The worst thing is that I don’t know if anyone will be there for me.

I’ve been worried about my best friend and whether there’s anything between us anymore.

I’ve been quiet around the nicest kids who can actually tolerate me.

I get really annoyed with family, because I don’t feel any respect coming from them.

And my body’s even breaking down right now.

No wonder I’m not even focusing on my last exam, tomorrow.

All I have to do is paint.

Discounting job searching, money grubbing, chores, obligations, duties… (who wants to do those?)

Is this hedonism? I don’t really know.

All I know is my head hurts and I need to go to bed.

‘”M’ nemesis, bitt’rest of foes, had me walk the plank. Cursed shark made a mangled mess of it ‘fore me crew hoisted me up.’”

Noticing the man watching his gesturing hook hand, he continued,

“He only bested me because a year ago the dreaded red beard took me left hand, me best fighting hand, with his last, dying sword stroke.

“And the eye patch, was that also red beard, or was it your current nemesis?” inquired the man.

“A seagull pooped in me eye. Arrr.”

“Really?! A seagull?”

“Aye. ’twas the first day I had the hook.”

I’ll have to cover instances when I did something with a passion and explain why I enjoyed executing the task so much. And so.

Allons-y…

Pride Experiences

I. “Ivan and I” comics (early youth @ the Fils)

There was a time in my life when the only person that mattered in the world was my best friend and cousin, Ivan, who came over every weekend nearly just to have a lark with me around the neighbourhood. We often had quite interesting adventures (such as stalking his classmate or going to Baguio City on a road trip) and in my comics, aside from illustrating these with chibi anime-style drawings and badly-drawn word bubbles, I also took the opportunity to fashion fantasies. The only one I remember very well is the fantasy that I was–and this is very sad, really–not actually going to leave him and the Philippines behind. I couldn’t tell you what I drew but I can definitely recreate the drawings I did. Very rough grids. Round heads, wavy lines for my hair and a black buzz cut for Ivan; me always wearing a plain dress and Ivan always with a sando and shorts; our hands like lobster claws, out feet always clad with tsinelas; and our eyes like filled-in ovals, under which there was no nose nor ears but a mouth, anyway. I loved making these things then showing them off to my mom, as I usually did for any other creative endeavour of mine. In addition to these visual records of my flights of fancy, I played around with music and animation effects in Microsoft Powerpoint and drew pictures of the Powerpuff Girls, but these comics–so full of sentimental value, not to mention cuteness–take the cake in terms of my passion. I loved the idea of creating a story out of pencil and paper, and the fact that those stories were so, how do I say it, fresh and fun and full of potential was the most exhilirating part. I may make one example of this fresh feeling: once I took it upon myself to come up with and draw what I would create if I were a Willy Wonka character. I came up with gummies as large as gumballs, a spray that makes rain taste like chocolate, and paper made out of cotton candy or chocolate on which you could write, then eat. I’m sorry, but if this isn’t fun to illustrate, what is? I also reiterate the sentimental value of my Ivan and I comics. They weren’t just for fun creativity. They were for recording our in-jokes and fun times. Although they were written and drawn in a childlike hand. But anyway. This was the best time I had in my youth–drawing these comics.

II. Babysitting Beryl (tween years + )

There was one time when I was alone with my newborn baby sister Beryl. We were living in the house on Avonwick, and it was late in the afternoon. I needed to keep the baby appeased. I had that tension that parents always feel when there’s danger of their child being anything but 100% comfortable! I held the baby in my arms, and determined to let her to sleep, but without a crib (I don’t know where it went…), I laid down on my mother’s queen-size bed. I then put the child on my tummy and, with my feet planted on the ground, proceeded to rock up and down like a crib would. It was a really special moment of peace. That I was doing this for this child felt very gratifying, but not in some sort of egoistical way. It just felt good rocking my sister to sleep.

