Some Lessons Learned

Airplane Rides

Some friends told me that it took a lot of guts to go to another country all by myself. I mean, I traveled alone (think of three airplane rides and the tormenting hours of waiting), and I do not have any friends or relatives in my country of destination. This may be an overstatement, but they were “amazed” at how I was able to manage all the traveling alone and living independently in another country stuff.

But there is nothing amazing about it. It is not like you are going to walk and rely on clues and maps (although that would be much more interesting). You take the right plane, then another right plane, and another right plane, and lo and behold, you are in your country of destination.

Life’s Lesson on “Readiness”

Now, I don’t believe in not trying something out because of that “I’m not yet ready” cliche. I’ve learned that you cannot be ready for anything. What you can do is decide to go for it or not, and deal with the regrets that go with the decision later. It’s like when you badly want to blog about something, but you just don’t know where to start. You say, “No, I’m not ready to blog about this.” But, you cannot be ready until you start typing out the first word or first sentence or first paragraph of your entry.

Choosing to live very far away from home is like writing that blog entry you think you are not ready to write. Was I ready for it? All I knew was that I was not obsessing over thinking whether I was ready or not. What I knew was I wanted some change to happen in my life before the year ended. When an opportunity came, I grabbed it without expectations of sorts. I did not know whether I was ready or not. And it paid off.

Not boredom, nor melodrama

First it was YouTube. Then Facebook and other social networking sites you can think of.  Imeem. Jango. And I have run out of free session games. Done watching 500 days of summer. Done reading the latest issue of Marie Claire. Done reading the script of  He’s Just Not That Into You.

The bright side of this all? I am blogging again. Maybe it’s just now. But I missed blogging, you know, making something out of that white space in front of you. I don’t consider this boredom, nor melodrama. It’s reality. You win some, you lose some.

A lot of things happened the past two weeks. One thing took place before I could take in the thing that happened before that. And while I have some “interesting” topics to blog about, I could not get my thoughts organized, and, like many bloggers out there, I chose to blog about how the absence of something interesting to do got me to blogging again.

Of Space and Time

“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.”

— Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

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 me 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.