The real tragedy of earning my degree in Philosophy (which should be soon enough) is entering the post-college limbo. During college, I have used parties and chewing on more ideas as an excuse to delay graduation. With almost less than two units, I’m almost there: the limbo where one grows up --- and grows up with an even more common tragedy: you grow up, and you run out of excuses for your failures.
Waiting for this Friday (course card day for Stat101)… waiting for the when, when I could say: the tragedy of my college life is over. Three days seems like an eternity away. I am glad to have the pleasure of reading Midnight’s Children comfort me, as cold gusts of December winds brush my skin. Yesterday, my thesis proposal has been approved with considerable commendation from G___ and Dr. E___. This at the very least, is a positive reinforcement for me. I’m confident I will receive a 4.0 in PHILRE1 that eradicates three units of my accumulations. I don’t consider this year as the grandest year of my life, but I would be glad to end it as I put an end my semi-sad affair with Statistics.
While waiting, I have once again resorted to the transitory yet big relief that a drinking binge brings. I went to the C__ Staff party last Monday, where the booze was unlimited. I had to limit myself though, because I had to bring the car along. I didn’t exactly have the grandest time of my life, but the party was all right. I am not sure if I am it looking at it in the right angle, but a lot of people in this staff has a certain kind of oddball quality in them. Of course, they probably find even more of that oddball quality in me, as I do frequently consider myself eccentric. But perhaps I should not judge people I have not known well.
The tragedy of my college life is over. I passed Statistics under Prof. D___, otherwise known as the most difficult professor in Statistics. I have failed the subject under another professor almost a year ago because I only attended the first four meetings. I also received a 4.0 in Thesis 1, after taking it twice. On both my terms taking thesis 1, I absolutely did nothing about it. These are trifling concerns, of course. But I must admit that they really are the major setbacks of my college life. For a measure of time, these setbacks had made me feel like a failure. I literally have passed my failures.
From Midnight’s Children, “Some afflictions, at least, are capable of being conquered.”
People are always fond of the people who appreciate them.
Ironically enough, I am supposed to be celebrating one of the last Friday nights of this year, or treating myself for my conquest over this small-time academic hurdle. But I'm not. I have not recovered from last night’s and the previous night’s hangover (at the terrific Harvard Café with their rather skillful dancers). Instead, I have spent the night driving my Mother and her Bunny Bunch Angels around CCP and Roxas Boulevard. I go home and read Salman Rushdie, who provides me with a quote (the last line I read before I stopped) too apt for my so-called conquest. Conquest, eh? I am laughing at myself.
I am hearing “Contessa” by Mozart through Winamp. Fantastic. It sounds appropriate when reading something like Lolita, and the kind of music Nabakov would listen when he's thinking Humbert Humbert.
I am hearing “Bye Bye Blackbird” by John Coltrane and Miles Davis through Napster.
Despite other afflictions that remain unconquered, I am able to say that at least, life is good for now.
H.’s Christmas text greeting goes: “How does it feel for an agnostic to celebrate Christmas? Easy, you hope that other people’s feigned and hollow happiness somehow rubs on you and in the process, hope that the happiness somehow becomes real, no longer feigned, no longer hollow. This is the most depressing ‘celebration’ of the year.”
H. is witty and eloquent as usual. I am not sure whether any of that “feigned and hollow happiness” really rubbed on me, but I did feel (as always) a bit happy --- without coercing myself to feign and pretend. But we do not measure the quantity, or the quality of happiness with yardsticks and paper cups. I just know that I felt happy somehow, and it was real.
This year’s celebration, however, is really a sadder one, with nation in crisis because of the impeachment trial. I barely noticed even a fake glint of the Christmas spirit that used to be there before. The country did not seem to be celebrating this Christmas, but country seemed mourning it.
Thus, I should no longer be surprised that __'s Christmas text greeting goes: I find no reason to celebrate the most superficial of occasions. I do not hope to absorb the artificial hope and happiness because it never becomes real… this is the most sickening sweetener to the bitter and absurd life we live out. So I’m not even going to greet you.
This was our first Christmas without my older Brother, who, as he has become a gentleman of intelligence and his own means, now works and lives in Singapore. My younger brother goes senti about him most of the time. And I miss asking him out for a drink, or him acting out his comical behavior, or our swapping of stories. In a more touchy occasion, when he called us while we were all eating with the terrific food cooked here at home, told me one time to leave ulam for him because he’s coming home for dinner. He's always had the redeeming kind of humor. Perhaps Kuya will find himself, his honest thoughts, his aspirations and his happy solitude, as he endures in a foreign land.
The year ended with a perfect irony --- in a time when fireworks light up the sky and the city at midnight is supposed to be bright as a star going supernova, the lights in our house went out. There was a brownout. Media Noche was had the perfect milieu. We had ham, wine, cheese, and candlelight.
Everyone had his/her new year’s wish, as my Father’s was for Estrada to Resign, and mine: that we may always be capable of conquering the most terrible of afflictions.
Sunday, December 31, 2000
Thursday, November 30, 2000
November 2000
Review of Related Literature. In the tradition of the “Review of Related Literature” in a thesis, I would like to do one (or maybe two) paragraph summaries of the non-school, purely-for-leisure books that I’ve been reading for the past two months. Most of these books have been borrowed from the library or provided for by my friends. Most of these are books my limited pocket couldn't afford.
The Tao of Philosophy by Allan Watts. As one would easily surmise, here is another Westener doing the Wisdom of the East routine. I have not read or heard of everything, but Allan Watts tells me nothing I have not heard of before (e.g., the human preoccupation with the “I” or ego, the Anthropomorphic nature of God, the inadequacy of language, or Nature’s domination in the course of all events.) I am more than thankful, however, that he reminded me of these things in a pleasant fashion. Sometimes I think so much of the future, or of what I’ll be doing next, to the point that I forget what I am doing. He reminded me and mde ask, how could I forget to live the now?
The language of Watts could be read quite effortlessly. With a Zen-inspired form, the effect becomes a soothing and yet mindful one.
There are a lot of clever ideas. Watts sees Epistemology as an effort to think thought, and therefore it is an effort to bite one’s own teeth. Also, he puts Nature in a beautiful oxymoron in saying that: “Nature is ordered anarchy.”
This book is a new acquisition from the library. I believe I was the first one who read the copy. It felt like de-virginizing someone. I read the first half of it before going to a party. The next day I read the second half in the wee hours of the morning, while listening to the Chill Out Project, with the lamp on and drinking green fucking tea.
Queer by William S. Burroughs. This actually qualifies not only as a beat-group book, but also as purely gay literature. It’s good to read gay literature when even M. accuses me of being homophobic sometimes. The story-line is simple: an American who is a withdrawing addict with really short-circuited sex drives lives in Mexico, exploring bars to scout for gays and splurges his money. Later on, he takes off to the South Americas with his pseudo-boyfriend to the South Americas in search of a mental telepathy-inducing drug called Yage.
Burroughs’ language is nothing but fantastic: very beat-group, very fifties, very very witty, with occasional Mexican and American cuss words. It's humorous, but always comes with a glint of loss and sadness. The events that transpire ride on the typical American-in-Mexico-during-the-forties stereotype, events of which are completely degrading to a country like Mexico. But perhaps it does happen.
I think like William Burroughs better than Jack Kerouac, and I’m putting another Burroughs, “Naked Lunch,” as a priority in my reading list. This time, I’ll buy myself the book. I read “Queer” in the room upstairs while listening to Café del Mar, Craig David, Moby, Joe, the Starubucks New York Jazz album, etc. (all pirated copies obtained from UM) with the newly-bought winner lamp on. I remember it was a Friday night so I made with reading more conducive by drinking around five beers and crunching some nagaraya nuts. I felt so fucking happy I even danced a little.
Listen up! Spoken Word Poetry. Spoken Word Poetry is an advancing form of poetry popular among poetry reading sessions in clubs and bars. The book features this, and it is not a coincidence that most of the authors are non-Caucasian and therefore marginalized. The language that runs in this poetry has its unique musicality that matches the colors and cultures of the authors. Some of the rhyme schemes would do for hip-hop. The content are as expected, the revolt of the black people against white oppression which sometimes sounds redundant. But perhaps it should never sound redundant until people start to really digest the point. I like it best though, if they write about Coltrane and Davis and it starts “raining rhythm.”
The author I like best in the book happens to be an Asian-American named Ava Chin. Her sensibility as her writer is close to me because it sounds Filipino. Her sad ironies deliver, and it usually is a reflection real-life event. I like her language --- rich but not too heavy, sarcastic, and very delicious. We kiss, we part, finger wide,/faculties open, folding our papers/our precious books like lost dreams and intangible mantras/scluicing the last of the coffee across our teeth/counting the streetlight to the station/praying to the subway gods at 2nd Avenue./Angry when they do not come.
