February 2001

Is it strange, how my days unfold? My life has mostly been nocturnal nowadays, and I spend most of the time at home, my nights alone, writing my thesis (with half the time consumed by watching TV, rummaging for food, letting my mind wander aimlessly to the most staggering ideas and fantasies.) It’s not the first time this happened to me, having my waking habits being out of order. Perhaps I have my time in my hands, and I’m having a terrible time handling it. I don’t want to begin thinking about how other people’s days unfold. I am in this moment to examine a fate that is solely mine. I feel like Mersault, sometimes, now that I’m with him in Camus’ A Happy Death. Existential materials always give me a depressive effect, and rakes up the existential angst I thought I have overcome already. “A man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You’re judging yourself now, and you don’t like the sentence.”

I’m drinking alone in the room again, One a.m. on a Friday night. Someday, I will genuinely be no longer terrified of solitude. I bought Andok’s liempo and prepared five San Miguel bottles, negotiable of course, depending on how the booze hits me. Pirated cd playlist prepared beside me.
Drinking perhaps, allows my mind to be lose and to be bounded by the constraints making every word seem beautiful and putting much more thought to thought. With booze, everything just comes out candidly. The higher the state of drunken euphoria --- the more candid it gets.

How terrible it must be to be unable to spell the difference between drunkenness and sobriety. How difficult it must be to be in the purgatory between wake and sleep, and still be uncertain of whether you are drunk or sober. You lie in bed, your eyelids opening and closing to an unfeeling black, until later you see the gloom hiding in the shadows. Sleep refuses to come, until you begin slowly to feel afraid of the thoughts that might pay you a visit. You feel your cheeks balloon, cold sweat mounts on the hairy region above your ear, until it rolls down to the temple. Your tongue is immersed in saliva carrying the stench of liquor and tar that was left hanging on the roof of your mouth and the edges of your teeth. There is a seemingly electric pain in your feet, your throat inventing a disturbing fear of choking in your own vomit. Your head splits in ache, and your mind thinks of thoughts you wish would remain un-thought.
I open the TV, watch a film called the Swing Kids. It’s almost a good film. It's that kid from Dead Poet's Society. but it There's a lot of music and dancing, and occasionally touching or ponderous moments --- but the last scene was so horrible I wish I didn't watch the it at all. After that I watch The Practice, giving me what probably was my fourth serving of the Susan Robbins episode. And then there’s Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place which gives me genuine laughs. When the laughs are silenced and the TV is off, the agony returns. I feel that agony in my body. I feel it the very veins of my heart, arteries that could’ve exploded if it was not for my still healthy youth. I could barely imagine how my lungs and liver look like, its pores occupied by human rust.
It’s five in the morning. I went out to buy a cigarette. The moon glows opaque through the clouds and the orange fog of 5 a.m. in Malate.

What danger does a needle face, when it does nothing, when it is insignificantly swept by the careless waves of the sea? Aloneness, maybe. I could not tell whether the danger of my being alone is real or imagined.

The House Above the World. There are no other late afternoons more beautiful than this, as it is real. The beautiful late afternoons have found me again. A flush of natural, gray-scale light cast from the window of the room, to the sheets of the bed where my back rests, to the crispy yellow of the pages of the book I’m reading. When the sky clears and the sun is at its highest point, the yellow gleams deep, almost like saffron. I hear the strings of the violins weep, and the somber, grave cry of the cello. As the cake is sweet, the coffee is strong and spirited, leaving you its heavy fragrance.
Despite the many attempts of displeasure, it does not have me seized. I have lived in pleasure. I have almost felt as though I’m with Mersault, Claire, Rose and Catherine on the House above the World, where the World is shut down because the world becomes you, both its judge and justification. Everyone is clever, beautiful, affectionate, and happy as possible. I like Catherine well, as she stands in the terrace watching the sky change, naked, with all her sensual pride. Their fabric of laughter is a luxuriant one, their appetite is splendid, the day is warm and the night is studded and overflowing with stars, the view is majestic, with red tile roofs and white sheets, glittering with a cape of jewels and seashells as the sea smiles.
I want to be in that house, where the world is shut down, where pleasure never seems to be fleeting or mindless, where there is nothing to conquer but the joy of each day.

