From where I sit on the cafeteria balcony, I can see a part of the metro tracks, suspended between the towering white facade of the Malayan and the stand of trees lining the ADB compound. Every so often, a train comes thundering past: a shock of blue that appears and disappears just as quickly.
Well, it doesn't exactly thunder past - this far, four blocks away, you can't really hear anything. But I can imagine the muted rumbling as the train cars flicker by in the soft rainy day haze.
"There goes the metro," I say to Greg. "And inside of it, how many souls and how many souls in love and how many souls bored?"
Most of my conversation is like this. Repetitive and rhythmic and ultimately rot.
"I'd guess a few hundreds. Half of them think they're in love and half are bored and those may be the same halves."
I chew on the straw of my soft drink while I ponder on this answer. I can't make sense of it.
"You just know everything don't you?"
"No. For instance, I don't know what you're thinking."
"I'm not really thinking right now."
"You know that's not what I mean."
"Ha, I don't know half the fuck of what's going on most of the time."
"Tsk, Drew, I've seen that act a hundred times too many. The Noble Savage should have ended its run several seasons ago."
"Everyone loves an oxymoron. Making fun of actual morons was too easy."
"Well I'm sick of figures of speech. Nothing nowadays is ever straightforward."
"Nothing and no one but you, is what you mean to say."
"It wasn't always that way. I remember when you were too, once." There is a wistfulness in his voice when he says this and the words carry an inevitable finality.
I am silent as I finish my cigarette. Its smoke curls upwards and is lost in the fog.
In the distance another train.
Tuesday
On B-Side and Cable Car: first impressions
Last Friday, I went to The Collective with Neil. My first impression of it was that it was seriously difficult to get to - like, you have to drive all the way down Yakal before turning left into Mayapis before turning left again into Malugay because of the one-way routing. Then you have to pray real hard that parking space is available but chances are, it isn't. I guess I'm good at praying because just as we were approaching the place, a car pulled out in front of us.
The Collective is a bunch of random shops housed in a converted warehouse. From the outside I thought it looked like an old-school market building. Inside there are a couple of restaurants, artsy shops, galleries, a bar, and lots of negative space.
We took a table outside B-Side and just sat there for a while. Actually we were waiting for someone to come and take our order but no one ever did. Well, there was this one girl in a skimpy outfit who kept on coming back to our table and leaving samplers of light brandy. I wanted to be supportive of her reaching her giveaway quota but I don't really like brandy so what I did was, I furtively poured the drinks into the planter beside our table. Later, I spotted a waitress all the way on the other side of the bar. I tried calling out and waving my arm in the air as urgently as I could but to no avail. The music was too loud and the lights too low. Anyway, I had to walk over to where she was to get the menu.
IT WAS FUCKING EXPENSIVE. Like San Mig Light was 60 pesos a bottle. And they didn't have beers by the bucket. I thought this place being "alternative", it would be cheaper but I don't know, being as close as it is to the CBD, maybe they couldn't escape the capitalist crap.
Actually, that's not true, because afterwards we went to Cable Car on Pasay Road to meet up with Panda (who had just come back from studies in China) and their local beers were only 45 pesos. And colder even. And the service was better.
Cable Car (Sports Bar. KTV. Billiards) was a nice surprise. On the first level there is a huge wooden bar which runs almost the whole length of the room. Upstairs is the KTV and the billiards tables, where we found Panda and his friends. There was also a beer pong table with a gaggle of minors around it.
Neil and I decided to play it cool and hang out at the bar downstairs. There was a little piped in music loud enough to keep up the buzz but quiet enough to allow for good conversation. Panda et al came down and joined us at the bar. Onion rings and chicken fingers were ordered and promptly finished. Can I just say that they were the best onion rings I have ever had. EVER.
Also I discovered that it is incredibly awkward to try to have a group conversation at a bar. But it was all good. In the end, everyone went home slightly inebriated and happy.
Thursday
On refreshing my perspective
Have you heard this song? It sounds like that other song, but it's not, it's this song:
Phil Wang (the guy in the doughnut shop) is like, one of my favorite people on the Internet because I find him hella cute. And also because he makes really good videos. How awesome is this new video? It's got flashing lights, dancing ladies, and a sweet as beat! So maybe the lyrics don't make a whole lot of sense but who cares I just want to dance to this song. Let's dance to this song!
