Write instead.

I am an overthinker. Reading back on my drafts from 5 years ago,  my overthinking has always brought me to my current state, that melancholic slightly anhedonic, mildly frustrated feeling. In my teens this had fueled much of my really beautiful poems though the frustration was less about my life in general than about me finding the right words to convey what I want in the poem. I guess writing my thoughts was the best sublimation for me.

It is always a struggle to find the right person to talk about these. I think most overthinkers are pessimistic in a way and not everyone you come across know how to handle talking to someone like that. Most people cut me off before I can arrive at my own aha moment. So, I end up letting my thoughts perculate instead because I cannot find a suitable person to help me work things out.

And so,  here I am writing again. Here, because I can write it out pretty quickly and whenever I feel that sudden surge signalling me that I am overthinking. I am pretty confident that not a lot of people would read this,  just those that matter. But in case another overthinker like me crosses by this, I hope this helps... and write instead. 

Love found, lost, regained, and left behind

It sounds awfully cheesy, like anything and almost everything related to the topic, but love is the best feeling in the world. It's just a little hard to come by.

It always seemed so easy in the movies, where girl meets boy, boy asks girl out, they talk for a day or a week or so, and somehow, somewhere in the middle, they realize, they're in love. But what we fail to understand or to even see is that movies, dramas, love scenes (the clean and decent romantic ones) are not the whole picture. They are but a fraction of the reality that faces each and everyone of us.

Love, like everything else in this world, relies on two things, the participants' realization and timing. You can spend years, building up for the moment when the other finally realizes that probably, love is there but the most critical thing of all is timing. Sadly, this "timing" can never be planned. I find it to be more of a feeling, provided by the world, the universe, that guides you towards something.

Some people are lucky, that they need not wait long for that push from the universe. Some do not have that sensitivity to hear it and goes on to rely on their realization, which is not all that bad, because eventually, the universe will take over. But still, some wait... and wait... and wait... and eventually, they either feel the timing coming, or they miss it without intending to. Pity, really, for that timing never comes back a second time. It may give a long window period before it leaves, but once it closes, the feeling never goes back and you lose it forever.

What Follows Next?

At the end of tragedies and storms,
a greater sadness settles
one made of destruction and rubble;
and the survivors are left to battle themselves
to battle the smallest shred of optimism
or to fight for that shred and move forward.

At the end of tragedies and storms,
there remains confusion
and insanity settles within the perturbed;

the brave harden their hearts and bury doubts
and then we ask, "what are we left with to show?"

At the end of tragedies and storms,
there is a fine line between a new start
and the abysmal end.

The Surrealism of Reality

There used to be a code of conduct for this when one will expect the significance of one day. Where there was much drama built up, so when it comes to pass, you can soak and bathe in it. But that has long been a lie, a fantasy, an attempt to make sense of the meaninglessness of the days that had previously gone, an attempt at consolation.

When it comes, the day doesn't stop, the responsibilities do not halt. There is just that fact sitting in front of you. When it comes, there is no fanfare, there is no orchestra, there is no heartbeat, and sometimes, there are no emotions. There is stupor probably, then there is amusement, there is wonder, and there is the feeling of surrealism. Then it halts and everything falls into silence, a silence that is not much different from the silence of the other days. It is an empty and lonely silence.

And there, you mull over and over. There is no drama. Just silence that is not deafening, and the overhanging responsibilities of life.

On Moving Forward – 11/15/2010

There was a man who wore everything backwards. Except for his glasses, everything else was worn backwards.

So a child came to him and told him, “Hey mister, your clothes are backwards.”

“My body seems to be on backwards I guess,” he answers. “You see it doesn’t want to look ahead.”

So the child asks again, “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t walk backwards.”

“Because my feet think we’re moving backwards.”

“Then why is your head not following your body?”

“My head seems to know that this is the front and wants to move forward.”

Then he pauses.

“Hopefully, I don’t have it backwards.”

Uncertainties (03/27/2012)

"I am lacking",
that sheer feeling of release
the moment those words escape
the lips, is also empty.

When was it? The first time
it knew no lightness, no comfort.

When was it? It sounded so crisp
so fragile that they'd break
and stop being true.

Here, it had stopped.
Without promise of meaning,
of solution, of resolution, of end.