After a Saturday night, 3:40 in the morning. I’m back. I'm here in the limbo were you never really get drunk, not yet drunk to bid drunkenness goodbye and sleep it off. I wish I was too drunk to sleep it off.

Friday night. Friday night is fantastic after watching a movie alone (The Family Man). Saturday night was at ___'s celebrating another ___’s birthday. I couldn’t drink too much because I was driving. I ended up asking someone out.

January 2001

One of the reasons why I suffer a journal lag is because I let my thoughts rest and grow. This points reference to more sensitive, more candid, devastating and derogatory thoughts about to be transformed into journal entries. I think twice about immortalizing them. I think twice if they were really thoughts I was thinking.

Winged Words. Two days ago, I met up with J____ and we ventured to Powerbooks and A Different Bookstore to order the Portable Nietzsche Volume. The order would cost me a grand or so, (it’s only 450++ originally) including delivery charges, shipping, taxes, my memorial plan and whatnot. The tag price would do a lot of damage to my limited pocket. Moreover, delivery could take a period of three months. I need the book badly as primary text for my thesis.
The interesting thing is that I actually owned one before. It was a well-cut multiple-karat diamond in my shelf. I gave Nietzsche to ____. I gave it to her as gift, two mornings after I told her I didn't mean any of the things I told her. In my drunken euphoria, and in the most flowery and winged words I could rake out of my woozy headed, boozed philosopher state-of-mind, I told her. There was even a point, a non sequitur of sorts, when she accused me of being “out running a scheme to ruin people like her.” That being, Z3-driving, horse-back-riding-at-the-club, Woodrose-alumni, been-to-New-York-London-Barcelona-Paris-and-I-know-those-places-like-the-back-of-my-hand, my-family-has-a-house-in-Highlands, I’ll-spend-the-weekend-in-Thailand, I-have-Oracle-stocks, my-friends-are-Ivy-Leaguers, I’m-acquainted-with-elite-and-political-honchos-in-these-sorry-islands. She also happens to be a I’ve-read-most-of-Shakespeare-I’ve-read-Umerto-Eco,-Nick-Hornby,-Herman-Hesse,-during-high-school, Ursulla-Heggi-Edith-Tiempo-reading, bibliophile, type of girl. Of course, I was not out running a scheme to ruin her, and I wouldn’t even call her a beefy rich brat. She was too intelligent, too splendid a soul to be brat. Her intelligence, her winged words, her grace, her free spirit --- conquers all.
“I was kind of wishing that you would like me.” "You’re afraid of me."
People like me don't give out expensive jewelry or fancy perfumes as gifts, I give Portable Nietzsche Volumes.
I wonder now, _____, where have all the winged words gone? Have they flown away forgotten to an infinite, yet empty space?
I have committed you to beautiful memory. We swam in an entire Pacific of marvelous words, ideas and stories, without even drowning.

Perhaps there is no better time to examine my life when I feel like being really honest with myself. This is actually one of the most fascinating things I learned about reading Nick Hornby, (the second novel from him is “About a Boy,”) Honesty is often laughable. We could laugh at the most honest occasions we find ourselves in. When it can’t be funny, it that scene in a dark comedy movie - when it's supposed to be funny, but you can't getting shit scared.

Some thoughts are not worth committing to memory. Some thoughts are worth going down the drain. The downside, however, is that some other thoughts are lost, some worthy thoughts wander off to oblivion. Sometimes, I regret not having the memory of these thoughts. These thoughts are no longer in my life when I no longer have them in my memory.

Most of the time I go on a solo-drinking binge. It’s two in the fucking morning, and I’m on my fourth bottle. I am supposed to be writing my thesis. And to put an evaluation on my thesis: my attitude towards it right now is that I haven’t been working too hard. I have only been writing it to put it on a level standard (which others would consider to be right enough,) but the bloke that I am ---- I haven’t given my all and the wholeness of every effort I could squeeze out of myself. Instead of writing my thesis, I drank and drank had pulutan. I finished a bag of chips, an estimated 1 pound of ground beef --- sautéed, with butter on a sizzling plate, added up with potatoes, an egg, red pepper, carrots, left-over liver spread and probably a gallon of artificial seasoning with all its monosodium glutamate clogging the veins in my brain. Drinking alone is an activity I have grown accustomed. And I’ve always been sure that it is always a happy occasion, much better than other drinking occasions that I spend with more that one person in the crowd.