There's also this other guy, Charley, who I don't really count among my favorite people, but who gets a lot of love from me because he gets to make up useless words.
Like one time when he was younger, he was sitting in a cafe and being moody because he was so poor. Scanning the cafe, maybe looking for pretty girls, his eyes happened upon the oval glass plate on the door, on which Coffee-room was printed, but the words facing the street, he misread the sign as Moor-eeffoc. Even in his later years, reading the word backward on cafe doors would remind him of that moment when he first noticed it, and this would send a shock through his blood
He wrote all this down in an autobiography and some people who read it (like G.K. Chesterton and Tolkien) were so taken by how Mooreeffoc perfectly describes the intensity with which we notice again something that has become trite - notice how any word sounds queer when you say it too many times - that they adopted it and that is why it still exists today.
And that is why Charley is awesome.
When I had just come to Manila, I struggled with conversational Filipino. It must have been very entertaining for my classmates to hear me speak; my accent was all wrong and my diction left much to be desired. For example, once I was walking with a friend down the college drive. A flashy car drove by and I remarked to him, "ang ganda ng sasakyan o!" He laughed and when I asked him what was so funny, he explained that "we do not usually say sasakyan. You can say kotse." So I took to calling all four-wheeled vehicles kotse.
Fast forward a few years: at lunch yesterday, I was telling my colleagues that I had to deliver some samples to Makati in the afternoon, and that I wished our boss would allow me a car, so that I would not have to commute.
I said, "Sana may kotse mamaya," and they laughed.
"Sosyal! Ang BM ni sir, baka yun yung ipapagamit."
"Haha, di naman. Kahit yung delivery van lang natin, basta may masakyan lang ako."
"Edi sabihin mo, ang L300."
"O bakit, hindi ba kotse din ang L300?"
"Hindi, van yun eh."
"Onga, hindi ba kotse pa rin?"
"Hindi. Sosyal kasi ang kotse."
And I laughed at the absurdity of our argument and how mooreeffoc this was.
Afterwards, I wondered if its Spanish roots made kotse classier than sasakyan. And on some level, it might be, but in a country where more than half of the population lives below the poverty line, does not even matter if your ride was pimped out or beat up. Sosyal ang kotse.
Phil Wang (the guy in the doughnut shop) is like, one of my favorite people on the Internet because I find him hella cute. And also because he makes really good videos. How awesome is this new video? It's got flashing lights, dancing ladies, and a sweet as beat! So maybe the lyrics don't make a whole lot of sense but who cares I just want to dance to this song. Let's dance to this song!
There's also this other guy, Charley, who I don't really count among my favorite people, but who gets a lot of love from me because he gets to make up useless words.
Like one time when he was younger, he was sitting in a cafe and being moody because he was so poor. Scanning the cafe, maybe looking for pretty girls, his eyes happened upon the oval glass plate on the door, on which Coffee-room was printed, but the words facing the street, he misread the sign as Moor-eeffoc. Even in his later years, reading the word backward on cafe doors would remind him of that moment when he first noticed it, and this would send a shock through his blood
He wrote all this down in an autobiography and some people who read it (like G.K. Chesterton and Tolkien) were so taken by how Mooreeffoc perfectly describes the intensity with which we notice again something that has become trite - notice how any word sounds queer when you say it too many times - that they adopted it and that is why it still exists today.
And that is why Charley is awesome.
Charley writing A Christmas Carol and wondering how he can incorporate a sense of Mooreeffoc into the narrative.
Fast forward a few years: at lunch yesterday, I was telling my colleagues that I had to deliver some samples to Makati in the afternoon, and that I wished our boss would allow me a car, so that I would not have to commute.
I said, "Sana may kotse mamaya," and they laughed.
"Sosyal! Ang BM ni sir, baka yun yung ipapagamit."
"Haha, di naman. Kahit yung delivery van lang natin, basta may masakyan lang ako."
"Edi sabihin mo, ang L300."
"O bakit, hindi ba kotse din ang L300?"
"Hindi, van yun eh."
"Onga, hindi ba kotse pa rin?"
"Hindi. Sosyal kasi ang kotse."
And I laughed at the absurdity of our argument and how mooreeffoc this was.
