Just feeling it...

(Written in May 2005, accidentally published in June 2022. I stand by what I wrote 17 years ago. To the one with whom I spoke about unrequited whatevers, this is what I meant then. But yes, it's all a bunch of "nothing"...)

This must be the night of plagiarization and unoriginal thought. Nonetheless, I enjoin you to humor me as I share with you a little something that I just came across in the blog of a friend's friend (come again?).

"For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are those 'It might have been.'" - John Greenleaf Whittier

The guy sure knows his stuff. Now, to "borrow" from the idiot box, here's a lengthier tidbit. Got this from the the Internet movie database, by the way.

Joey: So what is the best ending in all of literature? Don't say Ulysses. Everyone says Ulysses.

Professor David Wilder: That's easy. Sentimental Education by Flaubert.

Joey: And what happens?

Professor David Wilder: Nothing, really. Just two old friends sitting around remembering the best thing that never happened to them.

Joey: How do you remember something that never happened?

Professor David Wilder: Fondly. You see, Flaubert believed that anticipation was the purest form of pleasure... and the most reliable. And that while the things that actually happen to you would invariably disappoint, the things that never happened to you would never dim. Never fade. They would always be engraved in your heart with a sort of sweet sadness.

Whoever said Dawson's Creek was crappy, sentimental garbage or any permutation of such is absolutely wretched.

Now that I've made my point, I should be getting back to work.

Have a great weekend, y'all!

Well, lookie here!

I'm back, baby!

And that's coz I'm getting stressed out. There you have it, I blog whenever I am stressed out. But no worries. It's all good here, loving it. Just about.

Kasi naman. Why did I have to have a sort of thing with someone who goes to the same office as me? And who in fact goes to the same office at around the same time as me, like right now, when I'm supposed to be slaving my brown arse away in front of Gossip Girl and not in front of a half-cooked Powerpoint presentation. I was waxing sentimental over the whole thing (the aforementioned "sort of thing", not the PPT presentation) when he showed up uninvited. For what? A damn football game? Turn-off!

And why do I always have to write about such things anyway. My first stab at blogging in what, 7 months? On what--some boy? Gad, that's.... sad.

But yeah, I'm loving it here. Got in just before the recession hit, haha. Just like Ohms in Singapore. Yeahbah! As friends can attest to, my timing's pretty off in most cases. But this time, well, I think I've paid for it enough already. I was starting to get depressed (see below post entitled "Someday").

Some people I know would call it luck, which to me betrays their sense of insecurity and lack of faith in how this whole fate thing works for people who do work for things to happen. I worked too damn hard for this. Everything I've done in my previous company had been leading up to this. After all those months of intense prayer and relentless preparation (inside and outside the office), I got "lucky" and scored a pretty decent offer. And I'm loving it here now. Especially after I got regularized after my 3rd month on the job, so life is pretty rosy now, hehe.

And now I'm back on the blogosphere. For the same mundane reasons, but dang it, I'm back. I miss writing. I had to disappear for a while in case headhunters actually took an interest in my cyber profile and Googled me. Yes, I am Google-able. Used to be anyway, and this blog was one of the things that linked to me. It wouldn't exactly be a good idea to share more details than what are listed in the resume now, would it?

Gotta get back to (slave)work now. After all, people don't call this a country of (and for) slaves for nothing.


Keep you posted, for sure. The Saga continues in a few...

Ramblings

Funny how time works to help you get back on your feet. Not that I believe I’ve actually fallen on my ass before. But memory is a funny thing. Sometimes, even in the pits of the pits, if you absolutely have to be honest with yourself, you realize that there are some things you don’t ever wanna learn to forget. For a variety of reasons. Or simply just because.

Listening to the Love Actually soundtrack doesn’t do any wonders for me anymore. And not just coz it's so 2005. I can’t remember how I used to see visions of the now-forgotten whenever Eva Cassidy’s “Songbird” would play. I no longer feel like putting Maroon 5’s “The Sweetest Goodbye” on insta-replay. But don't get me wrong, the whole album’s still great, I love it. I’m just not moved by anything anymore.

