AND SO I WROTE…UH, TITLE LATER.

7:46 PM 11/9/2011
Right now I’m in the royal kitchen, enslaving the little machine resting on the family’s ancient dinner table. While I, the literary laborer, am slouched on a narra chair, the priceless wooden throne. To my left is a ploteriat, the empty dinner (ginataang langka) plate while to my right is a bourgeois, an empty cup of decaf. We’re settled and ready to give a name to our court. The Court of Vag Trench. But the cheap carbon-monoxide-expelling carriages outside buzz like annoying summer bees, devouring over my induced concentration to craft a world where Quixote may live.

Ah, it finally breaks. My veneer melts with my audience’s discovery of my pretense. I’m no queen, no laborer, no literary goddess, no epitome of erotic writing. I’m just a regular third-world kid guised as a poet writing what I think is poetry. You should know, Ich komme aus The Land of Delusion, Ich wohne in Imaginary Land.

Haha! Okay enough theatrical intro. I’m just faking it.

My day began with an experience I never had in a loooong time — I was crying in my sleep. Yes. And I wasn’t crying because I’m finally losing my virginity in my sleep. I dreamt about dad. We were fighting like hell. He’s whipping me with his leather belt, again, while I’m as stubborn as ever. Nevertheless, I found myself caught in his arms, forgiveness overpowering the rage in my heart, feeling like the child that I never was. So I cried. Cuuuuute. :3

But anyway. As much as happy dreams end and we have to wake up and walk away from them eventually, I just carried on my morning routines like I just had a dreamless sleep. I’m very used to that now, numbing my heart like I’m the Ice Bag goddess self-soothing all my purple bruises. I’m still listening to MGMT, repeating over and over the lyrics to the song “Indie Rokk” on my head. I feel like I suddenly understood young men. I found blood and I saw stars, all in the backseat of your car. And I told you it was love, but you don’t wanna know the truth! I’m a young man in my prime, and my heart’s still filled with fear. And it goes on bleeding.

Aren’t they right? XD

So what’s it like being back to the cradle of UP and swimming once again in the ocean of UP people? Just the usual. The usual insane insecurity you get whenever you ride Ikot and sniff the aura of their geniuses. Behind those glasses is the Quantum Theory, the Iliad, the symphonies of Beethoven, the stock market, the derivatives. Behind my grade 25 glasses? Just the usual heart bumps brought by the new semester, some old dreams that need replenishing, the excitement to meet new teachers, and the self-crafted illusion that this semester is going to be Hell Yeah.

My first class today was German 10. Fast forward, I found my ballpoint hung in mid-air, my eyes glued on her face with feeble shock as she mumbled words I’ve never heard before. I was as disoriented as whenever my Avira update window erroneously operate in Deutsch, but there’s no Change Laguage link right now. My first foreign language class. So the painter who painted with watercolor in all his life was given a sewing machine today. But I was able to weave my first sentences and pronounce “Ich”. Ja. Do you think it was fun? Nein. It felt like hell.

As I was lucky with the enlistment, it only took me a few steps to reach my next class. CW100, with my former Eng1 teacher. Only that she was absent today. It’d better be the late release of class list. It would tear me inside to know that she’s avoiding a walk-in TP kid for this sem. I was her TP baby last sem! T_T Ah, I remember standing by the door to a roomful of freshman, with a green form in one hand. Then I see her coming. I still remember my fascination, my eagerness, my anxiety. She was younger than I expected, and she possessed the loveliest face I’d ever seen. Her dark eyes seemed full and yet so empty. But she did sign my form26 and admitted me to her class. She had a lot so say and a lot to orient us with, discussing academic freedom and the activist tradition in UP. For me she carried the softness and gentleness of a pearl, had the wisdom of Merlin, and the epic-ness of Tano. Weeks later, she made me frown nonetheless, with my first mark on my bluebook. My admiration’s ups and downs went on for the rest of the sem, but what I will never forget is how she shocked me with her ability with words, that my admiration for her became masochistic pain. I envied her loveliness, the ring on her finger, her epic-ness projected by her photographs on Paris. She’s so superb, I found myself googling her every once in a while. Haha. I stole a gaze at her wedding photos and shrunk myself with my dreams of also marrying a poet one day. Ah, and I almost wrote an essay of admiration for her as my final requirement. But I didn’t get there.

But moving on with my day…

I had lunch at Katag, alone. So much for the name, Kainan at Tagpuan. FML.

My next class was Eng11. I spotted a new friend, Allaiza. Econ freshie. But before our little get-to-know, the halls of Palma echoed with the chants of IMPERIALISMO IBAGSAK! and EDUCATION BUDGET, DAGDAGAN, HUWAG BAWASAN! fronted by USC and some org I don’t know. Unexpected demo during the first day of classes, ah, real UP spirit. For me it’s good that they’re opening up matters that have relevance to the sagging society. Ideas we can easily ponder about, swoon over, be fascinated in to the point our passions are roused to the streets. But looking at the other side of the coin, activism is still more or less a contagious spritual disease that just happened to be prevalent in UP. Why? Because we’re just crazy kids doing freeze mob. And planking. And happens to give a shit. Big time shit. However, for me, I’ve given enough shit. And there’s no more shit to be shit. That’s just that. I’m not emotionless or too dumb to understand what’s behind PNoy being a U.S. puppet. There’s just no more shit to be shit, remember.

