I held opportunity.

I held a moment in my hand, brilliant as a star, fragile as a flower, a tiny sliver of one hour. I dripped it carelessly, Ah! I didn’t know, I held opportunity.

—

Hazel Lee

Every day feels like Wednesday.

Wednesday is the third day of the working week. It is neither here nor there. It is three days after Sunday, two days after Monday, a day after Tuesday, a day before Thursday, two days before Friday, and three days before Saturday. Basically, you are stuck in the middle that is Wednesday, stranded on an 86400-second, 1440-minute, 24-hour period of stagnancy and uncertainty, squeezed in between the indelible past and the unforeseeable future, constrained by the fact that there is no other choice but to simply make it through the day.
Every day feels like Wednesday.

Finally decided to revive my Tumblr account.

Four years (and) running.

20 October 2009

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

At the very last minute before handing in my final draft, Father inserted this quote at the very beginning of my valedictory speech. It was a concoction of words, wound together by the invisible strings of childhood memories and experiences, all of which had to be carefully restructured by the cumbersome hands of my parents and teachers, alluding to the idea that perhaps I – even though I was the (allegedly) smartest kid in the cohort – was too young to understand what the hell Lao Tzu really meant. Well, I didn’t even know who the hell that guy was.

My childhood memories have slowly disintegrated away to the most unreachable corners of my mind, but somehow, I have managed to hold on to this particular fragment of the past, embedding it on my life like a hammered piece of nail on a white, empty wall of cement. The resulting crevasses, fissures on the wall, those little distortions circulating the nail, stagnant and permanent in the immaculate sea of white, hid beneath the overhanging framed picture of a twelve year-old boy with a sun-lit smile tightly sewn from ear to ear.

Four years have passed and I have already hung so many pictures on this wall. The collection has kept on growing and growing and growing. Whenever I felt that I had to keep a memory or two, I would take a nail and a piece of string and hang them, keeping them alive with the stillness and tangibleness of these photographs. Looking back at them once in a while, I can’t help but realize how much time has already gone by; how many things have changed; how much experience I’ve gained; how far I have journeyed on my own. I also can’t help but realize how much of my life has been kept beneath these photographs: the sadness, the sorrows, the pain, the secrets, the bad experiences of the past, all trapped within the crevasses of my existence, cunningly transcended by my extroverted attitude and almost unearthly happy disposition as flatly seen by a typical outsider.

Well, it’s overwhelming. It’s a continual bombardment of the past, the present, and the prospects of the near and distant futures. Leaving home at the age of fifteen, facing the trials and obstacles of the unforgiving world without the physical protection of the hands that I once deemed cumbersome, encountering the kinds of people that I’ve never imagined I would actually meet, opening my eyes to the reality that life is not as clear-cut as black and white, questioning the validity of truth and the meaning of physical and supernatural existence, having to shave every three or four days for a nice and clean face, I must say that I have already traveled a long, long, long way.

It doesn’t sound like I’m happy, but don’t get wrong. I am happy. I really am. Seriously, I’m not kidding. LOL. I’m extremely thankful for everything; for my family and friends; for the awesome education that I’ve received over the years; for that person that I was, that I’ve become, that I still am.

It’s already been four years running, and I am still having the time of my life.

The contract is going to end soon, but life doesn’t just end there. There’s still a lot more ahead. There’s still a lot more things to do. And there’s still a long, long, long way to go.

A journey of a thousand miles,

of a million kilometres,

of a billion light years,

of eternity,

begins with a single step

and a simple smile that says,

LG, life’s good. ;D

Happy 4th anniversary.

Autumn leaves.

The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold

Since you went away the days grew long
And soon I’ll hear old winter’s song
But now I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall

**

C’est une chanson, qui nous ressemble
Toi tu m’aimais et je t’aimais
Nous vivions tous, les deux ensemble
Toi que m’aimais moi qui t’aimais
Mais la vie sépare ceux qui s’aiment
Tout doucement sans faire de bruit
Et la mer efface sur le sable les pas des amants désunis

Make-believing.

You can’t ascribe great cosmic significance to a simple earthly event. Coincidence, that’s all anything ever is, nothing more than coincidence. There are no miracles. There is no such thing as fate. Nothing is meant to be.

