Slowly eating me.

It just hit me. I have to start reading again.
The last one was Memories of my Melancholy Whores which I finished last summer. Embarrassing for a bookwhore. A series of novels I started reading but never finished, after. Atonement. Timetraveller's Wife. 100 Years of Solitude. What is happening to me?
My list keeps getting longer. And I'm stuck with laziness and my desire to maximize my time left with my housemates. I hafta start reading again.

of murakami love

i've been listening to Miserable at Best for a million times since i got here at Boston Cafe. and if the world wasn't so high-tech and i still used a cd, i would have worn it out. but it's the perfect song to go along with Toru Watanabe's love for Naoko's twisted self. i can't help but get carried away. and it's not really okay to laugh and feel all teary-eyed while gel's busy with her papers and with no one to smile with! i deserve a space in Naoko and Reiko's asylum that doubles as a resort!

i love it here, Gel says, here you feel so far away from Elbi when in fact right when you look outside you'll see Botica Castro and Minute Burger, complete with smoke effects of jeepneys.

it is so relaxing here, i haven't felt so rested. especially thanks to the party i had last sunday, although i have to say that my mom is the one who's most tired of all the cooking and cleaning and entertaining. (Thank you ma!) Boston Cafe relaxes me, or it must be Haruki Murakami. Norwegian Wood is killing me and i feel like Naoko, the way she makes everything complicated, it doesn't help that she loves The Beatles' Norwegian Wood too! But i have to say, it is kinda weird that i can put it down and resume reading after a day or two. Haruki Murakami is and will always be the shit! forget that some of his works are quite the disappointment. he's won my heart again this time. And if by some warped turn of fate i meet him and he decides to marry me (bah!) i would, behind a heartbeat, if only i don't think of him making me mad like he does with his characters!

So if you want to take those feelings and smash somebody with them, Smash me.
-Toru Watanabe (Norwegian Wood)

dreams come true.

for the entire day my mind is preoccupied by this dream(which some chosen people, thanks to my informative gm, know) i had this morning. and i wondered if it's possible for me to lose my head over depression, but who am i kidding? i was able to survive the last three years so i can't think of anything that could possibly make situations worse except that the longer i stay, the more i get drowned.

oh well. atleast my day was a little better thanks to shopping. aside from the new clothes, i got myself new staedler pens, a unipin pen(because i was right, the pilot drawing pen i used is not available here), chaka two new books! Haruki Murakami's After Dark, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Memories of my Melancholy Whores. i'm so happy!! really.

about the dream:
Miggy: so what's so bad about that?
Me: edi yung waking up part. tas you're lying in bed for the next half hour thinking, IT WAS SO REAL! haha
Miggy: well, dreams do come true.

yeah, they do, don't they? for princesses, and poor matchgirls in storybooks. but for the rest of us, dreams remain in our sleep.

long entry ahead

this sem was the fastest ever, but i constantly felt the need for it to end. everything was so tiring, mostly because of the play. other than that, everything else was just plain complicated. i'm beginning to love that word, complicated. it sums up everything that's been going on with my life lately. haha! anyway, when i finally felt the semester dawning, how i wish i could pull back time so i could have a few more moments at the apartment, a few more bonding sessions with my housemates. but i guess, i needed the break as well. everything is in such a fast pace that i feel in dire need of something to stop me from running over everything.

this morning, in the shower, i kept repeating my speech over and over again. this is about the nth time i've done it. i'm good at writing the things i want to tell him, but no, i lack the courage to say 'em. sure, we've been talking more and more each day now, i've got this silly hope that soon we'll be back to the friends we were. but i miss our silences, i miss when we talk with our hearts for what our words won't be able to say. i miss a lot of things. but i've no intention of bringing em back now. i just want to completely get over everything. tj, of all people should understand. if there is anyone who knew everything i went through, it's him, but i guess it's hard to understand such a selfish decision. i'm crazy. i should stop writing about it, it only gives me a documented proof of how stupid i am. i won't move on. so i guess i'm only saying, that i'm going to stop trying. dammit. i'm so fickle minded.

