Pano nga ba Magbasa

There’s a current literary fight in the blogosphere.

First read about it in ian’s blog.

Then went to read the original essay that sparked the outrage.

Then read exie abola’s rebuttal.

And finally, a blogger reacts here.

Kasi naman, pinapatulan pa natin. Eh taga Manila Standard Today yan.

Pero seriously, kung medyo difficult ang babasahin, hindi dapat tayo nadidiscourage. Baka hindi pa lang right time para basahin ito.

I bought The Best Philippine Short Stories of the Twentieth Century edited by Isagani R. Cruz and I must say, may mga kwento dun na nagkaroon ako ng struggle to read. So I skipped those muna. Then nakakatuwa kasi nung binalikan ko na ung iba, okay na. Madali na syang basahin. Pero ung iba mahirap pa din. So wait pa ulit ako before I attack those harder texts.

Kaya totoo ang point ni Ian eh, hindi porke’t mahirap, ididismiss na natin. Sayang yung insight na magagain natin from the stories kung ganun lagi gagawin natin.

vignette: sleeplessness

The industrial fan occilates my body with an artificial breeze as two silent exhaust fans rid the room of too much hot and humid air. The mattress feels stony on the wooden floor; each pillow becomes an enemy, punctured with imagined daggers that protrude from the excesses of the brain. The air smells of damp, abandoned rag. I lie semi-naked on the bed, chasing thoughts fluttering like hummingbirds inside the aviary of my mind, catching them with my fingers pulsing hurriedly on the QWERTY keypad of my refurbished phone, afraid the thoughts would fly away if uncatched. Outside, Makati still pulsates with the blood of call center kids and graveyard shifters, oblivious to the unheard gear shifting of body clocks in exchange for the devalued peso. I stand up and pace the room. I would have looked silly to onlookers, a man in his early twenties, wearing a red Bench boxer shorts with the words “squeeze me” running along the length of the buttcheeks, walking the small length of the room, pulling expletives out of thin air like dried laundry snatched from the clotheslines with the onset of rain, wishing the curse to be lifted, asking, demanding, pleading for a cure or a remedy - a true love’s kiss maybe, or the oil that manananggals use for separating their upper and lower halves, or the pulverized fine hairs of a tikbalang’s nape - anything, even the impossible, as long as it’ll cure me of this affliction.  God, I call out, take off hours from my life for every hour of sleep if you have to; just let me fall asleep please, at the right time, like normal people, so I could live a normal life. I silenced even my thoughts lest they mar a message from God, stopped pacing, and listened intently for an answer. But I could only hear the scuttle of cockroaches in the dark and almost like an echo, the staccato crowing of roosters at a distance. Dawn broke. Still sleep did not come.

 

Look Your Best

marami akong gustong makitang changes with myself. wholistic ang aking approach and i consulted a lot of people para mailista ang mga particular changes that i want to see.

sa puso, ang main goal ko ay tuluyan nang i-heal ang sarili from all the past pains that still affect my relations with people. i grew up being told i was worthless, i was nothing, i was ‘malas’ and it’s particularly hard to get over that. pero gusto kong mawala na ito. i want self-esteem. kasama din sa goal ko to have fewer but better friends. so far okay ito coz i’ve reconnected with my college barkada.

sa katawan, ang main goal is to achive a state of physical health. balik sa gym, bawasan ang sigarilyo, bawasan ang night outs, kumain ng 3 meals a day, drink 8 glasses of water and take vitamins. ganun ka-simple. and sana, ma-manage ko na yung insomnia ko. it’s really becoming a threat to my means of livelihood.

sa utak, ang main goal is mas palawakin pa ang aking intellect: meaning, read more, write more, expose myself to different media: art, photography, film, music, theater and possbile go back to school and earn a new degree.

sa kaluluwa, simple lang yan. ipagpatuloy ang pagiging spiritual. maging at peace with the world. matutong sumabay sa agos ng mundo.

panghuli, sa pitaka ay ayusin ang finances. most of my earnings go to cab fares and eating at expensive restos. i might need to invest na in kitchenware para i can cook for myself. i’m a great cook pa naman, sayang if i forget how to do the simplest of putahes like sinigang, tinola or adobo.

may mga nakarinig ng plans ko who laughed silently. i noticed the look. it tells me, di mo naman kayang gawin yan. so that pushes me to work harder to achieve it.

bawat isang goal, nakabreakdown into task. bawat isang task may date of implementation and may duration. all in all the whole thing will span at least two years. sana, sana, ma-achieve ko ito.

pero bakit ko nga ginagawa ito in the first place? well, i just noticed na sobrang nagiging negative na ang aking aura. nawala na yung eon na bubbly, fun and optimistic. must be myself reaching quarter-life and looking at my decisions so far and how it all affected who am i today and also making decisions of what to do next para mas maganda maging takbo ng buhay ko. sana suportahan nyo ko.