December 2000

The real tragedy of earning my degree in Philosophy (which should be soon enough) is entering the post-college limbo. During college, I have used parties and chewing on more ideas as an excuse to delay graduation. With almost less than two units, I’m almost there: the limbo where one grows up --- and grows up with an even more common tragedy: you grow up, and you run out of excuses for your failures.

Waiting for this Friday (course card day for Stat101)… waiting for the when, when I could say: the tragedy of my college life is over. Three days seems like an eternity away. I am glad to have the pleasure of reading Midnight’s Children comfort me, as cold gusts of December winds brush my skin. Yesterday, my thesis proposal has been approved with considerable commendation from G___ and Dr. E___. This at the very least, is a positive reinforcement for me. I’m confident I will receive a 4.0 in PHILRE1 that eradicates three units of my accumulations. I don’t consider this year as the grandest year of my life, but I would be glad to end it as I put an end my semi-sad affair with Statistics.
While waiting, I have once again resorted to the transitory yet big relief that a drinking binge brings. I went to the C__ Staff party last Monday, where the booze was unlimited. I had to limit myself though, because I had to bring the car along. I didn’t exactly have the grandest time of my life, but the party was all right. I am not sure if I am it looking at it in the right angle, but a lot of people in this staff has a certain kind of oddball quality in them. Of course, they probably find even more of that oddball quality in me, as I do frequently consider myself eccentric. But perhaps I should not judge people I have not known well.

The tragedy of my college life is over. I passed Statistics under Prof. D___, otherwise known as the most difficult professor in Statistics. I have failed the subject under another professor almost a year ago because I only attended the first four meetings. I also received a 4.0 in Thesis 1, after taking it twice. On both my terms taking thesis 1, I absolutely did nothing about it. These are trifling concerns, of course. But I must admit that they really are the major setbacks of my college life. For a measure of time, these setbacks had made me feel like a failure. I literally have passed my failures.
From Midnight’s Children, “Some afflictions, at least, are capable of being conquered.”
People are always fond of the people who appreciate them.

Ironically enough, I am supposed to be celebrating one of the last Friday nights of this year, or treating myself for my conquest over this small-time academic hurdle. But I'm not. I have not recovered from last night’s and the previous night’s hangover (at the terrific Harvard Café with their rather skillful dancers). Instead, I have spent the night driving my Mother and her Bunny Bunch Angels around CCP and Roxas Boulevard. I go home and read Salman Rushdie, who provides me with a quote (the last line I read before I stopped) too apt for my so-called conquest. Conquest, eh? I am laughing at myself.

I am hearing “Contessa” by Mozart through Winamp. Fantastic. It sounds appropriate when reading something like Lolita, and the kind of music Nabakov would listen when he's thinking Humbert Humbert.

I am hearing “Bye Bye Blackbird” by John Coltrane and Miles Davis through Napster.

Despite other afflictions that remain unconquered, I am able to say that at least, life is good for now.

H.’s Christmas text greeting goes: “How does it feel for an agnostic to celebrate Christmas? Easy, you hope that other people’s feigned and hollow happiness somehow rubs on you and in the process, hope that the happiness somehow becomes real, no longer feigned, no longer hollow. This is the most depressing ‘celebration’ of the year.”
H. is witty and eloquent as usual. I am not sure whether any of that “feigned and hollow happiness” really rubbed on me, but I did feel (as always) a bit happy --- without coercing myself to feign and pretend. But we do not measure the quantity, or the quality of happiness with yardsticks and paper cups. I just know that I felt happy somehow, and it was real.
This year’s celebration, however, is really a sadder one, with nation in crisis because of the impeachment trial. I barely noticed even a fake glint of the Christmas spirit that used to be there before. The country did not seem to be celebrating this Christmas, but country seemed mourning it.
Thus, I should no longer be surprised that __'s Christmas text greeting goes: I find no reason to celebrate the most superficial of occasions. I do not hope to absorb the artificial hope and happiness because it never becomes real… this is the most sickening sweetener to the bitter and absurd life we live out. So I’m not even going to greet you.
This was our first Christmas without my older Brother, who, as he has become a gentleman of intelligence and his own means, now works and lives in Singapore. My younger brother goes senti about him most of the time. And I miss asking him out for a drink, or him acting out his comical behavior, or our swapping of stories. In a more touchy occasion, when he called us while we were all eating with the terrific food cooked here at home, told me one time to leave ulam for him because he’s coming home for dinner. He's always had the redeeming kind of humor. Perhaps Kuya will find himself, his honest thoughts, his aspirations and his happy solitude, as he endures in a foreign land.

