Conversations With Self

Thursday, April 20, 2006

White Flag

For those who've seen my dorm before, I think it's not a wise thing to have the window wide open. I'm on the 20th Floor, it's a long way down. But yeah, I give up. Do whatever you want to me, I don't believe for a moment I deserve half the sh*t I just went through over the past week or beyond that. I don't know why I'm put in such a positiong, and I don't know how to react. So yeah, whatever it is, that's pulling on my strings, jerking me around like a puppet, congrats, you win. Now lay off.

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Hello

Hello, hello, won't you come right in,
I'd give anything just to see you again,
Hello, hello, won't you come right in,
Step into my world where you know you're everything,
Everything I need.
- Sugarbomb

I should watch The Terminal again. That's what it's like hovering between two worlds.

Kind of like my apartment search right now. Don't know where to go or what to do. And the deadline is drawing closer. Don't know where I'll be in two weeks, don't know if I'll be living on the streets, don't know if I'll find a place, don't know if I can sleep.

Worried? Yeah, partially. Panicking? There's a lot of futility in that. But seriously, I don't know what to do. More so because I don't think of anything I can do. Try running against a brick wall. Or being torn in two.

I pick up the phone and all I hear is dead silence. That's what it's like, being severed in connection. This is analogous to the frog in boiling water... if you don't call, by the time you realise it, it's too late.

Friday, April 14, 2006

Parallel fate lines

Things happen in parallels.

Today, I was left behind in the "cold" again. I very much hate the word "cold" about now. Yeah, anyway, we were planning to move out together for the next year. Yeah, the typical problem happens, that sh*t hits the fan and one of my friends decidedly pulled out of the idea, not tell us and made plans to do some other sh*t.

It was to be expected in every sense of the word, that having roommates are completely unreliable in this sense that long term plans never work out.

Am I pissed? I suppose I have every right to be pissed. After all, it was irresponsible of him to let us know now. No, wait, he didn't even bother to let us know, we asked him and he said he changed his mind.

Left behind. Again. Without even knowing it.

Stinks of betrayal. Considering how close we came to rent a place today. Just imagine if we did.

Look, I hate not being in the know. Especially things I need to know. Considering that I only bother knowing things that concern me, it's not too much to ask.

I'm still waiting for them to get back to me.

Parallels of fate, everything happens to me in the same way.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

A writer's bloc

Many thing weigh on my mind, but nothing culminates to a point where it becomes blog-worthy. It's like having a million stars, but none of them become a supernova. Pointless no? So instead, I think I shall just sit back and let my fingers do the talking. Apparently, this would lead to a lot of wandering around all over the place.

You know what's the first thing on my mind? I'm thinking that there should be a toilet seat heater. Seriously, there's nothing worse than in the cold winter, having to relieve myself and then despairing at the thought of raw skin having to touch the extreme cold plastic that sends cold shivers of shocks up the spine. Seriously, that so puts me off, puts me out of the right mindset for settling down in the toilet with a newspaper to read for ten minutes. It's like sitting on a block of ice, and I am pretty sure that if you had to sit on a block of ice to do something, pretty soon you'll forget about whatever you were suppose to do and just wonder, why the hell is your ass on a block of ice. That's my case for heated toilet seats, to a nice ambient temperature, slightly lower than body temperature, for a nice warm feeling that makes people happy.

But speaking of the cold, I'm very intrigued by the word cold. It seems to describe everything. A cold winter, a cold person, a cold car, a cold book, a cold meal, a cold anything. It has certain connotations, about being cold. But I am more interested in what image it invokes in my mind. When I speak of cold, I think of cold words. Cold words, reflecting the insensitivity of some people, the inner chill coated by the sound of each word that brings the frost right to the heart. Words that freeze the soul, that hardens the heart and shivers the nerves. I wonder how do people utter those words carelessly and heartlessly. And then, those words pass by, but the coldness stays on, in the residuals of memory and then I still shudder when I hear the echo of those words.

Today I had an interesting conversation with a friend over lunch. He was explaining his position of being a man-whore. His definition of a man-whore is that he's mostly a man, except when it comes to drinks, he expect girls to buy drinks for him. That's his whore part. I suppose he likes it that way. But I shall not comment. Anyway, he had this predicament, which I thought was kind of ironic, and I think this is the start of a really bad date movie plot. He has this chick friend, whom he tells everything to. And I mean everything, from his "manly" sexcapades to cheating on his girlfriend, to every conceivable way he picked up chicks and swooned them with his suaveness. And yeah, here's where the bad date movie plot comes in, he happens to fall in love with this chick. Yup, the one chick he told all his secrets to, the one chick who knows all his underhanded methods, and the one chick who is positively resistant to his charms. He's gonna confess his love for her tomorrow, so I suppose that it's kind of a good thing for him, to actually like one chick only. I got to say, watching it in real life is a lot better than watching a Hollywood movie, Hollywood has a tendency of wrecking movies.

I was thinking whether I'm superstitious or not. Maybe I am, I like to think I'm a modern sophisticated person, above the superstitions and weird practices, but somehow, I don't think so. Perhaps I'm as base as the next person, but I think that if I place too much hope in something, I'll actually jinx it and then bad sh*t happens. It always happen to big things; maybe that's why I don't like talking about stuff that happens to me.

I've just finished Crime and Punishment. Erick said it was... okay let me quote him directly:

E: Wow, you read those kind of things, huh.
Me: what do you mean, "those kind of things"?
E: Long boring books. Or at least that's the impression I have.


I don't know, but sometimes I get this deja-vu-ish feeling when I read a book, that somewhere I've read that book before. Towards the end, I get the premonition that I've read this before and I remember the ending, though I can't remember that I've read it before. Then I suppose that kinda wrecks the story for me. Life's kinda like that too, that some things become so predictable that it wrecks whatever ending I was hoping for.

