Hell The World

While, my mom and I were watching Michael Jackson’s memorial service, my mom tried to sing Heal The World. When she got to the chorus, she mispronounced “heal”, making it sound like “hell”. Teasing her, I continued, “make it a bitter place. Poor you and poor me…”

This gave an idea of making my pessimistic version of Heal The World. I think it is some kind of corny, but I’m posting it anyway.

So here it goes:

Hell The World

there’s a place in your heart
and it’s nothing but emptiness
and this place
will not get better tomorrow
and if you really try
you’ll find all the reasons
to cry
in this place there’s nothing
but hurt or sorrow

there are ways to get there
if you care enough
for the living
give them much more space
leave this bitter place

(and say)

hell the world
it is a bitter place
poor you and poor me
and the entire human race
there are people dying
to make more room for the living
leave this bitter place
poor you and poor me

don’t ask why
there’s a love that always lies
it only cares about receiving
if you try
you shall see
it’s false bliss
you’ll always feel
fear or dread
you’re just existing
and not living

(and say)

hell the world
it is a bitter place
poor you and poor me
and the entire human race
there are people dying
to make more room for the living
leave this bitter place
poor you and poor me

 

Chicken Little’s Funeral

This scene from Toni Morrison’s Sula once brought shivers down my spine:

And they saw the Lamb’s eye and the truly innocent victim: themselves. They acknowledged the innocent child hiding in the corner of their hearts, holding a sugar-and-butter sandwich. That one. The one who lodged deep in their fat, thin, old, young skin, and was the one the world had hurt. Or they thought of their son newly killed and remembered his legs in short pants and wondered where the bullet went in. Or they remembered how dirty the room looked when their father left home and wondered if that is the way the slim, young Jew felt, he who for them was both son and lover in whose downy face they could see the sugar-and-butter sandwiches and feel the oldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood, but the remembrance of it.

 

“Love is tricky.”

“It is never mundane nor daily. You can never get used to it. You have to walk with it, then let it walk with you. You can never balk. It moves you like the tide. It takes you out to sea, then lays you on the beach again. Today’s struggling pain is the foundation for a certain stride through the heavens. You can run from it but you can never say no. It includes everyone.“

– from The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan

 

What’s Worse Than *Pacham?

*pachamba-chamba

Voodooed’s specialty is Pacham. He puts together what he sees in the kitchen and makes a dish out of them. When it was Madwoman’s turn to prepare a dish,

Me: So Madwoman, what are you going to cook for us?

Madwoman: I cook by instinct, Me.

Silence.

Voodooed: That’s much worse than my Pacham, Me.

 

Milan Kundera On Characters

“Characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.”

 

60 Years From Now

One of the advantages of being unemployed is that you are compelled, in a way, to rummage through your old stuff when spacing out and daydreaming no longer work. You take out your journal and recall what you have been doing or thinking at some points in your life.

 

Going through my journal, I have been reminded of the things that I did about a year and a half ago, when I decided to leave my first job. I was unemployed for about three weeks. Most of the time, I was left alone in my room – no PC, no books. What I had included a television that only had three or four channels, a mobile phone, a notebook, and a pen.

 

Most of those unemployment days were spent staring into space, chatting with a friend through SMS, and writing down some noteworthy messages that this friend was sending me. Thanks to him, I got myself to post a new blog entry.

 

This friend and I were talking about how poor and bored we were at that time, and what we would become in ten years. One of his memorable messages (as written on my journal) was:

 

Hehe. I know we’ll be good friends Kat. Just think about it, 60 years from now we may never fulfill our ambitions, but we can look back and be happy bout the things we enjoyed together.

 

On patience, saying good-bye, etc.

(Warning: You may find this entry too personal, melodramatic, irrelevant, and so on, and it would save you a lot of your precious time if you stopped reading this now.)

“Still pursuing, still achieving, learn to labor, learn to wait.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Based on my employment history, I would like to believe that people grow more patient as they age. Two years after I graduated from university, I got three employments. For my first employment, I lasted one month; the second, four months, and the latest, fourteen months.

Right after I went out of university, I was itching to go out of the city in my desire “to see the world”, the overrated “real world”. So I got a job that flew me to another city. But after a month, I left my job because it frustrated me. Then I got another job, and it was less frustrating this time. I loved the people I worked with; I learned different lessons, from using Open Office applications to the biggest US companies that filed for bankruptcy. It did not frustrate me that much, but still, it frustrated me. Plus, I was itching to go home before the year ended, and eventually, I left my job again. 

