Goodbye Teenage Years 24 June 2008
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There is a sour feeling in my guts, and it eats me upwards until my throat feels raw with need and unvoiced desires.
Love is as old as Father Death and as young as the cherubs that dance on the East Gate of Eden. It is as enduring as time and as fickle as nature, and everything in between that defines what is life is nothing but a shadow of the steps of love in pursuit of its own end, with the power to inspire and in the same measure to destroy; surpassed only by death in giving meaning to our lives.
If I am not a writer, then tell me what I am. I am grateful for having the soul of an artist and the head of a gifted child. If I can craft sentences like this in a minute of inspiration, then I have done well and I am pleased, and I thank God.
I am happy with who I am. From now on, I resolve to stop trying to become average, to become a commoner; I will stand out. Trying so hard to fit in, when I was born to stand out, was the folly of my teenage life.
Now, I am born again. Old habits die hard, but habits are nothing but our creations, and what man has created, man can just as easily destroy.
Flood Gate 10 June 2008
Posted by meroe in life, personal.Tags: life
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Look at me brimming with all the unanswered questions, like a plugged sink, or an Olympic-sized pool left to the elements for two seasons. I read the papers and again I am angry – not quite – but then not satisfied. Still, I think, I am angry at the way my elders had mismanaged my country. I scoff at their follies and their herd mentality, their faulty way of thinking, their resistance to change that truly separates those who are young from those who are not. Yet, standing at the precipice of these emotions I refuse to feel again (refuse to acknowledge) there is a void before me and my impotency rings clear, like a church bell in a clear day, it reminds me that I am nothing but a small speck in the world.
Being Human 31 January 2008
Posted by meroe in philippine society, thoughts on national issues.Tags: filipino society, market and society
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Exploit the exploitable. Was it just me, or do you find the statement offensive? No, this is not the free market vs. socialism debate. But sometimes, it is disconcerting to see the difference between their values. It reflects how far we are from reconciling the hurt and divisiveness, the accusations and the pain; a betrayal in a society of free Filipinos, rich and the poor.
A professor of my friend said that, exploit the exploitable, and I cannot help but think: is that the reason why there is such a big disparity in the values cherished by the business sector and the government?
Surely, the government is not a saint. It has its more than scandalous share of the worst personas of our society. Everyone knows that it is riddled with the big G&C. But it is only the government that must protect the interests of the poor, the marginalized, the exploitable. It is only the government that has the capacity to ensure the protection of those who, out of circumstance or of being out of luck, have no means of ensuring their survival in a mechanism of dog-eat-dog. Those in the condition of absolute poverty, they are the people who do not own any factor of production, no land, capital, skills or technology, no wage that could be had for their labor. If being marginalized is a matter of being the minority, then they are not marginalized. They exist alongside our wealth and progress. And their sight pain the heart as it does pain the eyes.
Who is to voice the concerns of these people and protect their rights? For they, too, no matter how poor, are citizens of this state. It is the government who is mandated to ensure that they, too, are cared for in accordance to the wishes of the society.
It is undesirable, but it is necessary. It is being human when we cannot fully enjoy our wealth if we cannot be assured, to placate the conscience, that someone is out there doing its job for the unfortunate.
Maybe it is just me. But how can you ensure fairness, and justice, and other noble things in the name of public interest and social values, if you have the people who wield disproportionate amount of power, in part because of their economic might, practicing the doctrine of exploiting the exploitable? All for the name of profit maximization? Maybe there is a difference between preaching and practice, and no one pays attention. Maybe I am over-sensitive, or maybe they lack ethical consideration. Making profit is all right. Ensuring that the market mechanism is as efficient as it can be is even socially desirable. But if profit maximization can only be achieved via exploiting the exploitable, then maybe, we are very far from achieving our goals when we had our first and only exercise of direct democracy more than twenty years ago. The wounds of EDSA cannot be healed, just as the scars of a colonial past cannot be removed. There is no reconciliation, if those that operate, or influence to a substantial degree, the market mechanism define profit maximization as an end. If the end, and all of being human, is upholding profit maximization, then maybe, the business students need more courses to underscore the primacy of social values and objectives.
No Strings Attached 9 November 2007
Posted by meroe in life, personal.1 comment so far
The title comes from an artwork of a friend, or a used-to-be-friend, depending on where you look. I cannot help but exclaim, in the frenzied silence of a library research room, and a girl or two looks at me. I could care less; reality is so loosely bound that I sometimes forget the endearing quality of time and space.
