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.

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.”

December 1999

This is the last month in a thousand years, and there’s four more days before the new millennia. I haven’t caught the infection of that “millennium fever,” of which people had made a big ballyhoo about. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always thought of time as irrelevant, and I’ve always been conscious of the fact that I am alive. Even more, I know that one day, I will just die and people will keep on awaiting balls of fire to fall from the sky and the seven angels to blow the trumpets of the apocalypse – wasting their time instead of living. A few days back, some high school friends and I traveled to Pampanga to visit another friend, his kid and his wife. We decided that because the night before, we chanced upon talking about him in between beer and a bottle of Lambanog. Seeing him with a three week old baby cradled in his arms, we received a lucid indication that we all were less younger. There’s no longer anything flabbergasting about it. He asked us if we wanted to go fishing or if we wanted to see the sunset. This made us all laugh because fishing and watching the sunset was apart from ordinary human affairs as we know it. But after shoveling wet clods for worms, we found ourselves fishing. We caught nothing but he made us take home what caretakers of the pond just caught. We went to D.N.’s home at Alabang to have them grilled in the lawn. Each of us must have drank eight to ten bottles of beer. The moon which bathe us that night was the first full moon in a winter solstice for one hundred years. It was almost something like a ritual, in the company of my most wonderful friends, with another friend having us fancied as, “mandirigma.”

Malate, My Malate. For the past year or two, Malate’s popularity increased and spread like an electric jolt. It moves so fast, even strangely, like an organic movement, that something else seems to decay or completely disappear. There are new bars popping up like mushrooms. The lines at convenience stores selling beer getting longer in every street and the price is beginning to hit the ceiling. Something seems to be lost every time an old house is transformed into an establishment. No one is there to live and breathe and appreciate the life of the place during the day. I just don’t want the place to become to a completely commercial area. That would kill the real thrill, the identity of the place before it’s completely lost. It is still the place for my long late afternoon walks, along arched trees and houses, falling leaves, tall lamp posts, their orange lamps, the last embers of sunlight and the first moon beams.

The last time I was in Malate, with Malate as the gimmick venue - the crowd was unbelievably thick. There’s a street party at every street. This meant live bands playing the conventional nauseating repertoire and charging three hundred bucks per head for entrance. Somewhere along Mabini, there’s another fashion show starring homosexuals, sponsored by some cigarette or beer brand. There is a reigning perception that the homosexuals in Malate is a featured attraction, and I’m not sure whether that would contribute anything to the gay movement or if this is what they really want. Also along Mabini, there’s a foreign DJ spining jungle, acid and house music. On the other side of street, there’s another beauty pageant. Finally, in another corner is a strip of decent restaurants where there’s good food, well-thought-of bar concepts with a crowd mainly composed of couples in their post-dinner dates playing cat and mouse, determining blindly, and asking meandering versions of whether they are having sex or not. The only common denominator of all the streets is how difficult it is to find a parking space. The real jewels of these streets though – are places where they perform live jazz of the Davis/Coltrane persuasion, ska and reggae. The bonus is when you get free cigarettes from the mini-skirted Mild Seven promo girls.

Near the circle, in front of the church, youngish looking prostitutes are for pick-up. Art galleries and bars frequented by artists are another area of interest. Malate is also supposed to be a bastion for artists. I hope, no matter how pretentious some of them are, that Malate stays as this bastion. Tonight, there’s an ongoing art performance. There was a blend of international and local artists. Most of the performances provided decipherable metaphors, delving into sexuality, the collapse of humanity, imperialism and what seems like this never-ending psuedo-intellectualism. In one of the performances, I was a participant. A Japanese young female artist performs. She’s charming in a long, black chiffon dress. Her eyes are almond, her skin porcelain, her lips red as cherries. We saw her eating cherries in a previous performance. In her performance art, she raises a box to a pole. The box would reveal an infant with a penis and pubic hair. She takes out a sign, “Can anybody kiss me?” The girl approaches the spot where we stand and my brother, my cousin E, and my friend O. gives me a nudge. The girl offers her hand to me and I go up to the stage. In front of an estimated crowd of 100 as an audience, the Japanese girl and I make out to the “Unchained Melody” which was playing on the background. It was the first time I kissed a foreigner. I’m touching the breasts of a person who probably doesn’t speak a language we’d both understand. That fascinated me, how we were both complete strangers and we delivered a message: how stereotypical and libidinal the male specie is: perhaps how they even exploit and wrong women, and how they should be hanged for it. At the same time, the performance shows how easily men succumb to women: to the lure of this kiss in particular. Tonight, I happen to be an object for Feminst Criticism. I look back to that kiss and it’s not something lurid, and all of it is not just some parody. Anyone can argue with that, but