In Death There Is Only Sleep

I might have already said it all before. I find the idea of conforming to the rest of the drones who wake up early in the morning and sleep early in the night too parochial, provincial and, forgive me for saying, pathetic. I hate it. I hate them for making me look like a freak. I feel like the person who stood up for what he believed in and everyone else ganged up on him to say he believed wrong.

Okay, I admit that I am not the best candidate for what is ‘normal’. Getting sleepy at 7 in the morning might not be considered normal. And I am frustrated because everyone else thinks I’m so bad for not arriving to the office on time. But my alibi is supposedly acceptable because it is a disorder. And to punish me for a disorder is tantamount to discrimination. If we were to rank disorders by level of misunderstanding, mine would definitely rank first. And second. And third.

And this is not just some disorder I cooked up in order to escape the drudgeries of starting work early everyday. It’s in me ever since I learned to sleep and wake up. Imagine a kid who spent all night watching the stars pepper the sky while a pale blade moon watch idly by. Imagine that same kid still awake when orange blazing thorns work it’s way up the horizon. Imagine that kid struggling to be awake all day and sleep once he arrives home from whole day schoolling. Imagine that same kid growing up, mostly not attending his morning classes in high school because the first semblance of sleep creeps its way up to his spine only when the sun shines, his grades only maintained with a lethal combination of luck, connections and intelligence. Imagine that gangly kid now almost grown-up, relishing the feeling of making sure all his classes are scheduled on afternoons. Now I’m all grown-up and still, it haunts me.

It’s not like I haven’t really tried. I did. I tried so hard. But it feels as though I’m asked to voluntarily stop my heart from beating, which is impossible says those who’ve tried stopping their hearts from beating. What’s really sad is that those I work with might not even know the effect of forcing me to conform to the 8-5 standard. There’s not really a problem with my body. But my mind, my poor poor mind is reduced to the processing power of a 12-year old. If I merely work on menial tasks this wouldn’t be a problem. But I’m in IT for pepe’s sake and if my brain is reduced to the consistency of coconut milk, how am I supposed to be analytically, mathematically, logically and gramattically fluent all at the same time while all I think about is letting my mind take a stroll in Pagudpod while my body is nestled by a warm bed.

Oh why do they pain me so when I am in otherwise great company? Those I’ve come to idolize suffer the same fate - Kafka wrote about his dillemma in his diary; Dumas took strolls late at night; and I could only imagine Dickens, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald and our very own Pepe, Jose Rizal, toiling at night bleeding words on pages blank. When can companies hire, retain and promote workers on the basis of their individual realities and not on arbitrary societal rules that threaten to abolish uniqueness and individuality? And don’t even let me start ranting about dress code. Right now it’s only sleep. And I’m not getting any.

Disconnected

The lack of post can be blamed entirely on the economic slump of the United States as well as the ’strengthening’ of the peso. In an attempt to prevent the firm from losing too much money due to the peso-dollar exchange rate (clients pay us in dollars: meaning, the higher the dollar-peso exchange rate is, the greater our profits are), we were requested (forced is more like it) to surrender our firm-issued laptops and support phones. How does this equate to savings? Each laptop and support phone’s fair market value (plus the phone bill and wifi bill) are deducted from the money our clients pay us. If we don’t use the laptop and the support phone, it won’t be deducted.

What this means to me? No more internet at home. No more download of movies and songs. No more consistent blog entries.

The benefit: no more receiving calls in the middle of the night and during vacations forcing me to work.

There still will be posts once and a while. And oh, I’ll be a proud owner of a brand new dell laptop soon. I asked a friend who is coming home from the states to buy it for me.

