Bisaya Bloggers

1 hour and 14 minutes says the timer of my computer in this thriving internet cafe in our kanto. I'm in this renovated expanded room of theirs secluded from the gaming room which noise has been increasingly intolerable. Thank God for the improvement, it certainly fits well with the New Year.

Shit, it is 2008! This has got to be one of the most boring Saturdays in my entire life, not that I take note of all those gloomy Saturdays. Or maybe because I just feel like shit today and I wanted to do something else than stare at the crumbling ceiling of ours that I swear would crush us any moment all the people in the upstairs rooms stomp their feet all together. (Wait, it is really 2008, right?) I wasn't intending to write an entry and since the last time I wrote and kept on returning to my home page and seeing it like that, surprisingly, I didn't give a fuck whether I get back to writing. Which is seriously pathetic. And sick. Whatever happened to the therapeutic claims.

I was watching Season 1 episodes of Six Feet Under this morning, and fuck, what a slap of reality in my tiresome feeling-identification game. It was Nate who nailed it. After failing the funeral services licensure exam, Nate, the eldest of the Fishers, wails that he doesn't know what to do with his life anymore, that he isn't sure whether going back to take care of the business his father left them was really right. I am not 100 percent sure whether I'm in that uncertainty stage because I am not sure whether I don't really have the choices or that I am just trying to act stupid and chickenshit by not opening myself to these choices. Hell, they're even fucking impossible when I come to think of it. But what the heck, the choices aren't the problem, it's the chooser. Now, fucking choose or stay miserable and feel shitty as you always did.

This isn't a perfect world and we got to live with that and we got to live with the fact that we have to keep reminding ourselves of that, but like the short-time mortician of the Fishers who shortly replaced talented Federico, in describing the Fisher home, "this is depressing". Here's to 365 days of attempt at direction, fulfillment, patience, dedication, perseverance, persistence and happiness.

Jeez, Happy New Year to you.

I was twice introduced as Jay, the big shit of *mentions the office I'm working with*. I wasn't taken aback really. In fact, it was sort of amusing. The cordial exchanges ends with more laughs.

Recently taken from a presidential suite of an expensive (understatement) hotel here (perks, perks, perks), this photo doesn't really say how much of a big shit I am. In fact, I'm that proverbial speck, oblivious and marginalized.
(TY to my colleague Jong for including me in the frame.)

Sometimes, there are things better left unsung; it gives an inexplicable feeling of strength.

Stepping out of the cramped conference room after a long afternoon meeting, I glanced at the clock above the wall and its long hand was just in time to flick into the 30-minute mark. I wasn’t tired, no. My eyes were listless and I seem to be wandering in a state of dormancy and paranoia instantaneously. Anxious. I wanted to rest my head and drift off to slumber, put on that overplayed playlist of the day. 3 Doors Down, Yellowcard, Dashboard Confessional and some good ole Gin Blossoms. Swear to God, just felt tears welled up my eyes, but they were closed and my arms providing the cushion to prevent those lachrymal by-products from streaking down like snippets of slight rain on an empty wall. Gawd, I’m so fucking emo right now, I can’t even figure why the hell am I. The recurring fantasy of falling off a precipice or the Petronas Towers is so vivid right now.

Hooowaaahhhht?!!? Why do I have to always explain things that I shouldn’t in the first place? Enough of telling people around. Screw understanding. This just cements everything that I have come to believe about people and why they should quit telling they know what you feel and they understand. They don’t fucking understand you because they can never fit in your shoe. Bratty? What’s the fucking big deal about it? Bratty is for sissies and elitist dimwits who get what they want at the flick of their fingers. But the world doesn’t work like that man. Perhaps for all you self-deluded pricks and your thinly imagined world of banalities. Not for me and not for all those people who are going through a lot of shit.

Photocredit: Thanks to ka0rg for the caricature

The whole week mentally, emotionally and physically drained me. Let's just say I'm mapping out a path which I dunno where to begin and what to place. You find time to be with you old chums and bask in noise and perfunctory chatter (even when it was 48 years ago that you last seen each other) and try to forget the mental and emotional rigors elevated by your too much contemplation but you can't escape the Lost-in-Translation-loneliness-in-a-crowd. It's that type of thing. Times like these you want to imagine yourself in a tranquil place like Canibad where you can do all the thinking you want. I wish I can just have Hiro's teleporting capabilities.