Like it had always truly meant
to abandon it's self.

The Runaways

I did say that I was into rock bands lately and so by chance, I stumbled into this film which was showing on HBO entitled, The Runaways.

The movie chronicles the early beginnings of the band The Runaways. It was an all girl rock band around the 70's. Learn more about the band here.

The cast was quite impressive. Well, the moment I saw Dakota Fanning's name in the roster, I immediately expected a really good film. Amazingly Kristen Stewart was with her in the film, and what's even more amazing is she seemed to have some talent up her sleeves. Maybe she's just really not cut out for girly roles.

Anyway, IMDB gave it 6.6 rating. Honestly speaking, I thought the film was good. Nothing too very impressive as all biographical film, but the cinematography and flow of the whole story for me was good and captured the feel of the decade. I really am not yet aware of the jargons and elements in film so that's generally all I can say. It held my attention for the whole length of the film and not for the wrong reasons... so there... if you want a more professional comment go to IMDB.

Oldies Rock

For as long as I can remember, I have grown up with songs from these old rock and roll music themes... During my childhood, Rock and Roll was not as loud as how they play Rock and Roll now. There were more ballads,really good guitar solos, and all the good stuffs during those times. Plus screamers and howlers were not that many. Generally, the songs then for me where more rich in harmony and sounds.

But then again, I might be wrong. You know how sometimes all your memories are just tinted with your own little biases? So, I decided to download some of those decade's well renowned bands and compare them with the newer ones... I started with Aerosmith,

then Rolling Stones,

then U2,

then I'll go on with Beatles,

Bon Jovi, and Queen... after that, I'll probably download Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sugar Ray, 3 Doors Down, The Verve, Vertical Horizon, Semisonic, Deep Blue Something... Nirvana, Incubus, the Killers, 30 Seconds to Mars (which I already have), Maroon 5 (which I think I'm still lacking some),

The Script (which I already have as well), Coldplay (whose tracks I have not completed yet),

then probably the Fray (about 3 songs in my iTunes)... although I'll just be downloading only the BEST OF collections (except for Maroon 5 and 30 Seconds to Mars)... Let's see... I might just be flooding my iTunes... Oh well. :)

ENDING

I've always been in love with short stories and I guess over the last 4 years, despite my neglect of the art of literature, my love for this particular section never went away. Here is one story I found over the internet and at that instant, I knew, this was what I wanted to specialize in.

For me, there is something very beautiful to a short story. It is the foundation of all written novel. It requires so much from it's writer for such a short piece. It is much like poetry, how to make everything coherent, complete, and consistent but still be able to keep everything short, compact and palatable to the reader. It is always a dilemma of whether to end it abruptly, to keep it open hoping readers' interest would hold your name in their mind and want more from you and your works, to keep the characters as vague as possible or let them live out clearly defined personalities and lives, or simply to just let everything roll by as you write out this little play you have in your mind.

I wish I have more time over this short break from school. Hone a little skill, and get some decent routine in my life. Everything in it's right order, like all short stories, every element in it's right place, every little detail used to it's fullest extent.

Filipino Literature Online

I should have done this a long time ago, I should have searched an index or a site that lists some if not all of the past and current Filipino short stories and gave some critiques or introductions to the works. Hope I get to read this more than the mangas I read.


Click here for the site. :)

ABANDON ALL HOPE

Rodin's Gates of Hell

At some point, when I look back to the time when I was about to enter college and decide as to what major I should take, I think I saw Rodin's Gate of Hell. I remember very clearly, I told myself, "College is where the serious stuff happens and you need to get yourself into Medicine. So abandon all hope of ever seeing yourself complete another short story, or complete your search for things like plot lines, mentors. You eliminated that in the race."

Now that I am in the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, I see it again, more clearly now than the first time I had glimpsed it. Abandon all hope. Right now... I feel like I should, cause my sanity won't take the promise that hope brings... at some point... that hope... is what's killing me and making my suffering all the more heavy.

I may never really be able to get the meaning of the words... Abandon All Hope... and for sure I will never be able to grow anymore towards maturing anytime soon. I am not making sense... anyway... I just had to post something or else my whole reason and will would break and I'd fall into the trap of despair and I'd be thrown in further into this hell that I may have made for myself.