Despite myself I wonder, and a small lump forms in my throat (why do feelings always have to be physical, is it not enough that it confuses our silent dreams?), as I look, marvel and envy (all packaged into one) at the smoothness of his still shots, at his ability to capture the soul of a broken violin, to retell the life of a battered basketball. Maybe it all depends on who is looking, and maybe it doesn`t help that I feel for him, despite myself, despite all these years, that little string of connection to a time when we both were young, and that exquisite memory of a discovery that we both could draw; and the image of the 2nd grade poster making contest keeps dissolving in my mind.
There was a time when we both could draw, and I know that deep down I am scared of many things; I am scared of losing my art, my only identity I have kept all these turbulent years of adolescence. Art is my only heaven; the scenes that I recreate with nothing but my pen and my mind; the ability to give birth to a universe that only I can see, have given me comfort and an outlet of expression that politics, debate, family or academic honors will never give.
I am scared of many things, among them facing him and admitting that I have fallen so far behind.
So I sit before the computer and admire him, and feel happy for him, that he have the talent to capture the single moment when an object`s soul is expressed; that single moment for which photography exists to convey the history of things. (And I know, deep down, the moment I saw his new shots, that he will make photography his living; I read that story somewhere before. ) But he is so good and I tremble with excitement at what he will become, for ever since I was young I remembered envying him and rooting for him (all in one package), and then I was older and I know that he was one of the few people I truly loved, because I dreamt for him when he does not want to, but I am not so cruel as to impose my dream.
He was the same package all through out. The friend who was introduced to me by my mother, on the first grade, on the first day of school. The fat childhood friend whose connection with me is a string of memories that begins with a banana cue and a little piece of art.
No, he is not my personal star (though he does come close to, but never mind). Like his broken violin, so obviously new, (hah, he is not a perfect artist, afterall) between him and me, there are no strings, only permanently wispy smokes attached. [But I care for him and would (snobbishly) believe myself to be among the few people who understands what he has been through, how far he has gone ahead, because I saw his potential back when we were young and drawing doodles on our hands. ] I saw what he could be (though I would not so confidently say that I saw him for what he is). That is my blessing and my curse; I can love the image of the ideal.
I look at my sketchbook, my sketches, their beauty (I am not a bad artist) and take in their lack of color, the lack of an experiment with another substance or style. But I trace the development of my style and the widening of my vision in my mind, and I conclude that I am not half-bad, that I am truly an artist because I can create something out of nothing, as I have created an entire universe of half-living adults in my mind.
The white stillness captures my attention, beconks me to wonder, and I wonder, wonder, when I will ever escape the stage of the not-quite-perfect, not-quite-still art.
Promise Yourself 21 October 2007
Posted by meroe in life, Randomality.Tags: mantra, optimism
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Note: The better part of this post is copied from a mantra by Christian D. Larson, as published by Papemelroti. It makes good reminder though, that is why I want to share it.
**
Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. To talk health, peace, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet. To make your friends feel that there is something special in them. To love, sing, and talk like there is no ridicule or pain. To search for the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true. To listen to the other side before making any judgment. To think of only the best, work for only the best, and expect only the best. To be just as enthusiastic and as appreciative of the successes and stories of others as you are about your own. To forget the mistakes of the past and devote your energies for the great things of the future. To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a nice, warm smile. To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others. To not be an emotional vampire because happiness is such a precious thing. To be too large for fear and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
And to be so happy that you will never forget there is a God. And eventually, everything will be fine.
Tokyo Going In And Out 15 October 2007
Posted by meroe in flip flop journeys, life.Tags: dreams, foreign life, future plans, Tokyo
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It has been fifteen days – half a month, see – and I don’t feel as if I’d made progress at all. I have to sit up most nights to get a hang of the language. I was kind of expecting that two weeks would give me the conversational skills that I need. Blame it on the slow pace of the classes or whatever.
It was to no avail.
I have settled in Tokyo. The cold had been absorbed by my system, like snowflakes melting when it kisses human skin. I no longer wake up feeling surreal, as I had, vividly etched in my memory; the feeling of unreal for the first three days, waking up shivering, curled up to a ball, seeing the clean emptiness of the condominium-like room assigned to me, which is by far the best room I ever had in my whole life, with everything and something that I never thought I would need.
(On a second thought, I did need them.)