The Postcard by Jacques Derrida. Nothing could be more clever than the idea of writing people in postcards with a thirteenth century portrait of Plato behind a Socrates who is writing. I only read the first hundred pages or so of this book, and it is supposed to be about postcards violating philosophy’s desire to communicate eternal truths independent of time and space. This is what is supposed to be represented or reversed, whichever, by the thirteenth century portrait. One would see this in the book, but even more, the book is also a love story exchanged in postcards. Derrida could be such a romantic, “I recognize that I love you by this --- that you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.”
Flying Over Kansas by Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas A book lent to me, (and eventually given) to me by A___ when he had our first real conversation at the Gokongwei smoking area. The language of the book fits well with the mold of New Criticism, a theory that seems to run with the bloodline of the Tiempo-Torrevillas gene pool. The language employed is so rich and delicious which makes reading so pleasant an experience. It's like swimming an entire Pacific of beautiful words and ideas without drowning.
Even Torrevilla’s fourteen year old daughter gets a grasp of this language. Rowena asked Rima on what color she might want to paint her room, so as to stamp more of herself on the room. Rima replies, “the blue was perfect; at night the floors and walls seemed to blend together so that she was floating on sleep itself.” One could only wonder how it is when Rima’s own words would unfurl themselves into full blossom at her own time.
Aside from personal essays in the book, it also has critical essays and lectures Torrevillas delivered that could be very helpful in reading literature, criticism, and seeing what probably is absent, but is actually present all along.
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. In the course of my reading this book, and I am still reading it, I have read nine or ten books already. This book, it seems to me, is a happy experience I do not want to end.
Some recent movies:
100 girls. (Watched with D.N. after going to the gym on a Monday.) Basic plot: goody-goody type college dude is stuck in the elevator of a girl’s dorm. He’s stuck in there with a girl whose face he doesn’t see. The girl and the guy bangs in the elevator. For the rest of the movie, the guy embarks on a quest to find this “mystery girl/cosmetic beauty,” whom he lost his virginity to. He musters up all his “cerebral energy” and devises ways to find the girl: but his ways simply equate to doing all that is conceivably stupid. Conceivably stupid = pretending to be a maintenance man, putting up an ad, looking up the match for the panties the girl left, dressing up as girl, and going to Women’s studies class. In the process, he meets around 100 girls, and gets to play hero or catalyst for some of them. Of course, he finds the girl, eventually.
You can't really expect much from the script. While the script and the screenplay does level up to the rather low wavelength expected in such movies, it had nothing new, nothing fascinating and nothing clever to say at all. Although not absolutely “nothing,” perhaps. Moreover, it had grossly objectified women: mothers, women’s studies teachers, women and their vanity, women in their self-pity, women beaten up by their boyfriends. There good of it, however, is a detailed exposition of sexuality what could be sexual stereotypes with most of them as cliches: e.g., the room mate, who is too preoccupied with size of his penis.
The main character makes these long-monologues, which are terrifically annoying. The director has flashback effects that are equally annoying. The movie was not funny, although it made me laugh for around three times in two hours. The educational sex scene was the only good scene.
Road Trip. (Seen with cousin and older brother at Glorietta 4.) This is one of the films where
I got a genuine laugh trip. I genuinely laughed until my jaws fell. I would include this in my top 10 best comedy category (the #1 of which is the legendary Tito, Vic, and Joey’s “Ma’am, May I Go Out?”). The humor, however, is often more funny when the punchline hits the peculiar sexual conduct of the characters. It is a film about college students and young people, like what is should perceived and what will likely to transpire after "American Pie." The good of the film is that it does not contain those intolerably mushy lines, and the look-at-me-look-at-me, fashion conscious, I-I-I vanity and apathetic attitude of the youth.
The film delivers a line that should perhaps define college life: it is the window of opportunity for us to do the craziest things, i.e., scoring for sex, and everyday, the opportunities are getting smaller. This gives me more reason to delay graduation.
Late Saturday afternoon. Listening to the usual playlist and some 98.7, I muse on my thesis and get to accomplish my thesis structure. I pass the decisive motion to the honorable judge, I am not going out tonight. I, the plaintiff, am awarded the 500 bucks I am going to save for not going out. Soon enough, I’ll be able to buy the hardcover Nietzsche volume at A Different Bookstore. Besides, I still have a party hangover from a friend's sister's party. Tonight, I am going to cook myself spaghetti, and I'll buy fried chicken or pork barbecue. Before that, I’m going to beat the meat, with the kind assistance of adult films starring the pearls of the Orient. I am also looking forward to the HBO Saturday night movie. Lately, I’ve been having a lot of sleep, pancakes, and some cyber___. What is even more pathetic are their strange-sounding names: e.g., diwata (who claims to be a geologist taking her Ph.D) and Smermaid (who likes bondage.)
Confessions getting truer and truer by the minute.
College is indeed, the window of opportunity to do both the craziest and the most intelligent things. And I believe I have accomplished the latter as much as I did the former, the way the Appollinian balances the Dionysian.
I went to the Sophia/Lit Circle party. Most of the philosophy professors were there, and I got the chance to toast beer and tequila with them once again. It's flavored with conversations on the chaos theory, Nietzsche, Feminism, garnished with genuinely good laughs, cigarettes and genuinely intelligent notions raised. In the end most people confessed to being perverts. Some people objected to being perverts. Some of them confessed to being lesbian or bisexual. Professors get to dance with students --- yes, I’ve seen them in action. Jim Morrison and Santana hung their music in the spirited air.
The booze was overflowing and I reveled in drunken euphoria. The most important realization of the night is that these parties give me more excuses to remain in College, where all’s swell and so well (except for Stat101).
The Tao of Philosophy by Allan Watts. As one would easily surmise, here is another Westener doing the Wisdom of the East routine. I have not read or heard of everything, but Allan Watts tells me nothing I have not heard of before (e.g., the human preoccupation with the “I” or ego, the Anthropomorphic nature of God, the inadequacy of language, or Nature’s domination in the course of all events.) I am more than thankful, however, that he reminded me of these things in a pleasant fashion. Sometimes I think so much of the future, or of what I’ll be doing next, to the point that I forget what I am doing. He reminded me and mde ask, how could I forget to live the now?
The language of Watts could be read quite effortlessly. With a Zen-inspired form, the effect becomes a soothing and yet mindful one.
There are a lot of clever ideas. Watts sees Epistemology as an effort to think thought, and therefore it is an effort to bite one’s own teeth. Also, he puts Nature in a beautiful oxymoron in saying that: “Nature is ordered anarchy.”
This book is a new acquisition from the library. I believe I was the first one who read the copy. It felt like de-virginizing someone. I read the first half of it before going to a party. The next day I read the second half in the wee hours of the morning, while listening to the Chill Out Project, with the lamp on and drinking green fucking tea.
Queer by William S. Burroughs. This actually qualifies not only as a beat-group book, but also as purely gay literature. It’s good to read gay literature when even M. accuses me of being homophobic sometimes. The story-line is simple: an American who is a withdrawing addict with really short-circuited sex drives lives in Mexico, exploring bars to scout for gays and splurges his money. Later on, he takes off to the South Americas with his pseudo-boyfriend to the South Americas in search of a mental telepathy-inducing drug called Yage.
Burroughs’ language is nothing but fantastic: very beat-group, very fifties, very very witty, with occasional Mexican and American cuss words. It's humorous, but always comes with a glint of loss and sadness. The events that transpire ride on the typical American-in-Mexico-during-the-forties stereotype, events of which are completely degrading to a country like Mexico. But perhaps it does happen.
I think like William Burroughs better than Jack Kerouac, and I’m putting another Burroughs, “Naked Lunch,” as a priority in my reading list. This time, I’ll buy myself the book. I read “Queer” in the room upstairs while listening to Café del Mar, Craig David, Moby, Joe, the Starubucks New York Jazz album, etc. (all pirated copies obtained from UM) with the newly-bought winner lamp on. I remember it was a Friday night so I made with reading more conducive by drinking around five beers and crunching some nagaraya nuts. I felt so fucking happy I even danced a little.
Listen up! Spoken Word Poetry. Spoken Word Poetry is an advancing form of poetry popular among poetry reading sessions in clubs and bars. The book features this, and it is not a coincidence that most of the authors are non-Caucasian and therefore marginalized. The language that runs in this poetry has its unique musicality that matches the colors and cultures of the authors. Some of the rhyme schemes would do for hip-hop. The content are as expected, the revolt of the black people against white oppression which sometimes sounds redundant. But perhaps it should never sound redundant until people start to really digest the point. I like it best though, if they write about Coltrane and Davis and it starts “raining rhythm.”