My sassy friend Anna said living in the present is, for all intents and purposes, the best thing we can do for ourselves. But what if the present is anything but where you wanna be? No matter how it’s turned out, the past can be a well of wisdom and wonders, if you know where to look. And I’ve always thought the future is just super if you put enough faith in it, and in yourself. Besides, our capitalist culture doesn’t exactly make daily life conducive for such real-time living. Here in the RP, not all things are bright and beautiful. In corporate-landia, downtime in any shape and form is a waste of time and opportunity. Boost productivity, supercharge your bottom-line, and you’re on your way. Thinking at least two steps ahead is de rigeur. It’s get with the program or get your ass kicked. And to expand your vision, you have to start living it.

Because life is a really icky mess of processes (for lack of a better term), even the realm of the personal isn’t spared. Guilt trips are endemic in relationships. Behind every success story is a nagging seed of doubt that tells you if you aren’t careful, you could be setting yourself up for a debilitating fall. In Zen-like manner, Anna’s mom tells her to diss the guilt, and I wonder just how messed up can I be to be so utterly confused by the concept. When you think about it, the period between the before and after is the least reliable of all timeframes, precisely because it's in the here and now and we can still do something about it but for some reason, which I would attribute to human frailty, we don't. Or we mess up. The right way the whole carpe diem thing is supposedly done is to check all baggage, as well as expectations founded on experience or insight, at the door and just, well, live. But the thing is, life isn't all about the good times. (Lucky you if it is.) So of course it’s never that easy. Nothing is. Living in the eternal present is actually more work than it looks, and if anyone’s succeeded in doing this--like really really--I’d appreciate sticky notes on the topic.

My Kind of Twisted Sunshine

I found the ideal guy. Took me long enough, for sure. But I now know who he is. Thing is, he doesn't know I exist. Even worse, he probably never will.

I mean, what can you expect from someone like Marat Safin? And I'd be doggoned to let this fixation rule over my waking life like some loser stalker type. Or, for that matter, a giggly schoolgirl with a crush on some blond boybander (a lapse in judgment I can only attribute to the inevitable onslaught of raging teenage hormones).

But still, I know that if I adored tennis for the sake of the game, then I would come to know true love in the person of Marat Safin. After all, only a true lover of the sport would be able to fathom the depth of that pure, undulating genius. The perfectionism that drives him to such incoherent ebbs in an otherwise perfect career. No other player has been called the "purest physical talent in the history of the game," and this comes from a sports journalist-cum-raving-Marat-lover-slash-hater.

It's not only this, of course. I'm a newbie tennis fan, having been introduced to the sport by Jub, my uber tennis junkie of a housemate, last year. And when I first saw Marat play, it was understandably the physical presence that got stamped in my mind. He was so beautiful; he was just oozing with pure magnetic appeal, you know? But at the time I never ascribed something more fundamental to the impact that he channeled across that tired media known as the idiot box.

Simply put, he is poetry in motion, and then some. For a guy his size (he's 6'4"), it's almost unbelievable how his powerful form moves with such grace, making it look easy to sometimes "mess with the laws of physics." But even more than this, after reading countless interviews of his, I find the things that go on upstairs infinitely more fascinating than his brilliance as a player. Maybe it's because it all starts there. After all, genius stems from the brain, even if the field of intimate knowledge is in athletics. What I find exceedingly intriguing is his capacity for imperfection in his perfectionism, and the ensuing suffering he endures warring with his inner demons over things that an ordinary player would shrug off in trifling consideration. His pursuit of playing "perfect tennis" has led him to falter in the face of imminent victory. His one true enemy is his own self, and on court he berates himself for the tiniest, seemingly inconsequential errors he made, sometimes launching into dazzling displays of unbridled fury. For such a lyrical player in that his physicality is as precise as it is overpowering, he's not very consistent, and his losses could be debilitating in their protractedness. But the tennis world is not at a loss, coz when he's got his A-game on, then you would see something special happening to the game itself.

