I never write. And moments always pass me by. If I will look back at them a thousand more moments later, I will have no recollections but only fragments of scattered memories. My head will want from then to keep all the memories in the refuge of my letters, and yet my words will grace it with none. Everything will be lost in a silent shuffle on my atrophied hands.
Last night I slept after eating out with my siblings, hearing the faint drip-drip of raindrops on the rooftop. This morning I was woken up by voices hollering from inside our living room. My youngest brother and my eldest sister were fighting.
It wasn’t actually much to think of because the truth is, I’ve already had arguments with each one of my siblings and that thing this morning was nothing but normal and expected of siblings. Siblings fight normally because of petty reasons - in our case, reasons like who should use the computer first or who should hold the remote.
At the end of the day, what remain of the misunderstanding are the feelings of guilt remain and (hopefully not this one) the bruises and scars. They remind us of how childish we are. They give us the understanding that after all we’re siblings, and that we should be loving each other.
Out of boredom I decided to peruse my old works (last day’s posts already weren’t new, right?). And as though someone who was a cross between a grammarian and a plant biologist, I came to find my words were more flowery like the angiosperm sampaguita on my aunt’s front yard than they normally had to be.
But of course I knew I really WAS boring and that, I just had to admit. If I continued being that and my words were to tell of my life ten years from now and life was a job application to a publishing house, in five years’ time I will already have maintained a dozen boxful of papers with either REJECTED or TOO BORING written on them.
Still, at least I knew I was right to have admitted I hadn’t expressed myself well enough. (And I know well enough that I will have to commit the same mistake for having left with no choice but not to vote for tomorrow’s election.)
Ms Marilou Abon was dead. I wish to be wrong, but there’s no way I’ve misread Lev’s post on Facebook. The name had faintly rung a bell, and had Lev not indicated Ms. Abon was the director of NVSU, I would just totally have ignored the post.
Weird enough it wasn’t mourning that struck me, not even a hint of sadness. In some way the name caused to shuffle the world around me, transporting me back to the days where Nikko and I (and some other people) used to play jokes on how literally gay she looked.
But beside that, the school itself was basically the main object of our derision. What school, we always asked each other, has ROTC for what seemed like a 12-unit subject? And what school exactly requires students to go to class in their sneakers? And what school hires a sadistic PE teacher who talks louder than he is tall?
These are just a few of the painful truths of life there (at least it’s already considered life to them), and it would be like swallowing a vial of acid if I continue my list. Which is why it was one of those days that I detested having any particular connection to NVSU because to start with it was already torture I share the same birthday with the school.
I was insane, I know. I was mean, yes. But I wish I was not.
Today I would have been late for class had I not been woken up by Josh. But that would’ve not mattered given it was me if I didn’t wake up finding myself reeking of Skittles. In fact my book Don’t Call Me Ishmael had one crushed framboise candy sticking onto its back cover. Funny even, my palm had daubs of colors that were definitely characteristic of the out-from-the-wrap bite-size candies I clutched in my hand before I slept.
Merge. I was on my first year when I first learned the word. To tell the truth my vocabulary back then was just a sipful if you say Shakespeare’s was two brimming buckets.
For almost seven years now I have almost connoted merging with nothing less than its technical use on Microsoft Excel. But of course some people give some words their own meaning.
And for the same space of seven years I seldom use the word “merge” and its variants. Which is perhaps why I had no proper reaction yesterday when PBB announced they will be “merging” the two houses. But maybe there was because I’ve always thought the word in itself is useless and cheap, not to mention that just yesterday I realised I’ve almost forgotten even that it does exist in the dictionary.
But whatever “merge” means to me or to anybody, in the end, in the context it will always mean jampacking the housemates under one roof.
On the other hand, if in separate houses where there were only a few housemates some already have showed feelings of infatuation to each other and revulsion to the other house, what more could brew with the impending merging?
I’m not going to make this long: Yesterday’s episode of The Teen Clash was in part crappy because of Vice Ganda. That is not to say Vice Ganda IS crappy.
