Exhausting Happiness

“Let’s not get tired of being happy. Let's just not.”

What I didn’t write about. What I didn’t write about, I could not write about now. Like so many other stories and scoops of my life that just slipped this journal this year. This year’s probably one of the most unproductive years of my journal-writing, despite the year’s relative eventfulness.
The weight of the world rests on my eyelids. I’m sleepy as Sleeping Fucking Beauty. If this account was a superhero comic book, my protagonist will be called Tired Man. He’s a superhero with incurable hang-ups on the existential dilemma. Tired Man, the former reliever of the world’s tiredness, is now just tired. Tired Man, an ominous victim, a superhero turned into his own arch-rival. The knight in shining armor who’s also the damsel in distress. Tired Man was the hero of all those who were ever weary of work, of life, of anything to tire about, of those who suffer from a quarter-life crisis, of those who ever sought the answers to why they were thrown into their worlds.. He used weapons of elaborate philosophies. But he himself was convinced that he is tired of his superhero task. And as such he received that name, and became his own villain. But like Sisyphus, he acts against his fate and continues to try to save the world of tiredness anyway. Despite the unalterable fate of being tired himself.
I’m a tired man.

Tired man? The man with the tires? He’s got a Spare-tire backpack? He rescues people with tires gone flat?

I didn’t even tell why I’m tired. Maybe because that’s less interesting, or maybe because I heard Guster sing, “honest is easy, fiction’s where genius lies.”

On the last hour of the last day of the year. It’s still customary for everyone to throw in a Happy New Year text message. Don’t we ever wear out from all the merry making? I’m almost tired of being happy. All the happiness that streamed in during the holidays has literally made me sick, sneezing and coughing as my form of noise contribution to New Year’s Eve.
Like nothing’s ever new in the years I write, I’ve been drinking like a flower vase, and my mouth’s a smokestack. Between December 24 to 29, I’ve had four nights for parties. Present this year was Christmas-hashish-happiness, Christmas-party-at-the hotel-room, Christmas-reading-by-the-poolside. All these parties, all the compulsory Christmas joys. And yes, presents. For example, a Bulgari Weekend Set from D., the wonderful gift of D., the unspoken joy from my family, my friends, my life as a whole, and… a eucalyptus plant from J.K., a CD with 14 different versions of Bach’s cannon in D by my cousin D., a lucky rooster door chime from A.V., Blur’s Greatest hits and Razorback greatest hits CD from M&L, a Calm Water perfumed oil from ___, money from my Lola, handkerchiefs from my cousin B., weird figurines from H., brownies from B. and A., a DVD from D.T., and a desk set and desk organizer from my officemates and my boss. And whatever else I received from anyone else. It was all remarkable, but maybe a little overboard. I just spent over fourteen grand in cash and five grand on gift checks. But there is no accounting for this happiness anyway.
There is so much pleasure that I’m bound to receive some kind of penance. Like how I got sick right now. Cough cough cough. Like how things are bound to get hard when you’ve learned to take it easy. Easy breezy. Lemon squeezy. Maybe it’s not that hard to take it easy. Even if 2005 comes to me with all it’s got to get even. Even Stephen. When I come back to work on January 3rd, I’ll be buried neck deep with a pile of taped interviews to listen to. I can’t even begin thinking about the New Year’s results-oriented resolutions that boss will be imposing for the group. And 2005 means I will be 24. That’s definitely something I don’t want to think about, but I’ve already been thinking about since I was 17.
A line from the New Year’s greeting I sent to everyone goes, “Let’s not get tired of being happy.”
Let’s just not.

Christmas Figures

Some numbers I got from reading December’s Newsbreak, and some from newspaper editorials, appropriate for the 12 days of Christmas:

1.) 33% of the national budget will go to interest payments. Not even debt payments.
2.) 11 UP (school of Economics) professors warns of financial meltdown if government does not act on the budget deficit and reduce its 5.4 trillion debt.
3.) 6 months since Arroyo was “elected” into office. From what I hear, the amount she borrowed already totaled to the borrowings of 2 presidents combined.
4.) 451,309 corporations are registered with SEC. But only 113,145 firms have field their corporate income tax, and only 10,833 actually paid taxes.
5.) 29++ per liter of gas. 5.50 jeep minimum fare.
6.) 76.7 billion income tax yield: 87.8% was paid by workers and employees through automatically withheld taxes. A newspaper editorial goes: “Joblessness. High Prices. The middle class has little flexibility left. They are most resentful of the costs of bad government.”
7.) 4,000,000 families living below poverty line.
8.) 15,000 pesos in electric bills for 1024, 1022, and 1019 Nakpil. 7,000 in 1022 alone.
9.) 2.5% increase in family income from 2000 to 2003, but prices of commodities shot up to almost 14%.
10.) 4 Filipinos are born every minute. Growth in enrollment declined from 7.63% in 2001 to 3.94% in 2003.
11.) 1 – the number of sections in Letran Grade 5 elementary. It was 5 during my time.
12.) 30 pesos – taxi flag down rate. If I remember it correctly, it was 2.50 pesos when I was growing up in the eighties. Now it’s 2.50 pesos for each drop of the meter.

We wish you a merry Christmas (3x) and a Happy New Year.

