I Wrote a Poem

Adrift and without a schedule to really stick to, I wandered through the streets of Brera, Milan. In the past few years I have made a tradition out of spending Easter in Italy. This year, I found myself rather aimless and, for the first time, really just ticking cities off a list.

I was looking for an astronomical museum, aiming to reconnect with a past life. After detours and distractions, I found myself in a university, reminiscent of the one I attended three hundred lifetimes ago. It turned out the astronomical museum is not open around Easter—my plans to pass the time were dead before they could get even started. But that’s travel; you have to be flexible.

Instead, I found myself seated inside a moving art installation engulfed in the sound of literature read softly. As the sculpture rotated in its own solemn rhythm, you could, almost, see everything in the midst of the busy bustle of students and staff, tourists and travelers. Time, in dreams, is frozen, or so they say. And I was left to wonder just when—or where—the boundaries between dreams and my waking life blurred.

Time in Dreams is Frozen

It was while seated here that my mind opened up and the words came. I have been trying to write a poem for the past few months with nothing really to show for it other than scraps of embarrassing drafts. I had a high-level idea of what I want the poem to be, how it would work, but ideas are not art until realized.

One cold December night, in the busy scramble of last year, I thought I had the words but I forgot them like a dream evaporating from the first rays of daylight.

But I did not feel the need to rush and write down the words as they came to me in Brera. The past few years, I have come to learn how to kill my babies, figuratively speaking. If you make one good piece for every ten attempts, the only way to be prolific is to keep attempting, get the bad out of your system so you can get to the decent much quicker.

These words are not precious if I could not still remember them by this evening, hopefully in my hotel, where they will be written down for the first time.

Fortunately, they came to be. There is at least one person in the world who found the formulation strong enough that he cannot forget them; they were worth remembering at least a bit more longer. And now he’s sharing those words, without further ado.


Shadows in Summer Skies

I drown
in a paradoxical sea of binaries,
of contradictions mutually defining each other,
of contrasts defining form.
Light and dark.
Plus and minus.
You and me.

(We are drowning
in a paradoxical sea of binaries,
whether you know it or not!)

The words have been drained
from this pen,
from my hands,
from the soul;
these are the last ones
and yet they fail my goal
to deify and sanctify
the very air you breathe
the very space you take
the very…you.

I drown
in waters uncharted.
I guess I am afraid,
that when all the words have been said
when all the praises have been sung
all the hallowed verses immortalized
I will find
inside
Merely you.
Beautiful. Still. As you are.
And yet, mortal.
Not an emanation of the Divine.
Not the ethereal resonance of the celestial choir.

From a whole divided,
Comes forth identities multiplied.
From the darkest night,
Breaks forth the dawn.
The Beauty Surrounds.
And yet all I have to remember your presence
is that sacred and terrible air of your absence.


Well, what else can I say? Over the years I have come to appreciate art for the abstraction with which it delivers messages. As such, I am not really inclined towards over-explaining my art. There is a message, yes, but much of it will be left as an exercise to the reader. No, there is no solution key either.

(How terribly author-is-dead postmodern of me. But I will leave my complicated thoughts on postmodernism for another time. Perhaps.)

This much I will say about this: I have been very deliberate about the form and the words. It doesn’t mean there will be no wrong interpretations; it just means my message, once decoded properly (for some definition of the word “properly”), will be very strongly supported by the poem. Who is it for, what is it for, etc.

I like the intrigue. My greatest achievement in this mortal plane will be to buy a decommissioned lighthouse that I will reside in. My greatest achievement from the planes beyond would be if people (hi Academia) analyze the bunch of writings and journals that I will leave behind, reading between every damn line, distinguishing the purposeful puns from the accidental, maybe subconscious, wordplay. I like to think that from my artifacts, it is possible to reverse-engineer the unwritten rules of my work, my life. You’ll chase a bunch of red herrings, finding patterns where none exist. It will be glorious. It will be crazy. Okay, mostly crazy. It will spawn at least a couple dozen professorial chairs, maybe in my Alma Mater if not elsewhere. You are welcome, intellectuals, I just gave a handful of you in the future purpose in life.

Okay. That’s a looooonnnngggg shot. But in our consumerist capitalist society, dreams remain free. I’ll leave that in.

Another thing about the poem, I mentioned above how I had only a high-level idea of how the poem would work. Well, the concept on which I wanted this poem to operate (and which, I think, it achieved) is contrast. Lately, I have had a lot of thoughts about art and I have come to the position that perhaps the baseline that distinguishes art from kitsch is contrast. Elaboration is left as an exercise to the reader but you can take my 0.02€ worth of advice. Contrast is the baseline of art.

Is this poem about me or my life in any way? The short answer is yes. The long answer is yeeeeeesssssss. The smart answer is that I find it disingenuous to respond any other way. One can write about, for example, war, without ever having personally experienced the horror, and it will be no less a mirror of the author’s life.

