Menthol-Guy

Willful submission

Something’s terribly wrong with me while taking the Macroeconomics exam. Willful submission, I would like to call it. I was at peace. Surrender from the bullets of all those mathematical equations, I told myself. Days ago I have been planning on making homemade bombs made of chicken’s proventriculi soaked in gasoline (a much-celebrated delicacy on the university’s outskirts) that would successfully detonate itself with a button’s click at my professor’s office, hopefully destroying the exam copies or anything to postpone the exam but after thinking about lighting a pack of these entrails I suddenly thought of abandoning the bullshit. In Fight Club, Palahniuk listed on certain recipes for homemade bombs: two quarts of nitroglycerin, orange juice, wood shavings, but my attempt was loosely planned. So maybe I had to take the exam - the awful one-and-a-half hour exam - the exam that made students yelp and grasp for tissue papers in hopes of blotting their bleeding noses.

Where had I gotten myself into? Nowhere. I was really good with theoretical questions, if you want to know the truth, but it only had forty points to push my way out of the pits of hell. The graphical analysis was definitely easy but the computation bored me. I was just skinning my lips throughout the examination the way troubled catatonics would do things like that in this absent-minded way, staring at an imaginary conduit, thinking about morphing this whole dungeon into something else. But - oh well - I failed the exam and I’m sure of it.

After the exam, I briskly walked straight to my dorm and slept for four full hours. This is my vacation.

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Haslett stories

There’s something about short stories that really excites the hell out of me: the length of it. I was about to drill a hole on my laptop reading Murakami’s ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicle‘ not really because it was exceptionally boring (well, it wasn’t on some parts) but it was awfully long (compared with his short stories, obviously). Also, I can’t see any progress. The scenes down the well goes on and on until it lulls you to sleep. It’s enchantingly weird, yes. It’s definitely this deranged, out-of-this-world kind of novel. But it lacks the suspense. Kumiko’s whereabouts was not yet even mentioned ever since she left Toru’s house on the first few chapters of the novel.

However, Murakami’s ‘After Dark‘ barks the other way around: it’s a short story with seemingly brutal pincers to drag you close to the story no matter how distant you are.

J.D Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ for me is a short story (I have yet to know the standards for consideration to render a story short or novel in length). David Sedaris’s ‘Me Talk Pretty One Day‘ is an anthology of wildly entertaining short stories enough to make you laugh pretty longer than a usual Bob Ong book would do (err, I can’t remember myself laughing while reading ‘Ang Paboritong Libro ni Hudas‘). And Jessica Zafra’s ‘Twisted‘ series, of course.

However, Adam Haslett’s ‘You Are Not a Stranger Here‘ is a startling literary debut, somewhat close to Jhumpa Lahiri and her startling Pulitzer prize-winning debut, ‘The Interpreter of Maladies‘ in terms of its approach and its impeccable choice of concepts and storylines. But Lahiri’s work is more of cultural - focusing on Indian immigrants and some third-world stories; Haslett’s work is more of experimental and psychological. I’ve read three stories from his abovementioned anthology of short stories and all turned out to be clasically good and heart-warming (especially the story about this mother who got four digits of her right hand chopped away with a meat cleaver by his meth-drugged son, really dramatic).

Short stories are somewhat made for the hectic and for the work-bloated. When in the mood, I would read these short stories while waiting for a jeepney ride - you rarely miss the story since you can still manage to keep up with the pacing, and the fact that it’s short urges you to hasten your progress (since a back-to-back leaf can be read within a minute) and finish the story.

And oh, it costs forty pesos. One of the million things to love thrift shops like Booksale.

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In case you haven’t heard

Well, I’m sick. I’m having bouts of frustration these days ever since I lost my flash drive (which explains the minimal blogging), my umbrella, my newly-bought lighter and recently, my laptop charger. All of them lost in an entire week. Oftentimes, when these things happen in daily succession as if it contains an underlying pattern around it (chaos theory?), I can’t help but blame things. Probably there are dwarves around. Or thieves fancily dressed and invisible. Or ghosts. Or distractions - yes, probably I’ve had enough exams these days to make me lose the nuts and bolts which were keeping my head intact.

• The loss of the flash drive was indeterminable: I can’t even remember where I left it, when I last used it (but I can’t help but suspect that it’s in my bedroom). The loss of the umbrella was pure stupidity: I left it on the jeepney ride, but it was really thoughtful of that lady besides me to call me in this hushed, respectful tone as if I was born precisely a decade ago before her: “Kuya, yung payong mo.”
• So I reprimanded myself and told myself to keep it on my bag, but I hadn’t. I lost it while I was constantly reminding myself to keep it - ironic, I know. I was in Laguna when it suddenly occurred to me that I forgot to pack my umbrella on my bag, so it’s probably sitting on the red-leathered passenger seats of that bus that brought me to Cubao.

• The lighter got lost after I slept on a friend’s house. I wrapped it on my handkerchief while sleeping and the next thing I know it was gone. Both the umbrella and the lighter were newly-bought: the umbrella was a week old, the lighter lasted for a good hour on my property.

• I discovered that I lost the charger Tuesday night since my laptop went low-bat and it took me forever to find the charger. Then, it occurred to me that I lost the charger. So the next day I went to the barracks-shaped computer shop and asked the management if ever they were fortunate enough to retrieve a lost charger for a Dell Inspiron 6000 model, black in color. “No sir.” I told them that I was one of the customers that night who was surfing the net using their Wi-Fi. “No sir,” they insisted.

I started calling myself stupid, absent-minded, dimwit, anything else that could demoralize my morale. I’m such a lousy guy who keeps on forgetting things: was it a short-term amnesia that specializes in gadgets? Or may an amnesia for black things? See, my umbrella, my lighter, my laptop charger and my flash drive were all black. Or maybe those were black dwarves..

Then I asked myself: Where will I buy such a charger? Gilmore. Yes, Gilmore, the Mecca for technogeeks. But where will I get money? My Dad would scold me to death for losing four things (three, since the lighter shall not be mentioned ever) all at the same week.

I found the charger Wednesday afternoon at the same house where I lost my lighter. I left the charger there.