But that Vice Ganda said that someone as pretty as Ivan should have “more confidence, more angst,” to quote him, was something I just could not overlook. A considerable large portion of the population (at least here in the Philippines) mistake the word “angst” with “cockiness”, and I think that isn’t just some minor statistics. It may not generally be a big deal to everyone else, but how could it not be to someone who knows everybody he knows believes in something that is outright wrong?
Last night got into me and I realised it’s worth a blog this time. It was a hilarious idea that being UP students like him, Maj, Josh, and I had always wanted Angelo (which we pronounce as Anjelo and not Anghelo like the hosts do on TV) to be evicted.
The loathing had started just because we think he always bossed around, talked like he has not gotten proper education - and yeah, was stiff when he danced. Last night if it wasn’t guilt it was shame I felt because it dawned on me we had the lamest reason. Somehow when Mariel roll-called the parents of the nominees for eviction, a wave of guilt gushed through me and like a flash Twitter Echofon update that pops out on the right bottom corner of the browser, I suddenly realised Angelo had to stay, knowing his mother could not come and welcome him out just in case he got evicted just because she couldn’t afford to lose a night laboring for another family. I could have lost my face from being so inconsiderate and petty.
I don’t speak for Maj and Josh for saying this, but I think it was quite a decision that Pots had to leave and Angelo stay, although it wasn’t also saying that I like Angelo more than Pots. In fact I’ve always liked how Pots always put on a smile and found how it feels like to have a family because I don’t think he gets as much attention and love inside as he receives from his kin.
So there I was somehow glad that Angelo was safe last night. Considering that Pots had learned a lot (sorry for the ambiguity) and has all the money in the world compared to Angelo, I guess it WAS obvious Angelo has much heftier, loftier reason to stay than Pots.
I think I’m slowly becoming a bard. Like an agitated speed radar, I detected my bardness level had gone up from one to six, which (do I still have to say this?) was too high and ironic a leap. I used “ironic” because honestly I don’t approve of poetry in the first place.
It never crossed my mind becoming a bard, not even writing a few mediocre lines of poetry. I always thought that poetry is for high school students who write love messages on a piece of cheap, scented paper they slip on their crush’s bag when no one’s looking.
When you are someone who loathes poetry, you find it interesting to utter things like this under one busy night sky of April:
Life is boring,
Life is boring a hole in my heart;
A hole that can only be filled up with internet dreams.
I was surprised (but more of the “flustered” kind of surprised) that those words actually came out out of boredom. I admit that it may not be something worthy of journal space, but at least that was greatly felt, and that was greatly felt from my being continuously bored out. So it led me to think that boredom may after all be a hormone for bard attack (at least that’s what I call it when boredom has us churn out the corniest lines to ever reverberate on the surface of Earth), which further had me thinking that maybe Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t actually in love when he wrote his Annabel Lee, but bored - connecting his love to the girl like envious seraphs, sea palaces and demons - continuously bored as much as I feel.
I’d rather be home alone than homeless. Well, of course I am never home alone since there is Josh and I share with him our only copy of the pair of keys to the apartment, one each for the two door handles. That’s why when I unknowingly dropped the keys yesterday inside the jeep before I climbed out (I was planning to use “jeepney” but the Tumblr spellchecker underlines the word red, which I guess is a rather inappropriate gesture coming from a website that has a name that isn’t a word in the first place)…
So I was saying that when I dropped the keys, the two of us was left disgruntled to think we were left with no option but to spend the night out - to speak in euphemisms and concealed image of staying out late in a 24-hour convenience store - somewhere less of a house. We were nearly persuaded to think our case was hopeless: having to spend a night somewhere that feels less like home, thinking we had had an assignment to submit the next day, was unimaginable.
We have a new copy of the keys now. It will be as long as the Odyssey if I narrate how we finally get to have the keys duplicated and experience how it feels like to be home again, but that’s not just the point. What matters is we have the keys now. And we just can’t afford to trade another good night’s sleep with losing them again.
