’d decide to pay for he broken coffee cup and put the pieces together in a collage. Then I’d be what I always wanted myself to be – a wall décor! hahahah
Funny how, in being alone for hours at the airport, I can almost hear the demons in my head pushing the clouds of indecision, and everything becomes sunny clear. I would travel the world over if only for being stuck in at least 2 airports in one flight, the longer waiting hour, the better. And I am not being sarcastic here. I like it especially when I get first to the boarding gate and everything is so quiet – the carpet sucks the footsteps, the whooshing of planes buffered by the walls – nothing but the bored flipping of expensive glossy magazine pages by estranged passengers, each silently swallowing their nervous anticipation. Well, there are those who needlessly fumble with their cellphones, whispering agitated goodbyes.

My imagination is a sucker for story lines, I have loads of stories running through my mind and if you combine all the hours spent waiting at airports, I could come up with 2 volumes of The Flying Thoughts, which, after a while even intensifies my fear that I have forgotten something in my absorption to different plots. Am I getting insane? I guess so…

I remember the 2-year old French “feeding bottles” (times two) competing for my attention in one of those flights. The lovers beside me abandoned their seats to some private world and the two gray-green-eyed kiddos joyfully took their turns amusing me with their mirrored playfulness. The other one (only called Moppet) , obviously being “more matured than her twin, Emma, sat beside me for almost the entire trip to Hongkong.

Have I been mommyfied? (Kundera’s term is daddyfied) The flight was long enough for me to teach them how to juggle with their seatbelts for hours and play with utter abandon, unmindful of the other passengers. There’s that serene expression in kids’ face that I really like. Sometimes, all I have to do is hold hands with kids and things seem to be less complicated. I remember kate telling me she cried one time she went to church and a child of about 4 or 5 offered her hands in singing the Lord’s Prayer. Why is it that when we get old things become more complicated? I never seem to answer this question properly.

I agree with you, traveling in itself is an awareness building and enlightening experience. Aside from meeting old incorrigible Koreans and kids who were taught by their parents that life is a curse-ible experience (I later on learned from kate that the words being shouted alternately was not what the father claimed it to be, it was some sort of a bad word, in French), there is that self affirmation that I can always revert to my former self of being a loner or introvert, whichever is lesser in intensity and more flexible.

Ankoring Myself

2007-05-30T12:46:00.000+08:00

May 2005

Last week I climbed the steep stairs of the legendary angkorwat, wearing a pair of comfortable sandals (an inch high, what was I thinking?!) and sleeveless Thai shirt. In my own assessment, I looked like a fashionable gypsy who wandered way too far from “base”. That happened after ten days of smelling saltwater while watching chelsea beat those morons, the pope being buried, rainier dying and the royal family boarding a bus to the reception and practicing my Khmer (i can pass for a khmer if i stay still and not open my mouth).

I have become a football fanatic (i changed my earlier choice of manchester U to chelsea), a well-informed citizen of the world and rediscovered my swimming skills in my spare time to compensate for the increasing number of white hairs and wrinkles due to crazy "development" approaches of a.. a...never mind.

I climbed the steep stairs of angkorwat and was shaking all over when I looked down at how high I climbed. Wow, some fear of heights! My pride prevented me from succumbing to the embarrassing urge of fainting. I would've wanted to faint the town red! hahahah

Being on top is like standing on the precipice of oblivion. The building has this indescribable ‘quietness” - sounds do not echo, whispers are carried away by the Apsara carvings, footsteps are absorbed by the Khmer mantras on the thick, old walls. Maybe I imagine too much things but I get this passive-aggressive feeling within the confines of the angkorwat. It is quiet but not empty. Well, empty but I didn’t get that feeling of nothingness. Proud but unimposing. Serene and yet you feel the turbulent past screaming all over the place. I may have heard the silent screams because i share the same internal turmoil?

It isn’t as disturbing as all other historic places I’ve been. Photographs and films may have stored away its own mind, its own history, it’s own sadness, its own character. Or maybe, it has accepted its fate. Whaaa, its freaky, talking to a beautiful bunch of stones. Maybe I shouldn’t be left alone to wander. I get all self-absorbed (?) and I always feel I am so in-sync with the world that I can be sucked in by the earth and be happy forever. Blame it on the moon.