But maybe, for this poem, it’s more than a mirror. Maybe it’s a window.

Anyway, another strong influence for this poem is the critically-acclaimed intellectual game Disco Elysium. No, I still haven’t found my next Bioshock Infinite. As a matter of fact, my experience with Disco Elysium has been very confusing. This is not a detailed analysis of the game so, suffice it to say, the way the game was set-up dissonated very heavily with my idea of an RPG. Whereas, for contrast, I had some idea of how I would like to personify my Geralt of Rivia or my Dragonborn, I had zero idea how to roleplay renowned alcoholic and amnesiac Harry Du Bois. So I ended up choosing the most non sequitur choices for better and for worse. I needed the thinnest of threads to tie me to the character and, at least, that manifestation of chaos is something we could share.

All this changed in the final act of the game, its denouement. For the first time, I felt like I knew what Harry Du Bois would do in the situation. His character made some sense. I won’t spoil the game but I wrote this poem from the soft places between dreaming and waking that I, as a player, went through with Harry. It is definitely not written as from Harry Du Bois—I simply don’t think a renowned alcoholic and amnesiac-until-recently could be half as eloquent as me.

But maybe, what I had to confront in this whole exercise is the possibility that I might be more similar to renowned alcoholic and amnesiac Harry Du Bois than I’d care to admit.

Divide

Fun fact: I had a poem published in our school paper in my senior year in high school. It was exactly 100 words long, 102 with the title, purely out of coincidence. It was inspired by Star Wars, Norse mythology, and Tobey McGuire’s Spiderman 3.

Another fun fact, possibly related to the first: I was the layout artist of our school paper in my senior year.

Commerzbank Chapter Concluded

It’s been rather like watching a camel’s back as you add a strand of straw after another. Or, to use the German version of the expression, watching a bucket fill up with water one drop at a time. Until someone drops an iron block on the poor camel/indiscriminately turns the faucet on and the suspense peaks in one glorious heartbeat of chaos.

I have finally decided to relieve myself of the burden of being a Coschmerzbank customer. It actually happened quite some time ago but I’m only writing about it now that I’m at a comfortable level of confidence that my escape worked out well for me.

It turns out that Coscherzbank got my address completely wrong. Despite having presented them with my official registration documents (i.e., the Anmeldung, something everyone needs to do in Germany) they confused my street name. If, for example, I lived in Musterstraße they put me in Musterallee. Is it a mistake anyone could’ve made? Yes. Is it stupid? Heck. Yes. Very.

(As a software engineer, I can just imagine what must’ve happened when their customer support changed my address. He started typing in “Muster” at which point some form autocomplete must’ve kicked-in and suggested -allee and -straße. Guy absentmindedly clicks on the wrong option. But now I realize, this is what zip codes were made for. Both options do exist in Hamburg but in different zip codes. How the hell they didn’t clock that is beyond me.)

This is another mistake that I only figured out due to my own effort following-up with their frankly-useless customer support. I was one breath away from basically telling them how to do their jobs. It puzzles the mind how they can have such a relatively-decent customer support workflow, have agents that are, at least, confident in their jobs, and yet be just about as useful as a bookmark.

Anyway, despite having corrected that, for some mysterious ineffable reason, they still couldn’t get me the activation letter that would’ve finally re-granted me access to online banking. And I know for certain that they finally got my address correctly because I did receive some mail from this joke of a bank, just not the kind of mail that I so urgently needed from them. I know one should never attribute malice before ruling out incompetence, nor should one attribute human traits to faceless, soulless bureaucracy but it’s hard to feel neutral when I can get advertisements in my mailbox—apparently mailed no less than a week before I received it—and yet the activation letter is one of those things that “simply take time”. To add insult to injury, they are advertising their online banking to me when, you know, they can’t even apparently deliver that letter that will activate my online banking.

Hence, I began to consider enough is enough. Why should I stay with a bank who doesn’t give a flying damn about their customers? They feel so at ease taking their sweet time delivering me an important document but should the roles be reversed, they wouldn’t let me take the leisurely route, that much I can guarantee. Of course, this is not an action I could take hastily; having designated them as my “primary” bank, there are actually a lot of essential and automated payments going through my account.

Then fell the iron block. The faucet burst into the dangerously-full bucket. They decided to completely do away with the free tier of their banking services. Which meant, from my perspective, that they are basically asking me to pay them for their incompetence. The audacity. If I wanted to pay someone so they can treat me like dirt, Hamburg’s red-light district has, uh, ladies of that inclination.

(To be fair, this issue notwithstanding, I have a fundamental opposition to the concept of paying a bank for the mere privilege of having an account with them. But what their incompetence ensured is that I wouldn’t have second thoughts leaving them despite all the essential payments like rent, gym, and internet that I am making through them.)

