Echoes “I come undone”.

I suddenly lost the other end of the thread when I was resuming my Deal’s a Deal draft. I forgot how it should end, I forgot the climax and everything, and now I blame myself for postponing its publishing (well I don’t require myself to finish it anyway, LOL). Besides, I published “The Cult” and I think that would suffice.

So rock and roll, so corporate suit
So damn ugly, so damn cute
So well-trained, so animal
So need your love, so fuck you all

- Come Undone by Robbie Williams

I find myself stuck with a Robbie Williams song (yes, the singer who usually makes R-18 music videos since its oozing with sexual content and nudity – though I admit I watched a number of his music videos when I was like eleven?) entitled “Come Undone”. It sounds good when compared to his other single, “Rock DJ” (wtf). I had not thought of loving any Robbie Williams song but when I remember “Come Undone”, I somewhat say that as a lyricist – he’s good.

I was tweaking my Livejournal account and posted something about how I miss blogging at LJ. There’s something different that separates LJ from any other free blog-hosting website not only with its, uhh, simplistic dashboard (which looked like it was made way back 2000). When I’m writing on it, I feel like no one really cares about what I write there. I’m so free (I couldn’t do a Nelly Furtado song “I’m like a bird” here) and free and free. I feel so free. I can bash whoever I want there. I can do whatever stint I want, I can post even my own retarded pictures. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much friends in LJ (except for Dutzy, Shinji and Juice).

And my LJ is nothing but High School rants and day-to-day narrations (yes, I narrate everything I do – even watching porn or something, there) at that blog. Even when I bought french fries at McDonalds or played poker in the classroom and stuff – it’s all THERE.

Oh, I’m supposed to put our “Thanksgiving” last Sunday. I told my sister to prepare Turkey and the side dishes (both my sisters prepared coleslaw, mashed potato, corn and carrots, and the works). I told her to brand the event as “Thanksgiving” to give thanks for our (my Dad and I) arrival.

Well, in the first place, I think we’re worth the twelve-pound turkey, right? And they (my sister’s family, my sister and her friend and everyone in New York City and New Jersey) should’ve thanked us for coming, right?

A turkey roasted (or rather, ovened) with rosemary and other herbs and spices and orange and lemons, corn and carrots, mashed potato, coleslaw (made of grated apples and cabbage with milk and ricotta cheese), and buttered and ovened asparagus. Yummy.

The twelve-pound turkey.

 The left picture’s our family picture (my Mom’s not there since she’s working) in a park somewhere in New Jersey. Obviously, I’m the guy wearing light gray (the darker gray’s my DAD) and my sisters on the middle (don’t even guess their age). The right picture’s a shot I took somewhere near Times Square – it’s a GOSSIP GIRL billboard. I took it for my bestfriend (a girl) who’s really hooked up with Gossip Girl (that she even made me buy a NY Mag since the cover’s all about Gossip Girl). So, there you have it.

I’m not scared of dying,
I just don’t want to.

Though I quoted the abovementioned statements from – again – Robbie Williams’ “Come Undone”, this is precisely what I’m thinking while reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. It’s all about grief; how to cope up with grief, how to grieve (?), what are the kinds of grief and anything about grief. It’s a non-fiction book (which is quite unusual for me since I feel bored with non-fictions just like Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit) about her husband’s death from a “massive and fatal coronary” while their daughter, Quintana, suffered pneumonia and is in coma (and she’s living through a life support). 

Didion showed invulnerability when her husband died, which was not the usual case whenever someone grieves and mourns after a death of a loved one. She didn’t cry in the ambulance, though she found it hard to accept that her husband’s dead (she donated all his wardrobe except for a single pair of shoes, hoping that her husband would come back wearing shoes). She’s stuck with vortices – with places and objects that sucks her and makes her think about the past, about her dead husband – and how she tried to dodge those things and move on.

I finished it, at last, with contentment. That at least Didion, after all the struggles brought by the “contingencies” of her family, had learned how to live peaceful and accept what and how things really happened.

Next in line would be John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Oh yeah.

I’m a Swiffer.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d

I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a while ago. It so happened that its schedule on Sundance channel (yes, if you guys have heard the Sundance Film Festival which awarded some of my all-time favorite movies like Brick and Little Miss Sunshine – this is its channel, and the movies are way too stunning to crave for) is from ten in the evening to one thirty. I would like to thank whoever that genius is who invented movie recording (you can record your movie by just a click of a remote button and do whatever you want (like sleeping) - the tv or the cable or whatever it is RECORDS your movie, goddamit). What the heck – the eccentricities of American lifestyle.

So I slept at nine-thirty. Then I woke up, it was a freezing eleven-degree celsius morning, and I watched my recorded movie.

The movie is nothing but arresting. By the title I always associate it with autumn leaves and the sunlight, but watching the movie turned down this kind of supposition. The movie is very much complex since in the first place, it’s not presented in its chronological order, so the movie’s playful enough to trick your minds out of time, but I caught its drift anyway (since you can pause your recorded movie when you need to pee, and I peed four or five times since the temperature’s almost freezing). Whatever process is that which erases certain fragments of memories (I bet it’s called “lobotomy” since David Sheff mentioned it countless times in his book, Beautiful Boy – thus my interest with the movie sprouted) – I would think about it for months before undergoing that operation.

Update: By the way, the process isn’t called lobotomy.

