This is ridiculous. I’m so absorbed spending all 160 characters in a single text message, that a single affirmation, a yes, I’m goingtext becomes yes, I’m going, and if you’re not going you can meet me tomorrow around 9PM in the apartment, third floor, third door on the left side. All the possibilities are compressed in a single message. Creative, yes, but text messaging has been consuming more time, and it might just kill me while driving (I don’t have a car), or while crossing the street with my fingers texting Dad: I might not go home this week, though it depends if the Math exam will push through. Will my roommate would lend me money?
These days, shortening (distorting) words in a text message is not a crime. It’s pressing me to be practical, to the point that I shall type wrds lyk dis. Oh, I don’t know. It’s nice to look intelligent with whole blocks of words, like an essay, in a text message.
Though it successfully abolished the option of forwarding quotes from the inspired and the God-driven, texting, in my case, is becoming a… Herculean task (I shiver at the term because I discovered it from a friend’s notebook back in fifth grade, and I still have the guts to use it!). Very, very Herculean. It’s taking so much time.
I can hear the pleas of friends in their apartment windows. It’s either they ran out of load or they ran out of load.
Fuck, groupmates, let’s just chat on Facebook.
This entry was written by , posted on August 17, 2010 at 11:43 am, filed under IRLs, Opinion. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
A friend, who had the knack of explaining the most beautiful things in life, said that humans only use ten percent of their brain. She said this like a normal fact. She also said that when humans use ninety (or a hundred?) percent of their brain, they can have the ability to resist hunger and thirst, and they can fly.
I said it’s bullshit, and whoever made that ass-fuck research was either high on weed or high on weed. So I told her I don’t buy it, though it’s pretty interesting to believe in it. It’s a human fantasy to fly, to escape. To see things the way birds do, because birds are free, because they can fly at their own volition, knifing the wind and the sun and the rain.
This entry was written by , posted on August 6, 2010 at 9:03 am, filed under IRLs, Opinion, Pensive shits. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I stayed for two days in Manila for Cinemalaya, but instead of writing about my disappointments with a certain film (so far, the films in the competition are either amazing or dismaying in an epic scale), I’d rather talk about my learning to desecrate the city. I learned how to hate the fastfood chains and their prices (a cup of rice for PhP25 compared to the PhP7 in the province, and don’t ever dare to explain economics because I know the basics of it), and the smoke-belching cars and the unforgiving pedicabs which would mistake people as debris (and they don’t say sorry; no sir, in Manila they don’t, because they think they either pay taxes or consider themselves kings of Vito Cruz). The trains are always packed, always late, and the jeepney rides are frightening for most of the time the snatching happens there. The streets are never empty, never silent, save for the dark alleys and abandoned buildings with security guards smoking in front of the surveillance camera screens. Children selling sampaguita usually perform headstands to catch your attention. The standard of living is bullshit when equated with the minimum wage (and the average wage as well). In a jeepney ride I tried calculating the expenses when, for example, I earn Php 15,000. Apartments are expensive as fuck. Add everything else: the bills, the laundry, the food bought at supermarkets, the dinner dates which, out of respect and self-consciousness, should happen in either Italianni’s or some feel-good restaurant at The Fort, it’s impossible. The city is a robber and the very mechanism which destroys lives, which desensitizes feelings, which sags the eyes and steals from humans the ability to be human. I don’t like malls and clubs and condominiums. I don’t feel very comfortable with fashionable people and their Taglish (I wouldn’t like to brand them conyo simply because I respect them and their environment; I think the term is degrading) and their flaunting their Macbooks and the frequent sips on their Mocha Frappes and their playing their car keys with their fingers (or worse, the driver smoking beside their car, doing the same thing with car keys). I like it here, in Laguna, where you wake up without the combustion of jeeps and cars and the sticky smog, that Manila feeling in the hands which felt soiled for an entire day, the dirt coming from the handrails and basically anything you touch. Who cares about coffee shops when you have the solitude of the province, away from the stringencies of time and the overpasses and the first-world illusion? I wake up with free WiFi and a breathtaking sunrise from my cheap apartment window, a carinderia across the street serving a heavy meal for Php37 pesos (and if Nanay memorizes your face she might just give you an extra helping of anything), a university five minutes away on foot, thirty seconds on tricycle, and at night you can even smoke weed on the streets, I shit you not. I feel very thankful that I’m still here, studying. This place taught me one thing I thought I’d never realize: the fact that the city is just not for me. When I was a freshman Laguna feels so jologs with all the accents and the buko pie madness and the indecisive weather (ten minute rains are fucking awful), but now I guess I’m a local.
This entry was written by , posted on July 12, 2010 at 4:03 am, filed under IRLs, Life at UPLB, Opinion, Stress ball narratives. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.