Method Acting (Coming To Terms, part I)

What’s wrong with me? I’m trying to come to terms with myself – trying to see myself as another person. I don’t know if my reckoning is accurate, but here is a profile that I think I have established in my (almost) 22 years. This is just the relationships with friends. I have yet to pluck up the courage to assess myself in terms of romantic involvement with women, past and present.

 

1. I have difficulty in forging relationships with people, even relationships that should last. I am generally distrustful of strangers in immediate proximity, always considering how I appear to them (although I seldom acknowledge it). I don’t think I’m trying to establish a persona that they can relate to; I am more of trying to blend in the background, trying to attract as little attention as possible. That goes for strangers with a capital S: supermarket cashiers, jeepney seatmates, passersby, and neighbors. With relative strangers [colleagues, neighbors I know/who know me, classmates, friend of a friend (I’ll go into this more later)], I think I try to appear as one who doesn’t really care if I get to know them or not, I just want to mind my own business and to hell with it. Not that I am that kind of person, but I find it difficult to make small talk, to be spontaneous with people I don’t really know. Not doing anything is the easiest way out. I find interacting with strangers awkward.
2. I try as much as possible to keep a tight circle of friends, generally distrustful of “friend of a friend” types who might want to scrutinize me or ignore me, either for me is unacceptable. Maybe that is why it takes a long time for me to establish a kind of comfortable silence with another person, which my gauge of whether that person threatens me in some way I can only understand. Once that comfortable silence is transcended, I can consider that person as a friend. Although I would very much like to expand my social network and get to know people, I find it difficult. I am never one to initiate a conversation. I am wary of asking people questions about who they are, what do they do, what’s up with them, what do they think of this and that. I’m afraid it’ll come out as rude because I assume that I should have known all these things before I even talk to them, which is absurd, but I don’t know how to find a way around it.
3. I have no friends, the intimate ones who I can always tell everything to. The kind of friends that I can always call whenever I need something, or who will always think of including me when they want to hang out or do stuff. I have circles of friends: my colleagues, my activist friends/former housemates and my high/grade school friends. Perhaps every single person I consider a friend can only fall into one of those categories. That’s it. About deeply personal stuff, there are a few that I can tell things to, but I don’t actually have a clique I can call my own. I weave in and out of groups, mostly whenever it’s convenient for them to include me (I’m just there prowling around, they need my house, they want to make fun of me/me to make fun of them, they need me to contribute money (the second category is notorious for this). Otherwise, I have no “barkada.”
4. I used to have them, of course. In preschool/grade school, I even had a best friend, F. For a time, there was A too, but then he moved to Cebu summer before fourth grade. Then there was M and E; a friendship that can only be forged by grade school boys who know everything and itching to try everything they did not, making pacts and promises and other juvenile stuff. I high school, I became friends with C and L, but it fell apart when L changed schools and C and I fought over a girl (yeah, how ridiculous). In our junior and senior years, almost everybody had become friends by then, but I was in one of the most popular cliques with MA, MI, J, E, Y, H and W. But it was different, since it was a clique with boys and girls (and in W’s case, gay) mingling with each other. All of us, except H, were also honor student who were trying to outdo each other while at the same time helping each other out. We rarely see each other now, although we’ve kept in touch. Technology has seen to that.
5. Then in college, me, N, V, A, and to a certain extent, B, gravitated towards each other and formed a clique that I once thought was infallible. We were neighbors. I bunked with N, A lived in the building next to us, and V and B in the building after that. We saw each other every single fucking day; go clubbing a couple of nights a week, play strip pusoy/tong-its/blackjack/1-2-3-pass! with girls one of us has invited to come over, sing and dance in front of the TV to a Backstreet Boys music video, even giving each other haircuts. It fell apart: I got serious politically, N went to Japan, V joined a fraternity, B got kicked out of the university and had to come home to Mindanao and A, I don’t know what happened to him. He got kicked out eventually too, and I haven’t seen him in years.
6. After that, I got close with P. We went to rallies, we went clubbing, and we got drunk and stoned. Once, when both of us were drowning in alcohol, stoned with cannabis and prescription drugs, that he was planning to die and wanted me to be the one to pull the trigger if it came to that. We drifted apart eventually and he joined a fraternity. I guess that wasn’t a “real” friendship though, despite the things we’ve said to each other over bottles of vodka and rolls of joint. We’ve never had a “real” conversation. I still see him sometimes, but we both pretend not to recognize each other.
7. At present I have two groups of friends, one I see more than the other, but think of them as equal. First, the former housemates group. The clique: me, TC, D, MC, L, C, N, MO and TS. I was romantically involved with two of them, L and MO. I still see TC, MC, D and N sometimes. C and MO are “up there.” TS has gone insane. L is, well, I don’t know. Don’t care either. The second group is my past and present colleagues: JF, C, KM, KC, JS, D, E and S. There are others, but I’ve more or less considered this group of people my comfort zone. I don’t know what has happened but I suddenly feel isolated recently. I see KM and KC a lot since we work together, but KC has differences with some of the others. I know the others still see each other quite regularly, but I seldom get invited. JS and D are my neighbors so I get to interact with them quite often. The others, I don’t know. They’re caught up with their own problems, as I am with mine. I like them fiercely, and I want us to be like we were not very long ago. I write them comments, but I rarely get replies, even with my most innocent remarks, or those that require at least a meager response. I’m confused. But then again, JF once told me something I have never forgotten. He commented about KM and C being able to “exist” on their own, while he and KC and E can do likewise. Then he said, what about me? We laughed about it, and I don’t know if they still remember that day at the SC.
8. And now I have this blog. I have overloaded my primary blog with fleeting things and happy thoughts lately that I thought it would be weird if I get too emo all of a sudden. At least I can pretend as if someone’s reading (well, one did actually, just the first post) so I get the illusion that I can still communicate some of my intimate thoughts. This blog service has a shitty site meter (it doesn’t allow HTML) so I can’t pinpoint who has been reading, just the fact that somebody actually visited, and sometimes it doesn’t even register at all even if I didn’t log in and typed this blog’s URL directly in the address bar. Great, huh?
9. But what am I really like? I think I can be a little self-centered at times, but then who isn’t? Once I start talking about something I really like/hate, I can’t seem to stop. Sometimes I alienate people playing devil’s advocate. Sometimes I’m insecure. Sometimes I’m too proud. Sometimes I exaggerate. Sometimes I understate. But we all make mistakes, right? And that sort of stuff, I am always more than ready to talk about them in the proper setting. I don’t like being interrogated, but I find it ok if it’s just one person asking me questions. I find it hard to answer when one is talking to me and others are just within earshot and can interfere whenever. Well, I am more than enthusiastic if another person would start talking about themselves, and I can just join in like everyone else. That’s easier for me. I don’t know why.
10. The bottom line: I am REALLY lonely right now. If I didn’t work for the paper, maybe I’ll just drop out of people’s radars and be forgotten. Well, there’s the cat anyway.

