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.

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.