So I got another job, this time, in my very own hometown. You see, it is writing for the Web. Since it involved writing, I programmed my mind to love it. But, … and some opportunity came, an opportunity that will yet again allow me to see the world, only that this “world” this time is way too far from my comfort zone, my family, and friends. But hey, this is something new, so why not take the chance.

Bittersweet good-byes

I found myself too excited to leave the company after I submitted my resignation letter. But, a day before my last shift, my friend (also a co-worker) and I chatted through SMS. I told her that it was finally my last shift, and ended it with the expression, “hahay”. In reply, my friend said, “Nganong hahay man? Dapat yehey!”

I told her that somehow, I felt sad. There was no particular reason why I felt that way; I just felt sad about the whole idea of “leaving.” I was not particularly close to my officemates, and my very close friends had already left. But I don’t know, leaving is one of the few things that I feel sentimental about. As soon as my last shift started, I had a couple of people in mind to say good-bye to. And saying good-bye to them, I really felt sad, sentimental, and so on. I am just glad that there are people in my most recent workplace that I truly care about as I have always enjoyed bittersweet good-byes.

Probably, a month from now, I would be making the biggest, saddest, most bitter good-bye of my life. But, to console myself, I would make myself a believer of Proust, a person who decided that those years he suffered, those were the best years of his life.

 

A Valentine Post

This poignant poem, I love.

 

Complicating Reality

Thought that I should start my blogging year with a song that complicates reality. Just remembered Sir Nino’s reply to my comment on his blog entry entitled Why I Write:

“Kat, how about doing some complicating of reality. That might make you get back to writing again.”

Viva La Persistence (Kimya Dawson)

I dreamed i thanked scott ian for persistence of time
back when steve and eva died that album changed my life
it was a package of pure darkness tied up with a silver string
delivered by a fast train rearranging how i think
he said “i can’t believe you even know that i exist,
i’ve got all of your albums and i think you are the best”
he started to cry and i started to laugh
i gave him a hug and he gave me his autograph

reeling in my disbelief, i know that it was just a dream
all the covers that i see are different from the books i read

everything is crumbling around me
why does everything cost so much money?
could somebody please help out my family?
my mom needs hearing aids, new shoulders, and new legs
my dad needs a break he works all day every day
my brother needs a place and a job where he can make
enough money to take care of his baby

here’s a simple dissertation on a complex situation
money and intimidation and mass graves make strong foundations
for the giant corporations that own all the TV. stations
telling us to take vacations to their big theme park plantations
rather than to hearts of nations

where we might meet people on the street who say
“i don’t want my mtv ’cause it brought viva to its knees”
and mom and pop are begging “please, globalization’s killing me”
while we think that they think they need all of the things we think we need
like martha stewart shams and sheets and sugar free powdered iced tea
vanilla coke, lemon pepsi, friends episodes on dvd

i went to see the doctor of psychiatry
weapons of mass instruction finally broke me
he said “act your age, don’t be afraid, take two of these.
now listen real hard, put down that guitar,
don’t be a retard, be all that you can be”

the things he said i could be were laid out right in front of me
would i choose deep fried apathy, mcnuggets where my balls should be,
or super sized conformity? i walked away and i’m still me
free to go fucking crazy, free to know why i’m angry
one and one and one is three and you and me is all i need
singing songs, drawing cocks, picking locks to locked doors
find deflated hearts, and pump them up.

 

The Ant and the Elephant

Disclaimer: This is fiction. If you think you are one of the people referred to in this post, then do not be too assuming. As Daria puts it, “I love having low self-esteem, it makes me feel special.”

And I thought I was the only one who assumed to have low self-esteem. There is Daria, who loves to have low self-esteem because it makes her special. And there are those who seem to have high self-esteem based on their social skills, or should I say, their ability to belong to a large group with ease.

When you are in high school and you are one of those they call “top students” of your batch, you tend to hope and strive to enter what they call a “reputable” school in college. Of course, “reputable” is ambiguous. It is understandable that every school considers itself “reputable”. Despite that, there are still people who are very vocal about how proud they are about their school, yet they have this notion (although they may not realize it) that their school is inferior to other schools.

Because they do not come from what they believe as a “reputable” school, they assume that people from the “reputable” school have way too high self-esteem. And, this is one of the curses that people from a “reputable” school have to deal with.

The truth is, however, people from a “reputable” school have damaged self-esteem. This means that people from a “reputable” school do not have way too high self-esteem. It is just that the people from what is considered as the “not-so-reputable” schools have low self-esteem, which is not entirely bad because it would make them feel special.

And, it is not about schools, which are the reputable ones, and which are not. After all, every school aims one thing, that is, education.

This is all about the ant not being too small but the elephant being too big.