For the techies, the specs are:
built-in camera
1 GB RAM
120 GB Hard Drive
15 inch Monitor
Pre-installed with Microsoft Vista Premium Edition
4 USB ports

Jurassic

Someone un-enlightened posted a comment on my rant about Gay Pride and how in the Philippines it might no longer be really existing.

The comment is so Christian Fundamentalist moronic that I decided not to approve it. Instead I’m pasting it here for your eyes to feast on:

Di po ba, sa Biblia(sa genesis yata) God killed all the homosexuals sa sodom and gommorahh, kaya nga ang Sodomy ay galing sa Sodom. Kung ayaw ang Diyos nang mga baklah, di po ba masama sila? kasama rin ang mga bi at trans. di po ba, sabi ni Jesus, “if you are not with me, then you are against me”? so kung mga supportahan mo ay mga bakla, ibig sabihin ikaw ang kalaban ni Jesus. kung gusto mo mag pumunta sa impyierno, sama mo doon sa gay pride. kung gusto mo mag kaibigan si Jesus, dapat ang mga kalaban mo ay mga bading. ok..so now you are angry. sa bible, sabi doon, sa end times maraming tao nagagalit sa christians. ito po ay isang dahilan sa papagalitan. at nais ko malaman kayo that homosexualism is unatural and wrong. mahal kita lahats at nais ko kasama po kayo sa heaven. alam ko that many will be mad, but who is mad with you…is it Jesus? also, who cares what the gay community thinks. the Bible says that man shouldn’t fear man, who can take away only the physical life, but fear GOD who can take away your physical life and destroy your soul. =D

Whoever this person is, however he or she might have stumbled upon my blog, all I can say is: Shooo, shooo, go away. Go back to the caves where your kind belong and wait for the second coming of your christ. If Jesus really comes back, you’d be surprised that you won’t be included in the list of those who will ascend heaven. And by the way, read the bible; really, really read it. You might be surprised at what you can learn.

And by they way, kaya kong himayin point by point ang comment mo, pero, well, my energies are better used elsewhere.

He has Salamanca

I forgot where I read how they called him a cynical romantic. But tonight I could only call him a prophet, his words that bear resemblance to discarded feathers of fallen angels flutter like wings - the color of rainbow in the sunlight - of dragonflies swirling relentlessly on the top of my blown-off head. No it wasn’t sentimental; I wasn’t being sentimental. Why are my senses arrested by the beauty of his prose? Why, at this ungodly hour, do trickle of tears, saltwater stored inside the ducts of my eyes, flow freely on my cheeks, burning, trailing a path of, no, not sadness, but of melancholy and happiness, emotions alternating like currents inside my body wired with veins. He called it Salamanca; and I have a sneaking suspicion he has it stored somewhere in a clothbag, powdered dusts of pixy wings, dragon scales, tikbalang hooves and kapre ashes mixed potently in the oil the manananggal uses to smother her belly with to transform into something fantastical, with wings and fangs, and also with a conscience and a sense of justice. It was Salamanca after all, that sealed his fate as a teller of stories - magical realism they called it in latin America - called speculative fiction, a term he, himself brought to the Philippines.

So yes, I was crying, crying unabashedly as I closed Alfar’s book Salamanca. I have wrote about it before; and even went on to say with fervent hope that it become standard reading in high school and college literature classes; but I felt I needed to write more about him, how I waited at Instituto Cervantes for his autograph, how I was disappointed I might have missed seeing him, how, not being able to sleep, I read through Salamanca all over again and was still nectared with the same feelings, the same smiles, the same breaking of heart, the same belly laugh and the same tears. When I came to the end, it was satisfaction that coursed through my belly and it was like having a full satisfying meal of buttered crabs, sinigang na hipon, kare-kare and an unending helping of steaming rice. What was the final feeling? It was hope: a renewed belief of the relentless devotion of true love and the confirmation of a long-held opinion that even in love, when our brains become the consistency of gawgaw dissolved in water, it is our choices to love the same person, a choice renewed each day, that will carry this love through the proverbial storms and hurricanes that will stir in us a desire to possibly hold on, hold on for dear life. So yes, Salamanca has the mark of great literature and Alfar’s will be included in the canon of memorable love stories we know - Florante at Laura, Crisostomo and Maria Clara, Gaudencio and Jacinta. I can only wait in anticipation for his next novel.

