Some More Aimless Floating

I’m in the upside of the resolutely-floating-aimlessly-phase of my life. Only this time, I don’t feel lost and I don’t feel that I’ve gone astray. I’m smooth sailing. Smooth sailing while resolutely floating aimlessly, with tides and waves taking me to cloud nines and earth’s nirvanas.

A few minutes ago I was just having my serving of the early evening’s after glow, watching the sky’s golden gleams turn dark. From my 41st floor cave, I saw the sun’s fading glimmer cover half the sky with gold, red, violet and blue on one side, and darkness on the other. And I can see a mountain in between, like Olympus hanging there in the heavens.

And then one million light bulbs beginning to light up the city.

This afternoon, boss gave me a figure for my salary increase and annual bonus. My salary’s going to be more decent and I could use the bonus money for another trip. And considering how I don’t take any crap from anyone in this job, this job gives me not the tiniest bit of stress that I can’t manage, I’m grateful they’re giving me more money.

Tomorrow, I will be flying to Boracay Island with D., and a number of our closest friends. I’m no longer alone in my return to an island where I found so much of my happiness. Mathematically, I’ll be twice as happy. I’ve been too proud in telling myself that it’s my Birthday gift to D.

I remember how thrilled I was about giving D. this priceless gift. It’s a Bridgette Jones Edge of Reason original movie poster displayed in the glass walls of National Bookstore. I asked how much they would sell the poster. I had to charm (or plead, more appropriately) my way into it and ask the National Bookstore Customer Service officer to give it to me for free. For more sappiness, I brought her a bouquet of flowers on the day of her birthday. She prepared salad and we had dinner at her house. We had separate a dinner and a drink with her friends, at the Oyster Boy in Greenhills, on the weekend before her birthday. We’re out a lot and it just reinforces the joy you already have.

Three weeks from now, I will have an exam in La Salle for my MA Philosophy application. Visiting the University again and the prospect of studying again, made me feel like I’ll be doing what I want and I’m taking control of my life. It wouldn’t be the coven of complacency that is College, but studying Philosophy will somehow make me feel like myself again. I even reviewed a little.

Three weeks ago, I had a short story idea. There was one night this February when my stomach kept churning and I couldn’t sleep. It was my subconscious creating this physical manifestation, telling me I had to write. Until my hand did what it had long itched to do. Again, it’s no award winner, but I was able to write fiction again. My fiction.

Tonight, and in the coming nights, I think I’ll just have some more of this. Some more dreaming, some more living, some more aimless floating.

The Usual Pleasures

Sunday night: Slept 10 hours and woke up in the afternoon to visit the mall with D. for my obligated consumerism: a new body pillow, and the more rewarding buys from Book Sale. I found Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” It’s hardcover, newly translated Random House publication for the unbelievable bargain of 120 pesos. I’ve always wanted to read this, ever since I heard about it in Sophie’s World back in 2nd year high school. My adolescent urges made me interested in a book that caused suicide rates to increase. I remember reading that it was banned in Denmark and Norway for a time.

I also got a back-issue (August 2004) of the New Yorker from Book Sale. I’m not a big magazine fan, but this is a magazine that gives yourself a kind of blandishment for your good taste. The magazine has poetry and fiction, good reviews, the most well-written magazine features. Even the font looks good. I afforded this pleasure for P50.00 or 90 cents (against the $4.95 price on the cover.) And I’m reading on quiet Sunday night burning scented oils, while playing the Thievery Corporation, Groove Armada, and Jakata Visions.

Thanks to Book Sale, you can at least take a break from profligate book buying.

Another night: Spent the evening having dinner with D., at a Japanese restaurant whose servings are too big, then coffee at Café Ad.

Saturday: Visiting D. at her place, shopping sale items at Podium, and her treat to an excellent dinner at China Star. Hakaw, fish fillet spicy garlic, seafood rice. Laughing with D. while watching Friends’ final season. PS2 and booze until 6 in the morning with M.M., D.D., V.E. A.V. and my brothers.

I was spent some time listening and really re-absorbing The Smashing Pumpkin’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It’s one of the albums I’d bring if I’m going to be stuck in a desert island. Listening to Billy Corgan’s sad lines, I feel like Rob in High Fidelity (that part about having a which-came-first-the-music-or-the-misery? kind of conundrum.) How easily I identified to these lines:

holding back the fool pretends
(from To Forgive)

rescue me from me
(from Galapogos)

suffer my desire for you
(from In The Arms of Sleep)

tomorrow’s just an excuse way
(from Thirty-Three)

Having these usual pleasures, I remember how I was once miserable high school dweeb singing along to Melon Collie and Infinite Sadness. I’ve already attained a high on happiness that I’d almost be happy to be a little sad. You barely feel that you are yourself when you’re happy.

I'm a Model, an Alienated Labor Model

I’m a model, an alienated labor model. Work’s been so tedious, repetitive, bobofying, and dehumanizing. I have metamorphosed into one of the office furnishings. I’m just one of the pieces of furniture occupying office space. And I’m exceptionally tired of repeating to ask why.

My life felt like a Kafka novel.

And I feel useless. I’m as useless as the in-and-out tray for letters, at a time when everyone e-mails everything.

I wouldn’t have noticed that I’m actually alive if I didn’t hear some chillout or late 90’s music from my launchcast station. And if I didn’t sit beside a window behind the broad metropolitan sky, with a daily serving of sunsets during late afternoons.

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.