Menthol-Guy

Since Thursday I’ve been drinking every night. I get by with a beer each night (though with exceptions–Saturday and Sunday I drank hardcore drinks). It helps you clear things, gives you the heat you need in a summer night or the heat a simple jack-off can give you.

I’m quite sleepy.

I acknowledge these kinds of things when I’m quite tipsy:

1. I’m an introvert no matter how I deal with people. Even the personality test we took in my Psychology class told me I am an introvert.
2. I think of stories to write, but what sucks is that the morning after, I completely forget about that something (which I would always believe is something magnificent).
3. I think of how unintellectual my mind goes when it comes to handling I-don’t-really-know-what, specifically. Critical papers? Rewriting stories? Tolerating the mush of people? Korean fucked-ups throwing garbage across you as if you’re a streetlamp?
4. With Koreans I have empirical bases. Some Korean guys here in the university play soccer and these boys are just fucking braggarts. They threw garbage as if Filipinos were vassals or something. It’s disgusting, these chinks of a nation (and I’m sorry for Super Junior fans–really, I’m not generalizing). There’s another instance at Jolibee when two Korean guys were hissing at the waiter like it was fine fucking dining. It was absolutely unnerving the way these Korean guys (what Asians!) get around Filipinos like we’re filth.
5. I guess I’m quite incoherent when I wrote “chinks of a nation” but I guess you guys understand that?
6. When I reread number four I thought I misspelled Jolibee.
7. It’s funny how people make an effort to say goodbye to people who says they’re about to go because they want people to say goodbye to them. Do they really have to say they’re going to get something decent before they go? It’s better if you–nah, it’s too mushy.
8. I have this hunch I’ll be late tomorrow for my interview at the U.S. Embassy for my VISA renewal. This hunch is getting more solid with my tardy records for the past, uhh, ten years. (I started getting late when I was in fourth grade; I even bribed my teacher that my sister would make a cake for her; I lied to her and told her we have this bakeshop named Blue Ribbon.)
9. Sarcastic smiles and fake hellos. Oh my god, Hale.
10. I haven’t written my critical paper due Wednesday, entitled “A Critical Analysis of Haruki Murakami’s Tony Takitani (in both text and film media): Post-Colonialism Hybridity”. How cool does that sound.

I’m trying my very best to find the Publish button.

I try not to miss people.

I don’t know why or how I do it but it works. You see, before you even make friends with someone consider this fact: there will come a time when goodbyes are the right thing to say. It will always happen. So don’t cling too much. Brace for the things to come. Expect the worst things–she dying in a car crash, she dying in a train collision. Reserve a tiny bit of everything for yourself.

It’s as if to say you should think (or probably tell) all your eulogies about her while she’s still living.

It’s funny, but I don’t really feel anything right now. They go teary-eyed over things. I don’t. Sometimes I miss the feeling of missing people.

While my roommates study the anatomy of a chicken (its comb, to be specific), I study four different texts of hardcore nature with terms such as “hermeneutic praxeology” and from time to time cites Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan like they were still fucking alive–four different texts with verbose and seemingly intangible (not only the form but also the meaning) concepts for an eighteen year-old. I only read novels with plots, the climax most of the time makes my day. This doesn’t have any fucking climax or any twist at all.

I am taking Critical Writing (ENG 103) this semester, and the bulk of it presses the students to read thick handouts of post-structuralists, among other criticisms. (Yeah, fuck it.) But the thing I felt a while ago, after leaving the class, was the same thing I felt whenever I leave my coma-inducing Philosophy class a semester ago. I call it “intellectual masturbation“, for the lack of a better term (though I have heard of the term but am unsure of the meaning), since it leaves you dumbfounded, removed from reality, the same pupil-dilating feeling you get during climax. I easily forget group meetings, my LSS, my schedules. I am so absorbed by the concept that it leaves me suspended from reality, as if I were in the limbo between reality and the inner workings of my mind, never withholding the interest for such highfalutin concepts, but never wanting to seem insanely withdrawn from reality.

