Sunday, October 31, 2010

Person most likely to uncover the meaning of life


You have this phenomenal knack for content analysis and for chrissake, anyone who could derive any degree of epistemological substance from a taong grasa deserves a fucking medal. You come up with the craziest points but somehow they make sense. It's uncanny. We should shoot something together someday. If anyone just so happens to discover the meaning of life by way of 'grasism' (the adoption of the taong grasa lifestyle), we all have this lovely individual to thank. You are a beautiful person and that mind of yours makes me want to ride a giraffe standing on the edge of a disproportionately small earth while grazing on the rings of Saturn with a burrito in my hand.

The indentured slavery of temporal narratives


You, it's always you. I'll see you again someday and by then I might have something good to say. Yeah, you're right, I've been scared all this time. I wish to not let this happen again. I hope seeing you clears that up. How long do I have to wait? I hope it's not that long. I've only been waiting forever. I'll wait until forever. I've gone this far and regardless, I guess there's no other way for me to go.

Do you still think of me? I don't want an answer. I just want you to be with me. At least once, I'd like for you to see me as I am. Not particularly overjoyed by your presence, not in pain over always having to leave. I'd like for you to see the me you never got to see when you were with me.

Give me a night in November to show you.

I used to see you everyday, now I want you to eat a sandwich and come back home


You have no idea. Crossing you everyday on the way in and out of school, seeing the places you go, thinking about how close you were at some point. It's just surreal how we just ended up talking now. Something draws me to you. I just couldn't put my finger on it. I believe we're meant for so much more than this. At least once while I'm here, come back home. I'll make up for all those times I could've just walked up to you.

We can't just be like this forever. Not after knowing you thought of me the same way I did of you. You were so close.

From the ends of convergent trajectories


Before I met my ex, I ran into you on some internet forum. I thought you were rather interesting and it frustrated me to no end, how you were dating someone at the time. Soon enough, we started talking again and I was tied down. Later on, that whole thing subsided and you just so happened to be with someone new. I find the whole play on availability increasingly humorous but at the end of the day, this whole irony would still beg the question, "what if it was you instead of her?"

Perhaps we will never know. As early as that first time you messaged me, up until the first time we met, all through that period of latency we had in between, all I ever wanted to be was to be a part of your life.

I'm now your daughter's godfather and sticking to the belief that real life is stranger than fiction, the absurdity just makes me smile. I guess I'm a part of your life. Just didn't see this coming. I miss you, B.

You, just you.

Friends. I always thought of the two of us as good friends. I don't think that will ever change. We'll always be friends and I'll always love you. Times were different before you came along and whereas I met you by way of life throwing an unassuming curveball my way, you stayed by me. With you, I feel that I'm more than I actually gave myself credit for. I'm a better person than I thought I was and I'd like to thank you for showing me that there's value and worth in the things I say and do. I'd like to thank you for telling me I'm a beautiful person regardless of whether or not I'd say that about myself. Thank you for believing in me. We're good friends and we'll be that way forever.

Thank you for giving me something to believe in. Thank you for being there when I needed you and thank you for being someone who subtly changed my life, whether or not she knew it.

Nadeth, I will always love you. You're a friend I wished I had from the start. I'll see you soon.

Friday, October 29, 2010

This just might be the rest of my life


I'm finally done with this. All of the sorrow from this masturbatory little opus shall now be put to good use. I really hope this does well. I hope this gets good reviews and minimal revisions. I should totally slay the panel for this defense. I hope I know whatever the fuck it is I'm talking about though. It would be a shame since this really took a lot of heart.

I must do this. It's only the rest of my life we're talking about.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Mother was young once


My mom was eighteen years old in this picture. This was taken on a trip my mom and her friends took before my father started courting my mother. The week after this, my dad anonymously sent her flowers and would deny ever sending them. Eventually he did though (sellout!). Mostly for fear of having some other douchebag rest on the laurels of his gesture. The result was a little monstrosity they would oftentimes want to strangle in sheer frustration. Way to go for a teacher/student relationship. Okay, well technically she was my dad's friend's student. Whatever. It's odd just imagining how my parents were kids just like me. That they were people way before I came along.