As the years passed, I still took care of Beryl when my mother went off to work early in the morning, sleeping next to her then waking her up to watch early-morning cartoons. At the present moment, I pick her up from school sometimes, and though it is a bother to walk to her school instead of just nap, having her rush to me as soon as she spots me standing at the designated waiting zone makes it all worth the trouble. It’s true that it is not the child that should be thankful for our generosity; we should thank the child for giving us the opportunity to be more generous than we would otherwise be.

I suppose the most important point about this is that I understand the importance of taking care of someone more vulnerable than you. I understand that a lot of the time you have to stop being so egocentric and think about the other. You have to think like a child would, too. And that’s no trouble for me! I often have fun when I babysit my little sister. Sadly, the times that I do so will run down to none, soon as I leave the house.

III. Creating good journals for Religion with Mrs. Tersigni (13 @ SLR)

In grade 8, there were three different classes that my homeroom class shuffled around with. We belonged to Mr. Boland, but for Math we headed to Mrs. Rozen’s room next door, and for Religion, there was the indomitable Mrs. Tersigni. She had eyes crinkled a little as the rest of her face and bright shoulder-length hair, and for some reason I don’t know what, I see her as wearing black all the time as well as a long skirt. She also wore glasses. She was a shrewd woman who probably easily juggled a gr. 7/8 split class and two other classes that dropped by for Religion class. The main reason I say this is that she had this god-awful list of assignments we were to do for the whole year–basically a checklist. It was all very organized. And a lot of work. I respected her for her system.

A lot of the assignments we had to do were to do with questions about religion and about personal beliefs–whether for preparation for Confirmation or in response to a reading from our thin, heavily-illustrated (probably BS-filled) Family Studies book–and seeing as I had recently been inspired by Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch, I took the opportunity to write very extensively about my beliefs. I did this the whole year. I still have some examples. I was just as verbose as I am now, I see. There was the one time Mrs. Tersigni was kind enough to write at the bottom in her red curly handwriting: You have a way with words! And I was proud to know I had this innate ability that pleased my teacher so–and granted me good marks.

I enjoyed writing these journals for the exercise of recording my thoughts. Often the hashing out of it was an art in itself. (I believe it’s called rhetoric.) It was an exercise in creativity, and I loved being creative. Plus, I got good marks for it. Now that I look at it, my answers were absurdly long and involved, often going on tangents that took the long way round to get to the point. I got criticized for this in high school when I did the same thing–pah! of course I get this treatment in secondary school–but I think that it distinguished me. But discounting uniqueness and academic achievement, I’m proud of my linguistic skills because I think language is a challenge. It’s something very very complicated, but at the same time so intuitive. I’m very proud of my skills which come so easily.

More to come!

Although… I haven’t exactly read Benjamin Button, so I can’t really compare.

Right now I’m reading a six-part series of blurbs about Rothko’s life and art based on the definitive biography by a Mr. Breslin, as written in her blog by artiste Nancy Natale. There was a branch-off article about one of the Irascible Eighteen and the one woman, Hedda Sterne. She was interesting. Independent. Much like Hedda Gabler, maybe? In any case, I loved the three artworks Natale showed in the post. I am going to go to library and get a book that focuses on her… if one exists; otherwise, I’ll just have to settle with some other novels I’ve been wanting to read (plus Benjamin Button? I just read Great Gatsby, by the same author, recently for class, so…)

But anyway, let me stop my Polonius and get to the point:

Hedda Sterne said this in her (quite) old age in an interview:

You know, thinking, dreaming, musing become essential occupations. I am watching my life. As if I’m not quite in it, I watch it from the outside. Because after so many years of working unceasingly, and enthusiastically, being idle is a tremendous effort of concentration and adjustment … Sunday they [Romanian peasants] just sit, and their resting is so active – like an activity, resting. It’s a beauty to behold, you know. It’s not just doing nothing. It’s being and existing in a certain way. In a way old age is a little bit like that. It has its beauties.