Galera, the Story

FRIDAY, or Anywhere but Here

The Day of Valor has been moved to Monday, in accordance with Gloria’s propensity to create opportunities for Filipinos to enjoy a long weekend. Tomorrow will be the start of one of them.

The sun outside the apartment sent tiny pricking pains on my skin as I wait for a cab to take me to the office. I waited - 10, 15, 20 minutes passed but no cab. Waiting was futile and the sun was an unnecessary punishment. Sweat trickled down the small of my back. Today the sun was unwelcome and I looked at the sky, in hope of clouds to shade the needled heat, but there was none. The sky was clear, a steady expanse of gradient blue. No use, I said. And I started the long walk to the highway where jeepneys pass by.

Finally the office. I was sweaty all over now that my balls were profusely drenching my underwear with sweat. It’s the last day of the work week and as most last days, people were already slacking off taking extended lunches, long cigarette breaks and dozing off on their chairs. Not me. FLAG was rushing a conference and emails were flying through inboxes with requests of teasers, pamphlets, tarpaulins and back drops and sign-off on the “image” of the conference that will consistently appear on all marketing peripherals. Self-inputs for performance evaluations were also due and I was drafting mine as well as reviewing my co-workers’. Testing for connectivity to a new server was also underway. Configuration changes to software were necessary before testing commences. Weekly status report to the client was also due - contents of which were to be discussed in a meeting tonight. Software modification proposal were also to be discussed in another meeting and I’d have to read through code in advance to prepare for it.

I wished there was five of me to go around. An Eon for FLAG, a Team Lead Eon, a Client Coordinator Eon, a Software Engineer Eon and an Eon that stays at home with boyfriend. But it cannot be so. So here I was using two computers, all tasks opened and distributed between the two to better juggle them. The telephone also rang once in a while and window upon window of instant messages popped up demanding an answer. When you see me, don’t blame me for a short attention span. My work did that to me, all concentration blurred like the remnants of a sepia photograph.

The desire to get away was so palpable that I could almost taste the remnants of squids and mussels in my mouth. I smelled salt water for a second, a scent of what is to come. The sea is calling me; its voice reverberates inside the hollows of my heart. The steady rocking of the tides buoyed my mind towards a shore of ideas where sky, sun, sand and sea are steady fixtures of a solitary vision - there won’t be any buildings, IBM computers, proximity passes, black mugs half-empty with stale vendo coffee and instant messages that kick me out of my work reverie. When all meetings were done, it was time to go home, freshen up and wait for 2:30am to leave for buendia, the dark, damp, smelly place where the bus to Batangas pier await its passengers.

SATURDAY, or Throw Caution to the Wind

The smell of oysters wafted through the air. Little whirlpools swirled beside the motorboat as two men, their sun burnt skin the color of tamarind, pulled the cock-thick blue rope the anchor is tied to, making circles on the floor out of the rope as they pulled. The halogen lights that lined the pier winked as we made distance. Soon only the sea will exist and nothing else. The sky is lavender blue, with gray and ecru clouds hanging low. The sea is indigo, with bursts of whites as the motorboat parted its path. On my right the sun is about to declare itself on the horizon, with hues of oranges, yellows and red giving the sea an effervescent glow.

Passengers were either half-asleep or involved in pursuits of killing time. Couples leaned on each other as they slept. Others were listening to music players. Others still were talking about this or that. Jerron basked in the feeling of riding a motorboat for the first time. His mind was lost within the sights, sounds and smells of the sea. For us seasoned travelers, the soft rocking of the boat is but a natural thing, almost neglecting it. But Jerron’s experience was magnified. He was storing the emotions in his mind, a story within a story when he goes back to Baguio. Dave is playing with my PSP. His thoughts were lost too. His mind was preoccupied with the key combination to beat Naruto. He was oblivious to the goings-on of the boat. Why shouldn’t he?, when this boat ride was just a prelude, the soft opening to a three-day two-night vacation that aimed for him to forget, to get away from the drudgeries of early adult life - work, bills and coupling issues. These are mere figments in his mind right now; it will come back later, just as soon as he breathed the polluted Manila air.