This generation will die of hunger. TB, lung cancer or heart-related diseases only claim the lives of people in the urban areas because we have been inhaling the same poisons over and over again, but the entire Philippine populace is dying of hunger and children succumbed to malnutrition, which eventually results to death anyway.

I’m no fucking socio-economic analyst but these cavorting pigs with Ph. Ds in Economics frolicking in their high-priced seats and titles should really stop talking about poverty, employment and improving the lives of people when all they could really think of are short-term crap like the fucking feeding program. They don’t know a shit about being hungry because they have been practically pigs all their lives.

Oh, I know what hunger means. And I know a good deal of people who are practically starving. But then what point am I really making? Nada. This is a vicious cycle and no argument is really worth the saliva. So I’m going to migrate to Japan or Canada to work as a factory worker. Screw my degree and screw my fuckin’ honors. I’ll work hard for my naturalization so this goddamn government won’t be able to siphon my hard-earned cash and make it an excuse for a GDP increase.

Almost all of us when we were kids might have fancied becoming a doctor. Clad in antiseptic white medical gown, the most recurrent childhood image would be one with a hanging stethoscope by the neck. I always had this caricature in mind being a kid who once ambitioned to become a life-saving hero. Such aspiration wasn’t sustained though unlike those who really went on to labor through pre-med to med school. But truth is, surgery is where the real action is. A doctor could get some serious ass-kicking saving lives when he's best a surgeon with the OR as his playing field.

This surgical action is what really makes me stick through every Grey’s Anatomy episode. The melodrama is a bit soap-ish but then it humanizes the mechanical and artificial feel of the Seattle Grace Hospital. In the operating room, you feel the tension and the knife-sharp precision of every procedure. You think you’re watching real doctors, but in fact they’re really characters who one minute away from the OR are irritably twitchy, sex-starved, egotistic, attention-grabbing bitches and assholes.

They get weird sometimes and totally unpredictable. As weird and unpredictable from the cases they handle – male ‘pregnancy’, spontaneous orgasms, a ticking bomb inside a thoracic cavity. Their candid exchanges sometimes feel perfunctory and unflinching as their initial diagnoses. But they feel – sometimes putting enough emotional baggage in a patient – and sometimes they cry over the death of someone whose life they were heroically saving a minute ago.

I just finished the two-season marathon of the series. (The local channel showing it has 3 episodes left before the explosive finale.) After 30 or so episodes, I realized it was not the amount of blood shed or flesh cut, that would have prevented me from being a surgeon or a doctor for that matter, but the feeling after one declares the time of death. That sudden plunge into silence and grief. Having faced death, it's an emotional pit I don’t think I could ever get out of. It’s a difficult feeling knowing that you could not save lives at all times.

When you cease to eat, you eventually die of hunger. Think Somalia or Mozambique and the famished children of Eve. People who live below subsistence level cannot afford to eat a decent meal, much more do it three times a day. In countries like the Philippines where you can afford to commit crimes in the name of survivale, people risk it.

Quite certain they're running out of chances - and hope - some troop to Wowowee grounds to get into the impenetrable line for a chance at a million bucks. Unluckily, some die of a raging stampede.

Eradicating - or quite humbly, alleviating - interminable poverty is the slogan of almost all politicos, some of them even vowing to make your aspirations come true. Because our nation is poor, they want us to plant them in the Senate or whatever damned seat they want to be planted on. But really, they know nothing of what they're talking about. How can they when they're ensconced comfortably in their thrones wallowing in their privileges.

I've witnessed how this ailing situation of a nation ruins the Filipino family itself. It usually starts with blame-pointing, then namecalling - cursing and exhorting every evil name derivative there is in the dark recesses of hell. Then sometimes sharp objects are animated, come to life in the hands of the possessed. Next? You could just think of the unimaginable.

After lunch yesterday I was not myself. Actually, I didn't even have lunch. I threw a fit and walked out of the office because I was pissed at everything. Before the incendiary mood to blaze up the already-searing hellhole I was in, I decided to belt it out somewhere. Perhaps I should go sleep the whole afternoon, I thought. But descending the stairs, I realized I really didn't know what to do. I should have gone home but since I was getting stupid already, I didn't.

