Life in General – Page 2

Battles with Fate, Now with More Uncertainty

Even if you were living under a rock for the past eight to nine months, I’m pretty sure you would’ve heard about the pandemic ravaging the world right now, if only because you no longer need to avoid people; they socially distance themselves from you automatically. And you can treat those who, for some confidently-wrong belief or another, insist to invade your personal space anyway, as crazies. As a modern-day Diogenes you no longer need to invoke your view of the sun to insinuate someone is an idiot. A silver lining, what a relief.

Which makes me wonder if a modern-day Diogenes would read blogs because if not then my whole first paragraph has no audience. But I guess in an age of social media and walled content gardens the personal blog is the barrel in which a philosopher might dwell. Gasp. I was the Diogenes all along.

Anyway, back to the topic. I’m pleased to report that the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t affected me adversely despite living by myself, a stranger in a strange land. Selfishly I might even be thankful to find myself in Hamburg amidst all this. There are only a few ways I can be more comfortable right now.

Not that it hasn’t affected me at all. Whereas so far, thankfully, I’ve managed to stay healthy, the pandemic has got to my thoughts in all sorts of ways. From the usual negative stuff to more positive outcomes like bursts of productivity here and there, and things I wouldn’t have otherwise tried like finally buying a bike.

My key achievement so far is my proposal for a new economic indicator metric: the Toilet Paper Availability Index. It measures citizens’ general confidence in government proclamations at a highly localized level. Fair to say that this has failed spectacularly in many parts of the world during this pandemic, including, unfortunately, in Germany, long-clichéed to be world’s best at just following rules.

I guess, arguably, no formal rule was instituted, Merkel merely implored the German populace to not purchase like hamsters.

That said, it will be disingenous of me to imply that the scarcity I’ve witnessed is any cause for alarm. In fact, for reasons I would not expound in here, my apartment is currently home to an ungodly amount of REWE Double Chocolate American Cookies.

I hear your screams of “Wait, Chad. But. Why?!”. So okay. They are gosh-darned delicious okay? Addicting even. Won’t be surprised if REWE adds meth in these in secret. Okay moving on…

I noticed that my local REWE has stopped stocking these lately. I’m a bit worried as I don’t know why. I’d like to think they grew concerned that I, a loyal customer, will die of Diabetes but it’s probably either (a) they are trying to avoid liability from a loyal customer getting Diabetes or (b) they just stopped stocking it. I would like everyone to know that if I die of Diabetes, I would’ve died happy. But if I die of starvation in my apartment, you have my express permission to call me der Idiot.

(Editor’s Note: I have since discovered that my local REWE still stocks these cookies. They just moved the shelf somewhere else. I have very conflicted emotions regarding this.)

Speaking of worry, I have long since determined that my ultimate frustration is a situation which I can’t do anything about. Having no option but to wait for anything, for something to happen, is my idea of powerlessness. As long as I can struggle for a result, I can find a certain peace of mind.

Which might just be this pandemic’s greatest blow on me. To be honest, moving to Hamburg to work for Goodgame last year is quite a huge personal goal I’ve achieved, the downside of which is a very philosophical/poetic Loss of a Goal. I have, at the start of the year, just resolved to start poking around looking for a new goal. Then, history intervened: The Year In Which The World Changed A Decade. So much change that introverts tired of isolation.

And now I don’t know in the worst possible personal way. I do not want to give the impression that it is such a horrible thing. I just find myself on a plateau, quite a comfortable plateau, but a plateau nonetheless. I’d rather be scaling mountains, trying them just because they are there. The pandemic just made planning that so much harder. I have no idea what to expect when every expectation just goes out of the window more than usual.

I’m used to testing Fate. It’s just that doing that right now comes with so much more uncertainty.

I didn’t want this to end in such a downer so here’s a really pretty photo I took recently.

Dear Autumn,
Though I don’t like you for your tendency to remind me of my own mortality, I can’t deny you can be so pretty.
xoxo Chad

Schildkrötenpanzer

We find our way through the buzzing noise and the familiar darkness rather awkwardly, as if we’re here for the first time. We take a couple of empty seats for ourselves and sit in silence. I’ve never felt at ease in parties like this; it’s never been my element and I’m betting it never will be. I would guess you feel the same even if the years have taught you how to enjoy alcohol—another thing I will never get the hang of—and overall seem better adapted in situations like this.