You can even haha! fall in love with yourself

Reading E’s blog, I came across thisline from a poem:

You can even haha! fall in love with yourself.

Hit it straight. I know what (or to whom) the poem is about and I’m not at liberty to discuss it. But I will take it out of context and wallow anyway. Like now, I’m going home alone again and everybody’s gone with their cliques. Guess I’ll eat at home.

I’m not going to drink tonight. It will take a lot of effort to be distracted. Maybe I’ll just sleep. Damn.

Signal Theory*

I
To trudge home, the long night –

Ah, there’s the cat anyway, fighting her own phantoms
while you, calling out from across space-time
reverberating philosophies from blurred photocopies and do-it-yourself encyclopedias.
Shatter the silence with obscure riffs and refrains,
drain the bottles, smoke the cartons,
close the bathroom door and set yourself on fire.

II
Cognitive mapping is a delicate task.
You stumble and you scream, and there are
thousands of lines of code scrolling in front of you: that is the Future.
That is also the ghost of a chance. Your temporal doppelgänger is nothing but

a simulacrum. You parse your life and you disappear
in a most spectacular flash of blinding light,
its spectrum slashed into chapters,
all its properties coalescing into an incoherent piece of a vague remembrance.
Anything and everything is summed up by a memorial service,
or a body consumed by flames. And you can ask and ask
questions that will never be answered in your lifetime. Asking is a step towards
the infinite, but it is also a foray into the realm of insanity –
a horrifying schematic

of schisms and appropriations, of differences between
sentience and animation. Suspend your judgment,
everything will be as it was. Behold! the cosmos –
and your last, greatest chance to be something infinitely greater than yourself.

Interlude
Hear the whistle, come back to bed. No amount of finger pointing is sufficient
to evoke once again a semblance of a life. Come now to the fires

of the future, all the arrows painted on the soil point to it
like glowing embers in an antediluvian Night.

III
The universe will be finite eventually, when it starts contracting unto itself –
all will unfold in reverse, until the crunch that signals
the reboot of the cycle. All is all, but then we’ll all be cosmic dust
strewn into the black vastness of space. All will be meaningless,
all our memories will spin further and further into the Void. This red shift

eventually ends to the black hole of nostalgia, and while
we search for each other in between unimaginable parsecs of Space,

all is still. The stars are calling out from across the reach, but in time,
memory turns into legend, then legend turns into myth, and soon
even myth itself cannot escape the clutches of Forgetting.

IV
What of the Rogue? While the Other is cloaked in the comfort of its own,
the shadows of a thousand drunken nights resound. Many have come,
but many have left you changed but still solitary in the spectacle of fleeting laughter.
Another epiphany! And yet the realization is hollow, and it all comes back to the conclusion that in the end, we are all alone –
fighting the phantoms we have created, drowning in the Poison of our consolation.
Go home, the long walk ahead is nothing compared to the wall of silence waiting in the familiar safety of domesticity.