I finally have an idea for a story

Sucks when you have an idea for a story but have no way to write it out. My lappy crashed and is still stored up in my cabinet awaiting to be repaired. Not even sure if the repair would still be worth it.

To JK Rowling: Nicely Done

Call it the frustration or call it the emotional sap living within me, but I burst into tears after hearing JK Rowling's speech at the world premiere of Harry Potter 7 part 2. I wasn't crying while she was giving the speech because... sad to say, I am not that much of an avid Harry Potter fan. Let me clear that out - I skipped out in reading the books, for a very simple reason, my impatience with not knowing what will happen next and with reading details got the best of me and since the chapters had titles of what they contained, I skipped out on most of the other chapters and the other characters. So I gave up reading it. But the book was really good.

I remember that when the first wave of Potter madness hit, a lot of skeptics came up to do some damage to the newly rising best seller, saying that it promoted black magic and what not. Of course, in my house that talk was in the air as well, lingering there for quite sometime, but not really given that much weight as all the other arguments and problems that linger in our house. Those years were the years of controversial books so I can't really blame my parents for trying to be cautious with what their child reads. Anyway, I was still able to read some of the books in the series; those being books 1 and 3. Book 1, I hardly remember if I finished it thoroughly and then book 3 I finished in the skipping chapters method.

If my friends hear me, or read about this I am going to get a lot of sermons. Anyway, now that I think back on it... Anne Rice is an even harder read than Harry Potter.


Truth be told, I found the deeper meaning of the books in the films, it was the films that opened my eyes to the fact that this book was not some little bed time story book for kids. The take on the narration was simple, but the plot was complex. I thought it rather sneaky but intelligent. I think the best "writer" way of describing it is, JK had command over her language. She used it the simplest way she knows so that the appeal would reach even those that do not really think of reading as a leisure activity. And I applaud her for that, I can't do that. Make something simple and yet still sound intelligent and not like some teenage fan fiction writer.

So going back, I cried after JK's speech. After I told my friend, I want her life, that feeling of having done something you love or something you had poured a part of your life into, take on a life of its own and grow exponentially to touch so many people and so many hearts. That is something. I don't know if I envy her because she has made a name for herself and people will never forget her, or that she had done something so beautiful (period). I cried when I started to imagine how she must have felt crunching those last few hours, writing those last few lines, and then to finally end it. I envy her. I truly do.

I wish I'd get that someday too, to be in the same situation as when she was writing the last chapter of the Harry Potter series, maybe one day... but for now, Ms. Rowling, nicely done.

Kristin Bauer

I found out today that Kristin Bauer, Pam from True Blood, is actually into painting and that she even went to art school. That was quite unexpected. Anyway, I saw one of her paintings in http://www.perfectpictureframing.com/artistShowcase.htm and that just proved she is more than what I had thought of her, which is confined to just an actress (of course she also does well in this particular avenue). Anyway... that's it for the day... time to hit the books.

J.R.R Tolkien

Lament for Eorl the Young 

Where now is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

At Woodward's Garden by Robert Frost

A boy, presuming on his intellect,

Once showed two little monkeys in a cage

A burning-glass they could not understand

And never could be made to understand.

Words are no good: to say it was a lens

For gathering solar rays would not have helped.

But let him show them how the weapon worked.

He made the sun a pinpoint on the nose

Of the first one, then the other, till it brought

A look of puzzled dimness to their eyes

That blinking could not seem to blink away.

They stood arms laced together at the bars,

And exchanged troubled glances over life.

One put a thoughtful hand up to his nose

As if reminded--or as if perhaps

Within a million years of an idea.

He got his purple little knuckles stung.

The already known had once more been confirmed

By psychological experiment,

And that were all the finding to announce

Had the boy not presumed too close and long.

There was a sudden flash of arm, a snatch,

And the glass was the monkey's, not the boy's.

Precipitately they retired back-cage

And instituted an investigation

On their part, though without the needed insight.

They bit the glass and listened for the flavor.

They broke the handle and the binding off it.

Then none the wiser, frankly gave it up,

And having hid it in their bedding straw

Against the day of prisoners' ennui,

Came dryly forward to the bars again

To answer for themselves:

Who said it mattered

What monkeys did or didn't understand?

