Selfishness to Selflessness

Regaining Weight

I’ve been regaining weight and I’m regaining a sense of who I was when I was obese. Strangely enough, it’s easier to be confident when your mind and heart is clogged with butter from bagels. The saturated fat does the talking for you.

On other parts of my life, I feel the lightness of being, the longing for repetition.

Worries, Errands, Bills, and other forms of Whining

I forgive who I once was, the emotionally immature who documented my useless ranting. I ask forgiveness from my wife, who years before (and maybe occasionally), had to endure all that I was.

From Selfishness to Selflessness

If I ended now, I would have been a good story to tell. I know. I know because I long to repeat every moment of my life.

Family is a blissful selflessness.

The Highest Highs

I.'s laughter. Mouth opening and eyes chinked in a smile. I. falling asleep on my shoulders. The nasal high of sniffing his scalp. Hearing him say the first few words of his life: mama, dada, banana, fish (he must’ve have read JD Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Bananafish in a previous life). Having family. Having my own family. Having I. Having D.

Having these highs and wanting almost nothing more.

(Pictures by D.)

2012

Let's not hurry and let's not worry about end of the world. Trust in the beautiful process of the universe. We will persist. We will perish. It will be sorrowful. It will be joyful. It never really ends.

Love all around in 2012.

Hemingways

In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l'Odeon. On a cold windwept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p.35

Whether it was chaos, repetition, or a pre-destined natural order I am thankful that the world brought me to a moment when a mint-condition copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast fell on my hands. I am thankful for having bought it in a glorious bargain from a second-hand bookstore, and how it brought me back to an even more glorious time.

Around the time he was writing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald cruised in a Rolls Royce with his Zelda and hung out in Paris cafes getting black-out-drunk with “expatriate luminaries” like Hemingway. Gertrude Stein invites people over for tea at her 27 rue de Fleurus apartment. James Joyce, Ezra Pound can be spotted at Shakespeare and Co., the bookstore of Sylvia Beach.

Hemingway wrote his work in the nearby Closerie des Lilas, ordering café au lait or café crème or beer or wine. He wrote this posthumously published book in Cuba, and he still had Paris in him. I will not be foolish to even attempt to say anything scholarly about this book, so I account for how I take it with me when I can barely remember. I thought autobiographical books like these give you the right to judge the author’s character and reinforces your own. He revealed his complexities, compassion, weaknesses, brilliance and gentlemanliness without self-praise, pretension or the malady of blogs and biographies nowadays – sissiness and whining.

There's a recent Woody Allen called "Midnight in Paris" that took several references from this book. Salvador Dali was also in appearance. We never became expatriate luminaries (maybe except for H.) but a few High/Grade School friends urged me to see that Woody Allen film. I am glad we stay in touch in one way or another. And thanks to the advanced methods of piracy, I've seen the movie a few months before, probably even before it was released in other countries I told my friends: "All-star cast:Hemingway, TS Eliot, Fitzgerald et al. Most of who you read in high school to find out how to get girls. Paris in the 20s is our Manila in the late 90s. A moveable feast."

A Musical Plurality

I am going to generalize and say that nobody ever understood what the hell "indie" meant.

How many times have we repeated that the internet created this new space? I have to stop asking and enjoy the plurality by plucking out the music deliberately from this big, beautiful field of budding flowers.

In the advent of sharing links for downloading torrents, CDs may have been obsolete, too. So rarely do we burn them. There are always new ways of consuming media.

In the year 2011, I am three decades old but I listened to, for example, 20-somethings from France who called their group “Teenagers.” The music is sardonic, not always witty, but mostly libidinal and funny in a sex-typed humor. I’d like to think it’s an algorithmic result of my tastes that I ended up listening to the Bombay Bicycle Club or the Perishers – which did sound like music for organic soy, high Omega-3 tofu-eating crowd or College folk who look at the rain or autumn leaves on their windows while studying in some Boston campus.

I hear some of the latest pop from our maid and try to produce a balance it out by coercing her to listen to classical music whenever she’s nannying little I.

In this plurality, there are always the things I like. My late-nineties alternative/grunge nostalgia just won’t give in to amnesia. It all boils down to the final 30GB you saved on your iPod.

I remember a tweet from a November evening while listening to Jazz with my 17-month old son. It’s old, but it never sounds like a broken record. The tweet goes: Coltrane & Davis sounds better in warm white light, in a late November evening breeze where I can’t tell what’s random from what’s precise.

If I were 19 and read Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees

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.

Yours truly, July 2000

What blabber! Now that I take myself less seriously, I laugh.

I was 19 when I wrote that bit. Whether what I wrote was stupid or brilliant, I could hardly tell and quite frankly, should hardly care. Perhaps it's a relief that nowadays my list of worries no longer include the demarcation between Philosophy and Literature. If I entered into a conversation about it now, I'll have very little to contribute. But relievingly, I would feel more eloquent about my silence.

If I were still 19, I would have read books differently that how I would now. Nowadays, I take a more recreational approach. I'm happy enough to figure out what it makes me think, not even what it is trying to say - I enjoy reading without falling into the trap of false profundity. But I don't think I miss out on the key points - if I do, I can be redeemed by Google or Wikipedia. Other than the knowledge in web-based sources, I am also only a thesis shy of a Master's Degree in Philosophy - from an overpriced University.

If I were still 19, I would would go an exposition about the book I've recently read - Italo Calvino's "The Baron in the Trees." I'd go on saying - this work is described as Philosophical Fiction, the kind that both tells a story and outlines a philosophical treatise. The Utopian Concepts that run on the philosophy side surface easily enough. The story makes itself believable with historical conjunctions to milestones such as the French Revolution, ornamented with a level of detail devoted to the botany of trees. The real and the imaginative exists in this gentle juxtaposition which makes for the simple and therefore masterful storytelling.

At Thirty, I am a loving husband, and devoted father to a charming 1-year old. I picked up the book not as assignment, or something I want my friends to see me reading, but because I saw it like a glittering gem among the bargains in BookSale. I go to coffee shops, not with the intention of reading, but to keep myself from getting sleepy while driving. When I get home, I read while my little I. sleeps, until I myself fall asleep. Somewhere between the time we sleep, I tell him about the book I was reading. This 12-year old boy climbed a tree and never descended. Up in the trees, he fell in love, became a baron, wrote, and shaped societies. I couldn't stop reading it, like I didn't believe that this idea of Utopia in the trees would have been impossible.