Reposted from my previous blog(s)

July 18, 2006
Nothing, Whatsoever

When I was a whole lot younger than I am now (yep, I feel old), my favorite weekend pastime was sulking and giving everybody that get-out-of-my-way look, barging into my room as if the rest of the house was on fire, plopping into my unmade, books-and-papers-and-whathaveyous-filled bed and reading myself to death, vegetating like a piece of broccolli (i love this veggie, by the way) left out in the sun until my eyes would droop and so would the rest of me (how convenient that a pillow is nearby and I can just get lost in dreamland and meet Eustacia Vye on her way to meet The Native, or, maybe, just maybe, the great Holden Caulfield himself). Whew. Long sentence, wasn't it? But where was I? Oh, Holden--no, dreamland? I forgot. Totally lost track of my thoughts. What was I writing about? Sulking, I think, or maybe something to do with being young? I am typing, typing, typing and I don't care if I am making sense, or not. Are the punctuations correct? Is my grammar okay? Whatever. The point is...well,the point is that I don't have a point. I am rambling and how I started would tell you what kind of a person I am. Or maybe not. I mean, the last book I read was like a week ago, and it's taking me ages to finish the great Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I remember reading Slapstick when i was thirteen years old and not being able to make heads and tails out of it. It was my dad's, by the way. Yep, the great Dad who boasts of not having gone through the Hardy Boys and going straight to Moby Dick, from whom I got my copy of Faulkner's Light In August which is still in my bookshelf to this very day, pages tattered and browning away and browning some more, and all. Where was I, again? Oh, yeah, Slapstick. Fast forward to seven years later: One of my favorite English teachers, Prof. Thelma E. Arambulo (she says she hates her first name, but a heck of a woman she was!) tells us, her English majors-- and by the way, Contemporary American Lit just rocks!-- that the great Kurt would write in bits of paper and compile them into a piece of work that is so incoherent it would have your eyes glued on to the pages until everything would make sense. Where are you, James Merrill! Theodore Roethke! You Beat poets! Adrienne Rich! Omigawd my punctuation is so downright sloppy but I don't care I'm writing can't you see. I wonder, why this difficulty with Slaughterhouse Five? I mean, I read The Hours, Mrs. Dalloway and An Invisible Sign of My Own (which I bought at a booksale for a hundred and ten bucks and turned out to have been autographed by Amy Bender herself!) in a span of, like, four days. Is it just laziness? Is my brain deteriorating into something awful? Is it Vonnegut? The answer to this is: I don't know. I really don't. And I still don't know what my point is. I have no idea what shape this entry is taking. And, really, why is it called an entry? Because you enter the words into the keypad and they pop out into the screen? Who first thought of calling it an entry? Did it have, in any way, a likeness with how James Joyce started using the word epiphany to mean something else other than the feast of the three kings (were they really kings?)? I am so lost. Other words/names to think about today: canon, pathos, incoherent, James Thurber (where in the world can I find a book by him, aside from the UP CAL library?), lunch (or breakfast first?), sleep. Yep, sleep. I think it's lack of sleep that got me started, lack of sleep that made me go on, and on, and on. Stop. This is so much fun I'm dozing off.

October 27, 2006
From Billy to Randall

Correction: It's AIMEE, not Amy Bender. Sorry for that. I happened to look at my bookshelf this weekend and saw the mistake I had made. A whoops! moment, right there.

Slaughterhouse-Five was a real blast! Yes, I have finally finished the book, and managed to swallow Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in between. Now, S-5 (that's what I've taken to calling it) is about this guy named Billy Pilgrim who's become unstuck in time (sounds so glamorous, doesn't it?) and gets abducted by the Trafalmadorians (hope I spelled that right) who, by the way, are a group of aliens who have taken a keen interest in the human race. Now, what the book implies(or what I have gleaned from it, whichever) is that Billy began to have these hallucinations (they could just as well have been real, for all we know) after he survived the 2nd World War (why does this phrase always have to be in caps?), the climax of which (in Billy's experience, at least) was the bombing of Dresden, Germany. Slaughterhouse-Five is the name of the structure which housed the Americans (Billy included), and which miraculously escaped the bombing (yep, it was supposedly that disastrous).