The meek gray sky invites me to take a walk, and the manicured sidewalks littered with nothing but dying leaves greets me. I had my cellphone on just the second or third day, and life in Tokyo is fast paced, defined by high technology and convenience all through out.
Everything had fallen into place so much so that I find myself standing before the door of some friend, ringing her, then wondering why I am in Tokyo in the first place, with the least of worries except that which is universal: money. (But my room is warm and it is my safe haven, as any of my rooms had always been, an my doubts would go away.) Was I here just to study Japanese language? To be able to talk with people and live in a country in one year of deserved vacation, far from anything and everything that had always been my life?
(I wonder what I am missing back home; some party or a birthday, a gimmick, tender jokes? I decide it doesn’t matter anyway.) I am here and will be here for the better part of a year (though a secret part of me wishes it would never end; that moment when I stand in the treshold of a dream, and I know, feel, believe that it should never come to pass; the opportunities for seeing what I have never seen, being someone I have never been, tasting a life that I never had, dance on my fingertips, and I feel so excited that I think I could live for three days without sleep trekking or walking or being one with everything.
(But then I do come out and take a walk, and the people are friendly with their foreign language and their foreign signs, and I feel a little bit intimidated, a little bit scared, a little bit uncomfortable at my shortcoming and inability to speak.)
I hate being humbled, the humbling should come from me, for as I have confirmed, with various reactions ranging from tolerant to incredulous, I am really young, and I am oftentimes way smarter; I had always been in class. (Though when I leave the classroom I sometimes forget it myself, and I am young once again, uneasy an impatient at my inability to own the world.)
I do not like being humbled; I do not like not being on top. (Perhaps) being smart or intelligent had been with me for so long that it shines through me and identifies me more than my name. (But I’m kind of split on that, because, really, I am two person, and though I am young, I have lived long enough to must have found a way to integrate myself, and that I haven’t, sometimes frustrates me.)
[No, I do not want the world, to be sure, because the world is both beautiful and painful, the wound cutting just deep enough to let a shimmer of blood on a white rose skin. I do not want the world, but I want to change it, and have my share of it, the way I want it to be. I was brought up a consumer; the world was for me to take. (I have to earn the money though.)]
I am proud of being able to let go of priorities, because priorities are tricky; they may not always be yours. They should not define your life all the time. But I am also a bit of a planner and so there is always a reason for everything, even for casual abandonment. [I wonder what my reason for signing my name, all those months ago, is; education (could not be, for I'm having my fill of that in UP), job, work, the pursuit of a dream too personal to share?]
Then again, I am in Tokyo. I have left home and settled in a wonderland where I understand little (as of yet) but want to take much.
I suppose I have time to learn.
The House That Greets Me 30 September 2007
Posted by meroe in life, personal.Tags: leaving home
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What’s in a memory? A few loose cards that were never sent, some attachment to words never said, the poignancy and emptiness of emotions never shared.
I was a little bit frightened at how easy everything melded out. I remember being apprehensive of finally going home, of bringing all the things I have gathered in my three years of college in a faraway city. I thought as I have always thought: there is no going back home. Even though I was scared to admit it myself, I knew, deep down, the first time I saw the University, the first time I tasted its life, I know that I was going to live there, that that is where I always wanted to live my life.
So still, I come to visit, but I know I will never stay again.
Home.
A little weight flutters in my stomach whenever I look at the house, all alone, thinking how easily three years could remove you from a past life, all the time knowing that it should never, ever come to pass. But the house greets me, warm and empty, and the thought of being a stranger in it, rankles me somewhat.
It happened three years ago. That was when I was in first year college, but the raw sensation of standing there, expecting the old comfort of my bed, yet finding nothing, is still fresh, the unspent bitterness burning in my throat. I have always valued my private space, have valued it since I was old enough to sleep in a separate bed, and that bed to me symbolized the core of my private world. I lived in dormitories, but I never called any of the beds my own. I knew that after me, someone else would claim it; it was never mine to begin with, it would never be the center of my private life.
But that bed in our house was mine, and the first time I came home, I dreamt of sleeping comfortably in it, flooded by the pleasant memories of past times.
When my sister removed the traces of the high school me who have lived in that house, in the same room, I felt like crying inside. The posters and the books and the cockroach infested papers, the few remaining clothes, they were all testaments to the me who lived there. When my sister stripped the walls bare, when she packed all my stuff away and dismembered my bed, I never said it, but I felt betrayed. I felt so lonely; childish, homeless. I never did, but I really wanted to cry.