I could always assert that this is a simple, public kiss to a beautiful Japanese girl. Hopefully, she’d say a similar thing.

The next morning I attend Literary Criticism class, Feminist Criticism serving as topic, Ichampion the cause of Feminism.

Before I completely go off-tangent, I go back to Nakpil. I guess we’ll always go back to where the beer is cheap, and where grilled tuna belly is delicious. It’s this company, this shared experience, this belongingness and sense of home. It makes Malate our bastion and no one else’s. It’s the reason why you never shy away from a drink.

Every night is young and seductive.

November 1999

Malraux’s Man’s Fate Irony. Upon reading something like Man’s Fate people undergo something similar to a mystical feeling or a religious experience. There is an enlightenment or awareness of sorts, of death, of human suffering and it roots. This gives birth to idealism. In my case, it just might’ve signaled the end of it: as if to say that our fate is fate of suffering. I wouldn’t want to say that I’ve outgrown myself, but I can never obsess myself with immaturity of wanting to be the world’s savior. I know I can’t be the next Ninoy Aquino, another Marx or Jesus of Nazareth. It also doesn’t mean that I won’t do anything about it. At least the very least, I know I wouldn’t just despair, even if our fate is a fate of suffering.

This is perhaps my most favorite image: Sunday afternoons with damp and gentle November winds, ashen clouds occasionally allowing the sun to flash a smile, coffee, my desk, the fountain pen, a pink flush of light in the dimly lit living room where music is played. Last night, in celebration of SP’s birthday, I had wonderful drink with friends in Katipunan. It was our usual rowdy male crowd who dribbled ridicule, mockery and drunken banter. Pale Pilsen is still seeping out of my pores. It relaxes me from the difficult (although the job rarely is) duty last Friday. Now is the time I could collect myself, when I have the house of my own and everything falls into place. I feel solitude and found in this, a fraction of its meaning.

Life is so swell.

One of the days during the past week, my cousin E. bought me a drink. We passed by Nakpil and we both noticed how silent the deserted street was. I have often seen it lying there, flatly, in its silence, during long walks before sunset, amidst absence of nice-smelling tube-clad, devastatingly beautiful women, their balloonhead boyfriends and members of the male specie (such as me) with their eyes whirling and spinning. Everybod’s standing there in a “street party” parading themselves, probably wanting to get laid before the ice caps melt. But right now all the bars are closed and not populated, acid jazz, groove and dance music unheard and replaced by quiet steps and the hum of passing vehicles.
So much has transpired in Nakpil that had made many nights glitter. The beer flowing on the streets, the crowd looked good and the music was good. Everybody’s heads bounced like molecules to acid jazz. So much less have wondered how it appears when the lavish neon lights and bulbs are off, when there were no waves of mirth splashed across the place. So much less have wondered about how this looked liked in 1930, or how the moon glows on it, and how it slumbers in silence.

How are you bored? Is boredom what you go through when you do not use your senses, or are you bored because you have your senses used your senses excessively, to a certain dysfunction, that you are no longer thrilled by any expectation?