Now, what am I doing? I am boring myself to death. I didn't come out here to give a summary of the book! No way! Go and read it yourself! But why should you, right? Why the @#**#$% should you read a book written by some guy (sorry, Vonnegut fans. No insult intended, none at all) who had nothing better to do than write a book about some crazy war survivor who had, in turn, nothing better to do than walk in and out of time zones?

I am so incoherent. This is what non-writing (is there such a word?) does to people who used to write like writing was breathing. And so I have taken to coming up with patches of script that I am hoping would turn out to be worth this page, anyhow. Or your time. Now that was downright smug. I mean, am I really writing this with the thought that someone would even care to read it? But then again, there's always the zeitgeist, the invisible audience (reader, whatever) one has in mind when one is writing. I mean, come on, give me that luxury, at least! The only person I'm pretty sure would read this is the friend who gave the book to me. So, there.

Well, back to Dresden. Reading about the bombing made me remember Randall Jarrell, a contemporary American poet who was a fighter pilot during the WWII, who wrote about what it was like to be up in the air and just fire and fire away at a piece of geography (it mustn't have seemed real to them, at all, just a part of the map they were ordered to annihilate). That there were people being killed, living beings being shred to pieces by the ammunition raining like fire from the sky-- these would hardly have occurred to them, at all, at least while they were at it. What Jarrell's poem ("Losses," that was the title) seems to be pointing at is the unreality of what was happening, to them who were no more than just pilots with an assignment. What was real enough must have been what came after, that moment when the task is done and they land and hear about it from the news, look at the photo spreads of the ravages of war, the deaths, the shattered limbs, the ashes. And then they say, or think: Hey. That was me. Us. I did that. We did that. And then the sadness. The ache of guilt. And everything else.

I have no idea how to end this. A period would, I think, have to do for now.

So there.

Borrowed

"In the end, life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose."

-Paul Auster, "The Locked Room," The New York Trilogy-

"Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as the gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup."

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being-

THE WATCHER (excerpt)

this was a story that I wrote for my Writing Class under Luis Katigbak

Once, during the night, I had the strange feeling that she had seen me--really seen me--for the first time.

She was sitting up in bed, reading under the yellow light of the lamp, her black-rimmed glasses framing her eyes. It was very quiet and all that I kept hearing, for the last half hour and in intervals, was the sound of her fingers flipping through the book's pages. Then she yawned, dropped the book to her side and leaned deeper into the thick pillows propped up on the headboard. She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes with her palms, after which her gaze landed on me.

For what seemed like a very long stretch of minutes, she looked at me, just looked at me, with her dark-circled eyes. I saw questions, thoughts skimming her countenance in fleeting hosts. I felt her really look at me, past the layers of shadow and dust, ending the certainty of never being seen. Or so I liked to think.

This girl--whose name I did not even know--looked at me as if she really saw me, as if I was real, was more than what I had been for so long. And, inside me, a flicker of something that made me feel more alive than I had ever been began to stir. The hope that, perhaps, this girl was going to care enough to look for me, to find me.

And then, the moment passed. Overcome by fatigue, perhaps, or simply by the lateness of the hour, her eyes started drooping. She drifted off to sleep and I watched her, praying, please look at me once more, the way you looked at me tonight.