10 G Forces

2007-05-30T12:40:00.000+08:00

July 2004

1o things i thank the G Friendship for:

1. All the times you listened to my senseless complaints – academic or otherwise and my nonsensical tales of men with bad nails, doctors with nice hands, marriage proposals from psychos

2. For popping in my office so that you can imagine me writing you, for all the dinners, beers, vodka, scotch, and the conversations that range from bizarre love triangles, amusing tales of kabadingan, extremely puzzling tales of stalkers

3. For pulling me around when I can’t swim in PG

4. For putting up with what many people think are my eccentricities

5. For reading my long emails

6. For introducing me to so many wonderful people I’ve never known before(i.e., Murakami, Coetzee, Gramsci, Todaro, and well, even Peou, Aglietta, Wallerstein & Braudel, to name a few)

7. For putting names into my father’s long time unknown ‘friends’- the sensation of being home when I hear jazz which my father plays every Sunday morning for as long as I can remember

8. For watching films that fail to evoke happiness

9. For trusting me enough to share how you feel about many things in life

10. For believing in me when I can’t even trust myself

Carlos-ian Wisdom (From CRC)

2007-05-29T17:07:00.000+08:00

Thanks for the lovely photo...when I see pictures like those, I always lament that one of my unfulfilled desires is to photograph LIFE, people, places, things...I am 6 years into retirement and I may yet fulfill this dream...as in second wind...

So, what's in a number? 27? 28? 29? Remember, they only have meanings because society constructed meanings for them...Note how our so-called debutantes at 18 years are "presented" to society in elaborate debut balls...

Do you know the historial antecedent of the debut in Europe ( which we don't share...)? 18 years used to be the time when their women are ready to become wives/mothers and are presented to the eligible males to be chosen... sus, how can you "present' somebody at 18 when they are having sex at 9???

I am re-reading a book now by Levinson titled Seasons in a man's life. It details the psychological, physical and hormonal changes that happen to women/men and how , because of the constructions and strictures of society, they are "expected" to do certain things at certain ages...this is where failed expectations come in, the angsts, the sense of failure, despair...

Why do singers/rockers kill themselves at an early age? I guess it may have something to do with the dog-eat dog life in the entertainment world where you have to sell your soul to be ahead of the game. It is also on account of the ungodly hours that they spend on the road, practising , etc so their body clocks have to be adjusted by drugs...the road from there is a slippery slope to a sense of hopelessness and despair and a sigh away from self destruction...Just a hypothesis...

Will be in US on 17th. Let's have lunch when I get back...

Freezing in Beijing

2007-05-29T16:57:00.000+08:00

Its 1 am and i just arrived from a long cold walk in Tiananmen Square. Beijing is wonderful at night but is a cold, almost dead and bare country in the morning. This is my last night here and i am now convinced that school is such a hassle. I have to get back to manila tomorrow in time for my exam on friday (yes, i am enroled in the DPA Program in NCPAG). I am thinking of skipping that exam, getting an incomplete and staying here for two days, hah! It would be worth it, am sure. I remember we wanted to wander around Asia together but things changed, eh?

On Finding the "Civil" in Civil Society (Letter to KL)

2007-05-29T16:54:00.000+08:00

I have serious problems with CSOs being preoccupied with the Weberian-type bureaucracy, but I'd like to think that the common objectives directed to MPA management, the "sense of belonging" to a single cause and the relative flexibility of their "rules and procedures" qualify them as CSOs. Was it Ostrom's group who wrote that 'conventional' theories are not sufficient to explain the dynamics of managing the commons?

A French technocrat, Aglietta(?) used some of Marx ideas in developing some sort of a regulation theory and compared society to a balloon, the burgeoning middle (representing the middle class) makes it possible to float in the air but widen either the base or the top and it immediately falls down. There's more of us going down to the base.

There's no shortage of brilliant minds interpreting the world in various ways, but only a few are up to the challenge of actually "changing it". The vanguards of the proletariat are now part of the executive that manages the affairs of the bourgeoisie. They're in Congress engaging in self-referential monologues.