I wouldn’t bore you with the details of which payment was what (nor do I have any inclination writing about how I spend my money). As of this writing, the only inconveniences I have suffered from my move was not having Netflix for about a week and a little surcharge from a transaction I made at the gym. I’m pretty confident that there wouldn’t be more.

Quitting accounts in Germany requires you to mail your formal request to quit, the whole stamps-envelopes-and-Deutsche-Post dance. This is when I realized that I have never actually sent postal mail in my life ever, until now. Yes, I am hardcore millenial, the only thing I purchase from my phone is public transport tickets, and I don’t take public transport. But out of sheer spite for this bank stuck in the last century, I learned how to distinguish between a mailbox and a trash can.

Unsurprisingly, they also took their sweet time processing my request. It got to a point where I just manually moved all my money to my N26 account because I’ll be damned if I get autocharged for my account come June 1. About a week before they started charging for accounts, still with no confirmation that they have processed my account closure request, they send me mail reminding me to accept their new terms and conditions where I reward their incompetence with a small monthly fee.

“Sehr geehrter Herr Estioco,” the letter started.

Don’t Herr Estioco me you bitch. I am done speaking German with you.

Auf Niewiedersehen Commerzbank

I Hate Commerzbank

I’m not a sophisticated banking client. I have a very straightforward use case for my banks. When it comes to banking, it doesn’t get any more boring for me. Money goes in, some of it stays there, some of it I use, some of that usage is online. Boom. Boring.

I have also been banking since around 2009. I have opened accounts in multiple banks, two of them in Germany. I have jumped through all manners of hoops that banks come up with in trying to come to terms with the internet. Having been in the professional software industry for only slightly shorter than I’ve been banking, I try to understand why no banking system is ever pleasant to use.

What I’m trying to say is that I am an easy-to-please, hard-to-piss-off banking customer. I’ve had to complain to banks before, it was unpleasant, but only in the general sense that talking to customer support is unpleasant; when you get to the point where you need customer support, something has gone wrong so no one just “chitchats” with customer support.

That said, Commerzbank is the most frustrating bank I have ever had the displeasure to be a client of. There are only a few things the Philippines is better at than Germany and one of them is that we don’t have Commerzbank.

The sins of Commerzbank:

  • They have an over-reliance on snail mail, which is actually great if you are a bank from the last century.
  • This over-reliance has meant it took them ages to get me my ATM card when I first got here. I moved with only a meager sum of Euros to my name for various reasons but among them is that I was gonna get paid my salary soon enough anyway. I have considered that my employer might do me dirty and not pay my salary on time but I did not consider that I would end up with a bank who couldn’t even get me my ATM card punctually. (There’s a joke about German stereotypes here somewhere, something like, Germany would be actually punctual if they weren’t too bureaucratic.)

    For comparison, Landbank, my first bank and one of the least-prestigious banks in the Philippines, could give me an ATM card on the day I signed up.
  • This over-reliance has also gotten them into, frankly, absurd situations. Some time over the pandemic (I believe it was 2021) they changed their terms and conditions. They went through the trouble of sending all their clients letters informing them of the change and requiring us to set-up an appointment and make a personal appearance in one of their branches so that we could sign the new terms and conditions in wet ink.

    One year later, it turns out there was something wrong with their procedure so some court declared it invalid. They asked us to visit a link on their website, click on “Ich stimme zu”, and that was somehow the right procedure over that whole charade the previous year. Go fucking figure. 🙄
  • A few weeks ago, for some reason, my access to online banking was simply revoked. I called their customer support, who just kept “sending” me activation letters but after multiple attempts, it has become apparent that there is really something wrong with the customer credentials they gave me when I signed up. I had to figure this out myself, just today; I wonder why none of their customer support could figure out why none of the requested letters would reach me.
  • By the way, speaking of customer support, they claim that their support hotline is available round the clock. This is only true in the sense that trumps all other ways of being correct and true: technically. Yes you can call their customer support even in the dead of night and something (not necessarily someone) will interact with you “attempting” to solve your concern. It will even enqueue you for the next free agent. But if you actually want to talk to someone, stick to office hours. The unfortunate and deathly annoying thing is they don’t divulge when exactly these office hours are.

Note that some of these “sins” are not so much grounded on Commerzbank as a company but, arguably, on Germany as a society. Unpicking that is left as an exercise for the reader because I am too pissed and too worried that my rent payment for next month won’t come through because of this. For all it’s worth, during this whole time, I’ve been using my card to make payments and at least it’s still coming through. Small comfort.