“So, when are you leaving?” you ask to break the ice. It’s amusing how silence can exist between two people in a place where noise is just everywhere. Even more amusing is how this silence is broken.

We’ve never discussed my impending departure before and this question is the first acknowledgement between us. There was no blame in your voice, no worry, no disappointment; it was the most casual of questions you can ask between friends.

“Not for several months more,” I reply, knowing it’s an open secret now—it’s just as I wished it to be. I want to keep this bit of news strictly on a need-to-know basis and you are among the people I’d definitely want to know anyway.

“Have you said your goodbyes? To the pets?”

“I’ve been telling Embrr but I don’t think he understands what I’m saying. I think Luna does—she seems happy lately. I’ve been telling Newton too but he’s just too old now to care.”

“That’s good enough,” you pause to chuckle at the absurdity of pets understanding human language. “Will you bring your camera with you?”

“The A6000, definitely. And most of my lenses, I guess. But unfortunately I’d have to leave my original A35 here.”

“What about your telescope?”

“Nah, too bulky.”

We have cups of water on our table. Tonight you don’t feel like drinking. We observe the crowd illuminated by nothing but the glow of the neon signs from the bars across the street, flitting through the floor-to-ceiling glass panes of the office windows. I see someone I have, frankly, been avoiding the past few months because, reasons. She makes her way through the crowd, drawing closer to where we are seated.

There was a time when this company was so small we at least knew everyone else’s names and maybe at least a vague idea of their hobbies on top of that. Now, there’s enough of us to play petty office politics like this.

I guess only time will tell whether any given change was for better or worse. I am personally not even so sure if I’m making the right decisions. I do have good reasons to leave but, perhaps of more emphasis in my mind right now, was that I also have good reasons to stay.

Ironically, I knew that these people I count as my reasons to stay will be the ones most disappointed in me if I do so. Despite all that has changed, I am leaving not because I am running away, not because this place has become stranger; I am leaving because I am running towards something.

And I am grateful to you, my friends, that I can even run towards this. We saw each other go from debating board game rules to comparing mortgages. How very grown up of us, are we sure we know what we’re doing? And yet we still amuse ourselves with cats and dogs, kittens and puppies, movies and board games. That’s…not so very grown up isn’t it?

I guess some things change and some things don’t.

And now I have come to accept that you will change further without me and that I will likewise change without you. I find a certain poetic symmetry that among the last lessons reiterated in me before I left is how inability to change is invariably fatal. But it doesn’t matter. Among the things leaving has taught me is how home is what stays with you when you leave; it is not a place you go to but a weight you carry that defines you.

Kind of…like a turtle shell.

To all my friends with whom I am constantly in change with.

A Companion Named Desire

In the space of a few seconds–a handful of heartbeats, a few hundred meters covered, some hundreds of revolutions of an engine–the rumbling gray clouds made good on their promise of heavy rain. Even in that tranqulity induced by driving at cruising speed on spacious roads, the transition is difficult to miss: just roughly half an hour ago I marveled at how my car, just less than six months old, can’t be kept completely cool against an overbearing afternoon sun by its air conditioning. Now a sudden downpour drastically lessens the visibility and makes me turn my aircon down by a notch.

The rain puts me in an odd feeling of being neither here nor there. Earlier that day I was at UP, and I am currently in transit through a heavy downpour with Jason Mraz for a background music. The circumstances remind me strongly of a particular summer spent studying physics and yet…I am so far from being that student anymore. A car now is no longer an element of a kinematics word problem but is something I can name among my earthly possessions. And driving…heh, driving isn’t even something I wanted to learn back then.

The lookback is even more interesting once you consider the blog. I’ve been blogging far earlier than the summer mentioned in the last paragraph and I know I made a couple of posts during the summer concerned; posts about a budding photographer, beginning his observations of light and its drama, attending debut parties with the hefty University Physics for a date. But those posts are, unfortunately, among those I axed when I turned this blog over to WordPress. So I can’t link them.