The year ended with a perfect irony --- in a time when fireworks light up the sky and the city at midnight is supposed to be bright as a star going supernova, the lights in our house went out. There was a brownout. Media Noche was had the perfect milieu. We had ham, wine, cheese, and candlelight.
Everyone had his/her new year’s wish, as my Father’s was for Estrada to Resign, and mine: that we may always be capable of conquering the most terrible of afflictions.

November 2000

Review of Related Literature. In the tradition of the “Review of Related Literature” in a thesis, I would like to do one (or maybe two) paragraph summaries of the non-school, purely-for-leisure books that I’ve been reading for the past two months. Most of these books have been borrowed from the library or provided for by my friends. Most of these are books my limited pocket couldn't afford.
The Tao of Philosophy by Allan Watts. As one would easily surmise, here is another Westener doing the Wisdom of the East routine. I have not read or heard of everything, but Allan Watts tells me nothing I have not heard of before (e.g., the human preoccupation with the “I” or ego, the Anthropomorphic nature of God, the inadequacy of language, or Nature’s domination in the course of all events.) I am more than thankful, however, that he reminded me of these things in a pleasant fashion. Sometimes I think so much of the future, or of what I’ll be doing next, to the point that I forget what I am doing. He reminded me and mde ask, how could I forget to live the now?
The language of Watts could be read quite effortlessly. With a Zen-inspired form, the effect becomes a soothing and yet mindful one.
There are a lot of clever ideas. Watts sees Epistemology as an effort to think thought, and therefore it is an effort to bite one’s own teeth. Also, he puts Nature in a beautiful oxymoron in saying that: “Nature is ordered anarchy.”
This book is a new acquisition from the library. I believe I was the first one who read the copy. It felt like de-virginizing someone. I read the first half of it before going to a party. The next day I read the second half in the wee hours of the morning, while listening to the Chill Out Project, with the lamp on and drinking green fucking tea.
Queer by William S. Burroughs. This actually qualifies not only as a beat-group book, but also as purely gay literature. It’s good to read gay literature when even M. accuses me of being homophobic sometimes. The story-line is simple: an American who is a withdrawing addict with really short-circuited sex drives lives in Mexico, exploring bars to scout for gays and splurges his money. Later on, he takes off to the South Americas with his pseudo-boyfriend to the South Americas in search of a mental telepathy-inducing drug called Yage.
Burroughs’ language is nothing but fantastic: very beat-group, very fifties, very very witty, with occasional Mexican and American cuss words. It's humorous, but always comes with a glint of loss and sadness. The events that transpire ride on the typical American-in-Mexico-during-the-forties stereotype, events of which are completely degrading to a country like Mexico. But perhaps it does happen.
I think like William Burroughs better than Jack Kerouac, and I’m putting another Burroughs, “Naked Lunch,” as a priority in my reading list. This time, I’ll buy myself the book. I read “Queer” in the room upstairs while listening to Café del Mar, Craig David, Moby, Joe, the Starubucks New York Jazz album, etc. (all pirated copies obtained from UM) with the newly-bought winner lamp on. I remember it was a Friday night so I made with reading more conducive by drinking around five beers and crunching some nagaraya nuts. I felt so fucking happy I even danced a little.
Listen up! Spoken Word Poetry. Spoken Word Poetry is an advancing form of poetry popular among poetry reading sessions in clubs and bars. The book features this, and it is not a coincidence that most of the authors are non-Caucasian and therefore marginalized. The language that runs in this poetry has its unique musicality that matches the colors and cultures of the authors. Some of the rhyme schemes would do for hip-hop. The content are as expected, the revolt of the black people against white oppression which sometimes sounds redundant. But perhaps it should never sound redundant until people start to really digest the point. I like it best though, if they write about Coltrane and Davis and it starts “raining rhythm.”
The author I like best in the book happens to be an Asian-American named Ava Chin. Her sensibility as her writer is close to me because it sounds Filipino. Her sad ironies deliver, and it usually is a reflection real-life event. I like her language --- rich but not too heavy, sarcastic, and very delicious. We kiss, we part, finger wide,/faculties open, folding our papers/our precious books like lost dreams and intangible mantras/scluicing the last of the coffee across our teeth/counting the streetlight to the station/praying to the subway gods at 2nd Avenue./Angry when they do not come.
The Postcard by Jacques Derrida. Nothing could be more clever than the idea of writing people in postcards with a thirteenth century portrait of Plato behind a Socrates who is writing. I only read the first hundred pages or so of this book, and it is supposed to be about postcards violating philosophy’s desire to communicate eternal truths independent of time and space. This is what is supposed to be represented or reversed, whichever, by the thirteenth century portrait. One would see this in the book, but even more, the book is also a love story exchanged in postcards. Derrida could be such a romantic, “I recognize that I love you by this --- that you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.”
Flying Over Kansas by Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas A book lent to me, (and eventually given) to me by A___ when he had our first real conversation at the Gokongwei smoking area. The language of the book fits well with the mold of New Criticism, a theory that seems to run with the bloodline of the Tiempo-Torrevillas gene pool. The language employed is so rich and delicious which makes reading so pleasant an experience. It's like swimming an entire Pacific of beautiful words and ideas without drowning.
Even Torrevilla’s fourteen year old daughter gets a grasp of this language. Rowena asked Rima on what color she might want to paint her room, so as to stamp more of herself on the room. Rima replies, “the blue was perfect; at night the floors and walls seemed to blend together so that she was floating on sleep itself.” One could only wonder how it is when Rima’s own words would unfurl themselves into full blossom at her own time.
Aside from personal essays in the book, it also has critical essays and lectures Torrevillas delivered that could be very helpful in reading literature, criticism, and seeing what probably is absent, but is actually present all along.
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. In the course of my reading this book, and I am still reading it, I have read nine or ten books already. This book, it seems to me, is a happy experience I do not want to end.