I looked up my pockets and decided abruptly to spend the extra 100 pesos to catch 300. That left me with 80 pesos until payday. I guess I could just starve myself with my remaining Quaker Oats stored in the office fridge. That wouldn't be a problem. But for now I have to watch that movie, I thought. I walked in an almost-full theatre (quite surprisingly on a Monday afternoon) and Leonidas was throwing a fit himself (though not as discreetly as I did). 300 is pure savagery and I felt that rage surge up in me that I suddenly want to slay the unsuspecting audience with my own spear and bludgeon them to death with my shield. For a moment there, I was in the midst of the heroic 300 soldiers of the Battle of Thermopylae.

When the lights turned on the man sitting beside me attempted to start a conversation. "Mga macho sad ilang gipanguha no?" (They got buffed-up guys for actors, no?) "Lagi," I unenthusiastically said. I tilted my head back and covered my eyes pretending to sleep but he could not be stopped. "Grabe kaayo ang away no?" (What a fight, no?) Now I needed that spear. I pretended to sleep and moments after I felt he stood up. Thank God.

Walking out of the theatre, I still felt stupid. That 70 pesos could have gone to my schooling brother and sister, but no, I spend it to vent my unquenchable rage. I wasted it for a 'dinner in hell'. Riding the jeep home, I said, I'm such a stoopid effin moron. God knows how many times I repeated that line to myself yesterday.

You have been a great escape, dear blog. In fact, you're a sweet escape. When I let you know about things, it feels like I enter into a portal in a world of Middle-earth proportions. But I have been thinking a lot lately that it feels like I need to go back to the shitty world I've always known. I have been saturating you with my thoughts on self-important film nobody gives a fuck and I've been shitting a lot of stuff that nobody could care less. I'll go slay some more demons but I will escape soon. I hope sooner.

It's funny when people say "Don't worry, I understand." When actually they really don't. How can they? They're not you. They don't go through the same shitty world that you do. It's time to stop telling people to put theirselves in someone else's shoes. How can they? It's either it doesn't fit them or the shoes are too big for them. And even if they try to fit in, they cannot wear your shoe. It's your own shoe. And you'll be wearing the same fuckin' shoe for the rest of your goddamn life.

This part of my life is called waiting. Waiting for my rocket to come. What to do with the bloody rocket? I really don’t know. Maybe it’ll just go down like some meteorite and fuckin’ blow me to pieces. Or maybe I can ride with it. Induce myself to sleep in a capsule and hibernate to eight years or something while it catapults me into space. I will wake up in Jupiter or perhaps Saturn if the possibilities of Arthur C. Clarke’s A Space Odyssey would allow.

Whatever. I so want to skip this phase. I want to mess the course of time and fuck the rest.

Peter, our German colleague, had his birthday-cum-despidida party last night at his house. After almost two years of not being able to go back to his hometown in Germany, he'll be leaving for the land of great beers tomorrow Sunday, and won't be back till May.

I never really thought about how it will be like without him around in the office. Me and the rest of the gang are used to the jovial mood whenever he is around. Peter's smile can be really infectious especially when he goes around saying "Ja?", which in German would mean Yes. And who will ever forget the most generous German in Davao, in fact, according to people who have known him a lot, he is incredibly generous, which is kind of rare for a German like him. But then again, all of us friends would say, "Well...that's Peter."

He also has this adventurous spirit. Well, having to come from Germany to Asia -- first to Indonesia, then the Philippines -- he's one hell of a party. And it doesn't speak much of his age, huh. It was because of Peter that I rediscovered the beauty of Samal, when we went diving, and some trips to the beaches there.

Well... we'll be looking forward to your comeback Peter, and for more badminton games, cocktail sessions, and more parties. But until then, Auf Wiedersehen!

Fuckin' awesome. This is the real party. Pot session can kiss its own ass. If coke were legal and getting wasted is this fun, I'd prolly go mess my fucked up life.



(This clip is a teaser trailer of a new British TV series called SKINS. Thanks to bryanboy's blog for posting this vid.)

Speaking of drugs, there is also a good indie movie about drug addiction released 2006 called A Scanner Darkly directed by Richard Linklater of Before Sunrise fame. The film is a scenario wherein America has lost its battle on drugs. Although I haven't seen and read the book yet, it's an adaptation of Phillip K. Dick's novel. It's a hallucinatory headtrip and this might really require you to sit your ass down. You might want to check it out coz Keannu Reeves and Winona Ryder is in here though they are just in rotoscope which is a kind of animation. In the end you might get weirded out and dizzy -- like gulping coke or sniffing Mary Jane -- but don't say I didn't warn you.