Oriental Magic Realism

Notes after reading Haruki Murakami’s “The Elephant Vanishes,” “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” and a few of his stories found online:

*Fiction that you have to read through the end. A persistent craving, comparable to my unquenchable thirst for beer.
*Superbly written. Beautiful language with no fancy, flowery, words. The beauty of language is contained in what the words actually say, not in how it is said, but in how easy they are to absorb and how deeply you come to absorb the story itself.
*The books weren’t too insightful, it lacked a philosophy. It didn’t submerge your mind in a reef of ideas. The stories didn’t have a strong advocacy.
*I also didn’t find the usual quotable quotes. It's all about what happens.
*Each book cost me more than 700 bucks each. But it’s worth a lot more than that.

My Murakami fever is spreading.

Anaesthetize & Remember How to Feel

“Then my life just felt like a so-so life bordering on the stupid.”

Before Sunset. I must admit that I thought I enjoyed watching Before Sunrise since Ethan Hawke did a stunning job of pulling his philosopher-wannabe antics, and Julie Delpy was a strikingly beautiful girl who spoke English with a French accent. Both characters had a knack in conversation, in a movie that was about a glorified, romanticized one night stand. After the one night stand, they decide not to exchange numbers. Instead, they set-up a meeting at the train station six months later.

Only later did I realize how this movie was so un-thought of. I wasn't even waiting for something grand. It was just two people meeting then having conversation and sex. It would have been too mindlessly minimalist if all the movie wanted to say was - "they were young and stupid, and this is what happens in real life." I was so unimpressed and imagined how everybody wrote something like that. It wasn’t an entirely vacuous, abhorrently stupid movie. It was just a so-so movie that bordered on the stupid.

What I couldn’t believe is that this so-so-bordering-on-the-stupid movie even had a sequel. A strike two. Given its availability and cheap cost at Quiapo, I just had to watch it. I secretly hoped it would redeem the first one, the way the New Testament redeemed the Old.

The sequel had the same cast. Julie Delpy is still captivating. But Ethan Hawke couldn’t grow old graciously. His pick-up lines don’t deliver anymore, he’s lost his philosopher-rocker appeal he so strongly exuded in Reality Bites. Mentally, at least in this movie, he didn’t seem to grow old.
The 1.5 hours of the movie covered the length of less than five hours of them seeing each other again in six years. Nothing particularly happened in the movie except that the characters met, had coffee, and had good conversation and played the are-we-gonna-have-sex? guessing game. Amusingly enough, they talked about guns and violence in the US Media. Annoyingly enough, they threw impossibly cheesy lines meant to throw a stranger into bed. And that’s that. A movie made of snippets of conversation. On the whole, watching it feels like reading a badly written short story or a prosaic poem.

Another so-so movie bordering on the stupid. I half-expected it to be good, and I half expected to be salvated. In Fury, Salman Rushdie writes, “Perhaps daily life, its rush, its overloadedness, just numbed and anesthetized people and they went into the movies’ simpler worlds to remember how to feel.” Then my life just felt like a so-so life bordering on the stupid.

That’s how I remembered feeling.

The Better US Movies I saw this 2004 (In no particular order):
21 Grams
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Fahrenheit 9/11
Bowling for Columbine
The Event
The Usual Suspects
Love Actually
Dogville
Kill Bill Vol. 1
Troy

The Better non-US Movies I saw this 2004 (In no particular order):
Central Station (Brazil)
Zatoichi (Japan)
Vibrator (Japan)
The Apartment (France)
Run Lola Run (Germany)
Imelda (Philippines)
No Man’s Land (It's No Man's Land)
Not Ones Less (China)
City of God (Brazil)
My Wife is a Gangster (Korea)
Chunking Express (Hong Kong)

Resolutely Floating Aimlessly

“I have a 41st floor view of Metro Manila’s sunset skyline and its afterglow. It’s never a drag to watch the sun and its skyful of bright to fading light that takes on a different, breathtaking view everyday..”

“Yes, it’s what I am now. Resolutely floating aimlessly in this air of bliss that doesn’t seem to run out of wind.”

The alarm rang on a hung-over Monday eight am so that I can make it to the office at ten. But I just lent deaf ear and took five more minutes. I wasn’t sure if it was my subconscious was sending subliminal messages, or maybe just the slacker side of me, but I dreamt of being absent today. I could barely remember the dream that took place behind my thick skull. After my five minutes, it was already 10:30 a.m.

Now that I try to justify it, I can’t really say that I have been deprived of the joys I should have had if I wasn’t working in that skyscraper cave of mine. It’s not as if I’ve been working too diligently and I’m stressed out from the suffocating walls of the office. As a matter of fact, my office situation has significantly improved since I’m no longer in the graveyard shift. There’s even time for internet or going to the mall. I can listen to my launchcast station. I have a 41st floor view of Metro Manila’s sunset skyline and its afterglow. It’s never a drag to watch the sun and its skyful of bright to fading light that takes on a different, breathtaking view everyday. This is how I’d describe my life for the past couple of months: resolutely floating aimlessly in this air of bliss that never seems to out of wind. Take this weekend for example:

Friday night: met up with D. for dinner at Superbowl of China. Steamed Lapu-lapu with garlic, wanton soup, siomai and yang-chow friend rice. She even gave me a new shirt, and my mom a Clinque lipstick. We head out for drinks after.
Saturday: I wake up a little after 12 noon, and watch a Wong Kar Wai film, Chunking Express with D. We attend my Tito’s birthday, have dinner, and have a few rounds of beer. Before I drive her home, we went to a loungy bar in Makati Avenue, Tiananmen.
Sunday: I pick up girlfriend at her house and I finally meet her endearing six-year-old niece. We have a pleasant Sunday drive, drive-thru McDonalds and eat in the car. We watch the matinee of an excellent play/musical in CCP with our friends. We attend my younger brother’s girlfriend’s dinner party and pig out. Then we head home for dessert, the chocolate mouse we brought for ___, and a few drinks. Hung over from the musical, we sang our words. Then I drive home on this quiet, Sunday night.