I have vague recollections of the time I decided which posts stay, and which don’t. Up until then, the blog has been through a couple of (technical, not literary) rewrites where I painstakingly migrated each and every post. The decision to prune was, as far as I remember, based on the fact that the posts axed no longer reflect my views. And also to spare my blushes for my blunder years, where I tried to sound knowledgeable of the world–mostly by using long words like “knowledgeable” where vowels and consonants do not merely alternate–when I was, in fact, writing something worthy of Buzzfeed, minus the GIFs.

If I had to characterize the posts I hid from the public it would be that they are too emotional. “I write,” I would say back then, “to exorcise my demons”, all the while feeling like a tortured genius who has found reprieve and salvation through his muse, through his art. Maybe, a hundred years after my inevitable yet all the same tragic demise, that particular quote would find itself adorning a planner given for free by some book store, after a minimum-value purchase during the holiday season. And that’s if I’m lucky. If I’m really lucky it will even be attributed to me.

Because after all that, I have realized that the hardest part of talking about feelings isn’t about finding the courage to even be open about it. In some ways, that is the easy part. Human. What’s difficult when talking about feelings is in coming out with the maturity to handle them in all their nuance, and to not end up with a piece Buzzfeed would gladly put on their front page.

Or Thought Catalog. No one wants a mopey twenty something. Not even a mopey twenty something.

Which is maybe why projects like PostSecret and The Strangers Project move me so. Whereas tortured-genius Chad would overgeneralize and sweep his adolescent neural firings under a blanket of over optimism and flashes of wordplay, these revelations from people I have no idea who achieve authenticity despite their anonymity1. Raw and unfinished, you would not find them spouting a forced positive angle because sometimes, sometimes, there is just no good ending, at least not yet, and you could just barely keep it together.

Yet sometimes, life is not just good but also beautiful; a good ending would be unfortunate because, no matter how good, it is still the end of something as warm as hope.

(At this point, it all ends rather abruptly, as this has been gathering dust for months inside my drafts. Back when I started this whole rambling, I guess I had a plan, an outline, of how and where this all leads to. But not anymore. It gets published by virtue of the fact that it has, nonetheless, achieved its primary purpose, which is to get things off my chest, regardless of whether or not it ends up read by the intended eyes. I guess, after all that’s said and written, I remain the same, seeing words as some sort of magic to trap demons with. Some things change and some things don’t. Thank you very much for reading through and I hope you have a good one.)

PostSecret founder Frank Warren was once asked whether he worries that the secrets he receives are fabricated. To which he replies that the secret is not necessarily true for the person who wrote it; it is true for the person who reacts to it. [↩]

Sometimes, dogs do eat homeworks

Due to a long series of probably mishandled transactions, my XPeria Z ended up between the jaws of Embrr, a Labrador Retriever who part times as one of my roomies as well as Foot/Mouth-ball rival1, around two months ago. Does not help my feelings that in more than a year of our acquaintance, this is just my first (and hopefully last) possession which Embrr has sent the way of dinosaurs whereas my fellow humans who also share the same living quarters with the Lab has sacrificed so much more.

Pictured above is the World’s Most Disciplined Dog.

Also, the last line I wrote is the World’s Most Blatant Lie.

Now, after three years, I decided to go to the Manila International Book Fair again. Acknowledging that my efforts to turn this blog into one centered on Literature (note the capital ‘L’) isn’t really panning out, I guess it’d help people contextualize by admitting that, people, BOOKS ARE MY VICE. Back when I first got my camera and decided that a few thousand pesos-worth of filter glass is disposable (compared to a PhP 20K upwards worth lens), people told me that this photography hobby is turning to a vice. But I disagree. Every photography gear I have has been used, and used with good reason. And, to date, not one of my filters has ever been disposed. But just one glance at my reading queue would be enough to convince any sane-minded individual that BOOKS ARE MY VICE.

Books are my vice. Now that’s out of the way, it should not surprise you to hear that it is more than challenging to bring home all of my MIBF purchases. From MOA all the way to the suburbs of Caloocan. While I’ve learned a few lifehacks to make carrying heavy stuff easier and have put in way more push-ups than during my whole time formally training in Taekwondo since my last MIBF, my spendable cash has also grown. Yay Chad’s Capitalist Paradox.