Some recent movies:
100 girls. (Watched with D.N. after going to the gym on a Monday.) Basic plot: goody-goody type college dude is stuck in the elevator of a girl’s dorm. He’s stuck in there with a girl whose face he doesn’t see. The girl and the guy bangs in the elevator. For the rest of the movie, the guy embarks on a quest to find this “mystery girl/cosmetic beauty,” whom he lost his virginity to. He musters up all his “cerebral energy” and devises ways to find the girl: but his ways simply equate to doing all that is conceivably stupid. Conceivably stupid = pretending to be a maintenance man, putting up an ad, looking up the match for the panties the girl left, dressing up as girl, and going to Women’s studies class. In the process, he meets around 100 girls, and gets to play hero or catalyst for some of them. Of course, he finds the girl, eventually.
You can't really expect much from the script. While the script and the screenplay does level up to the rather low wavelength expected in such movies, it had nothing new, nothing fascinating and nothing clever to say at all. Although not absolutely “nothing,” perhaps. Moreover, it had grossly objectified women: mothers, women’s studies teachers, women and their vanity, women in their self-pity, women beaten up by their boyfriends. There good of it, however, is a detailed exposition of sexuality what could be sexual stereotypes with most of them as cliches: e.g., the room mate, who is too preoccupied with size of his penis.
The main character makes these long-monologues, which are terrifically annoying. The director has flashback effects that are equally annoying. The movie was not funny, although it made me laugh for around three times in two hours. The educational sex scene was the only good scene.

Road Trip. (Seen with cousin and older brother at Glorietta 4.) This is one of the films where
I got a genuine laugh trip. I genuinely laughed until my jaws fell. I would include this in my top 10 best comedy category (the #1 of which is the legendary Tito, Vic, and Joey’s “Ma’am, May I Go Out?”). The humor, however, is often more funny when the punchline hits the peculiar sexual conduct of the characters. It is a film about college students and young people, like what is should perceived and what will likely to transpire after "American Pie." The good of the film is that it does not contain those intolerably mushy lines, and the look-at-me-look-at-me, fashion conscious, I-I-I vanity and apathetic attitude of the youth.
The film delivers a line that should perhaps define college life: it is the window of opportunity for us to do the craziest things, i.e., scoring for sex, and everyday, the opportunities are getting smaller. This gives me more reason to delay graduation.

