"don't know what i've done but i feel ashamed"

was that modern guilt? that's it, right? fuck, i love beck! nev mind scientology. this new album has lots of spiritual non-crap i love it. or i think those were spiritual. where does he get all those, sounds?

the two best beck albums, and they're one of the best ever (even though i only have a very limited best albums knowledge: i think at least seven miles davis albums qualify for this), are completely different from the other i'm tempted to say they couldn't have been made by one person.

except i'm a sucker for melodrama. a terrible heartache produced sea change. it's broken loneliest alonest beck. guess i'm doing fine is a masterpiece in pretending and wallowing in despair: "it's only you that i'm losing, i guess i'm doing fine"; in a more popular song beck sings the simplest and saddest words ever: "baby, i'm a lost cause". that's for your one great love. odelay is the true beck sound.

only incidental that my friends and i call each other bek. or is it?

stuck, maybe forever

so we're still not over the dark knight. alanah says she thought the joker's a victim too when he first tells the story of his scars (that scene i find very scary. chinatown, anyone? except heath ledger's performance is a million times scarier than roman polanski's). when he tells a different story to rachel (with almost the exact same delivery, expression, and tongue movements) her summary, brief and i would have to say accurate, was: gago to a!

they say the best villains do not need explanations. oversimplification. villains escape reason, that's more like it. they do things not because of childhood trauma, or some tragic loss. that'd be trashy psychologizing (what kind of word was that). the joker is evil because of his position as the opposite of good, and this we can say is true for batman himself. that's the only way to define them both. the constitution of self as other. wtf!

i think i'm writing a batman-related grad school thesis, by the way. no, let's call it batman-inspired. it's about philippine cinema, and genre (love!), and parody. maybe some anticolonial narrative somewhere. ideas? help!

maybe the sun

sick. colds. rain did it. i think. can it do that? rain? honest question. if some virus causes the common cold then the rain couldn't have done it. logic and biology. shit, stop. i'm sure it was the cold weather. causes other things too. don't start. won't start. i swore before that i wasn't gonna do schizo writer but right now, feels ok. words make sense. one second away blacking out. nothing amy winehouse. hyperbole.

two weeks for the virus to go away right. the scariest thing/s in the word, viruses. i'd love it if the plural were virii. would've given the word more, i don't know, character, i guess. then again what the fuck character am i looking for (fword doesn't look natural but for emphasis i won't edit; new thing i'm trying: writing whatever's there).

my friend glenn is having let's call it relationship problems. or emotional. that could work. emotional problems. says he can't sleep. someone didn't text him. looks stupid and shallow and say whatever you want. happened to me once. and i think all my friends had that same life-changing moment. not the easiest thing. they say it depends on the person, or the handling. but i believe it's all about confessions and how much you're willing to admit something. what we say is rehearsed!

we all feel it, we all feel the same thing i mean, but the choice between trivial and noble gets in the way. or maybe i've just read too much freud. my nose is sore. tissue's not, erm, gentle

everyone's smiling

we all know what to say when we see something like this: a tear fell. something of a joke really, but then what's the difference between comedy and tragedy? let us call that intentional obfuscation. miss you, beks.

erika took the photo so she's not in it. impossible unless she's a mutant or something. there's one with all four of us but something's wrong with my eye there so i chose this. we watched the dark knight after dinner. alanah went home because, i forgot why.

after we graduated ujp lost its tambayan. the last time i've been to my beloved college was when i claimed my diploma like a month ago. another drama night, why am i not doing my papers?

disorientalism

much has been said about heath ledger's joker and i think i've talked a lot about it too. watching the dark knight again (third time! there will be a fourth) made me realize (what's another way of saying that?) there's another performance there that needs to be, well, praised (something's wrong with me): gary oldman's.

his jim gordon is so complex (as all magnificent performances should be) and so fragile i kept wishing there were a paul thomas anderson scene somewhere (you know what those are, right? julianne moore in the pharmacy? i've abandoned my boooy?) or maybe a faye dunaway-in-chinatown scene (the mouth-cuttings reminded me of chinatown). he gets to say the best lines too. those last words made me cry.

i need to write about maggie gyllenhaal; need to watch the movie again.

vernacular

no depression after ecamp. not a seer; who uses the word seer? was one day late, that was an entire day i missed! everyone was drunk or sleeping, or drunk and sleeping when i got there. tin and mayee were already sober and were taking care of everyone. pretended i was drunk, too. easy.

won a star, finally. yeah, always wanted one of those, to be honest. i kind of envied teammates who've won before. not the creepy envy kind, no. the summary's i'm only human, and i can't pretend i don't care. i do. happy i won. there i said it. oh, the star was for writing blog entries four times more than what i was obligated to write. wasn't there, by the way. eric accepted the thing for me. god i'm so self-centered. don't care, this makes me happy. for now.

joined the teambuilding activity on day two (this qualified me for a minor prize in the raffle but even though i insisted on joining, having an entry, i knew i wasn't winning anything; i did not). not a fan of those pop psych shit they tell you after tough games. that's because i pretend i'm cool. and we all know the blah about working together as a team, helping each other out. but when you're there something makes sense. well, something made sense to me.

i'm happy i was happy. dandandan here come the clichés. i should write like this more often.

it made me write this

if you are watching the dark knight anytime soon, please please tell me so i can come see it again! this is hamlet and othello with gadgets and summer movie stunts. harold bloom says iago isn't just a supervillain, he could be the inspiration for the literary satan. haven't read cormac mccarthy's blood meridian, but i think we have another iago in heath ledger's joker.