anyway, i've got the whole sembreak planned out. i should be able to finish atleast 3 classics, i'm choosing between 2 shakespeare comedies, hg wells' time machine and modern utopia or beuwolf. hmmm. wadya think? i've got about 30 korean movies to finish, haha! crazy, right? i was actually watching my girl and i last night. man, i cried in the first scene. them damn koreans know how to make a lonely girl like me feel deprived. the line was "su ho still can't forget you. his brain is tiny, but it's filled with thoughts about you. let go of my friend, please." and this line was being screamed into the sea, to a girl who's been dead for 10 years already. su ho was obviously stuck, it made me cringe more. with jealousy i guess. i'd exchange any intelligent guy for one who'd love me 10 years after i die.
the other day i stayed up until 4 am, talking to joseph when he was supposedly studying for math. we talked about selle. i hit him hard with the pillow everytime he say something nice. because i feel lonely. because all the time i was sitting there beside him, i was thinking how much i wish i was sitting there with someone else, and that someone else telling me nice things too. i get so desperate sometimes. can't help but remember my dad, he told me a month ago ata, that i shouldn't get too desperate, all i have to do is wait because i deserve a prince daw. touching, ha? my dad thinks i'm a princess, i can't even have a damned beggar tas he thinks i'll be able to snag myself a prince. perhaps the shining armor. but not the prince. haha!

not everything's been going fine. but i always had something to hold on to, it's the thought that when it's not okay, then it's probably not the end. diba? it makes sense to me, and it keeps me strong.

i miss writing. like really writing. i mean, i write, but not as well as i think i can. i don't know what happened. papa kept pushing, it's okay when he does, i feel as if i'm not pushed enough to work harder. growing up, i always felt that i was competing with him. ofcourse i never could win, but i love the feeling of defeat, i love that he always know the meaning of the words i throw at him, i love that he keeps reiterating how his vocabulary got so wide, i love his stories about his childhood, about lola who was an english public school teacher. i love it because i always feel that there's more i can do to improve. i guess that's why i started this blog, i don't feel challenged writing in english, but i can only write about one emotion in such a way that it becomes almost like a figment, like a shadow luring at every black and white photo, embracing a widower's cold shoulders over her husbands grave, enveloping a mother in her third miscarriage. see? only one emotion. sadness. i need to write about others things too.

bes is here in elbi. :)

battling ignorance

Frequent National Bookstore visitors will notice that the fiction section has grown inexcusably smaller. I find it terribly annoying that some Filipinos have very little interest in literature. Though love for books often starts at home, I think that it is also the school’s responsibility to bring their students closer to the enchanting world of words. I wasn’t blessed with a good literature teacher back in highschool, in fact I studied subject verb agreement year after year for four years. And honestly, It was a time badly wasted. (I envied my father’s kopong-kopong stories about what he learned from school, they read Edgar Allan Poe’s, Beuwolf’s and such.) I know for a fact that if we don’t do anything to stop it, the next generation will be dumber, less and less imaginative and dim-witted, thanks to the system of education, thanks to elementary and highschool teachers that teaches by the book and never by the words of Tolstoy and all them great. Back to National Bookstore, going through my usual browsing I observed that the classics, such as Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Harper Lee’s How to Kill A Mockingbird are now below 200 pesos. And I could only think of two reasons, two reasons that will either raise our hope for literacy among our unfortunate generation or prepare us for the downfall of the already sagging education. That they surprisingly lowered the prices to reach out to the financially poor lovers of a good read, or because literature is simply no longer of high value, that they are collecting dust in bookshelves full of expensive newer, sexier novels, that there is no other way to dispose them but to cut it’s real value. i would love to be able to talk to my children and hear them bragging about how they are receiving a better education that of that I received. Education should be improved by time, and yet it is always the opposite. When I was in high school, I asked one of my classmates if he has read this short story by Nick Joaquin, and he doesn’t even know him. I am ashamed of our lack of knowledge for these things, how do I expect kids my age to know H.G. Wells, if they don’t even know our national artist. People don’t feel ashamed that they don’t know about these great people and their equally great works, because everyone seems to not know it. Ignorance has become ordinary that everyone seem to think it’s cool, people who read and people who journey into the modern utopia become freaks. so I guess I’m a freak, then again so what?