Late Saturday afternoon. Listening to the usual playlist and some 98.7, I muse on my thesis and get to accomplish my thesis structure. I pass the decisive motion to the honorable judge, I am not going out tonight. I, the plaintiff, am awarded the 500 bucks I am going to save for not going out. Soon enough, I’ll be able to buy the hardcover Nietzsche volume at A Different Bookstore. Besides, I still have a party hangover from a friend's sister's party. Tonight, I am going to cook myself spaghetti, and I'll buy fried chicken or pork barbecue. Before that, I’m going to beat the meat, with the kind assistance of adult films starring the pearls of the Orient. I am also looking forward to the HBO Saturday night movie. Lately, I’ve been having a lot of sleep, pancakes, and some cyber___. What is even more pathetic are their strange-sounding names: e.g., diwata (who claims to be a geologist taking her Ph.D) and Smermaid (who likes bondage.)

Confessions getting truer and truer by the minute.

College is indeed, the window of opportunity to do both the craziest and the most intelligent things. And I believe I have accomplished the latter as much as I did the former, the way the Appollinian balances the Dionysian.
I went to the Sophia/Lit Circle party. Most of the philosophy professors were there, and I got the chance to toast beer and tequila with them once again. It's flavored with conversations on the chaos theory, Nietzsche, Feminism, garnished with genuinely good laughs, cigarettes and genuinely intelligent notions raised. In the end most people confessed to being perverts. Some people objected to being perverts. Some of them confessed to being lesbian or bisexual. Professors get to dance with students --- yes, I’ve seen them in action. Jim Morrison and Santana hung their music in the spirited air.
The booze was overflowing and I reveled in drunken euphoria. The most important realization of the night is that these parties give me more excuses to remain in College, where all’s swell and so well (except for Stat101).

August 2000

I decided. I had to go through a series of decisions, the results of which would be regrettable, or just slanting towards being regrettable. Life has been less kind and less convenient than usual. And I’ve been no less than lazy and too lame to affirm my life, grease my world and run the show.
I decided to delay my graduation for another three months, with only six units left after this term. I didn’t pursue my thesis for the second time, and I am once more defeated by default. I had to rationalize this to my parents. It is terribly annoying and energy draining, preventing you to do a whole lot of things or set your priorities straight, because you know that your parents disapprove of the way you run your life. I keep on telling myself that college is a marketplace of ideas and I haven’t been buying a lot of ideas on sale. All the same, I am not able to buy those ideas no matter how long I stay. Perhaps it’s time I move on to other markets, chew ideas of a different flavor. Perhaps I just didn't want to give up my college lifestyle at 19.
I decided to resign from the staff job at ___. I’ll certainly miss the shows --- my Philharmonic Orchestra Friday nights, my Sunday afternoon ballet from PBT or BP, TP plays, gala evening Operas, chorale festivals, film showings, art exhibits, that sparkling crystal and capiz chandelier, the marble, the hallways, the close encounter with real artists, the lumpen fucking culturati and the cultural fucking elite. Miss Saigon season is up this October. This musical is probably something a broadway classic, but it just saddens me to think that many Filipinos think that culture is embodied by something like Miss Saigon, and not by something like “A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino.” Behn Cervantes was saying that Miss Saigon should not be treated as some national event because it is only, after all, the “cultural surplus” of another country. It is a good show, yes, but it goes into the way of the slowly growing, yet highly esteemed theater groups such as Tanghalang Pilipino. It is regretful to think that under the banner of promoting culture, people would rather watch something from Cameron and Mackintosh. There are probably more morons than geniuses in the art world.
I decided not to attend my test and interview last Friday for Andersen Consultancy. I thought it isn't the job for me.
I decided not to stay sober from my drinking marathons.
And finally, certainly the most woeful, most regrettable decision of all: to decide that life has been regrettable lately.