It’s not just the weekends. There were even weekdays, like the day of JK’s birthday, when we went to Ayala Museum for a free tour and cocktails, then dinner and beer at Greenbelt. I’m with D. when I buy books and she’s a kind of arbitrator for my indecision on which book to buy. There are days when I meet up with friends for a foreign film festival, and have foreign film marathons on DVD.


Happiness is something I already said something about. I’ve been chewing on it like a gum and it’s something I just don’t want to spit out.


That’s probably why, after the thousands times I told myself I want to be absent one day. I finally reacted on this impulse. I have to take the time to chew on this happiness. Today I slept until 1:30 pm, had coffee while reading a few chapters of my new Murakami and listening to the best of Café del Mar while peach tea incense burns in my room.

And I have finally written something about my life recently. Yes, it’s what I am now. Resolutely floating aimlessly in this air of bliss that doesn’t seem to run out of wind.


My journal is on a Manila Bulletin-kind of phase where the news is always affirmative.

What Do I Write Now?

“How the brilliant kids of the future, having invented their own new media,
just laughs at this.”

From Fury by Salman Rushdie:

“There are so many brilliant kids who just love to create all kinds of, you can’t even say it, they’re inventing a whole new media everyday.”

So many brilliant kids writing so many blogs, creating a whole new sub-culture with their not-unheard monologues in rather diminutive spaces in the internet. And they can write in the language of XML and HTML. There are deviant arts enhanced in Photoshop, Seventeen-year-old kids staging photo exhibits in one of the greenbelt bars, five-megapixel cameras dangling from their wrists. There are galleries and galleries of them scanning themselves and their artwork. Them having two whole years worth of entries archived. Them moving in .gifs. Them buying their dreams, them in whiny entries about their own boring lives, their debaucheries in spas and malls and vacation houses, their attempt to be articulate and erudite, and them throwing words like: “God, words! Words! May faculty of the English language is not enough to communicate the horrid, screeching and agonizing pain that it’s auditory atrocities have inflicted upon me.” How phony. In an oxymoron: senseless profundity.

It’s all vanity that’s never even a bit self-effacing. I can’t help but smile a condescending smile, or even sneer a condescending sneer. I read them during office hours, and I feel like I’m almost paid to be entertained. Blogs have become part of daily office life’s ebb. How the brilliant kids of the future, having invented their own new media, just laughs at this.

With what some of them have aspired and accomplished, I almost felt incapable. Of what? Of writing in HTML, of having an eight-megapixel, zoom lens digicam, an ipod, of having all the time in their hands to send their creative juices streaming. Well anyway, many of these bloggers don’t have obligations and are free from no-brainer jobs. With this little journal lag I developed because of reading their blogs, I almost felt inept in writing, or straightforwardly felt envious that my own entries could not match their postings which catered a regular audience.

The conclusion is a sweeping simplicity: “All is Vanity.” It’s all about being meaninglessly vain. No matter how the richest mark-up language formats, digitized, beamed up images, or despite the fruitfulness or futility of the entries in these web logs, no blog could blow over the monumental vanity of writing about me, and writing only for me.

Texts to Remember June and July

“You are my spacious and yellow summer in a golden church”

I was sleepless despite the conducive-for-sleep weather. The pouring rain reminds me of how we are both wandering and aimless, slanting itself as the wind blows, but happy, just happy in falling for each other.
7st 4, alcohol units: 0, cigarettes smoked in secret: 7, calories: 10,257 (feels like), nice boyfriends: 1 (continuing good work)…
06:31:11 pm 06-08-04

I’m hiccupping from intoxication and my every breath is dedicated to loving you. Good night gorgeous.
01:07:01 an
06-03-2004

It has been a pleasure spending every single minute of the day with you. You make my aimless-wandering-lifestyle rather meaningful.
05:26:43
06-05-2004

Thank you for continuously making me feel special. I’ve been deeply touched. I hope I did
fine though. Thanks for the cake, the food, the warm welcome of your family, the ride home, and the wonderful gift of you.
01:30:52 pm
07-22-2004

I shall not let the waves of fate be cold and indifferent as to toss us unmercifully. Unlike that girl from Haruki’s story, I won’t let you, my 100% perfect boy, pass me by. I shall cherish you and the love we have forever. Goodnight my 100% perfect other.
11:25:08 pm
10st (feeling v. heavy today),
Calories: (innumerable, blame to Selecta for coming up with irresistible choco peanut)
cigarettes -4
alcohol units – 0
phone calls from you – 6 (haha! I’m such a goddess!)
Flashbacks of you – 14

I miss you the way the waves miss the shore.
07:46:56 am
05-21-2004


I fell asleep. I wanted to tell you to take care on the way to work. The weather’s terrible. Unrivalled love to you from your overly jealous but charming lover.
10:34:43
06-30-2004


My only regret in getting this dignified-day-job if ever, will be the absence of our little talks in the mornings that send you to sleep in the afternoons when you’ve had enough sleep already or at night when you’re rushing to the shower and I suddenly go mental wondering where you are or what you’re doing. Otherwise, this job is as perfect as you are to me. I miss you big time.
07:02:48 pm
07-13-2004

Thanks again for a lovely weekend. I’m loving you more than I’ve ever imagine I’m capable of. Don’t ever get tired of coming home to me. Have a great Sunday.
07:58:34 am
07-18-2004

Sporadically, A Blast

There was one night before the beginning of work when having a 41st floor view of the city lives up to its promise of a panorama. It was a night with fireworks display all over the Makati Business District. Fireworks were launched from the top floor of many skyscrapers, hotel rooftops, from the bay, somewhere from the Global City in Fort Bonifacio. These fireworks, blasting itself off all over the city, its outskirts, buildings from every corner, marks an occasion I just didn’t know.