The author I like best in the book happens to be an Asian-American named Ava Chin. Her sensibility as her writer is close to me because it sounds Filipino. Her sad ironies deliver, and it usually is a reflection real-life event. I like her language --- rich but not too heavy, sarcastic, and very delicious. We kiss, we part, finger wide,/faculties open, folding our papers/our precious books like lost dreams and intangible mantras/scluicing the last of the coffee across our teeth/counting the streetlight to the station/praying to the subway gods at 2nd Avenue./Angry when they do not come.
The Postcard by Jacques Derrida. Nothing could be more clever than the idea of writing people in postcards with a thirteenth century portrait of Plato behind a Socrates who is writing. I only read the first hundred pages or so of this book, and it is supposed to be about postcards violating philosophy’s desire to communicate eternal truths independent of time and space. This is what is supposed to be represented or reversed, whichever, by the thirteenth century portrait. One would see this in the book, but even more, the book is also a love story exchanged in postcards. Derrida could be such a romantic, “I recognize that I love you by this --- that you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.”
Flying Over Kansas by Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas A book lent to me, (and eventually given) to me by A___ when he had our first real conversation at the Gokongwei smoking area. The language of the book fits well with the mold of New Criticism, a theory that seems to run with the bloodline of the Tiempo-Torrevillas gene pool. The language employed is so rich and delicious which makes reading so pleasant an experience. It's like swimming an entire Pacific of beautiful words and ideas without drowning.
Even Torrevilla’s fourteen year old daughter gets a grasp of this language. Rowena asked Rima on what color she might want to paint her room, so as to stamp more of herself on the room. Rima replies, “the blue was perfect; at night the floors and walls seemed to blend together so that she was floating on sleep itself.” One could only wonder how it is when Rima’s own words would unfurl themselves into full blossom at her own time.
Aside from personal essays in the book, it also has critical essays and lectures Torrevillas delivered that could be very helpful in reading literature, criticism, and seeing what probably is absent, but is actually present all along.
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. In the course of my reading this book, and I am still reading it, I have read nine or ten books already. This book, it seems to me, is a happy experience I do not want to end.
Some recent movies:
100 girls. (Watched with D.N. after going to the gym on a Monday.) Basic plot: goody-goody type college dude is stuck in the elevator of a girl’s dorm. He’s stuck in there with a girl whose face he doesn’t see. The girl and the guy bangs in the elevator. For the rest of the movie, the guy embarks on a quest to find this “mystery girl/cosmetic beauty,” whom he lost his virginity to. He musters up all his “cerebral energy” and devises ways to find the girl: but his ways simply equate to doing all that is conceivably stupid. Conceivably stupid = pretending to be a maintenance man, putting up an ad, looking up the match for the panties the girl left, dressing up as girl, and going to Women’s studies class. In the process, he meets around 100 girls, and gets to play hero or catalyst for some of them. Of course, he finds the girl, eventually.
You can't really expect much from the script. While the script and the screenplay does level up to the rather low wavelength expected in such movies, it had nothing new, nothing fascinating and nothing clever to say at all. Although not absolutely “nothing,” perhaps. Moreover, it had grossly objectified women: mothers, women’s studies teachers, women and their vanity, women in their self-pity, women beaten up by their boyfriends. There good of it, however, is a detailed exposition of sexuality what could be sexual stereotypes with most of them as cliches: e.g., the room mate, who is too preoccupied with size of his penis.
The main character makes these long-monologues, which are terrifically annoying. The director has flashback effects that are equally annoying. The movie was not funny, although it made me laugh for around three times in two hours. The educational sex scene was the only good scene.
Road Trip. (Seen with cousin and older brother at Glorietta 4.) This is one of the films where
I got a genuine laugh trip. I genuinely laughed until my jaws fell. I would include this in my top 10 best comedy category (the #1 of which is the legendary Tito, Vic, and Joey’s “Ma’am, May I Go Out?”). The humor, however, is often more funny when the punchline hits the peculiar sexual conduct of the characters. It is a film about college students and young people, like what is should perceived and what will likely to transpire after "American Pie." The good of the film is that it does not contain those intolerably mushy lines, and the look-at-me-look-at-me, fashion conscious, I-I-I vanity and apathetic attitude of the youth.
The film delivers a line that should perhaps define college life: it is the window of opportunity for us to do the craziest things, i.e., scoring for sex, and everyday, the opportunities are getting smaller. This gives me more reason to delay graduation.
Late Saturday afternoon. Listening to the usual playlist and some 98.7, I muse on my thesis and get to accomplish my thesis structure. I pass the decisive motion to the honorable judge, I am not going out tonight. I, the plaintiff, am awarded the 500 bucks I am going to save for not going out. Soon enough, I’ll be able to buy the hardcover Nietzsche volume at A Different Bookstore. Besides, I still have a party hangover from a friend's sister's party. Tonight, I am going to cook myself spaghetti, and I'll buy fried chicken or pork barbecue. Before that, I’m going to beat the meat, with the kind assistance of adult films starring the pearls of the Orient. I am also looking forward to the HBO Saturday night movie. Lately, I’ve been having a lot of sleep, pancakes, and some cyber___. What is even more pathetic are their strange-sounding names: e.g., diwata (who claims to be a geologist taking her Ph.D) and Smermaid (who likes bondage.)
Confessions getting truer and truer by the minute.
College is indeed, the window of opportunity to do both the craziest and the most intelligent things. And I believe I have accomplished the latter as much as I did the former, the way the Appollinian balances the Dionysian.
I went to the Sophia/Lit Circle party. Most of the philosophy professors were there, and I got the chance to toast beer and tequila with them once again. It's flavored with conversations on the chaos theory, Nietzsche, Feminism, garnished with genuinely good laughs, cigarettes and genuinely intelligent notions raised. In the end most people confessed to being perverts. Some people objected to being perverts. Some of them confessed to being lesbian or bisexual. Professors get to dance with students --- yes, I’ve seen them in action. Jim Morrison and Santana hung their music in the spirited air.
The booze was overflowing and I reveled in drunken euphoria. The most important realization of the night is that these parties give me more excuses to remain in College, where all’s swell and so well (except for Stat101).
Thursday, August 31, 2000
August 2000
I decided. I had to go through a series of decisions, the results of which would be regrettable, or just slanting towards being regrettable. Life has been less kind and less convenient than usual. And I’ve been no less than lazy and too lame to affirm my life, grease my world and run the show.
I decided to delay my graduation for another three months, with only six units left after this term. I didn’t pursue my thesis for the second time, and I am once more defeated by default. I had to rationalize this to my parents. It is terribly annoying and energy draining, preventing you to do a whole lot of things or set your priorities straight, because you know that your parents disapprove of the way you run your life. I keep on telling myself that college is a marketplace of ideas and I haven’t been buying a lot of ideas on sale. All the same, I am not able to buy those ideas no matter how long I stay. Perhaps it’s time I move on to other markets, chew ideas of a different flavor. Perhaps I just didn't want to give up my college lifestyle at 19.
I decided to resign from the staff job at ___. I’ll certainly miss the shows --- my Philharmonic Orchestra Friday nights, my Sunday afternoon ballet from PBT or BP, TP plays, gala evening Operas, chorale festivals, film showings, art exhibits, that sparkling crystal and capiz chandelier, the marble, the hallways, the close encounter with real artists, the lumpen fucking culturati and the cultural fucking elite. Miss Saigon season is up this October. This musical is probably something a broadway classic, but it just saddens me to think that many Filipinos think that culture is embodied by something like Miss Saigon, and not by something like “A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino.” Behn Cervantes was saying that Miss Saigon should not be treated as some national event because it is only, after all, the “cultural surplus” of another country. It is a good show, yes, but it goes into the way of the slowly growing, yet highly esteemed theater groups such as Tanghalang Pilipino. It is regretful to think that under the banner of promoting culture, people would rather watch something from Cameron and Mackintosh. There are probably more morons than geniuses in the art world.
I decided not to attend my test and interview last Friday for Andersen Consultancy. I thought it isn't the job for me.
I decided not to stay sober from my drinking marathons.
And finally, certainly the most woeful, most regrettable decision of all: to decide that life has been regrettable lately.
Friday night. I take a break from doing nothing. Today I wish I had some company but there's no one to date. So it's alone as usual and fun as usual. I head out clad in a thin green shirt, khaki shorts and leather sandals. On the last full show the theater was a big freezer where even Dunkin Donuts coffee wasn’t any help. This Friday night’s movie is “Down to you." It was some chummy, feel-good movie, with its level of chumminess within the bearable. At the very least it's unlike the usual teeny-bopper flicks that make you puke your guts out. It was about relationships and commitments in the college and early post-college stage. What makes it interesting is the character who studies goes to art school in New York is a killer dancer. Somehow I feel like I myself could do a movie like that, a film which mainly consists of clever dialogue, a winner soundtrack, a lot of kissing and sex.
