when an anti-establishment hippie is established...

Alright. Lest  any of you may be thinking that I’ve gone and flung myself off a cliff---well, I haven’t.

I’m back.

And perhaps sadly for you, I am here to stay.

And guess what?

It wasn’t some over aged form of angst that had me seriously contemplating life on the other realm.

It was PMS.

Yes, that phenomenal, incorrigible disease found only in women.

And yes, my editor still hasn’t approved my article.

 

Posted by: Hoon at 09:43 | link | comments

Imagine a dull ache in your gut, a soul-sucking type of numbness that renders you motionless, bleary-eyed under the covers and hurting.

That’s it.

That’s the very crevice that for three days last week, I was stuck in.

If you’ve been tuning in to this latest dilemma of mine you will know that all this started the day the heavens decided to drown me.

But it wasn’t just about the article anymore. Being literally inept had become the least of my concerns by the time Saturday night had rolled around.

I was about to watch one of my favorite 80’s artists of all time (does anybody else remember fra lippo lippi?)

 And what was I?

 A pitiful lump of quivering flesh, void of everything outside the sphere of Sullenness.

Jason, always the last of our duo to notice anything amiss—I could be 3 minutes dead into a boring movie and he’d still be jabbering on about popcorn—was of course in top form; surveying the slowly filling stadium, zoning in seats that would warrant us the best possible Per Sorensen view…and after much networking I find myself stashed in the lower box despite holding upper box tickets. (Such is the beauty of concerts scheduled on a whipping typhoon. Everybody was asked to move one zone down; to effectively stimulate a full arena and thus gladden Per Sorensen’s heart.)

As expected, my eyes started glistening at the first strains of Stitches & Burns, tears poured forth during Light and Shade, I was blubbering all throughout Angel, and by their last song ( Beauty and Madness, of course) I had become slightly mad myself. (Loony-mad, not miffed-man.)

Fra Lippo Lippi fans troop out the exits in a respectful and orderly fashion, no riot-crazed fans storming the stage or anything wild like that. Just a good number slightly swooning and crooning,

“And cry, cry if you want them to see
Die every day to be freeeeeeee…”
And me?

I step out to cold, wet rain outside.

More than 36 hours have passed since I was first coercively drenched and

 Still…. Rain. Harsh torrential chilling neverendingrain….

I’ve begun to believe that the weather had buddied up with the levels of serotonin in my body. Conspirators in a grand scheme to depress, flatten and flush the wits out of me, and by golden gusts of Gustav, they were doing mighty well.

As I said, it was no longer about the article. The rejection only served as the Trigger, the crafty little well-timed device that blew all these mammoth emotions out of me— all these lingering bits of manic notions in my psyche, perhaps only kept at bay by my naturally optimistic wiring.

Mammoth thoughts that even the great soothing baritone of Per Sorensen was not able to purge.

I hated the rain, I hated the planet, I hated the artificiality of people, this life, the relationships I had, the relationships I’d severed, the choices I made, the choices I didn’t make, everything I left behind, everything I faced, the would have beens, the could have beens and the NeVer WiLL  beS.

And what was most frustrating was that this type of complete and absurd depression never really happens to me, little ms. ray of sunshine that I am, and I hadn’t the slightest idea WHAT. TO. DO.

So I watch the entire 1^st season of LOST the next day. In one sitting. Save for occasional bladder and gullet needs, I did not BUDGE from the bed.

Some way of coping. I expectedly end up way worse than when I began.

By midnight Sunday my eyes had a glassy sheen to it and I could no longer recognize objects.

When Jason came around from his job in the PBA all worked up about the basketball player who had a bad fall and landed on his spine and is now paralyzed I just stared at him, uncomprehending. (am able to write about it because now of course I do, at that time I didn’t, if you were planning to ask)

I had wanted him to bring me soup and when I finally sense that nothing else except more blow-by-blow accounts of The Fall was coming my way, what little fragments of sanity that I still had just shattered, into tiny shards—smash, clatter, ping. Just like that.

 

I cry and cry and cry my little orbs out.

 No Fra Lippo Lippi swelling in the background---just pure, raw, infantile tears of utter confusion.

And for the 1^st time ever, both Jason and I had no idea why.

 

Posted by: Hoon at 01:38 | link | comments (1)

Was right about ready to fling away most everything I’ve spent the last half year strengthening---my soul, my will, my beliefs.

Last Thursday, just as I had one foot planted firmly on the pavement and the other cautiously disembarking from the slightly crazy (as usual) bus ride I had just taken, the heavens, with a mighty roar, split into two.