I’m way humbler than ever to volunteer myself to clean the already-clean house. It sounds redundant but my sister, in order for her to see how her grown-up brother looks like during cleaning time, let me clean the household chores for an hour or so. To my surprise, she got this hybrid broom with its rotating surface (it’s not electronic) out of the drawer where all the cleaning materials can be found.

HOW THE HECK DOES THAT THING WORK? I asked her, appalled with the sight of the broom – it’s like a window wiper used by a fastfood janitor (I hope the word isn’t degrading) to clean the restaurant’s life-size glass panels (say McDonalds or Jolibee). Only, it’s used in the floor.

I suppose that this ingenious invention won’t work in our house in Bulacan. For one, our wooden floors are slightly termite-eaten and the abnormal thick dust might render this eccentric tool to malfunction.

So I sweeped, or rather SWIFFED the whole house (not including the basement and the second floor since it’s both carpeted – vacuums are much more complicated to use, I think) while they’re watching TV. How thoughtful.

I’m also fascinated with the dishwasher, and how they do the laundry (for just a couple of hours since they don’t need to hang their clothes to dry on the sun – there’s a thing called a “dryer”, just so you know). And the thousand-plus channels on my sister’s cable subscription (the fuck, they even have this Bangladesh channel and Rock, R and B, even Bluegrass channel) and the Bose speakers are kickass. And their hot and cold faucet, and how they count calories on their food.

Last Friday, it was my first time to drink with my family (thus they accepted my “occasional” thinking, which truly is “habitual”). I drank a Smirnoff (the watermelon flavored, it sucks; I’d prefer the red-labeled Smirnoff) while they’re drinking their own Smirnoffs.

That’s it.

If I Swerved.

I don’t really know if I parked the wrong car on the wrong side of the road. I swear, I never saw any dead end sign before taking this route. I can put half of the blame on Deviantart, and half the blame on me.

Deviantart has exposed me (and is still exposing me) to great (vague description but I mean it anyway) artists, like for example, this guy. Oftentimes, whenever I look at their galleries for thirty minutes – flipping their artworks and photo manipulations – I would always, always think about my unbridled passion for art and how I (slightly) abandoned it for some course I never wanted. Their works make this tremendous impact on me that I tend to think about how artistically-inclined I am back then. I sort-of viewed myself as a painter, or an artist, and later on, as some kickass graphic designer.

I am just as clumsy as a guy who had no idea with paint that he spilled the colors everywhere. Of course, to give consolation, the work he made is still art. But it’s not art art. It’s just art.

I just sort-of thought, or more like pondered, about my already-blunt art skills. I joined painting lessons when I was in the sixth grade and was glorified by Sir Bobby (this guy really boosted my creativity – he even advised me to keep my painting skills high by buying lucrative paraphernalias like easels and canvasses and paint stuff) with my ability to draw a circle that really looked like a circle (since most of my classmates are fifth-graders who made egg-shaped oranges and apples, duh), I was an exceptional artistically-inclined student. I am artistic back then.

I am fuckin’ and kickass artistic to the point that I had four wooden suitcases with nothing but watercolors and palettes and oil pastels. Uh-huh.

Of course the pungency of everything enters, usually, during High School. And mine was never spared. I just didn’t practiced art at all, except for two meetings a week of compasses and perspectives (I forgot the course name but it’s something like two-point perspectives, ortographics and stuff). My works are magnificent enough to let the teacher dismiss me early, like five minutes before the time (my classmates usually end up having their recess while doing their plates). So I considered Architecture an option. Only, I flunked the subject since I passed the plates a day after the deadline.

And since I hate the numbers I gave up my dreams of being an architect. How stupid is that?

Meanwhile, I am a frequent participant of inter-class art contests in our school, and as always, that girl by the initials of G.R. who even uses her handkerchief to blend the pastels together, beats me (though I always pity her since her handkerchiefs become useless for the day). For two straight years. She transferred to another school when we were on our third year, and by that time I gave up everything in my life and fooled around. Good thing she went away, though.

So my artistic skills were depleted to the core like a Vespene geyser which once was thriving with Vespene gas. (Okay, that’s Starcraft, and I always associate the word “deplete” with “vespene geysers”. Sorry. And oh, speaking of Starcraft: I’ve had my taste of exercising my architectural abilities on its map editor. I would always build maps and look at it and that’s it. How boring.)

Though my newly-found talent (the word “talent” is quite tentative since I myself am not convinced if it qualified the standards of the word), which is photography (the nerve, but this is purely a self-imposed statement), somehow keeps my art skills up and pumping, I am out of words when I look at Deviantart users and their stunning works of art. Damn them.

Anyway, I am just so fed up with artists that they keep on posting their Stendhalic works of art on my face that I feel so little. And I always end up nanghihinayang. Gone were the artsy days. Gone were the claps and that silver Art medal I garnered way back Elementary. They’re all gone with the wind.

Do you have this editor who’s very keen on editing that he can edit my comma splices? I always overuse commas. And sorry for lots of parentheses – I got the habit from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which I’m reading right now.

*by “Stendhalic works”, it’s a work that induces Stendhal Syndrome. It’s something related to it, for short. It’s a syndrome you need to look and search for Wikipedia since I’m out of words.

And oh, I hate my Dad for telling me back then that Fine Arts is bullshit. Screw him!!!