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.