I have often wondered --- despite the richness, or more often the disparity of the experience, why I refused to take into account my little adventures and misadventures with women. I have decided against delving into the details, the graphics of it. It would make me look amateur, weak. It would make me look like the child that I am. But I am an eighteen year old anatomy of stereotypical male hormones, and I am not someone archetypal like Panday the Invulnerable or Drop-dead Prince Charming. You don’t see Helen of Troy or Aphrodite fall for my silly shots. I am amateur, I am weak and I am a child. Until that time arrives, as Coupland puts it, when you go “beyond a certain age and sincerity becomes less pornographic.”
What do I have to be sincere about then, about women? I have not written about women, partly because, I somehow wronged them. True, I have somehow tailored this journal handsomely, but I never lied to it, I treat it as an audience. When I felt fear and self-consciousness the clarity of my thought had obviously been veered away, though I have not been dishonest enough to betray myself. Pretentious as it sounds, I want to have a proud set of principles which will not allow women to be objectified, falsely perceived and wrongly treated. Women are to be admired, treated equally, and loved.
I consider myself fortunate for having known what it is like to love as a young man, to love a young woman who, blossoms like a flower sweetly after summer. I loved her, and I have soared in that ecstasy. Now I consider myself honestly and see that all that love was crap.

The Room. This was of course, the crummiest spot in the house. The curtains breathes a cocktail of alcohol, cigarette smoke, dust. The pillows have seeped sweat and saliva. This was our venue for soda and gin twists. This is where the booze seemed bottomless. There was chaos, but it seemed like the chaos was an acceptable-enough order. It was home after all, where I have read, and slept.
My father told me that the room was a pisshole. And I grew woozy over my mom telling me to dispose of the overflowing ashtrays every morning.
I decided to rearrange things a bit, to realign my perceptions of what this room should be. It is only now that I was afforded active participation in what it might look like, at least in a minimum. We painted everything on gray scale, which complemented the blinds. We relocated things to create space. We bought a touch lamp designed with waves, and a chair which could be called decent. I’m still banking on the idea of a small candle collection, completing the carpet, and art for the bare wall.
The lamp is lit, its soft tone radiance glimmering on the liquor bottles, the chair, and it the room glowed. It still isn’t cutting edge interior design and it pales in comparison to the furniture of the filthy rich. But I’m hearing Ella Fitzgerald singing in the background, I’m having a drink, the candle scent air freshener has dissipated the foul in the air, and I could sleep well, I could feel calm like a Hindu cow.