These fireworks exploded for a full hour. Enough time to think how fascinating, how the universe coming out of this big fucking bang.

Perhaps there's no occasion.

It’s like how life, sporadically, makes you live to have a blast.


Going out wiht the girlfiriend:
*H. arrives in Manila from his brave and noble stop-the-war-stint-in-Iraq. We have dinner at the Korean Palace in Malate with B., E., M&L, ___, and ___. We head to the Café Adriatico in baywalk for drinks and we glorify Letran and humor ourselves with things like the rather eerie foundation day practice of kissing St. Liem de Paz’s bone/relic. And President Manuel Quezon vandalizing his grade school desk. What other school has produced a president who had such cute vandalism?
*A laugh-trip movie at Greenbelt 3. Fancy dinner at Cascada – seafood paella and lamb chops, chiken tikka. Just as I fancied it, in average-sized servings. I'm so happy with D.'s excellent taste. Downstairs, the Philippine Madrigal Singers serenade us. Then we watch them sing up close in front of Greenbelt’s Zen garden. We head to Panay to meet up with H., the P. crowd and high school friends for pizza and beer.
*In rare display of industriousness for driving, I pick up D. at home and we head to General Trias, Cavite to attend her friend’s wedding. She sang the finale, on the mezzanine of a beautiful stone church. Hearing her sing makes all the effort worth it. Then we head back to Makati for a drink with my two tall friends, ___ and ___ at Bistro 110.
*Dinner at Casa Armas with M&L, E., just when I was craving for Paella. We sober up at Coffee Bean before going home to drink again in O.'s party.

One Thousand Other Thoughts Lost to Oblivion

“I’ve snatched so much happiness and locked it in our fingers.
I found a happy ending in the middle of my story.”

Today is two days towards the end of April. Life has been exceedingly eventful and has been continuously happening. Love has flourished and blossomed with feelings of fluff. It’s been endowed with the purity of bliss that I didn’t have the space in the span of all these heartbeats to sit back and write, or just write some highlights. And so even a little, I’d try to weave and tailor the happiness I had into writing, to match with some unworthy words -- my dreams, my reality, my whims.
I will miss the aloneness I’ve been so used to. Now that it’s real, I’ll miss my fantasies, and the frequency of those fantasies that gave it verisimilitude.
The April weekdays were the almost just the same since there is work to be endured, which just makes the days more grinding. Tucked in the weekdays are days when I get to see D. after work. All this time devoted to her and all the seconds in time imparted with worth, plunged deep in love that finally filled me with the meaning of voluminous dictionaries.

What makes weekdays less agonizing and endurable, is just there thought of going out with her on weekends.
And I fall into deep sleeps, paraphrasing Neruda, with someone “pure beside me as a sleeping amber…” With someone I can call mine. With someone to rest with her dream in my dream.

Good Friday. What made Good Friday the best ever is staying in the room with D. all day while listening to chillout.

On my 23rd birthday, D. and I joined the Panay Crowd’s trip to ___’s place in the province.
After a day of swimming on the beach, getting sufficiently drunk, watching D., sharing our sentiments and a lot of laughs, everyone scrapped the idea of sleeping in the rented rooms and we all slept on the beach. Our backs to the sarong-covered sand, we were blanketed by a million stars flung like little white gems, sung for by the silent hum of water ripples, with the sea’s infinite, invisible horizon in front of us.
We took an hour-long boat ride only to miss the spectacled sandbar due to the rise of tide. On the way back to ___’s place from the island tour, the sun was setting as the afternoon fell and dissolved into evening. As a new palette paints the sky, the music in my mind thumps my head with something from Chicane.
Twenty of us were crowded on a little, wooden boat. We sang and Anya sang like a madman. There wasn’t any light on the boat and for all we know we can just hit one of those mangroves or hit another island, or just helplessly --- sink. Strong waves from the sea splashed against the sides of the boat and the water that came in stopped the engine once or twice. The fear in everyone was so fierce and ferocious, that if you convert it into a mass of heat, it could dry seawater into salt. This group of twenty found themselves singing “Take me out of the dark my Lord” aboard a lightless boat in the middle of sea wrapped in the evening’s darkness. D. and I laughed at the voice of fear singing.
I was also afraid. But then I was already too happy with D. along, I could have just died, that day after the sun had set, singing, my voice bubbling as I drown.

I’ve snatched so much happiness and locked it in our fingers. I found a happy ending in the middle of my story.

Even my parents sent me a text greeting. “Happy Birthday. Mama and I wishing you all the best.” I really felt it. All the best.

And one thousand other thoughts that I lose to oblivion since I didn’t have enough time to write them.