The deep voice of the narrator was awfully right. Serendipity, Fate, Destiny, Soulmates, True Love? It’s amazing how human beings can suffer so much from being obsessed and possessed by the orgy of such trivialities that they themselves have created and molded out of thin air. I don’t understand how these unbelievably fantastical and fanciful ideas have easily withstood the test of time. Thousands of generations have come and gone but we still remain prisoners of our own obtuseness, doltishness and vanity.

Many times I’ve thought that I’ve discovered what love was, but then I’d realize that everything was just a product of pure coincidence. Would I have felt a special feeling for that girl standing beside the bus stop had I not missed the only bus that goes to school? Would I have even seen her standing there at the first place had it not been for my phone that slipped from my hand and slid all the way to her direction? Many people would think  that it’s the product of fate, or the working of the hands of destiny, but one should not rule out the idea that it might simply be just a random occurrence, created by the hands of chance. Life is a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.

We all exist above the thin layer of crust of this planet bounded by the indestructible, undistorted, perfect laws of the physical universe, but rather we choose to live inside our own little worlds, our own little ideas of what should be and what could have been.

This world, this Earth, this tiny speck of dust sitting unnoticed in this vast expanse of space and time, is too muddled by our own fetishes.

This writing might not be making any sense, but one thing I know is for sure.

We need to stop make-believing.

Painted joys, hidden sorrows.

Why were there no tears?

There were ear-to-ear smiles on everyone’s faces. The joys and laughters reverberated through the corridors and inside the classrooms as if it was actually the first day of school. There were jokes. There were people who attempted to defy school rules by making impromptu pranks here and there, albeit executed with extreme care and subtlety, as if they were administering a last-resort placebo drug on a patient suffering from an impossible disease. Everything seemed so happy. Everything seemed so ordinary.

But it is, of course, a painted facade for everyone to see. While it was a fact that nobody within the confines of the school campus expressed grief through the shedding of a tear or two,  everyone knew very well that those smiles, those laughters, those jokes, were all nothing but lies.

Like a fish bone stuck on your throat.

I just had the last Physics lesson yesterday. The last English, Math and French lessons today.

Mrs. Hammond is transferring to Malaysia, and M. Heusdens is going back to Europe.

The last Economics and Chemistry lessons tomorrow.

It’s hard to swallow the fact that everyone is slowing leaving, fading away. That everything is slowly coming to an end.

Is it possible to fall in love with a movie?

Yes.

(:

(:

Check the movie’s track listing here.

Mon sort.

I am facing a vast horizon

of opportunities

waiting to be struck, to be grasped

by my hands that have endured

the burning sands of time.

Despite slicing through the gusty winds,

and traversing under torrential rains,

constantly challenging death,

this arduous journey

will lose its meaning

once my feet are stripped of their garments.

Barefoot,

I cannot continue any further

for the terrain ahead

is merciless and unforgiving.

Disappointing indeed

is the veracity of life’s misfortunes.

Clinging on like a relentless shadow,

sticking like unwanted dirt,

invisibly rushing from behind,

the perennial, stinging pain

of double-edged knives

inextricably stabbing at my back,

leaves me with no option

but to resign to my inevitable denouement.

If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow. ~ William McFee

Light.

With the modern-day physicist’s current knowledge of the universe, nothing - at all – travels faster than the speed of light. Based on the empirical calculations of his forefathers, light travels at an amazing godlike speed of 300,000 kilometers per second. Usually travelling on a straight path, its propagation can be influenced by the gravitational force of a massive body floating in the universe, say, the Sun. In addition, depending on the opacity of the object in collision, a ray of light with a certain wavelength may not be able to pass through it. Nevertheless, regardless of its bendable nature and variable penetrative power, Light travels faster than anything else, and perhaps, to him, that is all that matters.