I suddenly couldn’t concentrate with something, like this blog post, because my head aches. My head fucking aches from over-thinking, over-analyzing, and that the only solution (eventually, I knew about it) is to close my eyes for a couple of hours.

But I couldn’t just let go of the concepts; I want this. I somehow like this feeling of thinking something that isn’t mundane, of a problem I could just drop if I want to–since most people don’t give a damn about it anyway. (In short, it’s making a problem out of something, intellectually speaking.) Last semester I wanted to extend my Philosophy class for a good three hours–who cares if my nose bled–just for me to have enough time to relish this state of intellectual masturbation which tickles my mind, and which I rarely feel with other subjects.

Now I’m having trouble whether I should still think about it or not.

It’s one of those nights where it’s too late for yesterday and too early for tomorrow.

Well, I was lying in my bed in this Norman Mailer way–I mean, the way Norman Mailer’s character in The American Dream might have done it, smoking a cigarette stick and just blowing it away to the ceiling. It’s a classic way of smoking, methinks, with Cherry or Donna sleeping besides you, the way they must have looked like in the 60s or 70s, or the way those hipster polaroids depict it. I have just finished watching Insomnia from the laptop, directed by Christopher Nolan (I’m finding my way around directors lately; I think that I should know the directors too, out of respect), and by the time I was smoking my last cigarette through the Norman Mailer way (I should reread again that book if I would ever grow up, since I couldn’t exactly grasp the entire plot, sorry) my iTunes started playing blink-182.

When I was in my High School (here we go again) I used to listen to them. Not really non-stop and all that exaggerated fanboy lines, no. This Dell of a laptop first broke down in its first year, in 2007, and all my music files were wiped out from the system–my blogging archives and my music, including my entire blink-182 discography. I soon got tired of redeeming my entire library back (which is full of Saosin and Senses Fail, heh) so I didn’t give a shit about my library until recently, when I tried logging in to my Last.fm account.

I downloaded some of their albums I liked last Friday and it hit me.

One of my personally memorable posts in Utakgago.com is entitled “Songs as Memory Cards”, and though it did fail (unanimously!) in its attempt to narrate or pose this capability of songs to save memories, well, I still liked the thought. I don’t even think the readers understood what I’ve said in that post; they thought it’s esoteric, or that it is just some fucked up delusion I made

What hit me is that whenever I listen to blink-182 songs, I don’t remember High School. At all. BUT it gives me shivers, for in the summer of 2007 at Fort Lee, New Jersey, when I was at the backseat of the Subaru my sister used to own, I was listening to blink-182’s Down. (I do have an unquestionably sharp memory.)

At my sixth puff I was listening to Stay Together For The Kids, and it was eerie to listen to, in a night like that. November. The biting cold.

As I type this I’m listening to All The Small Things and all I remember was their awesome video–they were nude, all right, and they looked like Backstreet Boys and shit and it was beyond hilarious.

I know some of you guys don’t like blink-182 since they’re punk, or that you hate tattoos who happened to look like men (or rockstars, or Pharrell). But to put it generally, there are certain kinds of songs where we develop this special, personal (even biased) intimacy. Our spines shiver, our faces smile, our eyes well with tears out of the nostalgia we stoically deny. May it be blink-182 or that braided Britney Spears singing in the late 90s–or even Sammy Davis Jr. for all I care–the point of those special songs we have on our playlists, on our iPods or what-have-yous, is to refresh memories in our minds. It could torture us to the point that we would want to delete the song or crack the CD (don’t do it; I’m also on the verge of deleting my blink-182 songs because of the same reason) but that’s life: it’s a royal pain in the ass no matter where you go. At least you’re listening to a song. I’d be damned if it’s blink-182, too.

That way, they’re memory cards. I don’t really care if you guys understand it, but this is better than the former write-up (which is so last 2007; bordering on palm-in-the-face sentences and awkwardly written emotions).