I never complained about it. I reasoned that ours is really a small house, and keeping the things of someone who no longer lives there is a plain waste of space. Three years passed, and sometimes I feel a little scared of the thought that the home could go on without me; I was never the center of the world.
I no longer sleep in my bed. My uncle lives in our house in my place, and it is alright, it is a comfortable arrangement. Whenever I come home (which is very rare, for I stopped anticipating sleeping in a bed that was no longer mine) I spread a comforter on the sala, in front of the TV, and sleep there, loving the cold and the quiet. I started treating my boarding house bed like a personal possession, started to try to forget that someone else will claim it when the semester ends. Beds are only for sleeping, but whenever I clean the house and look at the sheets — my sheets — I sometimes run a hand to smooth it; I still sometimes miss my bed, the bed where I slept and dreamt in a past life.
No Tears for Erap 13 September 2007
Posted by meroe in politics.Tags: Erap, Erap conviction, erap plunder case, opinion about erap conviction, politics
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To start off, no, I am not anti-Erap per se.
One thing that saddens me is the way we sometimes reduce everything to black and white, either you are a pro or an anti, and being in the gray is hypocrisy.
At any rate, I was having trouble finding a worthy opponent to debate (and discuss) the merits of the Erap plunder case and its attendant events (and phenomena, if you please), including the historic guilty verdict.
I have listed it down to clear my mind. I shall be discussing the guilty verdict.
Cris Anthony Mendez 5 September 2007
Posted by meroe in life.Tags: Cris Anthony Mendez, fraternity violence, hazing
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It is perfectly normal to shed tears for a stranger, because circumstances make brothers of us all.
These circumstances may include death, poverty, education. The fact that the man used to walk the same streets you do. The fact that you might have sat together on the same exam. The probability that you have met him once; one nameless guy who passed your fare to the IKOT driver when you said “Paki-abot po.”
For the living life of mine, I saw him once. I saw him alive just once; taking notes and preceding over a meeting of our batch. SC representative, doing his job.
So Cris Mendez, Kuya Cris, I met him just once. But I cried because I can almost feel how they violated him, how they robbed him of his chance at life, after he had gone through so much and demonstrated so much talent, so much potential. I cried because I know it was never easy to get where he got before he died. It was never easy to be smart while being poor. It was never easy to live a life dreaming for a future, a future that was tied to your graduating, so that you might hopefully lift this family up and give them better lives, a better opportunity to take on things. It was never easy to have dreams that are not fully yours.
Ironic how we get to learn more about the person only after he dies. I read testimonials about him. Typical frat story. A simple guy. But no, not really a simple guy, because he happens to be poor and smart. A student achieve from the province, going to the city, brining with him the hopes and half-lives of a parent, a brother left behind. A burning dream of a brighter future. There are moments of indecision, but your life is not yours alone. The college of law, that grand old profession that was the gate to social climb. And if you’ve got the brain, why not go for it? Enter the fraternity, and the need for money. And then an accident. An accident, but a senseless death occurs, nonetheless.
I cried perhaps because I knew that it was never easy, what he had been through. And that it will never be easy for those he left behind.
4 September 2007
Posted by meroe in personal.add a comment
Do not sacrifice what is important for what is immediate. Or so they said. Or so he said, the pastor in and orange shirt. Just yesterday our professor asked us what we really wanted, and told us that maybe we should reflect. Because if what we want is wealth, we are in the wrong discipline. I thought to myself, yes I want wealth. But I am too young to have my wings clipped yet, so I won’t give that up, because I discovered some time ago that wealth is a fuel that drives ambition.
I read that once upon a time, I wanted to serve. And that was why I was in Public Administration, even though, on hindsight, I could have just as easily served if I was a doctor in Intarmed or something. But it is too late to live a life of regret, I have lived long enough to pride myself that I did not thrive on lost chances. So I thought, maybe I wanted to develop my story. A writer, an artist, illustrator, game developer. It doesn’t really matter. I have reached a point of obsession that I could no longer live without having accomplished that goal.
And lastly, I thought about my family. How after all these, I will undoubtedly return to them, with all the things they have dreamed of and sacrificed just to let me stand where I stand right now.
I wonder vaguely what I really want in this life, but decided that for now, a half-lie is more convenient than doubt, more useful that love, and more lasting than truth.