Afterwards, I wondered if its Spanish roots made kotse classier than sasakyan. And on some level, it might be, but in a country where more than half of the population lives below the poverty line, does not even matter if your ride was pimped out or beat up. Sosyal ang kotse.
Monday
On being by myself sometimes
This is why I follow so many blogs, why I like to surround myself (if only virtually) with all sorts of people:
And what I mean is that I find so many clever things like this video, so many wonderful ideas like this poem, so many beautiful people like this woman.
And this video made me understand that I had forgotten how to be alone.
Like last night I was restless and did not know what to do with myself. In itself this was not strange - the nagging feeling that I should be doing something is a part of my creative process.
On further introspection, what I was feeling was the unrelenting desire for company. After being out all Saturday with a whole lot of people, and spending most of Sunday with Greg, I was ill at ease being with just myself again. And then I realized that this was the exact same thing I felt on Friday night: home early and no one else in the flat, listening to dubstep mixes all by my lonesome, I wanted to be somewhere else so bad that I sent Jason an uncommon email asking him to drinks, and when it was already 10 PM and he hadn't replied, I decided to go to Malate and then changed my mind about it a couple of times, a hundred times until it was midnight and I fell asleep because I was tired.
There was a time when I never had to feel this way. I was perfectly happy to be home alone and loll on my bed and read a book any day of the week. Even on a Friday night. I didn't care that no one ever invited me to go out on Saturdays (actually I did but I prefer to remember this part of my life another way). I was content and I wrote a lot of poems.
And then things gradually changed; and this transformation was so subtle (or I was just not paying attention) that my profile on planetromeo still declared that I was "more of " a homebody when I partied every weekend. I still imagined that I spent quiet Sunday afternoons reading or writing when in truth I sleep through Sunday with a hangover.
None of which is a bad thing, really. My introversion is not something that I particularly want to hold on to. I like to believe that I am versatile well-rounded. In any case, I need to be more sociable and charismatic because I want to be successful in life. And my definition of success involves impressing people, persuading them to follow me, and whatever else it is that leaders do.
But I digress. My point is just that I haven't really given me some alone time recently. Even when I'm alone there are hundreds of voices in my head. Aside from the one that narrates my life to myself, there's people online telling me what they think about things I don't care about, and on top of that there's James Franco telling me not to be scared.
I won't be, James. I won't be scared of being by myself anymore.
* Photo from Graviton Creations.
And what I mean is that I find so many clever things like this video, so many wonderful ideas like this poem, so many beautiful people like this woman.
And this video made me understand that I had forgotten how to be alone.
Like last night I was restless and did not know what to do with myself. In itself this was not strange - the nagging feeling that I should be doing something is a part of my creative process.
No rest for the wicked.
On further introspection, what I was feeling was the unrelenting desire for company. After being out all Saturday with a whole lot of people, and spending most of Sunday with Greg, I was ill at ease being with just myself again. And then I realized that this was the exact same thing I felt on Friday night: home early and no one else in the flat, listening to dubstep mixes all by my lonesome, I wanted to be somewhere else so bad that I sent Jason an uncommon email asking him to drinks, and when it was already 10 PM and he hadn't replied, I decided to go to Malate and then changed my mind about it a couple of times, a hundred times until it was midnight and I fell asleep because I was tired.
There was a time when I never had to feel this way. I was perfectly happy to be home alone and loll on my bed and read a book any day of the week. Even on a Friday night. I didn't care that no one ever invited me to go out on Saturdays (actually I did but I prefer to remember this part of my life another way). I was content and I wrote a lot of poems.
And then things gradually changed; and this transformation was so subtle (or I was just not paying attention) that my profile on planetromeo still declared that I was "more of " a homebody when I partied every weekend. I still imagined that I spent quiet Sunday afternoons reading or writing when in truth I sleep through Sunday with a hangover.
 |
| Francis and Maurice enjoy a hot bath.* |
But I digress. My point is just that I haven't really given me some alone time recently. Even when I'm alone there are hundreds of voices in my head. Aside from the one that narrates my life to myself, there's people online telling me what they think about things I don't care about, and on top of that there's James Franco telling me not to be scared.
I won't be, James. I won't be scared of being by myself anymore.
* Photo from Graviton Creations.
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