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
Wednesday, March 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?
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 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.
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.”
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.
