Menthol-Guy

Dad bought me a 250 GB external hard drive from Dubai (via his officemate who had gone there recently). It should be a big help for a Windows user like me. Viruses aren’t a problem anymore. All I need is to back-up my files regularly and that’s it. I’m even planning to back-up my roommate’s files since 250 GB is so big it’s worth a lifetime.

What’s controversial with it is the slogan the product has when you open the manual. It says, “Save your life.” What?

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I was shocked that you’ve read my blog.

I was even shocked that you have read a specific post about my being guilty on what I had committed last semester–the inconsistency, particularly. It wasn’t really that good a news. I knew it was a result of the paradox of blogging privately; no matter how hard I try to protect names or make things private, people can still read them (the fact that I have published it on the Internet). Including you.

All the things I’m posting here in the Net are true. I’m terribly guilty for everything, but something else must have been going on my mind those months that I completely overlooked you. I completely discarded you from my life.

But I think I’ve made the right decision. I’m sorry if I was super numb and was too dispassionate about commitment.

The confrontation we had in the bathroom (no, we are not naked–we just talked in the bathroom since my roommate can overhear our conversation even if he kept on playing Armor for Sleep songs) was something new. We never had anything taken so seriously.

As of the moment, I didn’t have any regret with anything. I’ve been thinking of it for months and I know it’s a right decision–no matter how self-centered, conceited my reasons were–to leave you. I’ve made up my mind.

I hate myself for letting you fall for me. I hate myself seeing you in that very pit, drowning, and I even hate myself for leaving you just like that. I’m numb and dumb, selfish and egoistic.

I respect your right to be furious, but I hope you would also consider cherishing (or at least remembering) the times we have spent together as friends. I just hope that whenever our eyes met around the campus, you wouldn’t avert your eyes from me. I want to know we’re cool after all these things. But I know your rage against me is simply insuperable.

“Haven’t you ever thought of me and my feelings and what those things you’ve done had affected me in ways?”

No, I haven’t thought of it. I haven’t thought or considered anything actually, and you could call me crazy anytime and anywhere you want.

My laptop has been repaired. The technician did the following repairs: he reformatted my hard drive (from Windows XP Media Center to a humble Windows XP, big deal shit) and partitioned it into two. (I suddenly liked that term–partitioned. It isn’t so technical.) Also, he backed-up my files first before doing the said repairs–then put them back again as if nothing had happened. But I knew all along he’d miss something.

My “My Documents” folder has this subfolder, and it’s named “My Documents” too, right after I first injured my laptop due to stray viruses from my roommate’s iPod (it was a misplacement I lived with). I knew he’d miss that subfolder. I don’t know why but I really had a hunch that he’d miss it; I assumed he thought it was just a replicating folder made by a virus. That subfolder contains virtually everything from my High School life–my first pictures with a Sony Cybershot (shitty pictures), also my first time in New York and my revisiting California during summer 2007 (my firsts in New York–first subway ride, first everything) to name a few. Though there isn’t much in that subfolder than shitty pictures and High School faces, I still can’t help but sigh.

The incident wasn’t really painful for me. I’m just probably an extreme shitload of sentimental; it’s probably the most Confucian trait I have. I actually keep receipts–bus receipts, Starbucks receipts, Booksale receipts–hoping that I could make something out of it. I take pictures out of sentimentality, out of capturing something in a fragment of time, besides its aesthetic and artistic value it has for me. I’m just really sentimental, that’s all. When I left a bracelet I bought from Vigan in a friend’s house, I quickly texted her, even telling her that it was such an important accessory.

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In my Literature class, when you look back into the past, you’re Confucian. When you don’t, that’s when you become a Taoist. It’s the traits implied and embedded throughout those Chinese stories we had to read–The Dream of Red Chamber, Waves of the Wind–to name a few. I don’t really consider these things as religions; I rather look at them as philosophies.

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My cousin, Brian, once had this external hard drive (It can store to a whopping 120 GB). He brought it over in the house once for my eyes to feast, but it turned out–physically–to be a huge junk of a metal. It’s as big as an average CPU, to think that it’s only for storage. He bought it in Gilroy, when he was still working in Mountain View as some computer technician or something.

He toured me inside his external hard drive and there were tons and tons and tons of songs, around 8000 songs all in all, from Bob Marley to Velvet Revolver, from Siakol to Kanye West. The number of folders was benumbing; it was unbelievably infinite–or almost. Since then, I considered him as the coolest cousin I have; because of him, I was able to watch Eurotrip and drink beer with eight of his friends when I was fourteen. Fourteen, for chrissake. He also plays the bass in their band. In his Myspace page he brags that he was not into weed, didn’t have any tattoos. He’s “straight-edge as shit”.

Regrettably, his external hard drive went haywire (I didn’t have the time to ask him why). I think my Chinese, English-speaking uncle mentioned that he almost cried over it. “Like a baby,” he exaggerated. Then he got his girlfriend pregnant. The catch is, he first went back to California for a four-month vacation before even facing reality (he knew all along he got his girlfriend pregnant). It was totally ironic of him to even get his girlfriend pregnant. He used to tell me to “wear my helmet all the time.”

Last year, around May, he called me and proposed my being the godfather of his daughter, Summer.

I think he named it summer because they did it in summer, or that his daughter killed his summer vacation. But either way, he had to face the truth. Shit, when I saw him wearing long sleeves during his daughter’s christening, when I was sitting in the church pews and all with my Dad and my uncle, I almost thought I was dreaming.

Wait, how did Brian get into this in the first place?

One of my Christmas gifts for myself is this book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I went to Fully Booked Trinoma and inquired for a collection of Nick Joaquin’s short stories. Unfortunately, they didn’t have one–a rejection I had heard from both National Bookstore and Powerbooks, thus prove that Nick Joaquin is too elusive.

With a stroke of luck I came across this Pulitzer-prize winning book (the slightly embossed golden circle at the cover can’t be missed) at Fully Booked. Told myself I have to at least buy something for myself.

Then, shit, it’s a good book.

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