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.