On a side note, I absolutely adore those seafoam green loafers and those short Adidas shorts. I'd wear the exact same thing. As in THE EXACT SAME THING. Well, maybe not shorts that short but still pretty short nonetheless.

Oh and yeah, does anyone notice how my mom sort of resembles BP somehow? It's probably just me though.

My mother was young once.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Contrasts


I'll try my best to be brief for this entry. The past week has been an exercise in perfect dissonance. For the first time it felt as if the world wasn't falling apart. Rather, this dissonance sought to add a tasteful sense of contrast to the monotony of smooth interpersonal interactions. I spent a week in Manila to see some friends in between long stints of writing for my seemingly endless study on the life stances of music-based subculture. Chances are, you might have noticed a snootier tone with regards to my writing. I'm sorry for this.

Sometimes I wonder how I'll be able to survive there on my own. Something tells me I'll be just fine but I'm a bit apprehensive. On one hand, I missed my mother terribly while I was away but then again this is something I'll have to go through sooner or later. With my friends and the rest of my family up in the capital, I think I'm in good hands.

Things don't always go as planned but they could still be good nonetheless. I'm looking forward to the promise of shared experience, everyone. I'll see you all soon.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Momentary departures from life and living


I've always felt a bit off about receiving any form of sincere commendation with regards to my writing. I mean okay, I know I have a fairly adequate command of the English language but writing, regardless if it's for journal entries like this, disjointed "poetry" or the occasional bag of lyrics, was never something I wanted to do; much less something I'd be good at. Rather, I always saw writing as a sublimation of my frustration towards my lack of talent in the visual arts, mediated by the added frustration of my numerous (albeit lackluster) attempts to compensate by means of musical expression. Looking back, since I believed myself to be less of a literary failure than I am in those two other fields, writing was the only recourse I had. At the very least, I should be able to articulate certain aspects of the images I see in my own head.

I don't know if this makes sense but words don't really speak to me. Not nearly as much as actually being there to experience the vividness of the northern lights or the reassuring warmth of a lover's touch in even the coldest of nights. These are things that go beyond my capacity to articulate. These are moments that exist beyond the realm of words. At least it's that way for me. Not that I'm ragging on literature, though. I've always had an intense admiration for those who could weave intricate webs of meaning with the words they piece together. All I mean to say is that my receptivity towards the language of experience, inter-subjectivity and inherent meaning leans toward symbolic interpretations of beingness, stripped of the limits of a social context.

Long story short, my mind caters to the whole spectrum of one's individual perception of the world and its phenomena, broken down into binaries that spell out narratives by means of the presence/absence dichotomy they create. Single images that create entire life stories, the stories of places, of incidental people and of the objects they interact with and/or create for themselves. All without a single word spoken. I look to presence and absence as crucial forces in the formation of meaning.

All of this happens on an individual level and when I'm pulled back into the wax and wane of my own social context, I walk away with a little piece of everyone else's quiet narratives. That said, a number of select individuals have contributed immensely to the development of my perspective on life.

An adequate summary of this phenomenon is seen in the formation of what I refer to in my own taxonomy as Tristecism. The basic premise underlying the Tristecist perception of life and living is that all humans are situated in that same presence-absence dichotomy. All meaning is fundamentally derived from the absence and more so, the loss of certain values. The subsequent compounding of values and/or the lack thereof forms a series of experiential binaries. Each in itself, constituting part of a narrative structure which leaves itself open to reinterpretation and generative projection. The issue of substance has always been subject to the valuation of objects, at least as far as I know. I could be wrong. This perspective however posits that meaning is not to be derived from what an object is or appears to be but rather from the spaces and gaps that allow the object to be defined in reference to a greater context, much in the manner of a sculptor chipping away at a slab of rock to produce identifiable shapes and forms. Consequently, as objects or phenomena are liable to change, the loss of certain attributes would denote a transition in the composition of these experiential binary strings from one configuration to another, thus laying down the groundwork for another set of narratives to be drawn from and drawn into.

Always moving and ever dynamic, the perspective more than matches the valleys and peaks of shared human experience. With the above stated, let's go into how specific examples of the continuum of shared human experience persists to shape my own personhood on both an epistemological and aesthetic level. More on this in a subsequent entry.