They might not understand a burning-glass.

They might not understand the sun itself.

It's knowing what to do with things that counts.

by Robert Frost (1936)

from: http://foundsf.org; they have a picture of the Woodward Garden Entrance... you might want to check it.

- I was somewhat in the middle of reviewing my OB book during the time that the urge to suddenly open my Robert Frost book at a random page. It might not really be what the poem was trying to say but I thought the poem meant that it did not matter whether I truly understood all the stuffs I'm cramming or trying desperately to read, it's knowing what to do with the stuff that matters most. It was a little comforting during the time. 

-Yes... I considered myself to be the monkeys and someone superior to me who flaunt their superiority to be the boy.

Kafka on Shore

I just finished reading Kafka on the Shore, one of the best reads I've ever had for ages. It really had been a long time since I last took a thick paper back book, sat, read and finished the whole thing. I did not finish it in one sitting though, it took me the whole summer to finish just this one book. I think I've lost my affinity to lengthy novels since the last novel I successfully finished was Peter Pan -- that was good too, after all, I am in love with Peter Pan and the thought of there being a real Peter Pan; anyway this particular novel needs to be talked about in another blog -- so going back, yeah, my affinity for thick, lengthy novels have dwindled down to almost nothing.

At the end of each chapter, I felt that connection to the characters, that odd experience of a metaphysical level was definitely there however underplayed it was in my life at that time... it was undeniably there. Oddly so, at first I felt that this book might not have been for me, it lacked the sheer excitement that I got from Anne Rice and her vampires and odd little action scenes. It lacked the feel of being thrown into the realities of another person's life which I got from Paulo Coelho, or that warmth and pain you feel in love from Nicolas Sparks. Yeah, I have such a small and cliched  repertoire of authors. But they are the ones I read.

I was almost to the half of the book thinking, this is not doing it for me, I can't seem to really enjoy it. Not that he wasn't good at telling his story or that the plot was a bore, I just felt like I wasn't excited, that's all. But I read on, thinking that if I always stopped reading in the middle because nothing excited me, my view of the whole thing would always be incomplete, like how I did with Pullman's The Golden Compass. So a little touch of maturity on my part (yehey for me). And true enough, the book proved to be more for me than what I first thought of it. 

I was somehow in the same situation when I read this. The same feeling like wanting to run away from something and start over somewhere else. And the story kind of grew on me, not like the feeling you get from watching strong big waves crushing against the rocks, but more like how you come to like the gentle breeze of a warm day, that neither blows through your hair or sweeps up your skirt, just a silent blow as gentle as a whisper. Anyway, my metaphor's bad so I'll put up something that helped me through that weird situation I was in. 

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. 

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. 

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about." 
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

Allan Popa

I still have my senior's copy of Morpo by Allan Popa and was leisurely reading it today... gosh it's too hot today. Anyway, here's one of the many good pieces in the collection.

TAGPO

Nagsalubong ang dalawang landas.
Saglit na nag-atubili.
Iwas sa kaliwa. Iwas sa kanan.
Kambal-hadlang ang pagbibigay-daan.
Nauudlot ang mga hakbang.
Magkabilang akmang
mga panaklong sa tagpo.
Pagkaraan, kapwa huminto.
Naghihintay sa udyok ng direksyon.
Iiwanan sila ng panahon

Haruki Murakami

I recently started reading Haruki Murakami. I came across this author from my best friend's sister, when she decided to sell her old books as she has already bought a "kindle". I bought all her Murakami books. I have heard the author somewhere before, I just couldn't remember where... So far I'm halfway done with his Kafka on the Shore and so far, it's a good read. The story for me somehow started quite slow and easy. I like the fact that he used such subtleties in introducing his plot twists and concentrated on the scenes that he was building in every chapter. I guess that's the genius of it. It is quite amazing how he could put out so much social issues without it coming off as offensive. anyway.. that's it for now. :)

Missing out

My summer has not been progressing as how I'd want to. I'm already halfway into my vacation and little has progressed with my art exploration, I haven't gone into learning any new violin techniques, and up until, I'm only halfway through my reading of Neil Gaiman's book. I haven't even gone swimming it just feels like summer sucks.