These Texts Speak

Hey. I’d just like to re-affirm that initiative I took last night. It’s not that I didn’t have anything to say when we parted. I was trying to calculate the chance of you feeling the same way for me. I may have forgotten that feelings do not have mathematics to give us certainty. I was wishing too much, that you’d feel the same way. I realized I have to wager my own feelings, in order to gain yours. So here I am making my little initiative. I have to say that when your hands were laced on mine, and I felt your entire tenderness, everything fell rightly into place. Shouldn’t moments like that last longer? (mine)

I would’ve kissed you goodbye if not for the thought that you’d be too embarrassed by the time I leave. Besides, there’d be time for that, as you always say. I had a really grand day with you.
05:25:10 pm 03-22-2004

There will be time to kiss lengthily as endless time will let us. We’ll make the world cheese itself over with one kiss. As we walked the near-empty mall, and the silent streets, I stumbled upon a rare joy I longed for when I saw you. Imagine how today is only a drop of water in an ocean of happy days ahead of us.

Rise and shine. It’s yet another day filled with thoughts of me and you. 01:21:57 pm 03-31-2004

How Much Can Fit In 21 Grams?

Seeing this movie is seeing a movie both backwards and forwards, since the scenes are not fed chronologically and are not suspended in a straight line. It's unstuck in time. More than foreshadowing events, it lets you imagine. It lets you play the irony of what it is like to anticipate the past, and imagine how, what happened in the future foretells what is happening in the present.

It gives you the feeling that you know for sure that something’s going happen, but you just don’t know when – like dying. And then everything just makes sense while your gaze is intensely glued to the screen, the way an effective short story squeezes the life out your neck while you’re gladly coerced into reading more and more of it.

The film casts Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts. The acting is just so superb and downright convincing. These actors make you absorb their character’s hopelessness by showing you that hopelessness does not need saving. Desperation is at its deepest when even redemption no longer required. It's profound drama.

Sean Penn plays someone who’s on the verge of a heart failure, and he not only convinces you that he’s dying, he actually makes you feel what it’s like to have death knocking at your doorstep. Perhaps I can relate more closely since I have a little of a heart condition myself. The movie is sad but it didn’t require an emotionally-charged full orchestra, or the somber, saddening decibels of cellos or weeping violins fading up into the scene every ten seconds. The complementing soundtrack mostly consists of two or three long notes of a guitar or piano, which was simply enough to wrench the saddest emotions seated in the caverns of your heart.
I got the idea that Sean Penn’s character is Math Professor. And this part of the script just took me:

“There is a number hidden in every act of life in every aspect of the universe. Fractuals, matter… and there’s a number screaming to tell us something… numbers are a door to understanding a mystery that’s bigger than us. How two people, strangers, come to meet. There’s a poem by a Venezuelan writer that begins --- ‘the earth turned to bring us closer. It turned on itself and in us until it finally brought us together in this dream.’ There are so many things that has to happen for two people to meet. Anyway, that’s what mathematics is.”

While I reveled in the experience of watching it, I’d weigh it as a not-so-easy movie which

requires full attention. It’s not exactly the typical, vacuous teeny bopper flick.

And then I wonder if my own calculations on 21 grams were just - all wrong.

Why Do I Feel So Old?

Turning 23 feels like turning thirty. 24 would feel like 40, and 25, 50. 60 it seems, is a time to go.

Perhaps you only feel this when you spend a Saturday night with a young crowd in Eastwood City with a younger brother. I never belonged to that dance-y crowd, even when I’m not even old. Perhaps this feeling is an inevitable tendency, when all you do is get old, long for the past, reconstructing your life by fantasizing about youthful memories that didn’t even happen.

One March morning when I just arrived home feeling weary from work, I was crossing our street on the way to the store to get breakfast. From the corner comes an old man: his hair all white, his skin burned by so many summers, his shoulders sunk in a small shoe-repair cart he is pushing. “Ben Shoe Repair” was sloppily painted on the box. He was an old Sisyhpus rolling his boulder up the mountain top. My father used to, and once in while, still has his shoes cleaned and shined by this old man. He must have been doing this longer than I even had memory.

He must have been so weary from his work. Today, he didn’t have enough air in his lungs when he tried to yell the trademark yell, “Sapatos.” I can’t even stare at him when my fucking eyeballs moistened with tears.

Now, what right did I have to feel so old?

Why Am I So Bored?

Because I do not have enough time do the things I really want to do.

Why Am I So Wise?

The title’s allusion to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo was intentional. But maybe I’m not even wise --- just conceited. At least three people told me that I think of myself as someone who’s above it all, and everybody else thinks so too. I’m someone who sits in his ivory tower, as the cliché goes. They must have thought of my geeky gestures and awkward stance as a dismissal of everything else as negligible, non-intellectual bullshit which doesn’t deserve my attention.

And maybe because I used to humorlessly mock mediocrity as though I’m the final frontier of human intelligence. I refused to melt into the crowd, although I’m already wallowing in that cesspool.

____, for example, was someone who I breifly went out with but we never really considered each other seriously. She recently told me that I look down on her, and many other people whom I must have branded as idiots. Somehow, she gave a good demonstration on how I do this to her. I think I am the idiot. I should’ve stuck with her now that her Friendster profile states that she is a VJ/model. She drives a red Altis with her initials on the car plate. She used to call me babes.

Why am I so wise? I don’t have a fucking clue.