War Stories

There was this feature on The History Channel wherein they juxtaposed ancient warfare to modern ones, and it was chilling to see that, yes, history does repeat itself.
Here are the ones that I remember:
First, suicide bombing. The catastrophe at the World Trade Center has its roots in Japanese history, wherein the Japanese army of World War II, out of a desperate attempt to win the war and save their country's honor (they were quite big on this one), deployed young fighter pilots (17 to 22 years old-- you figure out why) to crash their planes on the American fleet anchored on Japanese waters. They are better known as the Kamikazees.
Next, Bioweaponry, like the Anthrax scare of several years ago. Some centuries before, the Mongols employed the first (known) biological warfare by starting the outbreak of one of the deadliest pandemics in history-- the bubonic plague of Medieval Europe known as the Black Death. The Mongols, unable to penetrate the strong walls of Rome in a war that they were desperate (notice the re-appearance of this term) to win, slung out corpses that were in numerous forms of putrefaction. Their purpose was to terrorize; they ended up killing two-thirds of Europe's population, a terrifying enough ratio, but one which even the perpetrators did not count on producing.
History is fraught with war. And war is, ultimately, the result of man's greed-- even hunger-- for domination. The tales of conquest that fathers tell their sons (why not their daughters, one might wonder) for purposes of inspiration and entertainment, aren't so inspiring, or entertaining, after all. What they are, it seems, are stories of horror that we should rightly be scared of, because history teaches that wars like the ones that have already been waged, are sure to be waged again, as long as man lusts after power. And that is a disease that, sadly, will just not let itself be cured.

Antidotes to Sadness

To all of you out there who find yourselves being visited by melancholia much too often (and would like to do something about it), here are some friendly suggestions:

1. A good book that doesn't take itself too seriously (I recommend the Jeeves collection by P. G. Wodehouse, Jessica Zafra's Twisted series or any book by James Thurber);

2. A cup of frappucino, a cozy coffee shop and three buddies (who aren't half as predisposed to depression as you are);

3. A rummage through your closet should do some good--you'd realize how blessed you are to have the nice clothes that you own; what more, you can sew the hole on that favorite old shirt;

4. There's nothing like a good, intelligent show on TV to steer your thoughts from the blues; your mind will turn (or be forced to) and you'd be all the better for it. Remember, the cliche "an idle mind is the devil's workshop" wasn't coined for nothing. So watch The History Channel and refresh yourself on those History classes in school that you never paid attention to;

5. When all else fails, sing! This happens to be my favorite reminder to myself. Music is the cure-all for every kind of sadness out there. So try it, it just might do you some good.

Darker Circles Around My Eyes

I admit, I've been losing sleep over it. But I don't really care.
That I know more now about the French Revolution and the Rennaissance than I used to, is worth all the winks I've missed.
I look back and trace this fascination back to my days as a grade 8 student, when one of my favorite teachers, Ms. Perez, made me fall in love with Asian History (yep, map quizzes, Hammurabi and all).
But then again, no.
It actually dates back earlier than that. I do remember being in grade school and leafing through the first set of encyclopedias nestled in a long, white shelf in our living room, and finding myself glued to the pictures of the Egyptian pyramids and the paintings of Da Vinci and the sculptures of Michaelangelo, and reading about The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the tragedy of Pompeii, the sophistication of the Roman empire. It was an addiction that stayed with me throughout my days as a student, which was refueled by the documentaries on The Discovery Channel (wherein I learned, among so many things, that what really caused the defeat of the Spanish Armada was a colossal navigational error, that Marie Antoinette never really uttered the line "let them eat cake," that Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning, that it was the Cavaliers who won in the Battle of Hastings and that its story is forever preserved in a beautiful tapestry called "The Carmen.")
And now, here comes The History Channel, which has made me topple over with excitement, that finally, there is an entire channel devoted to one of the biggest loves of my life! Its well-made documentaries have, for the time being, deviated my attention from books (I have yet to finish the one I started reading 3 weeks ago!). But it's a fair deal. That I now know who Maximillan Robespierre is, that the visual arts don't start and end with Da Vinci and Michaelangelo, that the Coliseum was originally called "The Plebeian Ampitheater," that Augustus was the first Roman Emperor and that Nero was not a rightful heir to the Roman throne, makes me feel that I have become richer.
In knowledge, not in money.
Now that is an entirely different thing (which I also lose sleep on. But come now, don't we all?)