There’s a unique pleasure I feel every time I step out of the theater, and walk the empty, tired mall late at night. I let the dry winds outside blow warmth on my cold limbs as I think about what I just watched.
Tonight I go home to fulfill my few academic obligations, and I was feeling a recovered from last night's tedious hangover. But I find the usual house scenario: friends are here are you're robbed of your time alone. No solace in this place but sometimes you're happy that there isn't.
I decided to delay my graduation for another three months, with only six units left after this term. I didn’t pursue my thesis for the second time, and I am once more defeated by default. I had to rationalize this to my parents. It is terribly annoying and energy draining, preventing you to do a whole lot of things or set your priorities straight, because you know that your parents disapprove of the way you run your life. I keep on telling myself that college is a marketplace of ideas and I haven’t been buying a lot of ideas on sale. All the same, I am not able to buy those ideas no matter how long I stay. Perhaps it’s time I move on to other markets, chew ideas of a different flavor. Perhaps I just didn't want to give up my college lifestyle at 19.
I decided to resign from the staff job at ___. I’ll certainly miss the shows --- my Philharmonic Orchestra Friday nights, my Sunday afternoon ballet from PBT or BP, TP plays, gala evening Operas, chorale festivals, film showings, art exhibits, that sparkling crystal and capiz chandelier, the marble, the hallways, the close encounter with real artists, the lumpen fucking culturati and the cultural fucking elite. Miss Saigon season is up this October. This musical is probably something a broadway classic, but it just saddens me to think that many Filipinos think that culture is embodied by something like Miss Saigon, and not by something like “A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino.” Behn Cervantes was saying that Miss Saigon should not be treated as some national event because it is only, after all, the “cultural surplus” of another country. It is a good show, yes, but it goes into the way of the slowly growing, yet highly esteemed theater groups such as Tanghalang Pilipino. It is regretful to think that under the banner of promoting culture, people would rather watch something from Cameron and Mackintosh. There are probably more morons than geniuses in the art world.
I decided not to attend my test and interview last Friday for Andersen Consultancy. I thought it isn't the job for me.
I decided not to stay sober from my drinking marathons.
And finally, certainly the most woeful, most regrettable decision of all: to decide that life has been regrettable lately.
Friday night. I take a break from doing nothing. Today I wish I had some company but there's no one to date. So it's alone as usual and fun as usual. I head out clad in a thin green shirt, khaki shorts and leather sandals. On the last full show the theater was a big freezer where even Dunkin Donuts coffee wasn’t any help. This Friday night’s movie is “Down to you." It was some chummy, feel-good movie, with its level of chumminess within the bearable. At the very least it's unlike the usual teeny-bopper flicks that make you puke your guts out. It was about relationships and commitments in the college and early post-college stage. What makes it interesting is the character who studies goes to art school in New York is a killer dancer. Somehow I feel like I myself could do a movie like that, a film which mainly consists of clever dialogue, a winner soundtrack, a lot of kissing and sex.
There’s a unique pleasure I feel every time I step out of the theater, and walk the empty, tired mall late at night. I let the dry winds outside blow warmth on my cold limbs as I think about what I just watched.
Tonight I go home to fulfill my few academic obligations, and I was feeling a recovered from last night's tedious hangover. But I find the usual house scenario: friends are here are you're robbed of your time alone. No solace in this place but sometimes you're happy that there isn't.
Monday, July 31, 2000
July 2000
Pleasantly uncommon flavors to the Ubermensch. Despite my efforts to regulate the wads of fat that continue to amass in every corner of my body, I had an overabundance of Italian food stuffed in my stomach tonight. Together with some friends, we had pasta at Italianni’s, coupled of course with good laughs and conversation. I especially enjoyed that spinach and artichoke appetizer spread on buttered bread generously sprinkled with shredded Parmesan. But I think I like Thai food better, especially the omelet on crab shells and bagoong rice, which we had so pleasantly had before in Suko Thai.
After these dinners we usually have a few drinks in the Malate. Tonight we went to a place called Batavia, which smelled of its wooden furniture, which they also happen to sell. They also sold the art or images hung on the walls as well as other interesting displays which in this season happens to be Thai. They happen to use very interestingly unique Asian utensils like heavy, hand made clay cups, plates with esoteric engravings, and pots from which you pour a pleasantly uncommon flavor of tea or brew of coffee. Everything comes with fresh petals of pink flowers.
As I went home I still had that deliciously relieving scent of coffee on my nose, as well as its rich flavor on my tongue. I sit on the desk and suddenly start worrying about my thesis. It’s supposed to some kind of monumental achievement in your entire academic life. It’s your medium for declaring to everyone what you have to say. It probes on whether your insights deserve a larger podium. I have not been there to allocate even a minimum of time for it.
Choosing on a variety of topics I finally decided to do one on Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, which will argue and critique on the difficulty of understanding, it’s interconnectedness to other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, on its possibility or impossibility, of whether it is a state, or a literary device. My thesis, with all my dreamy ambition, should also include a deconstructive insight on the Ubermensch using a Derridian framework. It is of course, pretentiously profound. But I sincerely wish I could fit in a kind of literariness in it which would abate the technical jargon and pseudo-intellectual chitchat into material with readable worth.
I have been more ambitious in dreaming about other topics which crossed my mind before. I thought of doing something on the demarcation between Philosophy and Literature, which will of course be post-structuralist, post-colonial, post-modernist and even deconstructive in discussion. When does a “text” become Philosophy, and when does it become Literature? This demarcation, this dividing of the line, will of course give birth to a web of implications and complications such as the politics of speech over writing. I planned to apply it on a certain text, something existential by Camus or Sartre, or even Nietzsche. I’m looking at Nausea, The Stranger or Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Well, I’ve decided to abandon this idea because I couldn’t handle it, of course. I am not too proud of my little intellect.
There is one more thesis idea which I took in consideration. It’s the idea that morality is unnecessary. G___ thinks it’s too radical. I think I took that idea from him. It’s true enough that the absence of morality would imply that we would blast each other’s heads off and blast ourselves back to dinosaur age. Other species survive without morality. Morality is mere dogma and institution that limits freedom, like laws and systems that limits us to propensities. Morality is never what it means in its Kantian sense, i.e., something we ought to do. Moreover, the absence of morality is not an absence of rules and laws. I guess I could convince myself to be proud of the part where I write of morality as a “problem.” The catch of the thesis is that without morality, we would still grow. We can be catapulted to another state of being --- instinctively, spontaneously. In G____’s analogy, young birds simply flap their wings and eventually learn to fly. This thesis will allow me a lot of room for my few metaphors and my own insights on things. It’s challenging yes, but there are too may strands that weave it --- it’s the principal philosophical task according to Nietzsche, and the most difficult problem that he had always grappled with in all of his philosophical endeavors. I think this would do good as a paper, but not as a thesis because there are many problems, and definitions and concepts in this case are too general, and rarely specific. One will have to be a very good writer to accomplish this, and perhaps this may be better achieved through literature.
The thesis I decided to write could be one I could empathize with, its problem oriented, it permits me to give understanding, judgment and interpretation, and the exploration of a admirable, peculiar, motivating concept such as the Ubermensch. That which I will become. Sounds Nietzschean? Sounds pathetic.
Is the world what we make out of it? Something with balloons or feel-good movies? Or is the world inevitably constructed to be unkind?
I haven’t been putting entries in the journal for quite a time, and I should consider the irresponsibility of not writing as a disservice to my life, somehow. I should at least look at my life twice, and be able to look at it again to do it good, to not make it lessen the efficacy of its magic.
I ask myself now, what have I been doing?
I write now, now that circumstances are not at all knotted, when I stand on a good, level position although they are not complete and perfect enough.
The sweet air of cigarette smoke runs in my lungs at four in the morning.
The now when I can still smell her scent and feel her silken touch. I can still see her smile in her sleep. I could still feel her delicately in my mouth. I could still hear her beautiful voice sounding so uniquely like rainwater falling on asphalt. She is unique in every way and her spirit is so free.
The now when I just came from work at CCP, watching a Korean Opera singing their history and heritage on stage. I go home and cook myself a late meal, while watching something like The Practice, having a drink coupled with smokes. All hail “The Practice.” I always find myself clapping in sincere applause, cursing as a form of praise for a TV show at 3:00 a.m., while no soul around me is awake.
This afternoon I just was just going through readings for my thesis while listening to 98.7 playing its usual playlist from Haydn, Schopann et. al., I see relish my coffee and my favorite image of blue light to my desk, and the sun through old rose curtains in my mother’s sala. I haven’t been accomplishing enough for my academics but I’m reading enough and I’ll respond to it. I’m having a drink right now, but I’m not drinking too much. I’ve been going out and even went dancing last Saturday night. I must have been hideous. But it was fun enough, having drunk half a bottle of Scotch and a few beers.