The fact that I’m perusing random articles of interest–Rothko then Hamlet–for no real reason must mean that I am quite taken with just resting. My mother criticizes me just yesterday for not being “active” in the normal sense–earning money, learning how to get ahead, caring about making sure the house is in tip-top shape for… presumably the queen when she visits!!

I have to say that right now I don’t care.

Blame it on old age!

The thing I could be most ashamed about is that I love my parents.

I wonder sometimes if she hates that I left as much as I do and wants me to come back, too.

I would be a different person if I were still around her and our friends.

You need to converse more gracefully.

That other people notice me seems odd sometimes.

That my name is so odd may make people see me as some sort of odd specimen, wouldn’t it?

We don’t choose who we love, but we definitely choose whether we can love yet.

I definitely don’t want to be an old maid.

Smelling a good dish is about as good as tasting it sometimes.

Even attempts to be well-rounded make you look–and I guess feel good.

Mental note: find the number for the piano lessons place.

Walk more.

Avoid fried chicken.

Stop trying to improve yourself like you’re Holmes-on-Homes–ing your soul.

Sleep more.

Let it be.

Smile at others more.

Hope they smile back.

Someday you won’t need so many imperatives, and then just sitting back and relaxing will be the only thing on your To-Do List.

—31—

“I’m hung up on my abducted sister–boo-hoo–but, wait, if I screw this woman… willIfeelbetter!”

Deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

Have my babies.

You’re not good enough.

By all this I mean, of course, that I think I’ll never be quite something.

Because there’s too much measuring. I’m a creature of comparison. Aren’t I good in my self, independent of the opinions of other people? Independent of what I can do, what others can?

In my immediate human relations, I know I am. Each person I meet is unique, and we’ll not be in competition with each other, because that’s just pointless. How do you compare two things so perfectly unique, so unrelated? It’s just apples and oranges, as they say.

But I can’t help it that in the sphere of living that matters just as much as relationships–education and facility/ability–I’m so hopelessly hung up on the betters, the worse, the bests, the terribles–in other words, classifications that come to nothing. For example, I am honestly delighted and unfeigned in my earnestness in a half-hour–long figure drawing session for Visual Arts class today. I love drawing what I see (especially if what I see is male and not unattractive), and to have it done for a class that is usually insufferable because I do not enjoy the creation process I am forced into, no matter how keen I am to create. (Why do I not enjoy it? That is a question whose answer is yet coming!) Then after all this joy, I find myself down again, dug into the dirt. I see another girl’s drawing. A laughing face. Windblown hair. A concise shawl. Beautiful shoulders. Realism and expression.

And I feel fucking terrible.

Going back to my seatmate, who I barely know but somehow am liked by, I begin to thoughtlessly rant about how realism is so much more respected than the style I am so used to, anime. I was only thinking that I cannot ever come close to that girl’s skill, because she works differently: literally, mentally, artistically. My seatmate doesn’t listen to me. I tell myself never to consider her more than a willing seatmate, a ghost to whom I am acquainted but will never connect to. As one can easily see, I’m a bit angry and depressed. I hate Art most of the time because I’m never sure whether my efforts will come to anything good. I don’t want to try. I don’t know how to try and be successful. I hate not succeeding.

This is who I am: I hate to be kicked a few rungs down in my own mental ladder. When I look at others’ drawings I look at them simply to see where I could sit on the hierarchy. When I write a creative composition, I am happy, and I very rarely listen intently when others read theirs aloud in-class. Yet while I draw, while I write, while I read things aloud, share my thoughts, what do I feel but complete inadequacy? I don’t want to understand it. Who I am.

But I do, even a little. I can blame it on a lot of things: my neo-colonial family, my individualist society, my parents’ unsaid but high standards, my ambiguity as to who I am, my tendency to be ill-at-ease when I am among moderate to large groups. Most striking is the factor of school expectation. See, I peek in my bag shortly after that little downer in Art class, and there’s the report card I’d procured that morning. I got an average of 94%, my lowest mark being just above a 90. I think only that I don’t want to be proud of it, to show it, even though you usually should be; it’s sad and ludicrous, I think, for my mark to be as such. I realized just half an hour ago now that I feel so much inadequacy because I can’t be around others who are more-or-less the same as me (little overachiever me) and because I must be surrounded by such range as makes me feel like I’m balancing on a constantly tilting plane of expectation of performance. Because I’m stuck in grey, in a “happy” middle.

