Mmmbop

My birthday is almost here!

Some of my friends at the office are asking me what plans I have for my birthday, and I’m always embarrassed when I answer I don’t know. With reluctance I admit that I never really had a fantastic birthday ever. There was one time when my highschool friends sneaked me out for a supposed weekend project for school, only to find out that they had planned a little celebration in my friend’s bedroom. We had some homemade chocolate cake, and a handwritten birthday sign on red japanese paper was taped to the wall. That was pretty much it, but it was probably the most sincere greeting I ever received!

When I was in college, a friend treated me out to watch a ballet performance, but she was with her boyfriend and I felt like I’m a third wheel the whole time, so. A highlight of that night though: all of the male ballet dancers dropped their pants in the finale, so there you go, a dozen penises, happy birthday to me. Birthdays with my ex-boyfriend don’t really count, too, because what else can we do but have sex dinner out somewhere romantic? I swear, it’s overrated. Harhar.

Maybe I’m this way because growing up, my birthday is not exactly an event to celebrate in my family. For one thing, my younger sister and I have got the same birthday, so I don’t exactly feel special. I can’t even go prancing around the house and say, “It’s my birthday, it’s my birthday!” because they’ll just tell me that I’m not the only one. Another thing, since my father has his own business, and my birthday falls on the fifteenth, it is, of course, pay day. So all his money is spent handing out salaries, that at the end of the day he doesn’t feel like spending any more, especially on me. Further evidence that it’s absurd where I live? I got my eighteenth birthday present when I was twenty years old. Yeah.

So when “the special day” comes around, I’m not really expecting anything. Although I have plans of trying to enjoy it. Maybe I’ll buy something for myself. Which is why there is no more need for an introduction of what’s to come next:

Some things from the history of the world that I wish I could bring back (well some of them are still here), because it’s an integral part of my life (or, My Birthday Wish List, if I may)

1. Mixtapes

(photo taken from here)

Back in high school I had a mixtape for all sort of moods and tiny events in my life. Off the top of my head, here are some of the themes I could remember:
- I Hate Physics But I Have to Study the Damn Thing
- You Say You Got a Boyfriend But I Bet He’s Just on Cyberspace, Bitch
- My Best Friend Had A Nervous Breakdown
- I Study in A Private Catholic School for Girls
- Today I Bought My First Porn
- This Mix is Perfect if I Also Had the Car to Go With It
- The Breakup (of course)
among many other things. I swear, it’s the quintessential companion. The only thing that was missing is a car, but in a third-world country, you know it’s impossible to even have an old, beat-down road machine at the age of sixteen. It’s just unheard of. So I settle for lying in my bed, with the lights off, alone in my room, popping cassettes one after the other.

2. Vinyl records (preferably jazz records)

(photo taken from here)

My turntable is actually broken and I can’t find a shop here who can replace the needle. It’s one of my goals this year to actually buy something like this, so I’m crossing my fingers.

3. Polaroid Type600 film

(photo taken from here)

In light of the recent devastating news that Polaroid is shutting down their production of integral film and have decided to go digital, I am now very determined to hoard as much film as I can.

4. Black and white film

(photo taken from here)

Yes! I’m spreading Ilford love.

5. Colored pens

(photo taken from here)

I need a new set. I’ve used and abused my current pens with abandon, and it won’t be long before they quit on me. I like Staedtler’s pens because they’re quite fun to write and doodle with. I actually find that I use a certain color depending on my mood. YAY!

6. Notebooks/Journals

They must be plain, unruled, with hard covers — okay, if I must be specific, Moleskines. This is how one of my journals look like. You can find more here.

7. Old shoeboxes chock-full of random things

(photo taken from here)

Okay, The Weird Girl award goes to me. My ‘memory’ shoebox at home looks way ghetto than this one. If I remember correctly, it’s from one of my old PE shoes with an obscure brand (Advan). It was so old that I have covered it in a glossy newspaper print. Inside you’ll find old letters, random buttons, a condom enclosed in a glass with the print, ‘Break in Case of Emergency’ — an old prank from a friend, specks of glitter, star confetti, old IDs, coasters stolen from random pubs and restaurants, friendship rings, and a lot more. I have a habit of collecting random stuff, what.

8. Stickers

(photo taken from here)

I used to have a sticker collection. I don’t know why I threw them away. I want them back.

9. Postcards

(photo taken from here)

I DON’T WANT postcards of national heroes, which is what you will find in a bookstore here in Manila. Not exactly what you are looking for if you want to write to a friend. Hello, how are you doing, this is Jose Rizal to inspire you in your day-to-day life. Not.

