April 13

Entrance test on the 21st. Hardly studied. Science is very different even though it's pretty much the same topic. We didn't learn the Newton's three laws in secondary 1.

I cannot even digest a paragraph of physics. There is no motivation. What I want to do is write, and when I write I do not need and definitely do not want to calculate the speed of my typing mentally, or calculate the diameter of a period, or compare how I write my Ys depending on my mood and try to find a pattern.

At least I can recite the definition of osmosis, I know that I can become HIV positive participating in anal sex, and that the world is in fact not flat.

Well I know that I do need to get into a good college/university/whereever I'm supposed to go after high school so I can take journalism, but I've never been much for having dreams about future schools.

I can spend hours writing up a blog entry, sit patiently and understand the relationship between aperture and shutter speed. I can stare at an inanimate object for a long time, taking mental pictures of how light falls onto my pen, how it creeps across and illuminates the texture on the palm of my hand. I can look up every single word that isn't already of my knowledge.

But read a high school science textbook and memorize a handful of formulae? I could try until money trees actually sprout dollar bills.

Shakespeare was tedious enough for me, but the Shakespeare of the Philippines for high school literature? I can hardly tackle 6th grade Tagalog.


Regret could possibly be evidence that happiness never sticks around for long and once it brings you high enough, it disappears and sends you crashing down, leaving you in a worse state than before.

Then again, if you've never regretted then you've never actually lived, right?

The aged tell you they don't regret anything in their life.

Then again, lying is one thing a person never grows out of and the world cannot function without.

It is how you learn, they say, how you make yourself better, they say.
As If they never think about how they could have turned out even the least bit differently.
Because there is no Best. It doesn't exist.

'Best' is almost like faith.

Every thing and every person is flawed. If I say someone or something is perfect, it isn't because it's flawless, it's because I accept everything.
If everything is perfect then nothing will be, and that's terrifying.


When I think, I actually write in my head. I was at Recollections on Wednesday, a 1.5 hour long sermon by a priest that is supposed to serve as reflections for Holy Week. Thing is, I couldn't really understand what he was saying, because that's what happens when you sit in the middle row of a huge church with bad acoustics and an even worse sound system. All the words echo and the echoes overlap the new words and so on. Like a ripple effect.

So I-oh hug-ahye-d hhugged-him ah-hi-nd ki-ah-ssssssed

" - Him on the forehead." You get the picture, it's annoying to type out.

Anyway. This is what wrote itself out in my head when he said a few lines I did understand because he was talking more softly:

   My father asked,

          Air conditioners whirr.
      Air conditioners whirr.

-
Because he was choking up in tears, you know? He couldn't talk. So for about 30 seconds all you could hear was the sound of the air conditioners and you could feel everyone looking at him. Those who weren't looking before look up to watch him. Looking down in silence, the words "Is your mother dead?" magnified itself at him like a morphing monster on and out of his sermon script; he probably chanting Don't Cry Don't Cry Don't Cry in his head.

Spontaneous composition like the above is my getaway. In a way you leave yourself to jump into someone else. An escape when you are too tired and sick of yourself. On the train, or a bus, or sitting at the mall. Millions of people you don't know and you always wonder what it would be like if you did. All the while you try to figure out what he/she is thinking, observing body language, identifying the emotion in the voice. Little short stories filed away in the brain. You digest everything around you with a greedy, devouring eye after garnishing it with witty commentaries and, okay, sometimes a little exaggeration.

You learn to read people if you do this a lot and in more ways than one, that is not good.

I've changed the layout. (One leans towards the tendency of getting sick of the look of things easily if the the resolution and color is from another century.) The date's at the bottom too because what I publish is never to the date anyway, like this one. This was written dayyys back (once I put it up.)
I wonder who'll still tag now that I just linked the tagboard to the Quick URL thing. Not that so many people still tag, anyway. I do appreciate comments and you don't even have to leave your name if you fear for late realization of stupidity. Not that I think a comment would be stupid.

I've wanted to switch to Diaryland for quite a while now because Pitas doesn't have the show-one-entry-only-and-automatically-link-the-previous-ones thing, but I don't know if I can change the entry layout like I can here. I'm hoping that I can, based on the fact that the two freeservers are run by the same people.

Today in church for Holy Thursday I looked out and witnessed one of the most awesome spreads of sky I have ever seen. Or rather, the clouds. The sky itself was rather dull, a blank monotonous gray, but all the more to illuminate the clouds.
The clouds were gray. But it was also a soft yellow, hinted with soft pinks and orange. If it were personified, it would be a beautiful but devastated, tear-striken woman (Think: Alice's portrait in Closer) - an epitome of melancholy and radiance at the same time.


April 14

It isn't enough, I've figured. What I want to do/achieve. It's all in the bag, but the bag isn't filled. And to make it in this world unfortunately your bag always has to be filled. You can't boast about a hike if you didn't have weights in your backpack. It's not about what you want, it's about what the rest want from you. The Eternal Search for the Best.

(Then again, if you can emote every single felling at will, are not camera-conscious, and have a good manager, well then you're all set until retirement spent waxing your yacht, buddy. That isn't quite fair.)

I remember writing here before about not worrying about everything in between your goal, and I'm perfectly fine with that. I was doing quite well actually until I kept getting distracted by people around me. Like my parents, for example, they don't fail to tell me how school is so so so so so important. Okay, fine, to them. But I honestly do not learn from what is taught in school (which actually has a 61 000 peso enrollment fee wtf.). And even if any of this information is somehow imprinted into my brain, it won't be of any use later on. I don't want to waste time like that. But that's probably just me and my horrendous prioritizing (which everyone but me sees).