Because of the bad first impression that Commerzbank has left on me, I also signed up for N26 as a back-up. I stuck with Commerzbank as my primary bank simply because I thought N26 is likelier to have problems in the long run, given that they are, basically, a “fin-tech start-up”. After almost six years, I think N26 has earned some bragging rights over grandpa Commerzbank.

TwentyTwentyPHOurTOS

I got ungodly swamped, busy, concerned, and distracted this year, mostly towards the end. It’s all resolved gracefully now, thank goodness but all the same, it’s the bad kind of busy, one where I wasn’t enjoying myself at all. Actually, it even ate into the good busythings, which must’ve just drained me even more.

I don’t really have much time for words right now but even in the busiest times, good or bad, I always have time for photos. And you know what speaks a thousand words?

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First of all, I met John Romero, one of the creators of Doom, arguably what ushered in the whole PC gaming industry. I know this photo conveys a lot of things but it doesn’t convey my machinations and orchestrations to make my employer pay for my opportunity to meet John Romero. I am such a savvy guy.

And oh, I already admitted to my not-really-malfeasance. And since it is not a malfeasance, they can’t really do anything about it.

He even signed my copy of Masters of Doom, a book I brought with me all the way from the Philippines!

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I didn’t get to travel as much, unfortunately, for reasons related to the annoying busythings I mentioned above. I don’t feel as hard done by the fact; after all, living in Hamburg has been a continuous five-going-six years of “vacation” abroad for me. And I get paid for it!

And I can visit the Schengen area basically. This year I went to Florence, cradle of the Renaissance.

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The Passage of Time

I visited Prague in pursuit of the master himself, Alphonse Mucha. I like Prague. It’s my first Schengen-but-not-Eurozone country and it has its distinct charm. Plus, when I was there, it was not really crowded. I can’t believe it myself either.

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And back here in Hamburg, Homeburg of five-going-six-years, I finally entered the hallowed premises of the Elbephilharmonie, the most expensive acoustics that money can buy and that German taxpayers paid for, and listened to the prestigious Vienna Philharmonic perform.

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Can you believe COVID19 has been half a decade ago? Goodness!

I might write up on the annoying busythings that got me this year, and maybe more about this eventful year in general, next year. But for now, Happy New Year World! I don’t like the number 25 for reasons but let’s show next year who’s boss, okay?

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Twenty Twenty Three

I’m writing this in a rush, in an attempt to beat the new year crossing into Germany in a couple of hours. Honestly, I kinda just took it for granted to even attempt to write something for this year. But, well, I got into the mood. After all, this will be the last alliterative year I’ll get for quite some time. I think the next one will be, what, Twenty Thirty? Hoo ha.

Medea at the foot of the Acropolis

Well, what to say? That’s another year in the books. If I hadn’t updated this blog for a while now, it’s all because I am happily hands-full with other things. I’m touching grass, internationally too. I’m, you know, doing that thing they call life.

Honestly, Twenty Three could’ve been better but I survived it, without new injuries to my person. I lost some luggage. I made some mistakes but also some friends. I managed to start the year in a liminal space of being between Germany and the Philippines. Now I’m ending it on a Sunday, which is really a neat and strange day to have such a transition to occur.

Titan Cat/El Gato Jumbo

Apparently, this is the year disposables and point-and-shoots are in-vogue again, which is a very head-scratching trend for me, given that one of the earlier story arcs in this blog is how much I struggled to escape that aesthetic. Kids, to recap: I saved up the money from my internship in order to be able to buy my first ever interchangeable lens camera, the admirable speed shooter, SLT-A35. And now you kids have the gall to say these grainy, never-properly-exposed shots are “more authentic”.

Kids. With all due respect. Get off my fuckin’ lawn!

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This year, Netflix also adapted All the Light We Cannot See, which is, to my knowledge, the last book to have made me cry. The adaptation, incidentally, has become the last piece of media to have made me cry. Funny how that works. Louis Hoffman is great as a co-lead but, honestly, I’m kinda disappointed the adaptation treated Volkheimer’s small personal story arc very superficially. I understand the creative decision but he’s really one of the memorable side characters that, I think, helped drive home the treatment of war in the story.

Note: I didn’t re-read the book nor my review for that small paragraph above. Also, remind me I gotta watch the film treatment of The Light Between Oceans. You can really tell this blog has been around for some time now when story arcs like this go full-circle.

Oh lastly, this year, I also saw FC Barcelona play live at Hamburg Volksparkstadion for Champions League action, no less. They lost to the “home” team, FC “Giantslayers” Shakhtar Donetsk.

That’s it! I ended up writing more than I intended to. I have some noise/music to meet the new year with. Ciao!

DSC08958 St Peter's Square DSC08664 Booze. Brits. Football. The Geographer DSC09393 Cato the Fluffy of Cathens DSC09902 DSC00094 DSC00386 DSC07527 PXL_20231001_123930406~2 Letratura