I don’t want to call it mediocrity.

I don’t know what to call it.

But I hate it, and I’m afraid of it.

Man.

Fuck all y’all.

Fuck my life.

Edit: Facebook does have some uses…

On this day, God wants you to know that you are unique and precious.

When you try to value yourself for being the best in something, you are bound to fail. Even Olympic champions are the best only for a few years. You are precious to God not because there is no one better than you, but because you are a unique creation of mind, body and spirit, – there is no one like you, – and that is exactly what makes you so indescribably precious.

But it is also very possible that you are not Melissa, so I guess that sentence doesn’t make sense. On more than one level.

Let me level with you, then. Where this story starts is probably… oh, way back in the day … right around Xmas break 2009. I’m doing a thorough clean-up of my room and my university things on account of a here-comes-some-new-tenants bedroom shuffle, and I find a card about Portfolio Clinics at OCAD. I take a sticky note, put the essential information about one clinic that I investigated using the laptop [strictly my mother's use only], and asked my dad to pay for it. The note was stuck on the door, then on the ‘rents’ pillow… until finally they stopped ignoring it. I was set up for Words and Pictures: An Introduction to Graphic Design January 30, 2010 in a jiff once my dad took out the credit card!

Cut to January 28, 2010. I’m studying for my fourth exam which will be the last–(WOO-HOOOOOOOOOOOOOO)–which didn’t go so well–(BOOOOOOOOOO)–because I was sidetracked from studying most of the day. There was a) the simple desire not to have to memorize all the freaking Beatitudes, b) music I had put on, using internet radio, c) a CBC Radio 1 program that, the second I tuned in, had a guy pronouncing, “The Greek ideal penis is small and elegant”, d) OMGLFMAO, and e) me running to msg Melissa about it on MSN and laughing for a full 15 minutes as I kept listening to that show. (It’s called Ideas, and that was the first installment of the series–wait for it… Phallus in Wonderland.) So it follows that after such a riot, there’d be less knowledge about my Religion course than desired. It also didn’t help that the teacher put questions for which we were never instructed to study.

That was all done and over with (whew!) when I got on MSN and msged my best friend about my emancipation the next day. Yet I still had worries. I’m to have my first portfolio assessment for admission into York University the next Tuesday, plus there was the workshop to help prepare for that assessment and the one that follows a couple of weeks later for OCAD. This workshop was gonna go down the very next day, but I really didn’t want to think of it–just talk to friends. Well, talking to Melissa that Thursday had made me realize how  much we needed to hang out again (she lives 3 hours away by bus), and the plan was set in my mind: leave right after the last exam, sleep over at her place, bus to OCAD which isn’t so far from her place as it is from mine, then take a bus home. Yes, that was roughly 6 hours of travel time in just 48 hours’ time, but I wanted to see my friend.

I also had my new laptop (♥) on which to play a DVD to keep me entertained, and so it was. After a two-hour stroll through Adventureland I found myself in Toronto Union Station. Using either my mom’s cash or my lunch money, which was originally my dad’s cash, I got onto the third bus that day–towards my goal, which was emblazoned on my sweatshirt: Melissa. (Yeah, I bought it just for the word choice.) Fifty minutes later, I had reached my goal. Starbucks was the rendezvous point. It was not the place to easily get Wi-Fi access (damn Starbucks Account gyp). Oh, well–I got a call to run outside and deposit my [rather, my mother's] bulky laptop bag in Melissa’s [that is, her mother's] car before she and I got to stroll around the mall, just her and me.