But that aside, I was reading Crime and Punishment, then I had to put the book down because of the usual life interruptions, classes, professors, homework... I hate dog-earring books... it's contemptuous, undignified and unscholarly. Disfiguring a book by putting a crease through it's pages is a lack of respect. Don't get me started on those who write in their books... even textbooks. I only wrote in one book, in my life, and that was under the threat of death. Yes, those who went to RI with me know of the reality of the threat of Albar... Mrs Albar. But that aside, I firmly believe it disrespectful to disfigure a book. So I took out my wallet, pulled out an American dollar bill and stuck it in the middle as a bookmark. Then I realised what I did and started laughing at the irony.

I need an apartment right now. I'm going to be kicked out of campus housing within 4 weeks, and I don't have a place to go to right now. I know I should be worried, but somehow I doubt I will be worried. The most is that I'd be reduced to sleeping at the library like how that NYU kid did. But then again, I heard that there was another kid sleeping at the Kimmel Student Center. So yeah, given the sad state of NYU housing for next semester, I won't be surprised at all one bit to find a bunch of homeless NYU students sleeping in the library.

Sometimes a person's blog starts to suck. Plain does. It happens, I've seen it before. No, I'm not talking about my blog, I think I've been rather consistent with my rants and bs, so if you know what to expect from my blog, I don't think I can even disappoint your expectations. Some blogs are witty, funny, tongue-in-cheek black humor, then suddenly their writers get girlfriends, and soon it becomes all mush and online professions of love to their significant other and somehow... yeah... err... I think that's rather personal...

But speaking of black humor, my professor today had a brief lapse of morbidity. We were on the chapter of joint survivorship and joint life, and then basically we take a couple, usually a husband and a wife, and the insurance basically works that the other person gets paid when one dies. So for calculation purposes, we, being the practical actuarial students that we are, assume their deaths to be independent of each other. (Btw, any person should know what independent means. One of the essentials of education is the basics of statistics.) But my professor went along and said, "But of course, their deaths are not independent. They could both die in an airplane crash or something. We could get as morbid as we want." At that point, I had a film reel running through my head of ghastly car accidents, or suicide bombings, or mass murderers, or avian flu, or genocide, or bizarre natural disasters, or Martian attacks, or walking zombies, or... or morbid actuarial students who watch too much nightly news.

Sometimes I'm insomniac, and I don't know why. It's not like I'm worried about anything in particular. Maybe it's more of because I'm worrying about everything in particular. Meh, I don't know. My vocabulary these days have expanded to include the two words, meh and bleh. I guess that kinda makes me sound like a sheep. But sometimes, when people tell me something pseudo-tragic that happened to them, the most I can go is, meh.

Monday, April 10, 2006

One, two...

"Hey, have you seen X's gf's pic?"
"No. Why?"
"Wait till he comes online on MSN. Then look at his display pic."
"Pretty?"
"Looks Japanese."
"Could be."


Okay, first speaker was a friend on MSN. And the second was me. Granted, I suppose this is the introduction to a simple question I want to ask.

"Do you ever get the feeling that when guys have girlfriends, you are no longer dealing with one, but two people?"

Look, I'm not talking rubbish okay, just that recently I've reflected on the people I've talked to and observed on MSN and I particularly like to look at their display pictures. The display pictures people choose for themselves are very interesting choices, and it reflects what they thing, desire or cherish. So what does this got to do with significant others?

When I think about it, I realise how when people are attached, they tend to choose a "couple" pic as their display picture. By a couple, I mean them and their significant other.

And when I talk to these people, I seem to think that I'm not actually talking to one person, but rather two. After all, there are two people in the display picture in MSN, staring back, and smiling in some ineffable manner. And I figured I wasn't actually talking to one person. I'm talking to two.

A friend blogged that there are single people and attached people and they don't understand each other. But hey, I suppose to a large extent you can't blame us single people. After all, I'm not the one constantly reminding you guys of how single am, while you seem to start using a strange collective pronoun called, "We". Hence the revision, that I am no longer interacting with one person, but rather a collective of two.

Perhaps what stranger still, is dealing with this collective entity called a "couple." First of all, I think that the sum of its parts are way too different from the whole. I generalise that one part would like stuff like Ferraris, PSPs, football, fart jokes and breasts. I theorise that the other part would like shopping, gossiping... pardon me, I mean discussing the affairs of a non-involved third party to some degree of partisan opinion, and being as would their gender be. (I confess not to know much about the aspects of this other part of the collective entity.) But the collective entity itself is not predisposed to either preference of past-times. This collective entity displays completely different characteristics, particularly a marked interest in nothing else but staying together through some strong attractive force not discovered by physicists yet.

But back to the part on MSN. I think that a choice of display pic reveals a lot more about a person, than a picture would. But I would damn sure like to know, am I talking to one person, or two?

Just a side thought. Thankfully monogamy is the norm.

Monday, April 03, 2006

High Flyer

High flyer I see you soar,
On winds of fame and glory galore,
Yet as I squint harder towards the sun,
Is that you?
On wings of friends and fathers-afore.
Can I aspire to your claim on destiny,
That twisted threads of fate so deign,
By some ugly chance of lottery most foul,
That I stand here to watch you shine.
Would I reach those heights,
That you seem to easily go,
If I were born with the wind beneath my wings,
Instead of the dirt between my toes.
Golden feathers don't glean much,
When one is out of the sun,
What good is a strong heart,
An eagle mind, and great wings,
When compared the mediocrity of a lucky headstart.
I don't hate you, I bear you no grudge,
I play the cards I've been dealt with,
All I can do is try to catch up,
Across that ever-growing rift.