The sea seemed to be embraced by mountains from afar. The hint of cleavage I saw at the distance. From the passengers I saw a flurry of caps. The shy orange glow of life vests lined overhead. The soft rocking of the tides, the splashing of sea water on the boat and the heart murmur of the motor lulled Jerron to sleep. He was now off to another place - dreaming of pools and families, of staying and letting go.

The sky was cumulus, nimbus, stratus and their combinations. There was no hint of rain. But as we reached Puerto Galera, the rain welcomed us - slow, tiny drops, like tears waiting to burst. The torrent soon came as we looked for a place to stay. We were tired, sleepless, hungry and soaked with rain. Tempers flared but died down as soon as we found a place. The rain stopped and we were able to eat breakfast. After that I slept.

When I woke up, the sun was at its full temper. The sea is a long vertical line of blue, where the darkest hue was the farthest and the lightest was nearest to the shore. It teemed with activity. Motorboats arrived and left, bringing and taking passengers with them. People were sunning themselves, playing volleyball, building sandcastles, walking on the beach, listening to music and sleeping on the sand. The island stretched like arms toward the sea, its shoulders the top of mountains, its chest the sands that turn almost golden with the sun. It is an idle maiden staring upwards to expanses of blues and wisps of whites. Today, tonight and tomorrow, I am nursed by this maiden, and all thoughts of keyboards, print outs, conference rooms, extension numbers and fast lunches are drowned by the tides.

SUNDAY, or I Could Get Used to This

Food was still the last thing on my mind. After a lunch of chicken barbeque, grilled squid and tilapia downed with ice-cold C2 Green and generous helpings of rice, I was sprawled, spread-eagled on the shore sunning myself. By now, I’ve got a golden tan, only that which was covered by my kiddy speedo was remnant of my true skin tone. The sun smiled friendlier now. Dusk was just around the corner. Locals passed by me offering massages, banana boat rides, trips to Tamaraw falls and snorkeling. I wasn’t minding them as I was lost in the beats of Beyonce, Britney, Madonna, Kylie and The Pussycat Dolls. That’s when I saw her - a small, forty-ish woman with skin the color of ripe coconut. She was wearing white, on her back, the word MASSAGE was written in red. I called her. I felt a familiarity, like I know her from before, and her eyes, small pools of water that mirrored the sea, were the ones that called me to her.

As she was setting up her mat, I asked her if she was originally from here. She said no. She was originally from the Cordilleras, and her marriage to a local brought her to this island. She has three children, two boys - one who drives a motorboat for inter-island travel and another who collects empty bottles and cans to sell to a junk shop - and one girl - a local guide helping tourists get rooms. Her husband drives for a ferry while she walks all day on the beach, giving massages. Unlike other masseuse, she doesn’t go around asking tourists if they want a massage. But they always come to her. It was those most weary who seek her out.

While she kneaded every muscle, she tells me her story. And I listen. When her hands were trying to untie the knots on my back, she told me that I can’t seem to relax. Laugh, she said. I asked her what she meant. She said, laugh. And I did, it started like little sparks of water, then a torrent, finally I was laughing so hard I was crying. And she was still there, slowing easing the knots on my back. Now you are relaxed, she told me.

While she massaged me, a woman came up to her and asked her that she be next. You’re really good with your hands, the woman said, I saw how you massaged him. Sure, that was all she said and she went back to massaging my thighs. When she finished, I gave her a generous tip. The sun was already taking its bow for the day, its orange flaming orb reminding me of my grandmother and her story of long ago when kapres fell in love with native girls, the tikbalang taking kids away and the mananaggal eating the fetus of pregnant women. On a dirt road near their house, there was a rolling ball of fire that chased travelers away. This flaming orb turns into a golden ball if caught with a black cloth used as a net. But no one was able to catch it. I wanted to throw a black cloth towards the horizon to catch my own sphere of gold to chunk pieces out of. I could only contend myself with seeing the sun, disappear from my line of sight.

Now it was dark and the sea was a big cup of chocolate and the boats are marshmallows floating freely on its surface , buoyed by the silent zephyr that whispered remembered secrets to the ears of mountains.

MONDAY, or Too Soon to End

Woke up.

Packed our bags.

Ate lunch.

Sunned ourselves.

Took lots of pictures.

Had a beer.

Went home.