October 1999

Death by Pivots and Pirouettes. Ballet, in common understanding, is an art of graceful posture and dance. In another light, ballet is the expensive non-school activity of bourgeoisie’s female children. We see the bourgeoisie parade themselves in the theater during the recital gala. Their jewels glitter with the bulbs, crystals and capiz of the chandelier. They are usually unduly influenced by the idea that only people like them could really appreciate and have a good grasp of shows like Giselle, Carmen. So much for Marxist convictions and pretensions. So much for me and my pseudo-intellectualism.
What I’m really impelled to say is that I don't have an exact notion of what ballet is as artform. I’ve experienced it while I was on duty, and I’ve frequently saw glimpses of performances by schools and companies such as the Philippine Ballet Theater and Ballet Philippines. While it's not precise, I've somehow I’ve fermented my own uneducated notion. It like a moving language, conveying emotions made more real, literally made physical as toes tipped in the platform. It's art and fiction performed skillfully by bodies. It conveys grace, elegance, magnificence through the most powerful, the most difficult and yet the most frail gestures: from a slight curve of the forearm to legs spread wide apart, one hundred and eighty degrees of human limbs in the air. You hear the bourgeoisie and the culturati applaud the seemingly difficult pivots, pirouettes and poses.
Just a few hours back I’ve seen Giselle, the story of a peasant girl who fell in love with a prince-in-disguise named Albrech. Albrech also falls in love with Giselle. Through Hilarion who had been suspicious of Loys (Alberch in disguise) Giselle finds out that he’s really a prince --- and that he’s engaged to this bigshot princess. Giselle goes daft, dances in a deranged fit, and dies out of depression. That makes up the first part of the play. I thought that was pretty dumb.
The juice is in the second part. There’s a new set after the intermission. We’re in Giselle’s grave within the Irish forests during midnight. The entire stage beams blue, the forest and the full moon looming in the background. Then the Wilis appear. They are fairies who were jilted, who died before their wedding day. They appear in white costumes, with veils then crowned with green flowers. Like ghosts in rhythmic movement they slowly appear. Their veils and their immaculate white outfits, float into the blue stage. The specter’s appearance was spectacular. They remove their veils and dance on the stage, in a large group, in the chorus of the beautiful language of ballet. They freeze in the most graceful and elegant stance, they dance in the most skillful, both the most powerful and frail gestures.
These beautiful Willis enchant souls into a dance-to-the-death marathon. This was the fate of the Hilarion dude. And through some kind of ritual, they claim the soul of Giselle. The ballet performance of this ritual was all too fantastic: the synchronized, difficult ballet movements of the Wilis (noted by the applause of the culturati), their white costumes and their pretty faces, the disconsolateness their characters portray in the beautifully lighted stage that speaks how both somber and magical the scene is.
Albrech visits Giselle’s grave and Giselle’s souls makes an apparition. Albrech was supposed to die through the dance spell of Wilis, but he doesn’t. Their love transcends death and Giselle forgives him. The sun’s golden glow drives the Willis away. The stage changes to brighter hues and Albrech lives. My favorite part is: Giselle and Albrech doesn’t end up together. Giselle's soul has been liberated from becoming one of the Wilis. And Albrech lives on.
I saw Liza Macuja Elizalde, a Filipina prima ballerina, play Giselle. I couldn’t get the second part of the ballet out of my mind. It is as if the Wilis had made me dance on a blue stage, and I will dance, though never with the grace, skill, beauty and elegance of a ballet dancer, I will dance until I die.


Alibis in the absence of something clever to say. I often wonder why I can’t get myself to say anything about the shows and exhibits during the duties at ___. Now I can almost find out that they reduce me to wordlessness, realizing that truth of the awe in Schopenhauer’s aesthetic contemplation.

September 1999

Along the lines of my Statistics 101 notebook, I wrote between the mean and the measure of central location/tendency : “I cannot settle for mathematical truths. They might produce an accurate picture of reality’s parts (which is still questionable and problematic), but accuracy is not adequacy. Math is an abstract science that cannot accommodate or quantify life’s many abstractions. Math can only make reality, or parts of reality - abstract. I only attended the class for 7 days and didn’t even bother to drop out. I remember Dr. E___ saying something like, ‘statistics has produced so much damage in our judgment.’ Statistics brings us biases, not only figures.

And yes, I despised the class.

It was the first subject I flunked, flushing myself down the drain without even taking any of the long tests, the midterm or final exams. I clearly could’ve made it to the dean’s list again (an exact 3.0 GPA this term, without that 0.0) and keep up my odds for honorable mention. But what is a 3.0 or 0.0 but statistics themselves? It should not say anything royal about my wisdom or my folly.

I spent a night watching a marathon of six films in J.V.’s room. Included in the lineup was “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “The People vs Larry Flynt,” “Something About Mary,” “Basketball Diaries” along with a few smut films. They were all spectacular. They were such a spectacle that for a few seconds, all I’ve seen and heard from the flickering TV screen was a blend of beautiful noise and a torrent of colors in a flit, filling a dark room, a spot in my eye and a cavernous passage in my ear.

The downside to this marathon was that I dropped my old habit of really reading through a film, listening to it carefully and even writing words from dialogue which was worth writing. Somehow, I’ve always allowed films, through dissecting them, to enter my mind to explore, embrace and challenge its cherished ideas. Now I merely watched it.

