March 1999

Dr. R___ was telling us about the Jungian shadow --- comprising our weakness, hatred, fear or desire. The shadow should be tolerated to a certain degree before it manifests violently, before objectifying it, or seeing it outside of ourselves.

We should never let other people have knowledge of our weakness, fears, or desires. The knowledge of weaknesses, fears and desires --- denotes its exploitation.
“We are all parasites.” ____ once told me. Whatever she meant by that. It appealed to me as a profoundly philosophical insight. In that metaphor she captured the very essence of human relationships: our selfish need for each other. We cling to each other because we suck juices off our host, until the host gets all scoobied up and we find new ones to be parasitic on. The sentence was just so beautiful. Have I corrupted her drift? Have I pseudo-intellectualized it?

Because I can never tell them, I love my parents, and my brothers.

Confidence often ends up in conceit.

People are optimistic for you not because they are genuinely optimistic for you. They are merely kind. Optimism is often a failed sweetener in a bitter life. What I meant to say is, optimism is often false.

Walking along Julio Nakpil at late afternoons, probably after drizzles or a downpour, I smell the peculiarity of asphalt and rain water, and the bay. Along the bathed street I walk and watch the bars prepare for a night’s party and its pretension. The clouds are orange, chromatically transforming to pink, blue and violet then black. The sun is sleeping in the east. I saw it last near the Church after coffee and croissant. I wonder how this appeared in 1930.
From Strange Days, “Paranoia is the highest scale of reality.” So true.
From watching a one of the Japanese films in this year’s Eiga Sai, My Sons:
- Old people are being discarded to make them realize how screwed up life really is. Then they let them die.
- Japanese people are so generic, they all look like action figures or dolls.
- Substantial and honorable economic principle: “I want to work hard, have a good bath, and work again tomorrow.” This moistened my fucking eyeballs real well and I nearly burst into tears when I heard it uttered in all the actor’s dumb sincerity.
- “The first gulp is always the best.”
- Touchy, but not nauseatingly touchy.
- Japs can be so touchy and so funny in their exaggerated gestures.
- Can we really blame people who climb the corporate ladder and are workaholics? Are they merely eccentric? Apathetic?

From Jailbird, by Kurt Vonnegut: “Policemen protect property rights, but not human rights.” “Vacancies had suddenly become extinct as dodo birds.”

Heaven flushes its acid teardrops on summer. Times like these, nature tries to sympathize with life’s dryness. But I cannot help but loathe Sunday afternoons when it rains, there nothing listenable and I don’t have the drive to study.

I really shouldn’t intellectualize things, and I concede that I never did so at all.

It left more than stunned or flabbergasted when Dr. A____ once mentioned, “On what grounds can we ask, Why?!” Why do people have all sorts of claims to intelligence?


Spontaneously enough, H. and I went for a drink to discuss his libel suit. We’re barely eighteen, and here he is in National TV and AM radio with a libel suit. All the while I thought I’d see him with beads of sweat streaming down his brows, his jaws clacking. With all the adrenaline shot up in his life, he managed to stay nonchalant.

It just popped out of my mind, what H. mentioned to me, that post-structuralists believe, or perhaps some them, that language is causing the destruction of society.


During the bus ride, I sat beside a young mother, roughly aged around 19 or 20, who cradled an infant in dark brown, weary arms. The baby was lying flat on his/her stomach. The edge his/her tiny feet tickled the bone of my knee. The mother looked panicked and asked me if I could reach her umbrella for her. I did most gladly.
The tot started crying, faintly, to increasing loudness. On that cue, the young mom beside me began to unbutton a portion of her white, sleeveless blouse and slipped a breast out. I looked away but she’s already bared her nipple --- the color of soil. It was an interesting, non-pornographic public image… until one begins to wonder if she was a slut who got pregnant, or a provincial girl who got banged by some nutty farm boy who brushed her off. So it goes for our socio-cultural stereotypes.
As I hope, I see her as young woman celebrating her motherhood.