After two and a half months of scorching heat (by scorching I don’t exaggerate. Filipinos don’t exaggerate when it comes to summer heat), ten-hour days and many many episodes of dehydrated fish moments (not me exactly, I love the sun. Don’t mind the burns one bit), Brother Weather finally decides to drown the archipelago.

For fun, I’m guessing, since in that split second since I emerged wide-eyed from the mad bus, I find myself suddenly drenched, rat-like, for no other logical reason that I can conjure. Within minutes other frantic commuters emerge from different points, and we all hightail it to the nearest building for shelter. No point really, as by the time we got there, we were all drenched tissue paper versions of our former selves.

Thus commenceth the worst weekend of my life. Ever.

On Friday morning the rains were still at it—turned out to be a real raging storm by the name of Kaloy, don’t ask me why—and so I had to lug around a hassling foldable umbrella which couldn’t fit in my bag. On a normal inferno-type day, our office’s temperature felt to me about 20 degrees below freezing, and so you can only imagine how I felt on that day of merry whooshing wind, coconut trees whipping around and all.

I was miserable, cold, and I could feel the early warnings of a terrible virus attaching itself in my larynx. As if that wasn’t enough, the article that I had just spent many of last week s frozen hours on was, in kindly shrouded spits of venom, rejected by my editor. On grounds of sounding too much like a woman. Well I was writing a piece on sex, for Freud’s sake…some touch of womanity was to inevitably flounder about somewhere.. and upon reading and re-reading and sinking deeper and deeper into words and sentences that were too flowery, too whiny, I realize with a jolt just how right my editor was.

MY ARTICLE SUCKED.

I SUCKED.

I couldn’t write.

I shouldn’t write.

I shouldn’t be working for a newspaper.

I shouldn’t be working at all.

I should have stuck to the seacows.

I should have married that Japanese American guy in the island and be living in Hawaii now, prancing in the golden sun, learning how to do the hula, learning to speak my name in Hawaiian, stretching, gazing, dreaming, burning, doing anything except sitting in this forsaken cubicle at 5 in the afternoon, wheezing and shivering, feeling like the most worthless piece of amoeba to ever occupy time, space and matter.

I hated myself.

And it was the silently nagging, inwardly settling, looming-deep-unto-the-psyche kind of hate.

So well into Friday night, I miserably cocoon myself in bed and try to drown the downpour of depression with a New York Times bestselling novel from Beth Bathhurst.?

(The book turned out to be a depressing account on teenage envy, anorexia, etc. and one of the girls gets killed in the end.)

Well into Saturday morning as the rain continued to claim the sky and SElf-loathing continued to claim me,  I determinedly begin the next novel on list, one Tourist Season mystery,

and read and read and was scared to put down the book because I knew that as soon as I did, I would be drowned by waves of insecurity  and die.

I read until I could no longer distinguish the letter A from V.

I read until I realized I had a concert to go to at 8 pm.

FRA LIPPO LIPPI NIGHT!!!!!!!

---[some seconds of rousing here]---

But then realizing I would have to trudge out in the wet streets, being destitute and having no car and effectively having to carry the stupid umbrella again and get my feet cold since I hated wearing shoes…

::::::::::::::::::::::::

gloom.

 ****************************************

*I will again, have to give you part two of THE WORST WEEKEND OF MY ENTIRE LIFE, ever, another time. It’s way past 5 and the guy cleaning our office is threatening to lock me in if I don’t get a move on, so. Yeah.

Posted by: Hoon at 10:09 | link | comments (3)

Yeah. First rainfall of the season and I get caught in it.

So here I am now, freezing my toes off in our tiny office while the world around me functioned in light fabrics

I wanted to turn down the air-conditioning but was met only by withering stares from the attorney-lawyer sect.

And then, nothing to do.

I’ve finally finished my article on Philippine dating where not surprisingly, only 2 of the 30 people I surveyed were virgins. Took me two weeks to research and compile results and three days to write. Just sent it to my editor for approval.

So now I’m left here blinking with over three more hours of nothingness staring back at me.

Did a name search on yahoo…found a lot of people who had the same name, karla vizcarra, as me.

Did a name search for old college better-left-unnamed-ables.

Got nostalgic for palawan, where I lived for over a year and searched for Carmen, just about the most beautiful being with the most beautiful island in there.

So did a search on the name of her and suncat’s island, kalipay.

Stumbled upon a blog that had kalipay in its entries.

Surprise surprise, I knew the guy who wrote it.

And got nostalgic over him.

Made me realize—the people closest to me right now

Could be just an obscure blog entry tomorrow.

Posted by: Hoon at 07:39 | link | comments (1)