*First draft. Rough. To be revised in the coming days.

Well Whiskey

I have started drinking again. Well, I drink actually, but this time, I have resorted to drinking at home alone – again. Too much shit has been piling up and I don’t know how to cope. Not that I’m fucking up stuff – I think I’m doing quite well at work – but the past week, I’ve put some thought into some things and I couldn’t bear the realizations. I’m resorting to alcohol, quite idiotic, if you ask me. But it’s better than playing computer games.

Smoked pot the other night. Got really high. It was around 7pm, there was a blackout and it was pitch black. I smoked too much. I hung out with J for about half an hour downstairs, getting some fresh air to collect our wits. It was no good. I was spasming like I was being electrocuted. The five to ten minute travel back to my house seemed to go on for hours.

I hit the sack immediately. About two hours later, I woke up, feeling very hungry. The cat was playing with some newspapers, jumping around and scratching at the papers. She moved reaaallly slow. I went out, still feeling woozy, and bought some bread. Ate everything, watched the cat for a few more minutes, then fell asleep once again.

I woke up again at around 3am. I still felt like my brain was being siphoned off into the Kuiper Belt. Beside my bed was the bottle of vodka I bought some days ago. There was about an inch left. I finished the bottle, then passed out.

Sun came up. SSDD.

Something Vague

Twenty and a half hours later, I finally made the decision. Not without consulting someone else though. Well, being a girl and all, she advised me how to go about it, without giving away too much, but still keeping the lines open.

Happy birthday. That’s it. A greeting and a smiley at 11:30 pm. She replied afew minutes before 6am: Salamat!

Now it’s time to procrastinate once again.

A Scale, A Mirror And Those Indifferent Clocks

My main blog can get so stuffy sometimes. This is the rationale for this new one. Here, I can get all emo and violent. And I can write like a 15 year old.

I feel miserable. Or maybe that’s an understatement. I don’t know, I can be such an idiot sometimes.

I’m lonely, okay? I’m going nowhere, I don’t have a job, I don’t have friends, I come home every night to find the cat and an empty house all to myself.

Let me elucidate. I’m going nowhere: I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, I just do what needs to be done without thinking about the future. It’s crap, but that’s my real disposition right now. I don’t have a job: I’ve tried applying, but I’m not really all that interested about those. I don’t have friends: Not in an I’m-gonna-kill-myself sort of way, but more like I don’t have intimate friends I can turn to. Well, I have a crowd, but it’s more like I’m dragged off to some place because some people are going and I’m just there prowling around. Like being invited out of convenience, maybe. Like nobody really gets a little out of the way to include me. It’s a shitty life, being like this. I come home every night to find the cat and an empty house all to myself: That’s it. Much as I got really sore of living in a group house not a year ago, living alone has gotten really lonely when coupled with the first three.

Like right now. I have been dreading this day for weeks now. I’ve just got a little dilemma but I can’t think of anybody I can talk to about it. See, there’s this girl I like(d). She said she liked me too, and I kind of pursued it. Some stuff happened, some stuff should’ve but didn’t, and eventually it didn’t work out and we fell apart. It’s harder because we work together, and I’m kind of her superior and has to restrain and be objective and all that stuff. I find it really hard when we have our weekly meetings and get to the part where we have to spill some personal stuff (like, how’s your lovelife?). What happens is that it’s like dancing the minuet – we beat around the bush and drop hints without looking at each other. And well, everybody knows we liked each other.

There was no closure – we just drifted apart and pretended that things never happened. The last meeting we had this week however, she said some things that disturbed me greatly. The most important thing is that she wanted to talk. I let it pass by, pretending not to have gotten the hint. I wanted to think it over.

And think, I did just that. But I never really got into a conclusion. I wanted to talk to people about it, but I don’t know how to, or I don’t think they’d be interested in helping me. Or damn it, there’s just nobody there.

It’s her birthday today. I thought that this was to be an opportune time to see if we can still salvage something. I thought about giving her something. Oh well, I’m not really that kind of guy who’d give a girl stuffed toys and flowers and stuff like that. But well, I should’ve thought of something. But if I did that, she might see it as a gesture of me pursuing her again.

But if I didn’t give her anything, hell, if I didn’t even give her a call or send a Happy Birthday SMS, I’m thinking that she’ll see it as a sign that I really am not interested anymore. Girls, you know. Hard to figure out. I’ve been stalling for as long as I could, but now the shit has really hit the fan.

It’s 3am. I have 21 hours left. I’m going home. But this time, I’ll find more than the cat and the empty house. A bottle of vodka is also waiting. And a Her Space Holiday album called Home Is Where You Hang Yourself. Wow, it’s a party.