It's a given, Marat is a godsend to the world of tennis. But for me, he's more than that. He's my construct, the standard by which I think I'll measure future prospects against. No, seriously. If I can't have Marat ("Oh please, Lord, let him be my destiny".. *crossing fingers*) then I might as well have someone who approximates his fine attributes. ("Hah! Not so tall an order--no pun intended") Okay, so maybe I'm asking for too much here.. Okay, okay, so maybe I'm asking for the impossible: drop-dead gorgeous plus athletic skills plus brains/razor wit. Damn, and I haven't even gotten to character traits.

But racket-mangling and chronic model-dating aside, my kind of guy can be someone with quirks like the next guy. I say quirks, not fundamental infirmities such as being an asshole or a chauvinist pig. Hell no, not even if you had a face and body like Brad Pitt's. Now, if you were actually Brad Pitt, that's a whole different story and I should be getting your number... (Ahahaha...)

But Marat, he's the real deal. Because he actually gives new meaning to the word "inspiration." He raises the bar for being someone who doesn't compromise his own standards for himself, who actually acknowledges his human frailty and is even humbled by it, even at the height of his superstardom. He's got his own philosophy about things, and he can be very unequivocal about life and human nature and one's place in the cosmos. He says a lot of things, but he's not full of himself. He's a spiritual person, and he's Muslim, too! (could I love him even more than I do now?) He's as philosophically poetic--and dry-witted--as they come. And he reads Lenin. How sexy is that? Heck, what 26-year-old do you know reads Lenin when they could be partying out all night and blowing moolah on big, fast, expensive things and generally living life in the fast lane? Okay, so he may in fact be multi-tasking even as we speak. So damn what? He's beautiful, he's young, he's successful. He's also a tormented soul. Passionate, tempestuous, never in the middle. Never wanting to be mediocre. Just like how anyone should be, when you think about it.

Admittedly, given his issues and intermittent madness, one can see he isn't the perfect specimen of male human existence. But for me, he's the standard, and I wouldn't want him any other way.

Here's to a baggage-free 2006!

In three weeks' time, it’ll be a year since I first met Blackie. Over the holidays, I’ve been trying to rid my system of nano-traces of him. Been ragging on about him to my friends here at home. Even griped to the parental units about his permanent defection (not that there was anything remotely official and hence legitimate about the whole thing to begin with). I’m not taking any chances, hence all this. To me, it’s no issue that he went and got himself saddled with some brand new heavies. I see that it’s no longer his call. And if he might enjoy the ride, that’s his prerogative. God, for his sake, I hope he does. Bummer, don’t you just hate it when the withering of possibility happens? It’s just my luck that the person I once thought might just be the one to provide me with a glimpse of all things bright and beautiful goes and puts a damper on things. Checkmate. I can’t move. I can’t even feign nonchalance and carry on like the last time we spoke, lest I get sucked back into the black hole of blind want. Backtracking a bit, I unearthed this piece of prose I wrote a few months back. Think it’s a tad too graphic for my daytime taste, but it’s certainly indicative of the state of things in which I found myself wallowing then: “Shit happens. Just when you think you’ve finally licked the habit of endless reminiscence and the resulting self-annihilation, you find that you’ve become too complacent in your newfound sense of accomplishment that you overlook the puddle of dung you just stepped into. And though you might have cleaned off a bit, you find that the stench—permeating and overpowering—still clings to your clothes, rendering you immobile as you are brought back to thoughts of reminiscence and emotional harakiri… I have to admit, the analogy’s a bit off. Coz I wouldn’t consider anything about the quasi-affair with Blackie odorous in any way. But yeah, shit happens. It’s a universal fact.” Hah. So there. It’s an infinitely exhausting process. If you’re in a similar boat and you’ve managed to detoxify and clear up your system, consider yourself lucky. Some people never get out of it. Some people just can't take a clue and keep thinking night and day about their certain someone. The one that got away. And to think I once thought I was the one that scampered away baggage-free from it all. F*d up, I know. But I’m clean now. Shoulda been eons ago, sure, but being free of him now is all that matters. Adios, my friend. ***** It's gonna be a rockin' new year, I can just feel it. Bonne année 2006, everyone!