Basically there's a big empty space in the middle and what I sort of intend to do is fly across to what I want. Knock out whatever's in my way. But that carpe-diem-tackle-whatever-is-thrown-at-you has a 50% fallability rate. So, the problematic thing is that isn't enough and I'm supposed to have little pitstops and, like, mini-goals. Like a Suma Cum Laude (gah I'll check the spelling later) or a Ph.D, or something. I mean, yeah that's great, that's awesome if someone else wants it, but it's just icing on top of the cake for me and I don't need any bloody icing.

Besides, I see new sides of things/people every day. One day you're convinced that something is going to happen, or that it's going to last, and the next thing you know, it's gone, you don't know why but it is.
I try not to use the term 'change' on a person, I'd rather think of it as a different side of him/her, just that I've never seen it before. Benefit of the doubt or not, I don't care.

I asked if I still had to study Math and Science if I got to college and take journalism/writing and thank god I don't.

My grandfather keeps saying that experience is the greatest teacher. What he doesn't know? I am 16 in the year 2006. He was 16 in like the 1940s. With all the sincerity in the world, that. Just. Isn't. THE SAME.


April 17

I have crumbled under the shallow entertainment of foreign love dramedies (Korea's Wonderful Life, in this case. *cringes at the title*) because I discovered it was shot in Singapore. I guess it isn't much of watching the show because I keep straining to look at the background, and stuff. I never felt any attatchment to the country when I lived there, it always felt claustrophobic and didn't have enough to amuse you with. But it's different when you've moved away because you'll have a yearning, whether it's strong or just a little part of you, for that very feeling of being locked in something way too small. When you start living somewhere with over 7000 islands, Singapore looks cozy and warm (literally or figuratively, you take your pick). Everything is so conveniently within reach. Even though Singapore won't be on my list of places to go to get a life, it's enveloping ambience is definitely something I miss and will go back to.

Today I learned that sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was the first person who thought that the center of the solar system was the Sun and not the Earth, as the early Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy had derived from his own explorations.

I will get back to you when that piece of information becomes of use to me (besides answering an exam question correctly).


April 19

I am aware that I may contradict myself soon but whatever I say in the present is what it is Now. I/Something can change what I claim as soon as, say, tomorrow. If that made any sense.


April 21

This is how I'm going to blog from now on, accumulating everything over the week. My father hasn't been letting me use the Internet because of my exam so I resorted into further strengthening my bond with Notepad.

The Korean drama plot has gone back to Korea, turns out they don't spend the whole series in Singapore.

A couple of days ago one of my grandmother's voice students, Yollie, was persistent in making conversation with me. She was waiting for her turn, sitting at the veranda, and likewise I was there drinking my breakfast.

Usual queries of an adult towards a student - what school, what year, how old, what to you want to be. I have yet to come across someone plainly ask me what I like to do and what music I listen to. The conversation was prolonged when I said I wanted to be a writer; turns out she's taking a writing class. Immediately, she launches into the regurgitation of information every human being has a habit of doing when faced with a topic of their knowledge.

Start reading, she said, read everyday and write everyday. That's what we do in our writing class, she said with the tone of wisdom - either by habit of age, or really genuine - that comes along with your wrinkles (provided you don't consult plastic surgeons). The minute we sit down at our desks, ha! Write, write, write. Right arm does the action of writing in mid-air.

I hate it when adults talk to me like I'm 5. I was never able to change the way I speak whenever I talk to an adult, either, I've tried but it always felt so weird, so I talk to them as I would another adolescent... problem is they think it's the absence of respect rather than the absence of a generation gap. Which, well, obviously sucks because I've spent a good deal of my life sitting through lectures and counselling and stupidly I bother to try to explain every time. Never works.

Feeling belittled by her assumption of my amateurity to the ratio of my age, I told her that I've had a passion for writing and reading ever since I was young. "Young" being the summary of "since I could read Dr. Seuss and my letter 'S's and 'N's were backwards."

She told me she had taught college Accounting when she was younger. To keep the conversation from dying I asked her what exactly was done in accounting, and besides, the image in my head has always been a woman in a suit with black-rimmed glasses, sitting at a table full of papers with arithmetic to be done, fingers flying over a calculator.
What I found funny was how her tone of voice changed when she talked about it. Instead of the enthusiastic, eye-smiling manner she initially had, she looked like a robot now, taking me through Accounting 101 in 60 seconds. It was like an automated telephone operator, or the pre-recorded voice at an airport query hotline.
Except her voice wasn't all calm and sleek.

She asked me what kind of writing I do, and I wasn't quite sure how to answer the question. No, I don't do poems. More like a journal kind of thing. And yes it is every day.
I need to show it to someone, like my dad or something; for critique, she said.
Hah, not happening.

The book Tuesdays with Morrie was, for the billionth time, recommended to me. "It'll make you cry like anything," she exclaimed, dramtically wiping away a non-existant tear. I need to read that book one day, its glory has been eternal since it came out.


Hahahahahahahaha exams were dirt easy! It was just so bloody long. They were all multiple-choice and there were like 200 of them. At least 80 for English, 120 for Math and 50 of Science. All in one long, cold (I knew I should have brought my jacket) seating, no breaks. The questions may not have been difficult but the whole thing was mentally exhausting. Killed them in about 2.5 hours.

A question in the IQ test:

For there to be communication there must be ____________

a) language
b) agreement
c) talking
d) understanding


Wow. 15 KB of rambling.


Updated Sunday, April 23, 2006, 12:04 a.m..
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