“Farewell my Concubine” saddens everything in me, even my toes. However, I still thought that films like these along with highly-rated films (including “Life is Beautiful” or “Saving Private Ryan”) has a propaganda for America, or American ideology. Farewell, for instance, seems to rant on heavily but quietly, about Communism’s setbacks. It seems that highly rated films must be pro-America. Undeniably, to describe these films as “fantastic” or “wonderful” would be an outright understatement. What I loved most about Farewell is how it showed China’s history through the story of two actors --- coinciding with a country’s rich tradition, culture, success, downfall, revolution, deceit, survival and desperation. And it really showed it, so as to make you know what China was with both warts and glamour. It made you feel what it was like, almost putting yourself in the character’s shoes. The drama has an Asian flair to it that made all the despair seem familiar. Unlike Filipino actors who are annoying to watch, the actors just move you. They don’t just scream and crying exaggeratedly, beg, or appear kawawa (pitiable) as Filipino actors do.

Today, I was on duty at the Eiga Sai Japanese film festival, which gave me a glimpse of a 1950’s film “Early Summer.” It was slow paced, blurred, and black and white that seemed strange and uninviting. Unlike Kurosawa black-and-white films, this one's just intolerable. I’ve also seen “A Sandcastle Model Family Home” which is no different from most Japanese films I’ve seen with its emphasis on their work ethic, and the nearly-generic yet fascinating character of Japanese people. It was much like “My Sons,” and I’m making that comparison because both movies probably run on the same festival theme. A Sandcastle has a good story, showing the family as a dying institution corrupted by mundane corporations.

We wanted to watch “The Red Violin” but it was in French, without subtitles. J.K. treated us to a Hollywood flick, “Deep Blue Sea.” The scares were well-effected on THX surround sound, and the 360 degree screen made the entire thing seem tangible.

All these films. Spectacles are flickering from a screen that blended beautiful noise and a torrent of colors in a flit, filling a dark room, a spot in my eye and a cavernous passage in my ear.

An almost-perfect dream. A volcano in a city by the beach was about to erupt. Its mouth started, abruptly, to emit smoke, like the radiator of an overheating car. Then it began spewing and spitting ash, lava and the volcanic grains that came with quakes and gigantic explosions from the core of a mad earth, making its nature nude. The nimbus of the noon sky took a completely gray scale.

Havoc was wreaked in the city. In this catastrophic event, people in all their craziness and impulsive panic rushed toward nonexistent exits.

I was standing by the beach, my feet buried in the damp sand. I just wanted to dance. I was almost happy, despite, or perhaps because of the chaos around me.

A woman with long hair flowing on her back approached me. She got herself undressed heedless of all the people running amuck and the danger about to devour everyone. She asked me to get undressed too. I did, without hesitation. I noticed that she was much taller than I am. This wouldn’t be awful, and would rather be the most beautiful, last testament in life. We kissed, though in all this haste I seemed not to feel anything in her lips. As some passion grew, I felt that kiss as the last poem, as the last romance, the last moment of existence. The volcano continued to erupt and made everyone bear its heavy grudge.

As we kissed, fire crackers lit up the sky. It’s a happy new year. On one part the sky was gray with ash, on another part, the many hues of the fire crackers sparkled and sprinkled like many Saturns and Venuses and Milky Ways in a pitch black midnight. We kissed while people were having their heads blown off, and their bodies consumed by tongues of cruel fire. Somewhere, someone was singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow.”

We held our hands, and she started running toward the sea with me. Then she swam. I couldn’t swim and I couldn’t tell her. She just went on and dived in to cold, green waters. While we swam, I felt my arms swish swiftly against the sea, and I kept on looking for her hand. When we found each others hands, we laced them and swam together. She carried me on. We reached the coast of an island, which had a rich, green rainforest. We walked, with our bodies bare, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

As we searched through the jungles, we found another naked man. He was handsome and had a powerful built. I was surprised that the woman knew him, and a second later they were wrapped in embrace. I knew the man said something to me, but I vaguely remember, maybe because I didn’t want to remember. I knew they were old lovers. They walked away.

I wanted to swim to where there were no shores, swim to the end of the world.

In the surreal world of sleep, there is no time, and no gravity. But it turns out there’s still romantic tragedy. All this dream-imagery makes me want to vomit.