Menthol-Guy

Two balikbayan boxes arrived last Friday. Aside from plates and kitchen utensils, books of Didion and Schlink, they also sent me…

A shirt with Captain America in it.

Papyrus bookmarks (covered in plastic) from Egypt featuring a sneak peek of the Egyptian mythology and hieroglyphs.

160 personalized stickers with my name on it; the overall design is completely revolting, as if–no–it IS for nine year-olds.

“Well, your Mom left you when you were nine,” Dad said. He had sensed my point, since I, on the verge of rage, made a brief soliloquy (”Maybe she just got Alzheimer’s…”) about the reasons why my Mom sent it.

“Let’s have a quiz tomorrow! About the stickers! It’d be fun!” Dad said with excitement. We always make fun of things at the right time.

I was wondering why New York sent these things; it seems like a joke worth laughing at, but the mere form of a Balikbayan box–the solemnity, even, as we slashed away the masking tape that had sealed it–staves off anything as comical as a Captain America shirt.

It could be the recession. I imagine Mom traipsing through the SALE section of Target or TJ Maxx, finding for the right T-shirt to give little Kevin, and there it is! Radiating something iridiscent, something that tickles her eyes is a Captain America shirt. It will fit Kevin perfectly, she must have thought.

She must have been walking along Canal Street (she buys fresh prawns and roasted ducks there) when she stumbled upon El Fayrouz, an Egyptian bookmark stall, and she remembered little Kevin and the pile of books sitting besides him. She bought it even if the bookmark has Nefertiti on it.

Painfully so, she must have remembered little Kevin at some Christmas shop because they sell personalized stickers–and one of it has the name of her youngest little boy. “I am so much grateful you guys have Kevin stickers,” Mom exclaims with delight in the counter. “Really.”

These balikbayan boxes are sent to the wrong people–or at least, to the people they think they know. It might be safe to say that the distance between Mom and I has been highlighting our anonymities, that the former mother-son relationship has been turning out to be a relationship we have with strangers.

Maybe I should consider introducing myself again to my family in New York. I should start with “Hi, I’m Kevin, and I really love reading books but that, umm, it isn’t suffice to say that I also read comic books, because the thing is: I don’t. I like…” and maybe my introduction would last for a good thirty minutes, snobbing some comments and interruptions (I thought you like Nefertiti! Mom interjects), but would a thirty-minute speech be enough to close the distance and enrapture ourselves in the relationship we used to have?

Yeah, baby. Caption this picture if you can.

What’s awesome with French is that you have to pronounce it nasally as possible. As if you have colds. Of course I have colds almost all the time–damn those pollens. (My favorite French sentence is je suis perdu. It means I’m lost. It means a lot to me, I dunno why.)

My notepad is swarming with things to blog. It says:

I have so many things to talk about, to write about, but it seems like all those things just go away when the situation calls for it. Like that kid in Rocket Science, all the stuttering (mine has to be a mental case of stuttering). No matter how much I’ve composed the things I want to write, it goes off all of a sudden.

My search terms are making me curious. It’s full of Menthol-guy PANTAS or PANTAS UPLB. Oh well, I was just… I’ve just become. I’m now (the grammar whore in me suis perdu!) a member of PANTAS (Pandayan ng Talino at Sining) UPLB, a writing organization in the university. If you guys are interested in writing or reading, just leave a comment and JOIN! It’s fun. Really.

Since I’m on my semestral break already, I went back home last Friday. For three days, I hibernated. My Notepad says:

My room makes me feel fucking whitewashed, and only the balcony–overseeing the roofs of the neighborhood and the trees and everything–makes me sane when I’m home.

You guys must be having an idea with what I’m typing in my Notepad. Anyway, I have just arrived in Los Banos to HAVE FUN with the Internet connection we have in the apartment, plus the company of my friends. I think I hear someone shouting “LET’S DRINK!!!” somewhere. I should check them out.

I’m reading Vintage Amis, a collection of short stories by Martin Amis (there’s also Vintage Didion and Vintage Murakami, both are pretty interesting). He’s hilarious. His writing seems very masculine (so far). Not really Hemingway masculine but I think you’d get the point.

It’s funny how I got teary-eyed with that song Jude Law and a Semester Abroad by Brand New. It gives me the shivers. It’s really punk rock and all, from their first album, but the substance it has really knocks me down. It has this lyrics:

Tell all the English boys you meet
about the American boy back in the States,
the American boy you used to date
who would do anything you say.

It’s… I don’t know why I’m feeling sadness over lyrics I didn’t even experience, but maybe it’s the sympathy working on me. It’s just sad. It plays on my head and I imagine this guy brooding over his girlfriend—no communication at all, assuming that maybe his girlfriend had met Jude Laws in England, Jude Laws who are oozing with fucking sexual appeal and all—and he’s left back in the States.

And all he’s wishing is the acknowledgement he wants from his girlfriend, to at least tell her English boys about that American boy back in the States.

I hope I can breathe after this.

The thing is: I want to talk about a lot of things. We could talk for an entire night and end up around 6AM at Mini Stop. It’s better if I could share cigarettes with you. The best place to start a conversation is in a coffee shop, the one with a veranda where you could see the merge of the sky and the street, in the middle of the snaking outlines of electric wires.

In this blog I don’t think I could talk about anything here. It either gets pretentious or very careful, the words very select. But in real life, we could talk about anything and everything with coffee in one hand and a cigarette on another.

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What I’ve been wanting to make is this short story–or probably a vignette, or a snippet of my mind–about how people would react to death eighty years from now. It’s about meeting this guy telling you that some Samantha you both know died, and that he said it so casual you would wonder why.

Eighty years from now, people must have been living in Mars or wherever. Death must have been so usual because typhoons last for two weeks, dry spells last for almost a year. Maybe religion has been dethroned of its original power, for science has successfully made a pill for eternal life. Maybe the use of cryogenics on people through submerging them in liquid nitrogen for preservation has been introduced.

The point is that the duality of life and death, by that time, has been insignificant enough.

Thus the lack of appreciation with life, that certain ticking of time on top of our heads gone for we know we will last forever. Our goal is to live forever, not to create something that will. What could be the driving force for something eternal to exist, other than the fact that something benefits from it?

I would probably hate it when life would lose its suspense factor.