A Little Sun Escaped

“It was still raining when we decided to come back down. After a while, a little sun escaped and peered through the clouds.
Slowly, the sun stretches its rays and the sky is flooded with light.”

Aside from the sun blazing, the fires of March licking my skin, the summer forecast includes my whining on why all that summer holds is --- work. I ask myself why I have to be slumped and enclosed in my skyscraper cave while the sun burns furiously, making us burst with a maddening, searing lust for life. The night is speckled with stars. Everywhere you hear the sea waves summoning you, chanting with full strength the blissful sonic trips from Chicane, Café del Mar, and the MOS chillout annual.
And so I went away instead of whining. Three provinces in two days is a full itinerary, but I even had time to read at the back of the car.
Straight out of work on Saturday morning, we visited the church in Calaruega. We took pictures and walked along the trails with all that wonderful scenery. During our retreats here when I was a 15 year old Catholic high school student, I confessed my agnosticism, or even refused to label it as that. I had my last confession here seven years ago, and this will probably be the last place on earth where I will tell a priest to forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.
We went to Sonia’s Garden in Tagaytay for lunch. This turned out to be one of the most tastefully unique, all-too-fantastic lunches I’ve ever had. I raved about it for days as my tongue dripped with its honey. They didn’t even serve any meat. At first, I almost found the prospect of paying a 550 peso lunch for leaves and grass rather repulsive. All the hype, the dough you’re shedding, and the long trip you made just pays off by the time you fork the salad to your mouth. It’s the first time I had a salad with fruits like jackfruit, mangoes, peaches, even corn, etc. The salad had nuts and probably six varieties of edible leaves/vegetables, or even flowers grown in this garden. The salad bowl was like a fucking forest. It came with two choices of equally delectable dressings. All servings were unlimited, including the usual shredded eggs, parmesan cheese, etc. The second set in the meal was bread with a choice of anchovies, basil and tomato pâté or white cheese. The main course was pasta. You still get to pick the quantity of pasta ingredients: the pasta sauce from sun dried tomatoes, shitake mushrooms, capers, chicken cream and yes – all the shrimps you want in your pasta. For drinks, there was a bottomless helping of dalandan juice with mint leaves. Everything we ate was nearly cholesterol-free. If health buffs always had this much fun eating, I’d be a vegetarian. We also just hung around the relaxing places in the garden itself that combined hippie features, new age inspirations, and in all probability: exclusively-yuppie prices. There were a lot of candles, incense, white linen and curtains, wide, wooden chairs and a variety of lamps.
For coffee, we headed to Antonio’s in the main highway. The cool Tagaytay afternoon wind blew gently on us, the volcano sleeping in the lake below. This huge cup of coffee made me want to take a crap. Tagaytay restaurants have an open-aired, wide window in their bathrooms. I had an extraordinary dumping experience, of shitting while having a live view of the sides of Taal Volcano. The world becomes a beautiful place while you drop your bombs and sink your submarines into the latrine.
The sun was setting while we were on the road, and I had my own rest. For about an hour, I dozed off on the way to Laguna.
After hours of driving or sitting in the car, nothing tasted better than cold beer that makes love with your throat. We had the beer in Pagsangjan Rapids where we checked in. We figured it would be too hot in the house, if were not also a little frightened by sleeping there with only the three of us. A cousin showed us this party scene in Pagsangjan and there was beer, music and a young crowd.
The next morning I had the unforgettable binagoongan wrapped in banana leaves, or binalot, and we went up to Caliraya for coffee. It rained like mad and the winds in the mountains knocked off the golf balls, driving the golfers to postpone their game. But then, you’d still gasp at this excellent scenery, and get to enjoy the freshness of the whipping cold wind.
It was still raining when we decided to come back down. A little sun escaped and peered through the clouds. Slowly, the sun stretches its rays and the sky is flooded with light. Like a scene from the Care fucking Bears.
Driving along on this mountain’s empty road, and reading my book on the backseat, I turned my head. My mouth encircled slowly like a bubble gaining circumference, and let out a “hu-wow….”
At close range, we saw the beginning of the rainbow, its edge emanating from Caliraya’s man-made lake. Cars stopped in the middle of the road. I wish I had this view every time I’m taking a crap.
This dispels the legend of the pot of gold found at the end of the rainbow. This did not, however, prevent me from having pot when we arrived that night. So how else could I sleep but high and blissful? I wish for more blissful, steady, sleeps and trips.

Rainwater on Asphalt

"Monday is tired and Monday rains and wants us to rest. February gives us one last glimpse of gloomy skies before summer ushers itself in and the mercury madly rises. I smell the peculiar smell of rainwater pouring on asphalt."

Morning shift. As though it were a redeeming value for the sullied mornings, Makati’s afternoon skyline is a delight to the senses. The panoramic view of the 41st floor is like a scene out of Lost in Translation. Tower antennas from neighboring buildings rise for a more cinematic effect.
When a ray of sunlight escapes between clouds, it casts silver on the bay below. It’s when souls rise up to heaven, leaving a thousand diamonds on the water and on its trail up.
When the sun sets, towards twilight, the most spectacular palettes of color are painted with happy curves.
Then the city starts to light up. At the end of the day in the office, a little life, at least, seems to begin.

On the way to becoming a full-fledged fatso, you eat Yellow Cab pizza four times a week, Mongolian bowls, beef brisket on Yang Chow fried rice, and all the deadly, savory niceties from the cholesterol factory.