Friday night. I take a break from doing nothing. Today I wish I had some company but there's no one to date. So it's alone as usual and fun as usual. I head out clad in a thin green shirt, khaki shorts and leather sandals. On the last full show the theater was a big freezer where even Dunkin Donuts coffee wasn’t any help. This Friday night’s movie is “Down to you." It was some chummy, feel-good movie, with its level of chumminess within the bearable. At the very least it's unlike the usual teeny-bopper flicks that make you puke your guts out. It was about relationships and commitments in the college and early post-college stage. What makes it interesting is the character who studies goes to art school in New York is a killer dancer. Somehow I feel like I myself could do a movie like that, a film which mainly consists of clever dialogue, a winner soundtrack, a lot of kissing and sex.
There’s a unique pleasure I feel every time I step out of the theater, and walk the empty, tired mall late at night. I let the dry winds outside blow warmth on my cold limbs as I think about what I just watched.
Tonight I go home to fulfill my few academic obligations, and I was feeling a recovered from last night's tedious hangover. But I find the usual house scenario: friends are here are you're robbed of your time alone. No solace in this place but sometimes you're happy that there isn't.

July 2000

Pleasantly uncommon flavors to the Ubermensch. Despite my efforts to regulate the wads of fat that continue to amass in every corner of my body, I had an overabundance of Italian food stuffed in my stomach tonight. Together with some friends, we had pasta at Italianni’s, coupled of course with good laughs and conversation. I especially enjoyed that spinach and artichoke appetizer spread on buttered bread generously sprinkled with shredded Parmesan. But I think I like Thai food better, especially the omelet on crab shells and bagoong rice, which we had so pleasantly had before in Suko Thai.
After these dinners we usually have a few drinks in the Malate. Tonight we went to a place called Batavia, which smelled of its wooden furniture, which they also happen to sell. They also sold the art or images hung on the walls as well as other interesting displays which in this season happens to be Thai. They happen to use very interestingly unique Asian utensils like heavy, hand made clay cups, plates with esoteric engravings, and pots from which you pour a pleasantly uncommon flavor of tea or brew of coffee. Everything comes with fresh petals of pink flowers.
As I went home I still had that deliciously relieving scent of coffee on my nose, as well as its rich flavor on my tongue. I sit on the desk and suddenly start worrying about my thesis. It’s supposed to some kind of monumental achievement in your entire academic life. It’s your medium for declaring to everyone what you have to say. It probes on whether your insights deserve a larger podium. I have not been there to allocate even a minimum of time for it.
Choosing on a variety of topics I finally decided to do one on Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, which will argue and critique on the difficulty of understanding, it’s interconnectedness to other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, on its possibility or impossibility, of whether it is a state, or a literary device. My thesis, with all my dreamy ambition, should also include a deconstructive insight on the Ubermensch using a Derridian framework. It is of course, pretentiously profound. But I sincerely wish I could fit in a kind of literariness in it which would abate the technical jargon and pseudo-intellectual chitchat into material with readable worth.

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.
There is one more thesis idea which I took in consideration. It’s the idea that morality is unnecessary. G___ thinks it’s too radical. I think I took that idea from him. It’s true enough that the absence of morality would imply that we would blast each other’s heads off and blast ourselves back to dinosaur age. Other species survive without morality. Morality is mere dogma and institution that limits freedom, like laws and systems that limits us to propensities. Morality is never what it means in its Kantian sense, i.e., something we ought to do. Moreover, the absence of morality is not an absence of rules and laws. I guess I could convince myself to be proud of the part where I write of morality as a “problem.” The catch of the thesis is that without morality, we would still grow. We can be catapulted to another state of being --- instinctively, spontaneously. In G____’s analogy, young birds simply flap their wings and eventually learn to fly. This thesis will allow me a lot of room for my few metaphors and my own insights on things. It’s challenging yes, but there are too may strands that weave it --- it’s the principal philosophical task according to Nietzsche, and the most difficult problem that he had always grappled with in all of his philosophical endeavors. I think this would do good as a paper, but not as a thesis because there are many problems, and definitions and concepts in this case are too general, and rarely specific. One will have to be a very good writer to accomplish this, and perhaps this may be better achieved through literature.

The thesis I decided to write could be one I could empathize with, its problem oriented, it permits me to give understanding, judgment and interpretation, and the exploration of a admirable, peculiar, motivating concept such as the Ubermensch. That which I will become. Sounds Nietzschean? Sounds pathetic.