Love in Existentialist Terms

It is death first that we encounter - death that we are no one and we are nothing if we do not define who we are and if we do not create meaning for our existence. Death then is a welcome event, a starting point where we can freely accept our own unique self and choose our own meaning for our lives based not on a norm but from our own judgment.

From death we historize our being. We look at the limitless possibilities of who we will become in the future based on the confluence of facts, events, feelings and states of mind we have from our past so that we can freely decide what needs to be done presently to get from our past self to our future self. We take a third-person view at ourselves, alienating us from our being, to consider who we are, objective of knowing that it is ourselves we ask this question to.

Death is our ticket, a passport if you will, and alienation is our plane ride, for us to will ourselves to achieve a state of happiness - happiness that emanates from within; happiness that comes from knowing who we are and loving everything about ourselves. We subject ourselves to existential questions like “who am I?” and “what makes me, me?”. Our discovery would then lead us to the question “do I love myself?” Only when we love ourselves can we then share that love with others and we cannot fully love another person if we do not know the self that loves this person. So we must love ourselves first because this is the self that the beloved loves.

It is then us, the ’subject’ of our inquiry to our being that encounters the beloved. It is us, an us that we have determined our meaning to that sees and feels a special connection with the beloved. This connection I believe is the desire to become part of the person’s life, to discover his past and to discover his being, for it is his being, and not just his qualities that make us feel that connection. Of course at first we would think that it is his qualities - tall, lean, mestizo, with an honest smile and contagious laugh, witty and flirtatious - that has captured our attention. But we will soon come to realize that we will meet other people with the same qualities and yet the connection isn’t there and so we conclude that it must have been because it was him with those qualities that we feel a connection with.

How can we tell him then that this connection exists between us? If he feels the same connection then we don’t really need to tell him. Our response would not be a show of our own qualities, qualities that we might think are the ones he would like, but a show of who we really are as a person, strengths and shortcomings all, so that he will come to love the us that we love ourselves. I believe we can only truly do this if we are happy with ourselves, meaning, we do not need him in order to be happy. What we need is a beloved to share our happiness with and it is him that our hearts have chosen. If our happiness we rely on other people, then our beloved will only be an emergency exit to escape our loneliness from. We will suck him dry of his happiness. We will merely use him as a dumping site for our insecurities.

When we have become with our beloved, we are filled with hope that it will work out between the two of us because we are committed to take responsibility for the relationship and we are willing to face the risks. Our self-centeredness ends because we start focusing on our beloved. But this loving does not stop us from forgetting about ourselves because with loving, we discover ourselves more with our beloved’s view of us. As we come to know ourselves more, we will also come to know our beloved more. Loving him means accepting his whole being, his past, his present and his future. As when we first discovered who we are, we would also historize our beloved. We will learn about his failed relationships in the past and how it makes him who he is today. We will learn about his childhood memories and how it affects how he deals with other people. We will learn that he loves chicken noodle soup because it was what his mother fed him whenever he was sick. We will learn that he doesn’t like the color green because his yaya used to force-feed him with ampalaya. Loving his whole being also means accepting what he has yet to become and having the patience to wait for him to achieve his potential. This patience comes from our hearts. It is something that we do not need to will to happen.

With each new discovery about our beloved, we will come to love him more because we are knowing his whole being. Really knowing him is a discovery of specific details, details that make him more real to us. That is why love is concrete. We cannot just take the bits and pieces of our beloved that doesn’t make us sick to our stomachs. It is this acceptance of even his shortcomings that makes loving him more difficult as opposed to loving the idea of him. Loving something abstract is easier because we can overlook the details and romanticize the idea. This is not the case of loving truly. An abstract idea of the beloved is empty because it is not this that we share memories with. We share memories with a real person, someone flawed, someone who has really bad breath in the morning, someone who doesn’t put up the toilet seat when urinating, someone who squeezes the toothpaste in the middle, someone who gets angry with the littlest provocation, someone whose temper flares up even without reason, someone flawed, someone real.