10. Other weird stuff like library cards, bits and pieces of paper, bus tickets, ripped concert tickets

(photo taken from here)

Yeah I kinda miss those. It’s basically trash to you though. I know.

11. Stationery

(photo taken from here)

Stuff to stick in my journal! Have you seen my journal? It’s like Chinatown on acid.

12. Wax seal

(photos taken from here)

I’m in a letter-writing mode and if you want I’ll mail you one! Wouldn’t it be fabulous if it has my stamp on it? You’re free to keep it as a souvenir when I become famous (HAHA!) someday.

13. Lighter

(photos taken from here)

I soooooo want a metal lighter. This is the only instance that I have allowed myself to want something that would make me look hip. Because something like this? Is hip. And I’ve never been hip, and I never want to be, except when I’m killing my lungs. Might as well do it in style, yes?

14. Vintage + Crafts + What-have-you
Anything and everything vintage, campy or kitschy, whatever. I like it. I suspect somewhere I have a secret personality disorder, and at times I maybe somehow manipulated by Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minelli, Linda Rondstandt and Diana Ross. So my friends, forgive me. HORNNNNN!

I like stuff like these:

Vintage wallpapers

(taken from here)

Decorated tableware

(taken from here)

Pop art (not too much though, something that still reflects my personality)

(taken from here)

Pins and buttons

(taken from here)

15. Books

16. Dinner out somewhere nice with friends where we can camwhore and talk all night

17. A dress!

18. Baubles, bangles and beads, err dangling earrings!

19. A road trip

20. A Flickr Pro account

21.

22.

Two more to be filled out when I think of something else! If I am to buy these for myself, I need money. And right now I can’t really do that since I have resigned from my job (OH YES DIDN’T I TELL YOU? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA)

Open Heart Zoo

There are so many things that’s been happening lately in my life that feels so wrong, and so right. This is the probably one of the pages in my book that I’ll have bookmarked, and in time, I’ll return to remind myself that yes, this is when I had the temerity to say, “I was so confused” and at the same time, “I was so sure.”

Here I am, two weeks shy of being twenty-two, and this is my life. And I am still making grandeur statements like, “This is my life”, as if I was listening to an overture (which I am, by the way, what a laugh).

At twenty I felt like everything was just beginning, but at twenty-one suddenly a lot of things have ended – things that I was certain were in my control and things that sadly were way beyond my control. The beginnings I have anticipated a year before grew into little fears that everything was too late.

“Very early in my life it was too late.”
– Marguerite Duras

Which is why lately I’ve passed time seesawing between wanting to be born years before 1986 and wanting not to be born at all. Every little thing that I feel a connection with are slowly drifting away, and fading. It’s like everybody’s been having a good time while I was still upstairs sleeping. I feel like I’m always late for everything – late for vinyl records, for polaroid cameras, for Frank Sinatra and rock and roll, for ideals, for following your dreams, for throwing caution to the wind, for living life slowly, measuring your days in coffee spoons and all that cliche (apologies to T.S. Eliot).

Nobody does that today anymore. At least, in the world I live in. Nobody lives that kind of life anymore. Everything is just so damn fast. And I know it’s too much to ask, really. When I think of packing my bags and walking off to somewhere, it’s all a dream. It’s so much of a dream that it only comes to me in bits and pieces now, like remnants from an old memory, an old life. Am I still making sense?

Gah. It’s all a bit rubbish, isn’t it? I want that kind of life so bad that it hurts. What can I do with a life that’s confined to my silly little room, with all my thoughts sitting pretty on my bed, running down the walls, tucked underneath my pillow? Let me say it again: I want that kind of life so bad that it hurts, and it’s a kind of life in all its fucking unglorious state: I want to get hurt I want to cry I want a punch in the gut I want to run down the road chasing foolishly after a car that will not stop for me I want to be sleepless day in and day out I want something that will turn me inside out I want to have things to regret I want to be missed and cursed at and be shamed and be loved –

And I don’t know how much that is for a girl of twenty-one going on twenty-two, whose world tries poorly to revolve on petty things like work and money and technology.

Pfft. I don’t know how else to put it into words!

Have you ever just stopped, just for a moment and thought, this is it. This is it: everything happens to me. Have you ever thought that? I haven’t. I did though, have one similar experience. There was this wide-open sky, I opened my arms and said, please let the world happen to me.