I remember one indulgent Saturday morning with friends. After breakfast at Mcdo with my officemates, with mcflurries and all, I met up with a few more friends and had coffee at the Seattle’s Best in Paseo Center, then beer and stuffed bacon pizza and a little lasagna at Sbarro’s. I sent my stomach sailing to LBM.
And that night I went to AV’s party to drink some more, engaging merrily into drunken banter before I realize (and regret) later on how loquacious I’ve become.
I am Jairus Jason’s lonely lump of fat.

There is never really enough time to seize the day. As soon as arrived home on Saturday morning from my shift, after gambling and losing on NBA Live with my younger brother, I went to Quiapo with O. for pirated DVD shopping. Although the latest movies aren't out yet, I got something produced by Almodovar, the whole third season of The Simpsons.
Saturday evening was a musical/play in CCP with ___ and ___. After the play we found ourselves trudging towards the bay area in Roxas Boulebard where M&L and D. met us up. It was D.’s birthday. Roxas Boulevard is a great idea with an ideal proximity for me, but the establishments are poorly organized. The service is terrible, and food and drinks are unreasonably costly. The crowd is too huge and the bay would have no solemnity left.
But I was just too happy with our crowd, with how ___ can make a mockery while exacting humor on everything. Nobody is ever bored around her.
That night, I was just glad I didn’t feel the need to be drunk as a whirlwind.
We went biking at three in the morning.
At 5 am we were at M.’s place. L. and D. made breakfast. I slept a little and laughed some more.
____ dropped by the house at lunch to watch Almodovar’s Talk to Her while I slumber away. I wake up to dinner with my family, then watched one of the DVDs I bought recently, something that’s at least less vacuous compared too what they’d show in the theaters.
And I could use some more sleep, and a day for reading, coffee, lounging and horsing around. Before I know it, it’s already Monday. Monday is tired and Monday rains and wants us to rest. February gives us one last glimpse of gloomy skies before summer ushers itself in and the mercury madly rises. I smell the peculiar smell of rainwater pouring on asphalt. I plunge into a dejavu about going to La Salle again, my nose teased by the moldy perfume of faded-yellow books from the library. I am Jairus Jason’s perverted sense of smell. It made me sleep so well.
Today February rains like June, as though time is really not there.

A Skyscraper Cave

“This is where grandiose dreams are drained, disappearing as it dusts quietly like forgotten job orders or resumes filed neatly in folders and file boxes.”

“This is where, despite how furiously the sun may shine… casting its golden gleams every morning, despite the breath-taking heights of skyscrapers, being here is like being enclosed in a dark cave, where all you see are shadows.”

A Writing Exercise/Warm-Up. Tired of what? I’m too tired; even to think of why I’m keeping this journal, why I string these words together. Somehow it has just become essentially who I am. It’s become difficult to become who I am, even by my own standards.
I’m thinking; why am I so drawn to writing this, why do I have to present myself to myself in a proper package? Why I feel inadequate if I do not write, if I write with less insight, if I no longer write with peculiar interest. I tend to lose interest in life – which is a most natural tendency, when your days are quick and redundant.

“Ultimately we all sound like broken records glossing over the same wounds and the same bouts of giddy happiness.” Yet I continue to write, and take some of it to account. I write, even if the only line I can say is: What the fuck anyway? Living requires metaphors, the production of phrases both to abstract my reality and just make my reality – mine. Writing is when I take possession of this reality.

I can almost see now, how this puzzle is pieced. A small ray of sunlight enters the room, and lands on a bookmark in my desk, highlighting the yellow in Carl Spizweg’s “The Bookworm.” This old man is on top of a ladder cataloging books on a high shelf. Then it’s gone in a jiffy, and the sun just burns for every other atom and dreg in the world. Everything else that becomes altered into insignificant little specks in an infinite cosmos. Then it shows itself again, the 4:47 pm sunlight of the setting Sunday sun dapples the yellow sheets of my scribble pad, the old wood of the desk, and glints on the spilled fountain pen ink. I’m hearing a perfect sunset song, something out of the Calm 6-track chillout sampler, which 5 or 6 years ago, after buying a few chillout albums, was given to me as a freebie by the pretty-looking Chinese merchant who appeared to own the pirated-CD store in the left wing of UM.

The sun sets in the west, and none of its last setting rays would’ve made it to the room, if not for the tinted glass panels of the building windows across the street. At this time of the day, towards dusk, sunshine is literally mirrored to the room. I see it on my arm and it glares on my pores, against the fan-blown hair which came out of it. Now sunlight is cast on the Escolta Circa 1880 postcard. Sunlight mirrored on a painted sky, on a postcard’s faded sepia tones. And I think of how my life is as repetitious as the rhythm of my own breathing. But even if a lot of it is the same, I just must write, the way our lungs breathe air, hands must push pens.

For January weekdays, morose Mondays and all, I’m slumped into working life’s routine. Without much motivation, interest, or any grappling with reasons why I should go to work, I mindlessly manage to wake up at 7:30 pm to prepare for work, sluggishly entering the bathroom door for a shower at 8:30 pm. I just have to appreciate the fact that work is less excruciating now. I can’t complain as much. I even have time to snatch some lines and write haikus (if you can call it that) in Filipino between office hours. When I arrive home in the morning, I often manage to read two or three stories from the Palanca Anthology of Winning Works in the 80’s. So far, my winner amongst winners is Eli Ang Barroso’s “Our Lady of Arts & Letters.” This story has such a powerful, dramatic plot and a hair-rising climax. The elements of the short story as I learned it in lit class – is put in such excellent use. Awed by his characters, you can almost feel the writer showing-off his mastery through the sheer brilliance of having the development of his characters point reference to popular characters in literature. I’m awed even by the character’s own thoughts.