I’m in a scarcity of words to spice and fancy up the way of saying that I’ve been feeling glad enough recently, and I can endure another difficult day.
My brothers along with myself and a few of our friends converged in the house in a Friday night and ventured to Intramuros, a place that kept some of (or what’s left of) our heritage. We spent a good part of childhood here since this is where we studied. The place is now being gradually metamorphosed into another gimmick spot. The lumpen fucking culturati. We checked out a rave party that collects 200 for the entrance, 300 more to move to another dance floor 70 for bottled water, and 90 for the cheapest booze. The party featured guest DJ’s, a great crowd, a black-lit cage, laser lights and mirror balls and all. We couldn’t trick ourselves to splurge our money for all that crap. We go back to Malate and drink at a liquor store where booze is 17 a bottle, and you can have plenty of squid balls, quail eggs, or fish crackers. My apologies to the feminists but along with the drinks came a delicious view of nice-smelling, tube-clad, well-dressed or nearly half-dressed women to indulge your eyes, depress you somehow and make you throw a few expletives (because you can’t have them).
This liquor store was an untapped resource we discovered a long time ago, before all these street parties. Nowadays you have to fall in line during a Saturday night to buy beer. Somehow, we felt invaded.
We drank some more and called it a night at 4:30 in the morning. I had to wake up at 6:00 am for an 8:00 class so I’m groggy and disoriented all day. After a quick nap in the afternoon I gather enough energy to have a drink in Makati with some blockmates. After that I met some friends in Malate to find an unbelievable volume of people pretentiously parading themselves along the street. We decide to rather default ourselves and abstain from the rowdiness, pretension, pretty people, and the huge expense and exhaustion of a Saturday night in Malate. We just had coffee, mocked people whined, patronized ourselves and fattened our egos. I had a good time.
I remember this lousy dream I had a few days back. I was driving a fast car and falling in love with some woman. I think a stirring in my subconscious probably caused this because I tried writing a surreal story. I had better, more creative or even recurring dreams about unnamed mosquitoes, dinosaurs, floods, fireworks and swimming. But it’s this lousy dream that disturbed me. The woman had no face, or I have forgotten her face, and I think she had a lover who left her. I was pushed by some obscure impulse to go to places and find her face. I was stupid enough to think of it, and even more stupid to do try to find, leaving me with moments to sit and stare blankly at space, looking gloomy as a dark cloud for days, wanting.
I laughed at the idea that dreams are better than movies, sometimes.
Nice line last line from the previous paragraph. wish I could take credit for it. I think it belongs to Salman Rushdie.
Listening to The Chill Out Project playing a version of a Jim Morrison song on the twilight of another Saturday night, I tell myself, once more,
I would dance with Mary Jane.
After these dinners we usually have a few drinks in the Malate. Tonight we went to a place called Batavia, which smelled of its wooden furniture, which they also happen to sell. They also sold the art or images hung on the walls as well as other interesting displays which in this season happens to be Thai. They happen to use very interestingly unique Asian utensils like heavy, hand made clay cups, plates with esoteric engravings, and pots from which you pour a pleasantly uncommon flavor of tea or brew of coffee. Everything comes with fresh petals of pink flowers.
As I went home I still had that deliciously relieving scent of coffee on my nose, as well as its rich flavor on my tongue. I sit on the desk and suddenly start worrying about my thesis. It’s supposed to some kind of monumental achievement in your entire academic life. It’s your medium for declaring to everyone what you have to say. It probes on whether your insights deserve a larger podium. I have not been there to allocate even a minimum of time for it.
Choosing on a variety of topics I finally decided to do one on Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, which will argue and critique on the difficulty of understanding, it’s interconnectedness to other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, on its possibility or impossibility, of whether it is a state, or a literary device. My thesis, with all my dreamy ambition, should also include a deconstructive insight on the Ubermensch using a Derridian framework. It is of course, pretentiously profound. But I sincerely wish I could fit in a kind of literariness in it which would abate the technical jargon and pseudo-intellectual chitchat into material with readable worth.
I have been more ambitious in dreaming about other topics which crossed my mind before. I thought of doing something on the demarcation between Philosophy and Literature, which will of course be post-structuralist, post-colonial, post-modernist and even deconstructive in discussion. When does a “text” become Philosophy, and when does it become Literature? This demarcation, this dividing of the line, will of course give birth to a web of implications and complications such as the politics of speech over writing. I planned to apply it on a certain text, something existential by Camus or Sartre, or even Nietzsche. I’m looking at Nausea, The Stranger or Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Well, I’ve decided to abandon this idea because I couldn’t handle it, of course. I am not too proud of my little intellect.
There is one more thesis idea which I took in consideration. It’s the idea that morality is unnecessary. G___ thinks it’s too radical. I think I took that idea from him. It’s true enough that the absence of morality would imply that we would blast each other’s heads off and blast ourselves back to dinosaur age. Other species survive without morality. Morality is mere dogma and institution that limits freedom, like laws and systems that limits us to propensities. Morality is never what it means in its Kantian sense, i.e., something we ought to do. Moreover, the absence of morality is not an absence of rules and laws. I guess I could convince myself to be proud of the part where I write of morality as a “problem.” The catch of the thesis is that without morality, we would still grow. We can be catapulted to another state of being --- instinctively, spontaneously. In G____’s analogy, young birds simply flap their wings and eventually learn to fly. This thesis will allow me a lot of room for my few metaphors and my own insights on things. It’s challenging yes, but there are too may strands that weave it --- it’s the principal philosophical task according to Nietzsche, and the most difficult problem that he had always grappled with in all of his philosophical endeavors. I think this would do good as a paper, but not as a thesis because there are many problems, and definitions and concepts in this case are too general, and rarely specific. One will have to be a very good writer to accomplish this, and perhaps this may be better achieved through literature.
The thesis I decided to write could be one I could empathize with, its problem oriented, it permits me to give understanding, judgment and interpretation, and the exploration of a admirable, peculiar, motivating concept such as the Ubermensch. That which I will become. Sounds Nietzschean? Sounds pathetic.
Is the world what we make out of it? Something with balloons or feel-good movies? Or is the world inevitably constructed to be unkind?
I haven’t been putting entries in the journal for quite a time, and I should consider the irresponsibility of not writing as a disservice to my life, somehow. I should at least look at my life twice, and be able to look at it again to do it good, to not make it lessen the efficacy of its magic.
I ask myself now, what have I been doing?
I write now, now that circumstances are not at all knotted, when I stand on a good, level position although they are not complete and perfect enough.
The sweet air of cigarette smoke runs in my lungs at four in the morning.
The now when I can still smell her scent and feel her silken touch. I can still see her smile in her sleep. I could still feel her delicately in my mouth. I could still hear her beautiful voice sounding so uniquely like rainwater falling on asphalt. She is unique in every way and her spirit is so free.
The now when I just came from work at CCP, watching a Korean Opera singing their history and heritage on stage. I go home and cook myself a late meal, while watching something like The Practice, having a drink coupled with smokes. All hail “The Practice.” I always find myself clapping in sincere applause, cursing as a form of praise for a TV show at 3:00 a.m., while no soul around me is awake.
This afternoon I just was just going through readings for my thesis while listening to 98.7 playing its usual playlist from Haydn, Schopann et. al., I see relish my coffee and my favorite image of blue light to my desk, and the sun through old rose curtains in my mother’s sala. I haven’t been accomplishing enough for my academics but I’m reading enough and I’ll respond to it. I’m having a drink right now, but I’m not drinking too much. I’ve been going out and even went dancing last Saturday night. I must have been hideous. But it was fun enough, having drunk half a bottle of Scotch and a few beers.
I’m in a scarcity of words to spice and fancy up the way of saying that I’ve been feeling glad enough recently, and I can endure another difficult day.
My brothers along with myself and a few of our friends converged in the house in a Friday night and ventured to Intramuros, a place that kept some of (or what’s left of) our heritage. We spent a good part of childhood here since this is where we studied. The place is now being gradually metamorphosed into another gimmick spot. The lumpen fucking culturati. We checked out a rave party that collects 200 for the entrance, 300 more to move to another dance floor 70 for bottled water, and 90 for the cheapest booze. The party featured guest DJ’s, a great crowd, a black-lit cage, laser lights and mirror balls and all. We couldn’t trick ourselves to splurge our money for all that crap. We go back to Malate and drink at a liquor store where booze is 17 a bottle, and you can have plenty of squid balls, quail eggs, or fish crackers. My apologies to the feminists but along with the drinks came a delicious view of nice-smelling, tube-clad, well-dressed or nearly half-dressed women to indulge your eyes, depress you somehow and make you throw a few expletives (because you can’t have them).