And this is why love is a form of suffering. We fall in love with our beloved due to the connection that we felt with him. But to grow in love is to suffer, to fear that we might have made the wrong decision in loving our beloved. As opposed to falling in love that happens only in the first encounter, growing in love is a commitment made day after day after day, a commitment we make every time we experience an event that triggers our fear whether or not we are still doing the right thing of staying with our beloved. It is also a fear that since love is a free decision, our beloved might decide someday that he no longer wants to be with us. The risk of loving is rejection. If our beloved no longer loves us and we keep insisting to love him still, then our love is truly authentic. But we must respect his decision to not love us anymore and we must take this as a chance for us to examine our own lives and further discover and develop ourselves so that when we encounter a new love, we are ready for it, lessons and bruises all.

Weekend Getaway

I spent time with Dave today, my current IT friend. We were at MOA all afternoon until late evening. We talked a lot – relationships, family, career, plans for the future – basically everything there is about Life, and yeah that’s with the capital L.

I’m in a deep funk currently, and my Sunday was supposed to just be spent at home, brooding over the state of my love, work and family life. Dave invited me to MOA instead to hang out. He invited other friends too but none confirmed except me, so it was just the two of us.

First order of business was to go to Majestic Ham to appease my growling stomach. I love their ham. It was Glenn who first introduced me to this brand of ham and I love it. I bought two ham sandwiches and Dave and I bought drinks from Quickly. With our drinks and my sandwich in hand, we went to the food court and ate. Boy watching galore. There were three boys good enough to eat. Too bad they’re with their parents, so all I could do was feast my eyes on them.

Yosi is next on the agenda. We sat at Starbucks and Dave read a book while I logged on the internet to chat with boyfriend. I was going to help him out in his philosophy finals but he wasn’t prepared with his answers so I got mad at him and told him to talk to me only when he’s done his work. We discussed how failing and being a failure are two different things. That failing doesn’t necessarily make a person a failure and giving up also doesn’t make a person a failure. What makes a person a failure is not being good at anything at all or giving up without trying. I think boyfriend understood it because I had some very vivid examples to drive my point across.

When that’s done, I decided that since we’re in a mall, I’d finally buy the eco-friendly bags from Bench (gold) and Human (silver). I learned from the salesperson at Bench that Kashieca has one in pink so I bought that too (sorry no photo of the pink one. I got the Bench and Human from Cecile Zamora’s blog, hope she doesn’t mind).

Then eating time. We ate at Pizza Pasta Aveneto (hope I got this spelling right). We ordered oil and garlic pasta with shrimps. Sarap! Good with Buffalo Wings and Coke. We both had large helpings of the food and we ate while fantasizing about the cute waiters (Hi waiters Josh and Jeremy).

Finally, off to finish the night with a few drinks. We chose Marina, a restaurant/bar overlooking Manila Bay. There, while downing bottles of San Mig Light and me eating fresh oysters, I finally got to talk to him about what’s bothering me. Boyfriend, if you’re reading this, sorry if I didn’t tell you about it. It’s just that I had to think it through first. Dave was there as a sounding board so I can run through my thoughts with him. We talked about relationships in general, and about only grown-ups being able to make them work. I asked myself then, am I a grown-up, to which I think I am not. I also thought about being only in a relationship when I reach a point in my life where I think I am happy even without one. These plus stories about our lives, our exes, the many men we’ve hurt, the many men who have hurt us, about our different failings at relationships and about how we want to both make it work this time around.

Right now, I’ve come to consider Dave as one of my best buds. Boyfriend doesn’t know him yet but I hope they’ll get along fine once I introduce them to each other. I’ve been helping Dave get over a bad break up, encouraging him, keeping his spirits up, even helping him find the perfect mate. In return, he keeps me company, we talk a lot about grown up stuff and it helps that he’s in I.T. as well. I’m a bit worried that boyfriend might get jealous with the closeness but I’m hoping that he be mature enough to see that Dave is just a friend, not more than a friend, and will never be more than a friend. I know this for a fact because Dave and I alked about it. How, if I’m only single and we’d date, it wouldn’t work out because we are so alike in a lot of ways. And we both knew that we don’t really like dating ourselves. Hahaha. So we’re perfect as friends because we’re so much alike, but we’d be really lousy as lovers.

After the drinks have been drowned and the oysters have been scraped off their shells, it was also time to go. With how deep our subject was earlier, man, I’m all talked about Life with the big L. Learned a lot, and will talk it through with boyfriend once he comes down from Baguio for the sem break.

All in all, a very productive weekend.