“I will say only this – you don’t generate but rather recycle ideas. Given enough time, I can trace your ideas to all the books you have read. Your mind is shamelessly derivative. It is a collector of clichés. And your life is nothing but a cheap imitation of art. Intellectual parrotings don’t impress me.”

It’s probably done before, of course, but execution is crucial and this one stands out exceptionally. I’m thinking of how he thought about all of it, and it just humbled me. The artful use of language and clever phrasing of his own figures of speech is almost just a given. This ranks up to one of the best locally-written short stories I’ve read in my entire life. It kept me up all day.
I also started on reading a little Philosophy again. I selected to review Kierkegaard. I’m reminded of how he trashes Hegelian Idealism, and emphasizes individualism, or focuses on individual existence. “He was the gadfly who stings you until you perform the essential act of introspective self-knowledge.” I related with how he acknowledges anxiety and dread, since I was an angsty, zit-ridden teenager who chanced upon contemplating the meaning of life when I first read him. I’ve always wondered whether I was in the aesthetic, moral, or religious stage. But I wouldn’t really be an advocate of these stages. I dislike how he holds religion, Christian religion at that, as the highest level of consciousness. He jumps seventy thousand fathoms and remains deep in the water, blinded by faith. How he loved irony.
The past few weeks, most of what I’ve been listening to would be Eggstone and PurpleChickens. They’re both classified as Indie. What it probably takes to be indie is that it’s really good music that not a lot of idiots listen to. Eggstone doesn’t differ much from Blur in having that general character of European bands, in terms of sound. They’re probably the European counterpart of Weezer. But what I especially love about them is how their rather sadness-ridden lyrics become strangely relieving when accompanied by cold, passionate vocals: “And in my eye, something is telling me that I have to rest for a while…. Supermeaningfectyless.” I hope they play this song in my wake or eulogy. In a song called Birds in Cages, “Maybe it will rain tomorrow… Maybe I’m insane tomorrow... One thing is for sure, I’m not happy anymore.” And in “Neil,” “I need Sundays… I need Highways… More than I know, when I die, I will be gone forever… More than I wonder, why on earth do I try to be so clever…” What I also would adore most about PurpleChickens is the lyrics. And I wouldn’t even say this with any bias on judgment because I know Aldus Santos, its vocalist and writer. Offhand, I’d say that this is one of the best feats local music has ever achieved in years. I can hear traces of what influenced him in music back in high school: The Beatles, Grunge and REM. If I didn’t hear about them, I’d mistake this album for a foreign act. Aldus sings in Dream Systems, “If I smile the smile of the forgetful… run from me run from me… If I smile the smile of the forgetful… stay away stay away stay away.” Or in Eyelash Envy, “I was saltwater… that you wiped off from your brow.”
On weekends, there’s still time to troop to the mall. Last week I saw the Lord of the Rings III on a date with myself. The previous week, I was with ___, D. and ___ at Rockwell, just having some laughs at the expense of other people, merely by looking at them. Then we spent all night drinking at Marie’s. Two weeks ago, I was right smack in the middle of Greenbelt III with ___, ____ and ____. ___ just came from Quiapo and she brought candles and penis rings. Each of us was assigned with, and lighted a candle, holding it while sitting on a bench. We received a few curious glances, as though we were having a happy, yet solemn ceremony.

I juggle the days and nights, watching them slip off my hands as someone who is unskillful in this pursuit. Every morning, as the end of the shift nears, I see how time melts through the 41st floor window. The Makati morning skyline is nothing that ranks as awe-inspiring, if it is not a downright horrible sight. The whole city is covered with obvious dirt and smog, divided by a clear horizontal line from the whiter clouds up above that industrial sludge has not reached and harmed. If this were an era in life, what must have been a period of "career development" has been a period of intellectual recession. At night, no stars are seen from the 41st floor window. The lights of the city look like an unmapped constellation with tiny galaxies of street lampposts, tail lights at the rear end of cars, lights from the airport runway, neon signage and the distinctive green and blue light emanating from Greenbelt. This galaxy is a galaxy which has lost its glamour. Its stars are old and tired, dying to become a supernova. They await their gigantic explosion, that second wave of the big bang which the lifeless occupants of these stoned edifices that will breathe life on their humdrum lives. We beg for something enormously stirring to happen, to perk the guts out of us. An explosion to shake us out of out of all our cherished beliefs. Like the last scene in Fight Club.
This is probably why when I ride the cab at night, I've always suspected that something is about to explode in this city, something that the bomb-sniffing trained dogs have not found.
And this is why this city has begun to look like a city of ruin from the 41st floor. This is why smog douses its skyline every morning, its whole radius covered in black cloud. It is because this is where everyone's passions begin to wane, in the long huddle of their laboring. This is where grandiose dreams are drained, disappearing as it dusts quietly like forgotten job orders or resumes filed neatly in folders and file boxes. This is where, despite how furiously the sun may shine and stretch its rays, casting its golden gleams every morning, despite the breath-taking heights of skyscrapers, being here is like being enclosed in a dark cave, where all you see are shadows.