we are confronted with these concepts good and evil every time, but this best work by chris nolan asks, and shows us, the shakiness - or is it shallowness - of these mere words. nietzsche, anyone? the joker says: what doesn't kill you makes you stranger. i'm tempted to venture into freud, deconstruction, and maybe spivak again but this is so uncool already.

moviegoers have to learn to manage their expectations. on our way out of the theater mayee and i heard some teen say the dark knight is so much better than harry potter.

diary of hate

the fact is that the world cannot be populated by just the graham greene-reading, the reflexively funny, or the gorgeous and the überhot. there has to be a point of comparison. the rest of us may remain in the middle, but we are privileged to be judges of those beneath us. ok, i'm being too arrogant. i shouldn't hate so much. i should start considering thinking about liking people for what they pretend to be instead of, you know, not liking them for who they really are. a lot of action words there: first the considering then the thinking, i wonder if the sentence made sense at all.

some people do the weirdest things, you know. and they're annoying. or worse than annoying. they give life at twenty some action, or conflict whatever, thanks, but they should be shot somewhere far. we need that climax. that would be it.

scary day five

useless trying not to repeat myself; i think i blogged about not sleeping last saturday and then attending two three-hour classes without so much as a five-break between them. i think i was sleeping every fifteen minutes, those minute-long sleeps when you try hard not to close your eyes but they just do, on their own. i think everyone noticed.

the point here: catharsis (thanks, mhwb). i heard "purgation" and "cleansing" and i think i knew what the word meant from previous classes, but i feel like i missed something. i should've coffee-d. fun! as if understanding an aristotelian concept's going to help me when, ah well. four days

hope and mathematics

how's this for a boring life slash person - that would be my life slash me (how's that for a crappy intro): my blog posts are all about books, grad school, some music, some movies, a lot of tennis (before the french open; it will take maybe years before i write anything tennis again, the slam after the french was really devastating. we will call it that: the slam after the french).

of course there are the emoposts, can't live without drama. they're all true by the way, they sound all campy and shit but when i wrote them they made sense. even this attempt at metawriting borders on the dramatic, hence on the overly uncool too.

i should do a quantitative study of all my blogposts. find out how shitty my life is, or at least the part of it that i'm willing to write about. it may not appear so but i do edit myself, and harshly. i'm just not that good a writer. or editor for that matter. real life is nasty and brutish and short. where'd that come from! real life is shittier than what we tell other people it is.

next week i'm attending a company activity in subic. tried my best to not go but i'm a hopeful person. that or i'm masochistic. said yes last week. the lack of sleep lessened the obsessing, which should have begun five seconds after i confirmed. one friend summarized everything (and this i know is the truth of it all; i just will not put it this way. i'd stick to my moving on, i don't deserve this story): you want to go. i do want to be there. i'm not trying hard enough. is there like a pill for this?

school is a verb

mom says i maybe it would be a good idea if i didn't grad school (verb, i forgot how she said it) next sem. the schedule's really killing me and i'm a confessing animal: i tell her everything. no sleep at all for the past two days, not two days, just forty hours (no, i didn't sleep at the office: blog - this one, not the work blog - needed some fixing, priorities). the repetitions! you may not read this thank you.

i think i've convinced her that everything's fine though, and that for the next few years i'll still be grad schooling (verb, again). because i've no idea what i'd do without it. it is still a goal. not a big one but it would give the next two or three years some kind of direction.

vitamins will help

i've no idea if i liked mamma mia or not. on the one hand, the hesitation must mean i didn't, because if i did like it, i'd rave and curse and start throwing hyperboles. on the other hand, i've seen movies that really sucked and i knew i hated them right away.

why did i stop listening to norah jones? maybe it was the lure of the obscure. the rhyme is unintentional. it stays. i don't like writing about the music i love. you listen to music. you say shit about it but that's secondary. this is secondary, what i'm doing.

reading raymond carver's short cuts. a million directors couldn't make a decent adaptation even of a mediocre work. robert altman made a film based on nine carver short stories and one poem. if that wasn't genius, then what is.

i wish i could write about something else. like how my date with this person made me happy. or how i laughed today because someone i really like told a funny story. fiction's an option but that's just sad. and imagination has limits. i'm not that bad, i think. i should be happier.

never wrong

i've been writing spam articles for like six months now, and i want to think i'm the expert. well, at least when i'm talking to my mom and my sister. so kaye tells us she received this email from a friend, one of those earthquake warnings.

technical writer me was quick: hoax! remember those viagra emails? the greeting cards? let's not panic here, ok. delete the email. do not forward anything.

but mommy did an alan lightman: it really doesn't matter. there will be some quake sometime soon, spam or no spam. it may happen tomorrow, or when you're forty and kaye's thirty nine. it's geological. silence. this happened a week ago. then, last night: earthquake.

mornings and melancholia

finally talked to my dentist (after two weeks of calling and texting - all her numbers, even her assistant's were not working) and all she said was: ok. tomorrow. thanks. i'm worried about my teeth: the two in front are so brittle i think i woke up earlier and found fragments on my pillow. and the grinding's getting worse every day; my mom heard it when we were talking on the phone! the jaw, too, some problem there.

then the twitches. which must mean i am very ill. a twitch is never a good thing. mayee told me i might be hypochondriac or something. then i started worrying that i might be. she laughed and pointed the irony (or humor) of that problem.

i haven't slept in days. well technically i did. three of four hours. three days. been sleeping at the office, too. this morning i woke up and the it's morning already. the hand and feet cramps were the worst ever. if i'd add that then that'd be seven hours in four days!

this is a part of my favorite vignette from einstein's dreams: a world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. for while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. while people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted... people look at their watches and take refuge in time.

i make no sense. and the writing is really terrible.