Becoming an actor is something that one must have wanted when he or she is still a child. When someone asked me, I said I wanted to be a doctor, which is the most common thing to aspire for a kid. Later, I wanted to become a computer engineer but realized that it cannot be reconciled with my dislike for math and the rigid discipline it entailed. During the first year of high school, I realized I could write and sometimes fancied delivering the news, so it was some kind of a toss between journalism, broadcast journ, or the more general mass communications.

It was during the last months of high school that I started to get hooked on the TV show The Practice. It was a courtroom drama that I would kill just to watch. I got hooked with Dylan McDermott’s character and Lara Flynn Boyle. So great was the show’s impact that I wanted to become a lawyer. I actually didn’t think of the social responsibility that lawyers are tend to be attached with but that great feeling of having the entire room listen to you as you deliver your closing statement or debunking the claims of the other party. So intense was that ambition, that although I was already registered with a Mass Com course on the first week of freshmen registration, I came back before classes started to have it changed and got myself re-sectioned with the Political Science and Philosophy majors.

But that flame didn’t last long. I found myself wanting to do Mass Com work. It wasn’t disappointing. After all, I love writing. And our learning was not confined to the four walls. We got an investigative story published about the Davao bombing anniversary and made a documentary about gangsterism in Davao.

It was also during that summer production workshop that I realized I could become another person I didn’t think I was capable of. I acted for a short narrative. I was ‘cast’ by the other group, though I was the director/scriptwriter for our group. And despite the tight schedule of the class, I gave in to the opportunity to see myself on screen. It was really silly watching me, that on the screening I hid at the back. Actually, all of our attempts really seemed silly. After all, we were given by our wonderful teacher a mere one week to complete the job. And it’s an attempt; at least we should be credited with that. Anyway, as I said I looked silly, especially with the part that I cried. It was in the church and my ‘director’ told me that I should be able to convey with emotion in exchange of what should be a dialogue with God. We had no time to rehearse because it was getting late. Even now, I refused to view that again. But I must admit that acting is something new to me and eventually I get to do it in small plays our class produced. It was exciting.

When you’re acting, it feels like you’re in a different world. I can see that is the reason why we get lost when we’re watching good actors and actresses. They are able to transport us into their world. If there would be an entirely bizarre twist in my career path, I’d probably consider acting. But then I would think of all the nasty stuff you go through as a beginner in showbiz and all the pretentiousness that you have to endure, then I know I’d be kidding myself. And then I think of the effect it would have in my psyche having to undergo the rigid auditions in SCQ and Starstruck and being paired with others whose sole ambition in life is to become an artista, and then ending up with something loose in your mental framework because you can’t even construct a sensible sentence. I cringe. Auditions would be terrifying but then an offer is tempting.

So much for great expectations and hoping that things would be well. I should have expected that it would happen sooner. Continue to shake my head in disbelief. Everythin's so fucked up now. Fuck them and fuck their temerity to be mum about the things that fucked me up.

Dear Pa,

You've never understood me, just as what you always insist that I never understood you. I do. But you may never have the heart to see that. Even if you may not believe me, as I always say, I have passed that stage of blame and remorse. Though you always insist how childish, immature and irresponsible I am. I never get to see that point. I have accepted the fact that you may have to spend your lifetime with someone who nearly killed you. Even if you may not believe me, I tried my damn best to get along. There are just irreconcilable differences that you insist on reconciling.

I never take pride that I'm earning a bit more than you do. I never intended to bring myself the subject of your constant ire because of this. Even if you may never believe me, and even if it may show that I do not, I want to help this family, and I want to see us together. Please see it in your heart, that despite the many fights and misunderstanding, I have stayed and never left this family. It may never be the same but we're family, and it counts.

I'm sorry I raised my voiced when we fight. I'm sorry if I hurt you. If someday I will go away, please understand me. I'm your son, and I'm not perfect. I make mistakes, and even if you may not believe me, I continue to look up to you as a father.

*****

Dear Ma,

I fear that I may have failed my promise. Remember when you were in your deathbed, you told me to take care of my brother and sister when you're gone? Now that we're in the midst of hopelessness, I can't even find their hands and reached out to them. Their hearts have grown cold. I cannot help them as much as I can.

But I hope you understand me. I know you understand the situation. It's not my fault Ma. You left us, and I was too young to understand why such terrible things happen to good people. I know that if you're here, you could always pull our family together. I refused to dwell on this painful past, but the thought of you makes my heart ache. Perhaps God knows better.

I just hope I can see it through. And I wish you were here.