Regression Analysis III

How can you regret something that made sense? How can you regret something that’s keeping you sane, even if you feel otherwise? How can your salvation lie in both the safe and the self-destructive?

Maybe that shouldn’t be the question. Maybe it oughta be, if either way your salvation can only end as a mistake, which mistake can you not live with?

Oops, I forgot. That can’t be it. Not anymore, anyway. The fcuk with questions on salvation. The 50 Million-Dollar Question should now be: When are you gonna stop?

***

Thing is, maybe I don’t want to. It’s crazy, but I’m scared that someday I’ll forget. I’ll forget how I used to feel about things. I’m afraid of the day when my memories of all things "malabo" will lose all depth and color. It’s scary that such memories can recede into nothingness. And all I’ll have are nebulous scribblings to serve as a reminder of the times.. and then, nada.

Guess I should be happy at the prospect of impermanence; it's the only thing one can ever count on. But.. I dunno. I just don’t wanna ever forget.

Tattoed*

The curve of the smile,
Indelible against time.
Can you imagine?

***

too bad
so sad
gone mad
you bad
stay rad.


*for the Blackster, the happy accident I never saw coming. The rush of blood to the head that almost was.

Regression Analysis II

It was yesterday when I the epiphany. Despite only a few hours of sleep, I awoke with a start. And with full clarity, I saw it. The sign.

It wasn't meant to be. And I'm cool with that. Finally. Sure, it would be fun to be mighty cool with him again, but I guess we're really better off as just friends. It's just one of those things that you know to be true, you know? Coz deep down, despite the acknowledgement of his finer attributes, despite his being the quasi-epitome of the guy of your dreams thus far, you recognize that something fundamental is amiss. And you know that you do deserve better...

But still, it was sort of fun to be missing someone like that. To have your head in the clouds whenever you thought about the way he used to make you laugh (whether he meant to or not). To be thinking of badminton matches and video marathons and home-made gourmet dinners that will never happen. To be looking for his face among the crowd on the sands of a tropical paradise, even when you know his presence there was unlikely.

All I know is... Passion, even in delusion, is far better than living in static reality.

.........................

The dream was fun while it lasted. But I'm wide awake now.

Regression Analysis

Man, I cannot stand not knowing.

Yes, I know. Chicken shit never win in the rat race of life. That's what I deserve for getting cold feet when things were just about to get hot. Have no idea what I'm talking about? Heck, that makes two of us.

Seriously (and I hate being serious), there are few things in life that I actually regret. Okay, so I regret not having been more of a nerd in college, I regret not being sports-inclined earlier in school, I regret not having taken height enhancers before I hit 20 (okay, so that's way too much info). But that's about it. Of course, that's not to say that I make the best decisions. But in events that require you to think and act, you do what you can and stand by what you've done. Regrets are all about losing out in the past.

Heck, I don't even regret the whole BJ episode (yes, you keep on guessing). What's to regret? I definitely learned a LOT of things from that. If life is about to deal you a roundhouse kick to the noggin, you gotta learn how to dodge it a la Neo in The Matrix, or bear the full brunt of its force and just roll with the blow. In any case, you learn.

The point I'm straying from (again) is, what if you regret the future? Or the non-future, as is in this case. (Sappy waters ahead, but don't say I didn't warn yah.)

Just so you know, the gist of this entry is written under the misguided and unlikely notion that I might be saved by this admission of guilt. I think I made an error of regret when I ran away from possibility. Just coz I didn't know better. Chalk it up to the innocence of naivete, chalk it up to the so-called wisdom of being unduly cautious. Whatever the case, that's no excuse coz everything in life is a gamble anyway. And let me tell yah, sitting in the sidelines for far too long is just gonna get you some major butt burns. And that ain't gonna be a pretty sight, nuh-uh.

And the worst thing, I never told him why I had to disappear. And to think I told him way back when that I was all about total and open communication. Pffft. What a fake.

It's been a few months since. To date, I take regret as my daily dose of reality. I don't even have to think about it, or get lost in the same engulfing waters, to know that it's there.

It's just there.