But it seems that certain circumstances prevent us from seeing things. Perhaps the very notions that it can only travel on a straight path and pass through a specific object, already give us a sufficient idea that a cashier can steal her employer’s money in the cash register while he is inside the toilet; that a man inside a car with tinted windows can drive along the highway stretch with his left steering the wheel and his right veering his pussy plunger like a gear shift lever; that a revered, retired army general in his 60s can spend a lovely afternoon reading People Magazine while ostentatiously singing and dancing to the beat of Madonna’s Vogue; that a stout, ugly and sickly mother of five badass children can find enough reasons to divorce (or even better, kill) his good-for-nothing husband by secretly finding out the existence of his online PerfectMatch account which he uses to impregnate his lifeless Saturday evenings. While light allows anyone to see and witness anything within the range of his stereoscopic vision, regardless of whether or not they bring about human pleasure or satisfaction, the limitations to its immense power actually lie in our inability to break the physical, impenetrable barriers caused by us ourselves. We cannot be in more than one place at the same time. We cannot see things beyond mountains. We cannot see what’s underneath the sea. While light is everywhere, we - in any moment in time – can only be somewhere, at some place, and not anywhere else.

Perhaps the invention of high-speed Internet has somewhat overcome these barriers. It has allowed man to access the world and circumnavigate its entirety as if he was the sole commander of his very own ship.  Without an inch of my ass moving out of the plastic chair inside my room, I can reach the beautiful beaches of the Bahamas or the pristine waterfalls of Tanzania in a few seconds or so, depending on the strength of my wi-fi connection. I can even travel to outer space. While we cannot see what the light in another part of the world may allow us to see there, the images of foreign lands and peoples can simply be just a click away. We can also hear things as if we are really there: the sound of traffic, cackling laughters, cries for help, among many others.  Never had we held so much power right under our very fingertips.

And this has become so evident in the past few days. Like a travelling wave of light, with so much energy along its incessant and relentless propagations, news about the then-city, now-wasteland that is Metro Manila, hijacked cyberspace immediately after Ondoy’s wrath came and left like a loan shark demanding the monthly interest payment from his unfortunate victim. Pictures swarmed the electronic world and their copies multiplied like bacteria, sending concerned spines shivering all over the world. News of the worst metropolitan calamity in the Philippines in four decades, regardless of their reliability and accountability, spread like wildfire and filled up the headlines of every imaginable newspaper. And as the commander-circumnavigator of my own ship, I somehow reconnected with my identity and found ourselves steering and veering towards my desolate and grief-stricken country. Although in reality, I was stuck in another piece of land, which is a hell for any IB student, but which would undoubtedly be Nirvana for anyone who lost their homes to Ondoy. And, more sadly, all I could do was to watch the calamitous events like flashes of lightning, discomfortingly filling my heart with amazement, anxiety, and fear.

Such power I had, under my fingertips, to be able to see my countrymen covered in mud, traversing the torrential currents of rain and sewage. Such power to be able to witness homes being destroyed and washed away like children’s toys. Such power, to be able to witness the new generation Bayanihan, utilizing all forms of media to reach out for manpower and financial assistance. Newspapers. Radio. TV. Google. Facebook. Twitter. Such power indeed. Much more powerful than light, whose absence on that unfortunate Saturday left twelve million in complete darkness.

Ondoy’s wrath drowned the hearts of many with its relentless, continuous downpour of a month’s worth of rainfall in six hours, and left a multitude of hungry, naked, and homeless civilians. And while Manila was submerged in darkness, the Internet proved its increasing dominance in our lives. It became the fastest means of communication with the rest of the world. It’s accessibility, ease of use, simplicity, and unparalleled speed allowed us to know about the disaster within just a few clicks. Regardless of where the rest of the Filipinos were at that moment, they all gathered together as one force in cyberspace. Once information spread like virus, the consequential actions then came down to each computer user. Many Filipinos harnessed its power to further spread the news to help speed up financial assistance and increase volunteer numbers to make up for the government’s unsurpring failure to come up with preventive disaster measures, or at least coordinate its forces and allocate its resources (because there were no resources to allocate anyway, since the country’s Emergency Funds were diverted to sponsor the diablo’s international ventures such as this).

Well, everything all came down to me. I had the chance to use its power to - at the very least - help spread the news, in the hopes of getting more outside help. But instead, I simply sat down on my plastic chair, drowning myself in the comforts of my room while watching a submerging metropolitan of twelve million people desperately trying to make ends meet.