If this is the life I’m supposed to live, if this life is it, right here, right now – please, somebody, open my eyes. Because I can’t see it. I can’t see what’s so special with my now, and I want so badly to get up, go out, leave this now and move backward in time to a now that’s in my head. There’s a most beautiful now in my head, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Nothing

the time when we had everything

~

1.
Chopin on Nocturne in C sharp minor, Op. 27/1, Larghetto. In four minutes and four seconds I sat quite still while my heart is breaking.

2.
Sharp pangs were never unfamiliar, but I never thought I’d go this way again: it’s been almost three years now, and I should be over it. Over you. But I never forget, so: happy birthday.

3.
I opened my diary on my lap and I was determined to write the greatest love story of my life: There was a girl who only had two great loves – the first was with someone who stopped loving her, the last was with someone who never stopped.

But I’m afraid the happy ending hasn’t happened yet.

4.
Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, Op. 65. In nine minutes and fifty seconds I stood in the middle of my room and imagined one night when I rested my head upon your shoulder as we swayed to the silence.

5.
I don’t know which is more excruciating: enduring the fourteenth, when everybody celebrates love, or the sixteenth, when you celebrate the day you were born.

I think it is the fifteenth, wedged in between two tragic days: I dance in between not crying and wanting to cry.

6.
I opened a book of poetry and I was determined to read about how other poor souls dealt with such loss. All I could bring myself to read was: “Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.”

7.
Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor. In eight minutes and fifty-five seconds I willed myself to fall asleep. No good will come to thinking about you now. You are somewhere far away, and I have refrained from sending you a postcard wishing you the best of luck. And that is that. The illusion of a warm hello will not conquer the distance, nor the pain.

8.
I closed my eyes and suddenly you were whispering in my ear, “All the clocks in the city”, but you never seem to finish. We were lying in bed with your arms around me but you never did finish what you were going to say. And then all the clocks ran out of time, and then we were over, and your words were lost.

9.
The one who stayed to finish it, was Auden sitting on my bookshelf –

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

And then my heart skips, skips to how it all ends –

‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

And how, how do you curb the urge to disappear again?

You try your damnedest to ground your heels, you reason to yourself every day, every night, why that would not be a good idea. Shave the restlessness off, and write. And if writing needs a Muse who has suspiciously been absent for quite some time, you pick up a book and read.And if your mind drifts off, you pick a pen and doodle, try to chronicle your days in a diary. You smoke more, talk less, listen to music and think of something to do.

This week it has been mostly random, I’m at that stage again. It’s a fucking chink in the armor, to be this unsettled, knowing what I don’t want but not really sure what I want. Does that make sense to you?

Anyway, apart from a cab breaking down on my way to work there’s really nothing to say. I go to work, I sit at ‘my’ desk, try to be productive for the first four hours of my shift, and then out of annoyance I conjure up my what-the-hell attitude and watch Survivor: Africa. Yes I’m that far behind, I wasn’t really much of a fan before, can’t say that I am now, but I am beginning to like the game if only because I get to sit back and think about the people’s next moves, based on observation and logic. In my dreary day-to-day existence, prying other people’s minds consume my hours; I see this as a definite highlight (if not a very sad fact of life) since I am tired of picking my own brain for answers I don’t and won’t ever have.

I have also turned to retail therapy, meaning I have bought some books and CDs again because looking at things and deciding what to buy is such a menial yet soothing thing to do. However I’m trying to stay away from it, I really don’t have much money, as you already know.

And if I’m not thinking about the people stuck in Africa mindfucking one another, I gossip about my officemates because that’s what slackers and no-good employees do when they do not have enough work to keep them occupied. It’s an amazing practice, really, I never knew I could be so mean and so elitist. I can’t say I enjoy it that well to make it a full-time job, but it passes the time, and bridges my Tuesdays to Wednesdays to Thursdays and so on, and ah, well, I’m that removed to feel a sense of what’s right and wrong these days.

Maybe the most brilliant idea I have for this week is, how about a trip out of the city? In my foolishness I am actually entertaining the idea of backpacking out of the city to who knows where. I’m thinking, a backpack, my cameras, a few shirts, money, and then my poor sense of directions. I wonder how this will turn out.

On my way home, I was half-asleep at the back of the cab. Suddenly it occurred to me how easy it was for me to get mobbed this way, and horribly imagined jolting out of sleep to find myself facing the barrel of a gun. I thought so much about it, by the time I got home my head was full of images of me lying on the ground, shot and trying to gasp my last few breaths. Hmm.

Ah, but what would it take to be perfectly happy and content and not feel that I should run run run run run.

—————-
Listening to: Frank Sinatra – Day By Day
via FoxyTunes