It’s a good thing then that I have some living quarters at Makati, incidentally the same living quarters I share with the Lab pictured above. So I thought it’d be nice to house my new friends there for the meantime while, batch by batch, I transport them to stand with their kind. Perfect plan.

Except for the Lab.

Of course, I made sure before I left for the weekend (along with my first batch of new suburb roomies) that the books are in a secure cabinet which can’t be opened without opposable thumbs. The problem is that:

Just before I left, I found the upper part of the cabinet door not latching properly. I gave it a light kick so that it latches properly and left it at that. I should have looked for another cabinet, one that really latches properly.
The cabinet is in a low enough position that should the Lab develop opposable thumbs, he can open it. I’ve seen him steal socks from improperly-closed cabinets of the same ilk. I should have put the books on my bed—the upper bunk of a double deck, the only part of our room I’m sure he can’t reach. I should note that this is the only type of cabinet we have which can house the bulk of books.
1. But then we have a cat and the cat can reach my bed. Where the Lab bites, the cat bites, pisses, and scratches. It is for that reason that the cat is not allowed inside our room but her fondness for, and excursions to, human bed cushions is not unheard of.

I left having secured my new friends considerably well. But if there’s one thing I learned, “considerably well” is not good enough for dogs, moreso a Labrador of Embrr’s calibrr. This hit me midway through my grueling commute from Makati to suburbia and it kinda triggered that part of my brain that always wants 101% assurance on things.

Which leads us to this post. I’d have wanted to wax philosophical on faith, assurance, fight, dream, hope, love, etc. but then this post won’t see the light of day until it has been peer-reviewed and defended before an independent interdisciplinary panel of judges. So instead of doing that, I guess I’ll just ask the question…

Will my new friends survive the weekend, until I can get back to them?

We are waiting.

Edit (9/20/2016): Aaaannnddd they’ve survived! That’s all for now ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.

I use my feet, he uses his mouth. Never the other way around and I’ve never used my mouth. [↩]

Photograph of the Month: Futsal

Why am I a photoblog all of a sudden? Read about it here.

And for my last PE class I took up Futsal, a.k.a, futbol de salon (not futbol sa loob), or, in plain English, indoor footbal. Incidentally, this is also my only PE which is a team sport or a ball game, my other three being Archery, Fencing, and Taekwondo, taken in that order.

Some trivia: When some people hear the word Football what comes to mind are players like this,

football_zombie — From http://images.wikia.com/plantsvszombies/images/1/1a/FOOTBALL.jpg

save that they are most likely college-age, with a muscular build, and hungers for burgers and not brains. Well people, that is American Football. America, to avoid confusion, calls that sport in which Spain prevailed in last year’s World Cup Soccer. Elsewhere it is Football and…uh…Handegg?

Because I really can’t make a ball out of that egg-shaped pork-skin, I’ll be with the rest of the world in this matter and say Spain won in the Football World Cup.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to play Football. I remember kicking softdrink tin cans with friends way back in elementary, being that we had no Football equipment and that softdrink tin cans were just perfect in weight if not in shape. Even as relatives and teachers thought I’d be playing Basketball due to my growth spurt when I was young, I kept dreaming of green fields and goals.

My elementary school had no varsity teams. So, when I moved to a new school for high school, I really looked forward to playing a sport. But alas, the high school I moved to had varsity teams, alright, but not Football. Our space was pretty cramped, you see, that sometimes even the Basketball team had to practice half-court since the other half was being shared between two other sports (giving them a quarter-court’s share each).

And I thought I’d end up in Basketball finally, and make my teachers and relatives happy for a prediction-turned-right. But then, my high school had Taekwondo. I trained for the whole four years of my high school.

Those four years weren’t exactly the most injury-free but they were definitely character-forming. It’s thanks to Taekwondo that I developed a habit for sports and working out. It also taught me how to push-through with what I want to achieve and to give my 110% in the things I do.

Come college, I knew that I wouldn’t have enough time to practice a sport regularly. I had to stop at 2nd grade brown belt. My need for some physical action was filled in by trying out various sports (as outlined by the PEs I took) and other activities (remember rappel?).

And now, Futsal. It isn’t exactly played on green fields but hey it’s got goals and play is football-like enough.

What about you, played any sport recently? *wink*