I think we were there are full four hours. Most of it was me following M. around like a puppy dog through the stores, and all of that time we enjoyed the pleasure of chatting after a pretty long silence online-wise. (It was EXAM TIME. Blame it ALL on Exam Time. A nervous breakdown–Pulled all your hair out? It was Exam Time– and even someone dropping a nuclear warhead–People dying by the millions? …It was Exam Time! ) It was quite enjoyable. Do I even need to say it? Gosh, but we laughed our heads off. Must have been the sugar from the fury-inducing ice cream.

After that was an interesting shopping trip for door handles, not to mention a stop by a Portuguese bakery café. After that was laptop-showoff time! Then after that was me not understanding a telenovela. Then, finally, the time came to indecisively come to a conclusion that we should watch the Last Samurai. It was around 1:30 A.M. that I stood from the floor (I’d scooted to very near their large TV) and, speechless, ejected the disc, wobbled about, and tried to answer Melissa’s question of whether I liked it. “It’s the kind of”–insert stuttering and blubbering here–”the kind of movie you see over and over again….” Let’s just say that it was inspiring. I sang the Philippine national anthem in bed, trying to calm down and fall asleep.

*

7:30 AM. January 30, 2010.

I don’t want to get up.

8:30 AM–scheduled 21 Milton GO Bus departure, eastbound–to Union Station. An hour from now.

I need to get up. Still don’t want to.

Last week Rebecca and I spoke about a get-together during the post-exam break. It was planned for Sunday afternoon, 31 January 2010.

I can get through today, if only to get to tomorrow… I guess. So I get up and get ready. Melissa’s mom got up quicker to cook me breakfast, which I eat. We leave. Melissa drives. I partie. I feel sad. Not to mention fucking cold.

When is the bus coming? It’s probably 8:40!

A woman comes to the shelter everyone’s gathered at and presses some sort of unseen button. I look around someone’s shoulder. The button has a sign above saying “Turn Heater On.” Looking up, I notice this box of horizontal metal of some sort, just like the one at the ice skating rink Beryl has her kids’ skating lessons at. It’s glowing red. I thank the gods for the little reprieve my forehead is getting. I think my brain might just be thawing a little.

Then I reach OCAD. It’s the same as I remember from past visits, for the Open House and for the Portfolio Day. Big. Colourful. A little empty and cold, in terms of the wall decor. The same could be said for the room in which the 15 kids–hailing from Saudi Arabia, through Russia, to Brampton, not including me, of course, the one from Barrie–sat and listened to the amiable bantering and commenting from our two facilitators, Nancy Snowe and Saskia van I-don’t-care-to-pronounce-this-or-spell-it. I had already been in this room. For the portfolio check-up by Emily Carr. That crushing experience. But today, the experience was to be constructive, stimulating, somewhat cold but educating anyway… all in all, fun and easy. I hope my post-secondary experience really does end up being something like this!

It is of note that after this 7-hour stay at OCAD, I got to get acrylic paints and origami paper at Curry’s, and there were 3 very colourful paper cranes sitting on my empty seat at around 6:05 when I ran to catch my bus. Who found it? I can’t know. I hope it surprised, pleased, or even just made someone take a second out of their day to think of something besides their rush-hour life. That was my goal for that whole hour sitting waiting for the right bus to park, sitting and making a paper crane.

It is also of note that I came home, not wanting to get excited anymore or anything, but then there were stand-up shows on at Comedy Network, and my dad came home with the poster size print outs of my portfolio pieces (a movie poster designed by me, for example), and these both got me in a torrent of thought and excitement. I slept at around 1 AM, tired but fulfilled.

*

Sunday can be described in one sentence.

Rebecca Kelley, I can’t say I understand your past exactly, but I have to love ya.

…Oh, and Battleground is somewhat too slow-paced for a war movie. ):

Of all the movies I’ve seen in this weekend (Adventureland, Last Samurai, 500 Days of Summer, Adam, Battleground), I think Battleground was the least stimulating one. I’m about to watch yet another movie, called Departures or, in Japanese, Okuribito.

Signing off!