April 1999

I had given my muscles a reason to rejoice by doing stretching, jogging and exercising almost daily. After what seemed like an eternity of choosing to be bed-ridden, I never had such fondness for making sweat ooze out of my pores, and burning the accumulating slabs of fat in every inch of my body.
Even though it’s only in a machine, I really liked running. Running made me feel active, free and functioning. I’m running and I’m running away.

After watching a so-so movie, “Meet Joe Black,” I wonder how it could’ve been all-too-fantastic if everybody would think that you'd would die tomorrow or the day after or in such proximity that you would always be kind. You would always be grateful to everyone, and you would always try to maximize life to its limits.

Only by accident and not by deliberate intelligence did I receive a 3.6 GPA. Or is ‘deliberate intelligence’ merely, if there ever is such, just an accident?

Fear is contemptible.

Appeal to fear. Fear makes you see peril where there is none. It obstructs the clarity of thought, and prevents one from doing commendable acts of strength and wisdom of mind. Fear makes all actions contemptible, and would eventually lead to an absolute cowardice.
Fear of God, for instance.

Another “for instance….” - my fears when I'm taking the car out without permission. That permission carries with it respect and honor. What is honor anyway, according to N., but self-superiority made public.

Perhaps it is what N. really meant to “live dangerously,” i.e., to be never insecure about the insecurity of insecurities --- death.
To not think of death means to at least be able to live freely, to be able to live the now, to think, and therefore to be able to seek the truth and its greatness.

I just turned eighteen.

Most of the time, I’d merely want to be fascinated. To say, “that’s fascinating.”
As N. thought (without deserved respect, esteem or perhaps truth) about women, something or someone is profound only because we never tried to fathom their depths. They might not even be shallow, so N. says. Let the cliché go, “familiarity breeds contempt.” And the knowledge of weaknesses denotes the exploitation of it.

Dumb people try to hide their dumbness in intelligent language and technical jargon.

Why should wo/man be a social being? By that I mean, why should people always share their sympathies and common experience, if they can have their own ways with the world? Have your own way with the world, instead of ascribing to what everybody else (not that I am discrediting it, for something could be learned from them) has already done or accomplished.

N. had once more given me a reason to enter the churches again, and that is, to visit the beautiful, all-too-glamorous tombs and sepulchers of a dead God. God just might still be worthy of paying respect to, like some deceased relative we came to remember on grow occasionally sentimental about.