This liquor store was an untapped resource we discovered a long time ago, before all these street parties. Nowadays you have to fall in line during a Saturday night to buy beer. Somehow, we felt invaded.
We drank some more and called it a night at 4:30 in the morning. I had to wake up at 6:00 am for an 8:00 class so I’m groggy and disoriented all day. After a quick nap in the afternoon I gather enough energy to have a drink in Makati with some blockmates. After that I met some friends in Malate to find an unbelievable volume of people pretentiously parading themselves along the street. We decide to rather default ourselves and abstain from the rowdiness, pretension, pretty people, and the huge expense and exhaustion of a Saturday night in Malate. We just had coffee, mocked people whined, patronized ourselves and fattened our egos. I had a good time.
I remember this lousy dream I had a few days back. I was driving a fast car and falling in love with some woman. I think a stirring in my subconscious probably caused this because I tried writing a surreal story. I had better, more creative or even recurring dreams about unnamed mosquitoes, dinosaurs, floods, fireworks and swimming. But it’s this lousy dream that disturbed me. The woman had no face, or I have forgotten her face, and I think she had a lover who left her. I was pushed by some obscure impulse to go to places and find her face. I was stupid enough to think of it, and even more stupid to do try to find, leaving me with moments to sit and stare blankly at space, looking gloomy as a dark cloud for days, wanting.
I laughed at the idea that dreams are better than movies, sometimes.
Nice line last line from the previous paragraph. wish I could take credit for it. I think it belongs to Salman Rushdie.
Listening to The Chill Out Project playing a version of a Jim Morrison song on the twilight of another Saturday night, I tell myself, once more,
I would dance with Mary Jane.
Friday, June 30, 2000
May & June 2000
The (non) Equivocation of Philosophy and House Chores. I let the many moons pass without having a single sentence written. My will to write was wearied and enfeebled by the playstation, my alcoholism and house chores. I begin to understand, almost just now, how to spell the difference between
scrubbing bathroom tiles
accounting money for the store
paying house bills
and
the more ponderous existential dilemma
the destruction of society through language
the aesthetic pleasures of literature and art.
I begin to wonder what should be of prime importance to people. What is my first obligation? Is it to help with house chores or to read my books and write? Time is loyal only to one master. Most of my time serves my desire to drink. We’ve spent all summer in a perpetual hangover with a lot of pizza, tuna sky flakes and tomatoes with salted eggs. We had the grandest time as we laughed like madmen, slept like babies, and did the chores. There are chores, a bottomless well of booze but a scarcity of personal space. My rusting creativity has been paused by this lull of events which prevented me from creating metaphors.
Sometimes, I sought solace and found it. Late afternoons are crowned glorious during May in my mother’s sala. I’m glad to have solace rest in my arms right now. I am here in the room upstairs while the early evening was doused in depressing purple shadows. My ears are clogged with phones playing Pablo Neruda’s poetry. I also immerse myself in the gratifying idea of my parents travelling across the pacific. My cousin just sent an email with a picture of them dancing. I never saw my parents dance. The joy my parents have are never are never artificial, and because of that, so is mine.
The university used to cater a big buffet of intellectual appetite. I’ve now become anorexic to that appetite. Except, perhaps, English Lit with Marj Evasco. Her lectures are so pleasing to hear they’re like silver bells in your ears. While I thought I wrote a good paper or two in that class I often wish I can respond better to the lectures. I feel like I’m losing my gab. What worries me even more is the important task of being to say something unique.
scrubbing bathroom tiles
accounting money for the store
paying house bills
and
the more ponderous existential dilemma
the destruction of society through language
the aesthetic pleasures of literature and art.
I begin to wonder what should be of prime importance to people. What is my first obligation? Is it to help with house chores or to read my books and write? Time is loyal only to one master. Most of my time serves my desire to drink. We’ve spent all summer in a perpetual hangover with a lot of pizza, tuna sky flakes and tomatoes with salted eggs. We had the grandest time as we laughed like madmen, slept like babies, and did the chores. There are chores, a bottomless well of booze but a scarcity of personal space. My rusting creativity has been paused by this lull of events which prevented me from creating metaphors.
Sometimes, I sought solace and found it. Late afternoons are crowned glorious during May in my mother’s sala. I’m glad to have solace rest in my arms right now. I am here in the room upstairs while the early evening was doused in depressing purple shadows. My ears are clogged with phones playing Pablo Neruda’s poetry. I also immerse myself in the gratifying idea of my parents travelling across the pacific. My cousin just sent an email with a picture of them dancing. I never saw my parents dance. The joy my parents have are never are never artificial, and because of that, so is mine.
The university used to cater a big buffet of intellectual appetite. I’ve now become anorexic to that appetite. Except, perhaps, English Lit with Marj Evasco. Her lectures are so pleasing to hear they’re like silver bells in your ears. While I thought I wrote a good paper or two in that class I often wish I can respond better to the lectures. I feel like I’m losing my gab. What worries me even more is the important task of being to say something unique.
Sunday, April 30, 2000
April 2000
There is something with the sunrise of summer, something that I loved which never lost its spectacle. I watched its sky from the blinds of the window, the transformation of pitch black to purple to pale white to a glorious yellow. The golden beams bring a blistering heat that brushes a familiarity with my skin, announcing the arrival of summer and all it holds. What does it hold? A bottomless well of booze to quench an undying thirst, endless parties, trifling and sensible thoughts to ponder, newspapers and books to read, the idiot box, boredom that can never be effaced, scorching heat and lazy afternoons and a summer to spend eternally in bed. This bores me. I wrote the same material two summers ago. There nothing new to romanticize about.
“We scurry like ants looking for sweetness.” The author I studied from poetry class places in tasteful imagery. Why are people so eager and so inclined to love and romance? Whole lives are spent in pursuit of it. The stupidest things are done in its name: jumping out of windows, stabbing skulls of other people or whatnot. Beautiful poetry had risen from it, and it have given birth to beautiful children. But so did love provide tasteless poetry in the cards of Hallmark, they bear wayward children.
Love has always been stupid. “Love is never intelligent, for if it was, it should’ve been conquered by the strong.” That was one of the P. lines that I hailed so much. It’s almost Nietzschean.
But people love anyway, the strong and the weak alike. Love is just something that happens, or persists, like suffering… Love is just like taking a shower, brushing your teeth or eating. Love is something strange like a drizzle in a blistering hot noon. Love is suffering, brushing your teeth, love is a strange drizzle in the blistering hot noon. It’s just something that happens.
I am going to regret one day, why I never dropped Stat101 and why I didn’t pursue my thesis this term. I believe that I made the grade for honorable mention, but I already flunked and blew my chances. Got close, but no cigar. What the fuck anyway. I never wanted gold stars patched on my forehead, nor laurel leafs on my ear. At least I got a 4.0 in Nietzsche.
One of the things a 4.0 in Nietzsche (that I flaunt blatantly) had taught me is the so-called preservation-enhancement values of life, strength, the excess of it, the expending the energy of the will to power. But I think I’m pruning, I am subsiding. Life is a hundred times too short to be bored, but I’m mostly bored despite having gone partying for the past two weeks. I am so obese from a shovel full of food into my mouth, and I didn’t even have enough physical energy to dance until four in the morning with D.P. and friends at the Common Ground on a Saturday night. Well I never really dance a lot, but its always been such an apple in the eye to watch them dance in their tube outfits. But even more I have not appropriated my mental energy to reading, writing, and thinking. Another regret.
After reading Lolita for a month or two, I read another F. Sionil Jose book, “Sins.” Like most of the books his written, it impels one to a to valiant sense of nationalism, and jogs your memory of the roots of the ills of a society which are the same ills which this country of poverty is sick of because we never fond out what our history was, we trivialized it in textbooks, and if we ever knew what happened we would eventually suffer from a national amnesia. We never knew how elite the Malolos congress was and how unequal the treaties of Americas were, for instance.
It’s amazing how the bloodline that’s been ruling and exploiting back then still has the same gene pool. “The higher you go, the whiter it gets.”
It also seems that it is our terrible lot to forever hold the elite in power, sell ourselves to imperialism camouflaged in globalization. Just now cronyism is rampant in the government and the president is supposed to be the champion of the masses. Sure. The educational system has taught not a lesson to our despicable people and the 2:30 p.m. soap operas on the tube and you’ve-seen-one-you’ve-seen-all action films had surely suffused something into our minds.
It bends my intestines, and twists my guts when I yak about capitalism, elitism, revolution, Marxism, land reform and the like. The things we could not eschew, and could only do little on.