We introduced ourselves one by one. I pulled out a line I’ll never tell here but I made the class laugh. Yey. So far I think this class is going to be good. I can’t afford to have a grade of less than 2.0, so I have to work close to my best. If shit happens, I mean real shit, The Shit — i may just disappear. I’d die.

I’m half-serious, guys.

So that concludes my class day today. I hope tomorrow’s better — I’m meeting my poetry prof, if he doesn’t ditch us. :”> By the end of the sem, I should know what poetry is, and be effing legible to take the workshops (if offered) next semester. So let’s call it a night. I feel half alive.

IGNORANCE IS BLISS.

I am not supposed to feel this. Ambush of fate, this is entirely unplanned. I’m supposed to be lonely tonight, but thanks to this stupid blog from my highschool days, my facial muscles pulled out a rare genuine smile.

So different, so distant from who I am now. Maybe I had been growing up all along. Maybe.

WHAT POST NUMBER AGAIN?

6:26 PM 9/19/2011
desktop background: a couple of cherry blossom trees, in full bloom, with innumerable pink petals scattered all over my screen. my vision is filled (and overwhelmed) by this masculine pink that has the power to swallow the presence of any icon that dares stand out from it, but it seems that it’s not its day today. the number of desktop icons plastered on my screen has reached a certain number that screams a complaint my goliath background can no longer repress.

“There’s one hell too many of us; like the disarray of clothes in your closet, can you not please organize us?”

Okay. I know it’s a weird way to begin an after-break post, but the hell with it. Nevermind disorder and lack of sense, let the words be…let them be a burst of…of hot sperm after a glorious orgasm! And if by burst, we should mean nothing hindering the relase, no control, no regulation, no condoms. Writing is intercourse with words, and I decide not to write safely this time — no rubber between me and the words.

But before you close your browser in disappointment of me (and disgust), I’ll start getting serious and type faster now.

When I made a pact to myself that I shall cease to write like I used to, it was a pact driven by emotions and insecurities. It should be hard to admit but i’ll say it blatantly. I lost reason to write, or to be exact, my reasons to write were taken away from me. It is true that I had written nothing farther from my sheer immaturities which consisted of being “papansin”, “pa-conceited”, “pa-want like a seven-year-old”. Day by day, I am not just burdened, but also corrupted by the persistence of my immaturity. In one of my silent moments where my eyes are trapped in thin air, I looked at myself, deep down as if it’s trapped at the bottom of an old wishing well. And i saw a girl with the same face as mine, under the crystal clear water, eyes wide open, staring back at me, skin pale as the moon. She’s begging me to grow up, to think of the days when I made sense.

Coincidentally, childhood memories came running back to me like crablets racing from the tides. However, as soon as they appear, they come back to olivion before I can catch one. But the flicker of images were enough to give me a reminder of the resilient child that I once was — the one who made geisha paper dolls, wrote her own myths and legends, scripted class plays and directed them, lead the class, went over-the-bakod to buy Yu-Gi-Oh cards, literally played with fire to smell like burnt leaves for the whole afternoon, trekked the whole of Roxas Central School and led the treasure hunt games, ultimately imaginative to the point of being speculated as a schizophreniac, the one who made believe a lot but never delusional.

I wish my parents were appreciative of literature and raised me to write for a Palanca or at least a decent book. But no, they raised me in hopes that I become a dentist or an OFW, despite witnessing that all I ever did during my childhood was fold, cut and staple bond papers to have pages to write on. Purity and innocence right from the virgin hands of a young child whose writing is never driven by a desire in vain, unlike what I write now — full of selfish desires, lust, conceit, vanity. I wish I could once again be like the child that I was, selfless in the name of literature, standing in the middle of the room, storytelling about how fishermen should not use dynamite and loggers should stop illegal cutting. Oh, the memories. Back when I was a genius, a human property of the noble ideas that coming out from thin air.

Which leads to the question of what should I write, what should I write other than the shit I have managed to write for more than two years. Definitely it is not going to be another Day Out With Love, or shit like that. Writing should no longer be a verbal expression centered on the author, the rewards of the author, bragging rights of the author, monetary profit of the author. Writing should be for the sake of humanity, the humanity who created its art.

I don’t know when will I brave another set of hopefully coherent words here. But before I create a literary piece again, I should polish myself first. An unsharpened pencil will not write very well no matter how skilled are the hands holding it. Right now, I am plastering my wounds and learning to be confident with my scars. I am trying to get up from the muddy ground where I disgracefully slipped. I’m still finding who am I, who I truly am, but not so clueless with what I want from life.

I still want to carve my environment with the sharpness of my words, nonetheless.