Is the world what we make out of it? Something with balloons or feel-good movies? Or is the world inevitably constructed to be unkind?
I haven’t been putting entries in the journal for quite a time, and I should consider the irresponsibility of not writing as a disservice to my life, somehow. I should at least look at my life twice, and be able to look at it again to do it good, to not make it lessen the efficacy of its magic.
I ask myself now, what have I been doing?
I write now, now that circumstances are not at all knotted, when I stand on a good, level position although they are not complete and perfect enough.
The sweet air of cigarette smoke runs in my lungs at four in the morning.

The now when I can still smell her scent and feel her silken touch. I can still see her smile in her sleep. I could still feel her delicately in my mouth. I could still hear her beautiful voice sounding so uniquely like rainwater falling on asphalt. She is unique in every way and her spirit is so free.
The now when I just came from work at CCP, watching a Korean Opera singing their history and heritage on stage. I go home and cook myself a late meal, while watching something like The Practice, having a drink coupled with smokes. All hail “The Practice.” I always find myself clapping in sincere applause, cursing as a form of praise for a TV show at 3:00 a.m., while no soul around me is awake.
This afternoon I just was just going through readings for my thesis while listening to 98.7 playing its usual playlist from Haydn, Schopann et. al., I see relish my coffee and my favorite image of blue light to my desk, and the sun through old rose curtains in my mother’s sala. I haven’t been accomplishing enough for my academics but I’m reading enough and I’ll respond to it. I’m having a drink right now, but I’m not drinking too much. I’ve been going out and even went dancing last Saturday night. I must have been hideous. But it was fun enough, having drunk half a bottle of Scotch and a few beers.
I’m in a scarcity of words to spice and fancy up the way of saying that I’ve been feeling glad enough recently, and I can endure another difficult day.
My brothers along with myself and a few of our friends converged in the house in a Friday night and ventured to Intramuros, a place that kept some of (or what’s left of) our heritage. We spent a good part of childhood here since this is where we studied. The place is now being gradually metamorphosed into another gimmick spot. The lumpen fucking culturati. We checked out a rave party that collects 200 for the entrance, 300 more to move to another dance floor 70 for bottled water, and 90 for the cheapest booze. The party featured guest DJ’s, a great crowd, a black-lit cage, laser lights and mirror balls and all. We couldn’t trick ourselves to splurge our money for all that crap. We go back to Malate and drink at a liquor store where booze is 17 a bottle, and you can have plenty of squid balls, quail eggs, or fish crackers. My apologies to the feminists but along with the drinks came a delicious view of nice-smelling, tube-clad, well-dressed or nearly half-dressed women to indulge your eyes, depress you somehow and make you throw a few expletives (because you can’t have them).
This liquor store was an untapped resource we discovered a long time ago, before all these street parties. Nowadays you have to fall in line during a Saturday night to buy beer. Somehow, we felt invaded.
We drank some more and called it a night at 4:30 in the morning. I had to wake up at 6:00 am for an 8:00 class so I’m groggy and disoriented all day. After a quick nap in the afternoon I gather enough energy to have a drink in Makati with some blockmates. After that I met some friends in Malate to find an unbelievable volume of people pretentiously parading themselves along the street. We decide to rather default ourselves and abstain from the rowdiness, pretension, pretty people, and the huge expense and exhaustion of a Saturday night in Malate. We just had coffee, mocked people whined, patronized ourselves and fattened our egos. I had a good time.
I remember this lousy dream I had a few days back. I was driving a fast car and falling in love with some woman. I think a stirring in my subconscious probably caused this because I tried writing a surreal story. I had better, more creative or even recurring dreams about unnamed mosquitoes, dinosaurs, floods, fireworks and swimming. But it’s this lousy dream that disturbed me. The woman had no face, or I have forgotten her face, and I think she had a lover who left her. I was pushed by some obscure impulse to go to places and find her face. I was stupid enough to think of it, and even more stupid to do try to find, leaving me with moments to sit and stare blankly at space, looking gloomy as a dark cloud for days, wanting.

I laughed at the idea that dreams are better than movies, sometimes.
Nice line last line from the previous paragraph. wish I could take credit for it. I think it belongs to Salman Rushdie.
Listening to The Chill Out Project playing a version of a Jim Morrison song on the twilight of another Saturday night, I tell myself, once more,
I would dance with Mary Jane.