I’m whining. There is so much to say, of course. I have read a number of books that have moved me, summoned me somehow into doing something… I’ve written poetry about it sure, but I feel that I never had done anything that will cast golden deeds before the words I have uttered.
I’m digressing. F. Sionil Jose’s story wasn’t so powerful, I didn’t enjoy the plot so much because the events were predictable and you knew what was about to happen. Despite that though, you can’t put the book down as if you were held by the neck and you had to read it.
I admire the way F. developed the character it its fluctuations and vicissitudes in the struggle for power. It was a magnificent character. It wasn’t so bad to be the haring-may-lupa that exploited us exponentially, he was merely being strong, being Nietzschean --- the weak shall perish. They live life and they nurture power. I believe after all, that we are not equal and thus speaks justice. We will never be equal but I’d like to see the poor’s side of the seesaw rise up a bit.
However, F.’s ironies were too obvious. The character’s I-have-everything-but-can’t-please my-son thing, that I’m-a-philanderer-now-I’m-impotent ironies were far too overused already. But it wasn’t so bad as too make me vomit. It’s holy week at this time and one of the funny stunts F. pulled is that attempt at magic realism with that pendant from Siquijor thing. It seemed desperate.
The sex scenes were excellent as usual.
The facility of language was so effective that it is as if I the scenery was tangible. I read “Sins” in a late afternoon of this summer and the crisp yellow pages of the hardcover book set in a galliard font looked glorious against a sun about to set in the world’s rims. I was listening to classical and the feeling is familiar. I could smell the sea again.
Holy Thursday. I’ve indulged my ears and soul with classical music from Bach to Beethoven to Schopann to Schubert in 98.7 day in and day out. This was coupled with honeyed tea while reading the first part of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.” The streets are silent and sea emits its smell so fragrant. I was even able to give a little hand on house chores.
Dostoevsky is largely similar to Nietzsche whom he influenced. They both have an amusing, eccentric, creative literary style and rather uncommon notions on matters such as free will, history, math and numbers, consciousness. I must admit that I misread a little of Nietzsche when I read him on my own, but who didn’t? I am also afraid of misreading Dostoevsky. But aren’t those literary critical theories such as new historicism, American criticism or even deconstruction, misreadings themselves? What we take as a form of understanding is only a misunderstanding.
Should I completely digress again?
One way of reading Dostoevsky, or at least the first part of Notes… is its reaction to reason, natural laws, logic and logocentricism. In an effective metaphor he says that “life is not a series of square roots."
In another strong figurative representation he says that “man is not a piano key.” We have wishes and desires, which couldn’t be graphed and atomized out by science because it comes from “devil knows what.”
The book is pool of insights with things to say on toothaches, cursing, smashing things, and how insensible history is. e.g., “whether good or bad, it is pleasant to smash something on occasion.”
He agrees and disagrees at the same time, saying that one thing is excellent and its opposite equally excellent. Dostoevsky tells you to stop laughing when you begin to laugh at his book, and I’ve never seen a writer so overly self-conscious. So far, the book is profusely amusing and it has good imagery.
Last night, on the eve of this Holy Thursday, “New York Stories” was on at Star Movies. It had three short films directed by Martin Scorsese (Life Lessons) and Francis Coppola (Life Without Zoe) and Woody Allen (Oedipus Wrecks).
The Scorsese film had the trademark camera movements which speaks for itself amazingly. I believe it explored the condition of the character (an artist in New York who falls in love with young, attractive female artist-wannabe, but as it shows the ladies have whims and the impulsiveness of a lose canon which couldn’t be handled.) It had some sort of parallelism with the music and paintings and probably some deep literary meaning entrenched in it but I wasn’t able to catch. Coppola also told a nice story about this affluent New York child named Zoe (Greek for ‘life’) who had this fantastic flute player for a Dad which I don’t want to put into paper anymore because it’s an exhausting occupation to do so and I’m bored out of my wits writing and I’m not into mental gymnastics for the night. It was wonderful to watch though, like reading short stories. At 2:45 a.m. I’ll be watching “As Good as it Gets” over beer and that will bring in good laughs and some superficial, inauthentic feel-good air to my lungs. After that I will read Dostoevsky again until the sky turns blue and I’ll be gobbling a big fucking breakfast.
What a Holy Thursday.
“We scurry like ants looking for sweetness.” The author I studied from poetry class places in tasteful imagery. Why are people so eager and so inclined to love and romance? Whole lives are spent in pursuit of it. The stupidest things are done in its name: jumping out of windows, stabbing skulls of other people or whatnot. Beautiful poetry had risen from it, and it have given birth to beautiful children. But so did love provide tasteless poetry in the cards of Hallmark, they bear wayward children.
Love has always been stupid. “Love is never intelligent, for if it was, it should’ve been conquered by the strong.” That was one of the P. lines that I hailed so much. It’s almost Nietzschean.
But people love anyway, the strong and the weak alike. Love is just something that happens, or persists, like suffering… Love is just like taking a shower, brushing your teeth or eating. Love is something strange like a drizzle in a blistering hot noon. Love is suffering, brushing your teeth, love is a strange drizzle in the blistering hot noon. It’s just something that happens.
I am going to regret one day, why I never dropped Stat101 and why I didn’t pursue my thesis this term. I believe that I made the grade for honorable mention, but I already flunked and blew my chances. Got close, but no cigar. What the fuck anyway. I never wanted gold stars patched on my forehead, nor laurel leafs on my ear. At least I got a 4.0 in Nietzsche.
One of the things a 4.0 in Nietzsche (that I flaunt blatantly) had taught me is the so-called preservation-enhancement values of life, strength, the excess of it, the expending the energy of the will to power. But I think I’m pruning, I am subsiding. Life is a hundred times too short to be bored, but I’m mostly bored despite having gone partying for the past two weeks. I am so obese from a shovel full of food into my mouth, and I didn’t even have enough physical energy to dance until four in the morning with D.P. and friends at the Common Ground on a Saturday night. Well I never really dance a lot, but its always been such an apple in the eye to watch them dance in their tube outfits. But even more I have not appropriated my mental energy to reading, writing, and thinking. Another regret.
After reading Lolita for a month or two, I read another F. Sionil Jose book, “Sins.” Like most of the books his written, it impels one to a to valiant sense of nationalism, and jogs your memory of the roots of the ills of a society which are the same ills which this country of poverty is sick of because we never fond out what our history was, we trivialized it in textbooks, and if we ever knew what happened we would eventually suffer from a national amnesia. We never knew how elite the Malolos congress was and how unequal the treaties of Americas were, for instance.
It’s amazing how the bloodline that’s been ruling and exploiting back then still has the same gene pool. “The higher you go, the whiter it gets.”
It also seems that it is our terrible lot to forever hold the elite in power, sell ourselves to imperialism camouflaged in globalization. Just now cronyism is rampant in the government and the president is supposed to be the champion of the masses. Sure. The educational system has taught not a lesson to our despicable people and the 2:30 p.m. soap operas on the tube and you’ve-seen-one-you’ve-seen-all action films had surely suffused something into our minds.
It bends my intestines, and twists my guts when I yak about capitalism, elitism, revolution, Marxism, land reform and the like. The things we could not eschew, and could only do little on.
I’m whining. There is so much to say, of course. I have read a number of books that have moved me, summoned me somehow into doing something… I’ve written poetry about it sure, but I feel that I never had done anything that will cast golden deeds before the words I have uttered.
I’m digressing. F. Sionil Jose’s story wasn’t so powerful, I didn’t enjoy the plot so much because the events were predictable and you knew what was about to happen. Despite that though, you can’t put the book down as if you were held by the neck and you had to read it.
I admire the way F. developed the character it its fluctuations and vicissitudes in the struggle for power. It was a magnificent character. It wasn’t so bad to be the haring-may-lupa that exploited us exponentially, he was merely being strong, being Nietzschean --- the weak shall perish. They live life and they nurture power. I believe after all, that we are not equal and thus speaks justice. We will never be equal but I’d like to see the poor’s side of the seesaw rise up a bit.
However, F.’s ironies were too obvious. The character’s I-have-everything-but-can’t-please my-son thing, that I’m-a-philanderer-now-I’m-impotent ironies were far too overused already. But it wasn’t so bad as too make me vomit. It’s holy week at this time and one of the funny stunts F. pulled is that attempt at magic realism with that pendant from Siquijor thing. It seemed desperate.
The sex scenes were excellent as usual.
The facility of language was so effective that it is as if I the scenery was tangible. I read “Sins” in a late afternoon of this summer and the crisp yellow pages of the hardcover book set in a galliard font looked glorious against a sun about to set in the world’s rims. I was listening to classical and the feeling is familiar. I could smell the sea again.