You have to see To Live, an interesting perspective of China during the Communist Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, told not in an overly political and dramatic sense. There's no car chase but a lot of chasing counter-revolutionists, you can't tell the difference.

A very long story (letter to a friend)

2007-05-29T16:43:00.000+08:00

"Life is never too short, its just that you've been dead for so long", says the shirt of a teenager. Here's how i've been resurrected last December and since i am too lazy to write, might as well post an edited version of my email to Rae.

~~~
Just came back from a long holiday in the province (no internet, no malls, no frills) and I was able to recharge, sleep 12 hours a day and hopelessly answering bizaare questions from 4-year old cousins while watching national geographic and cartoon network, so here’s a long account.

It seems to be no life at all but it was what I needed. I regret not being able to catch up with anyone during the Congress. Every email i receive starts with "although we were unable to talk during the EAS Congress..."

I wanted to give you Pablo Neruda's Memoirs (you would've loved the book!, i swear)when we got hostaged to the SOA-PEMSEA dinner (again!) which lasted until the wee hours in the morning. Some parts of the "dinner", I no longer remember, thanks to Anchor Ice Beer and Great Wall Wine (?). I discovered that I can really get drunk to the point that my brain would stop taking in more memories, dangerous, eh?

My friends were teasing me the next day about my "obsession" with my shoe laces. They said that I kept on stopping along the way to check on my shoe laces (which were fine, by the way), but I really can’t recall any of it. The months of exhaustion may have finally taken its toll. We were all so drunk so i am not really sure if they were just bluffing or imagining something or what.But i couldn't dispprove their claim...

I woke up feeling like a zombie on 17th of December and realized that I just missed talking to people I would’ve wanted to talk to! So much for building partnerships...But the worse part of it all is that I couldn’t take a morsel of food without the feeling that I was gonna throw up . It didn’t help that I am not such a big fan of Chinese food, i just don't know why I can't get it in my system but don’t tell anyone.I lose a lot of weight when i'm anywhere in china, even hongkong for that matter. No one appreciates KFC and McDonald's more than I do when i am in China...

We left Haikou for Hongkong on the 19th and got to visit the Peak. Last time we went there, it was still being constructed, and well now, aside from the stunning view of the Victoria Harbour , it’s a good coffee place . There’s the “cute” WWF Office along the way and I contemplated dropping by to say hi to Andy but I decided against it knowing full well that they may be very busy wrapping things up before the year ends and besides I am not well acquainted with him so he may not remember me at all. Darn, missed that chance, Fra____r!

We were actually making an inventory of people we know so we can all give them a call but we can’t seem to come up with any names, hah! I visited the space museum and the museum of art, out of a freakish obsession with museums and anything that reeks of history, especially when it’s teeming with “communism”, hahaha. My friends enjoyed the shopping, they went to every nook and cranny buying every conceivable gif while I was fighting the impulse to buy another SLR camera. It’s a sickness really, camera shopping, tsk, tsk…i should see a shrink.

Kafka's Faint Shadow

2005-03-03T13:47:00.000+08:00

Some quotes from Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.

"When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don’t, and when they’re trying to run away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them."

"There is only one kind of happiness but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes."

"Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness is a story."

"People are drawn together by tragedy not by their own defects but by their own virtues."

"In dreams begin responsibilities."

"Artists are those who can evade the verbose."

The tragedy continues...

2004-12-21T08:26:00.000+08:00

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

2004-12-15T15:25:00.000+08:00

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

2004-12-10T21:51:00.000+08:00

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

2004-06-14T22:15:00.000+08:00

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

2004-06-06T22:13:00.000+08:00

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

2004-06-02T20:30:00.000+08:00

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...

2004-06-01T19:26:00.000+08:00

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)

2004-05-24T09:12:00.000+08:00

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

2004-05-01T07:18:00.000+08:00

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

2004-04-29T09:15:00.000+08:00

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

2004-04-25T10:02:00.000+08:00

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

2004-04-10T22:04:00.000+08:00

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...