Holy Thursday. I’ve indulged my ears and soul with classical music from Bach to Beethoven to Schopann to Schubert in 98.7 day in and day out. This was coupled with honeyed tea while reading the first part of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.” The streets are silent and sea emits its smell so fragrant. I was even able to give a little hand on house chores.
Dostoevsky is largely similar to Nietzsche whom he influenced. They both have an amusing, eccentric, creative literary style and rather uncommon notions on matters such as free will, history, math and numbers, consciousness. I must admit that I misread a little of Nietzsche when I read him on my own, but who didn’t? I am also afraid of misreading Dostoevsky. But aren’t those literary critical theories such as new historicism, American criticism or even deconstruction, misreadings themselves? What we take as a form of understanding is only a misunderstanding.
Should I completely digress again?
One way of reading Dostoevsky, or at least the first part of Notes… is its reaction to reason, natural laws, logic and logocentricism. In an effective metaphor he says that “life is not a series of square roots."
In another strong figurative representation he says that “man is not a piano key.” We have wishes and desires, which couldn’t be graphed and atomized out by science because it comes from “devil knows what.”
The book is pool of insights with things to say on toothaches, cursing, smashing things, and how insensible history is. e.g., “whether good or bad, it is pleasant to smash something on occasion.”
He agrees and disagrees at the same time, saying that one thing is excellent and its opposite equally excellent. Dostoevsky tells you to stop laughing when you begin to laugh at his book, and I’ve never seen a writer so overly self-conscious. So far, the book is profusely amusing and it has good imagery.
Last night, on the eve of this Holy Thursday, “New York Stories” was on at Star Movies. It had three short films directed by Martin Scorsese (Life Lessons) and Francis Coppola (Life Without Zoe) and Woody Allen (Oedipus Wrecks).
The Scorsese film had the trademark camera movements which speaks for itself amazingly. I believe it explored the condition of the character (an artist in New York who falls in love with young, attractive female artist-wannabe, but as it shows the ladies have whims and the impulsiveness of a lose canon which couldn’t be handled.) It had some sort of parallelism with the music and paintings and probably some deep literary meaning entrenched in it but I wasn’t able to catch. Coppola also told a nice story about this affluent New York child named Zoe (Greek for ‘life’) who had this fantastic flute player for a Dad which I don’t want to put into paper anymore because it’s an exhausting occupation to do so and I’m bored out of my wits writing and I’m not into mental gymnastics for the night. It was wonderful to watch though, like reading short stories. At 2:45 a.m. I’ll be watching “As Good as it Gets” over beer and that will bring in good laughs and some superficial, inauthentic feel-good air to my lungs. After that I will read Dostoevsky again until the sky turns blue and I’ll be gobbling a big fucking breakfast.
What a Holy Thursday.
Monday, February 28, 2000
January & February 2000
A Problem of Language. It is as if I have not really lived my life until I have written about it, until I have put it into the words. A few days ago I was caught in that warp with my family. We went swimming, singing. We feasted on steamed shrimps, caldereta, grilled liempo. I spent sometime looking at the greenish mountains splashed with the yellow luminosity of the sun. I kept thinking and went on with how we cannot think of anything that cannot be put in language. Everything is probably not language, but everything is in language. At the same time, language cannot accommodate all reality, all feeling, and perhaps all thought. More than a philosophical problem, it’s a personal problem when you begin to ask yourself.
How does one describe the way one had lived? Through words, through what has been done and what is remembered and written? But that doesn’t show you everything, not from the spot where there’s a panoramic view. Words do not feel the wounds or the wellness
How do I describe the January mornings that have been unusually cold, the shiver that went up to my spine, the delicate softness, the blow of warmth that the blanket rubbed on my skin? There’s a parch on my throat, with tiny webs of saliva accumulating in the corner of my mouth --- it’s the faint tang of last night’s beer.
I haven’t put into words that life I’ve been living --- with all its peculiarities, pompous events, little incidents, humor, wisdom, love, thoughts, pretension and idiosyncrasies. Doing the writing is not much of a chip in the shoulder but I’ve not done it all the same. Perhaps for my neglect, for my passiveness, my willingness to be a mere by-stander to what has transpired in my life, I feel defeated. I have not really appreciated things until I look back to it. More than that, what is lamentably lame is my awful skill as a writer.
And now how do I begin? Friday nights at duty with the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra. Weekend duties with fantastic main-theater performances such as Metanoia, Chorale festivals, Opera, Ballet, art exhibits at the gallery, Tanghalang Pilipino plays. No higher-than-minimum-wage job can be superlatively better than mine. I am surrounded by art that I humbly, knees planted on the ground, admit: I do not completely understand or put into words but do appreciate still.
There are Saturday afternoons sacrificing siesta for laughs and priceless learning at Cirilio Bautista’s Introduction to Poetry class. Or that other serving of existentialism, and TH mornings with Nietzsche taught by G___reminding me of his classic lines such as “We are all in one boat, and that boat is going nowhere...” How could one leave out beef pares with friends (technically -colleagues) after duty, or occasional Burger Machine treats in the middle of a dead night. I am in a multitude of remembrances, of ideas and a scarcity of words, and of patience.
More than that this is a time in my life when there’s a lot of women to be with --- to respect and love, to watch them dance, to admire and esteem, to play with, to laugh with, to smell, to give my glib, and yes, to thwart me, to cause me to cower.
Among these two months was a time I jumped into the wagon of health buffs. Together with D.N., we tried working out in the gym which I realized, requires so much discipline and determination just to keep a stupid built. Muscles wouldn’t make you any smarter. But it is one way to enhance power and be active. I enjoyed running during Sunday afternoons during sunse I run by the bay, by the burgers and the barbecue and my salt and my sweat. You see children, maids on day-off, and even foreigners with probable prostitutes with hands laced, watching the sun dapple the waves and the sailboats with orange, as the sphere slowly plops into the water.
For thepast two months, I had Lolita for my literature, along with a taste of Jack Kerouac. I also heard one of the albums that made a splendid mark in my life: The Police greatest hits album. Right now, Sting is singing: “all made up and nowhere to go.”
How does one describe the way one had lived? Through words, through what has been done and what is remembered and written? But that doesn’t show you everything, not from the spot where there’s a panoramic view. Words do not feel the wounds or the wellness
How do I describe the January mornings that have been unusually cold, the shiver that went up to my spine, the delicate softness, the blow of warmth that the blanket rubbed on my skin? There’s a parch on my throat, with tiny webs of saliva accumulating in the corner of my mouth --- it’s the faint tang of last night’s beer.
I haven’t put into words that life I’ve been living --- with all its peculiarities, pompous events, little incidents, humor, wisdom, love, thoughts, pretension and idiosyncrasies. Doing the writing is not much of a chip in the shoulder but I’ve not done it all the same. Perhaps for my neglect, for my passiveness, my willingness to be a mere by-stander to what has transpired in my life, I feel defeated. I have not really appreciated things until I look back to it. More than that, what is lamentably lame is my awful skill as a writer.
And now how do I begin? Friday nights at duty with the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra. Weekend duties with fantastic main-theater performances such as Metanoia, Chorale festivals, Opera, Ballet, art exhibits at the gallery, Tanghalang Pilipino plays. No higher-than-minimum-wage job can be superlatively better than mine. I am surrounded by art that I humbly, knees planted on the ground, admit: I do not completely understand or put into words but do appreciate still.
There are Saturday afternoons sacrificing siesta for laughs and priceless learning at Cirilio Bautista’s Introduction to Poetry class. Or that other serving of existentialism, and TH mornings with Nietzsche taught by G___reminding me of his classic lines such as “We are all in one boat, and that boat is going nowhere...” How could one leave out beef pares with friends (technically -colleagues) after duty, or occasional Burger Machine treats in the middle of a dead night. I am in a multitude of remembrances, of ideas and a scarcity of words, and of patience.
More than that this is a time in my life when there’s a lot of women to be with --- to respect and love, to watch them dance, to admire and esteem, to play with, to laugh with, to smell, to give my glib, and yes, to thwart me, to cause me to cower.
Among these two months was a time I jumped into the wagon of health buffs. Together with D.N., we tried working out in the gym which I realized, requires so much discipline and determination just to keep a stupid built. Muscles wouldn’t make you any smarter. But it is one way to enhance power and be active. I enjoyed running during Sunday afternoons during sunse I run by the bay, by the burgers and the barbecue and my salt and my sweat. You see children, maids on day-off, and even foreigners with probable prostitutes with hands laced, watching the sun dapple the waves and the sailboats with orange, as the sphere slowly plops into the water.
For thepast two months, I had Lolita for my literature, along with a taste of Jack Kerouac. I also heard one of the albums that made a splendid mark in my life: The Police greatest hits album. Right now, Sting is singing: “all made up and nowhere to go.”
