something's the matter

but i've no idea what the hell is out of place again.

The nights are growing longer and lonelier, and I'm left alone with my thoughts and my imagination. I used to think that creativity and thinking about things always yielded good things... It just drives my crazy now. I fly to Andromeda and I drink stardust and moonshine, drop to the pits of hell and talk to the dead. Scream and dance in a senseless pattern of hands weaving in and out of dreams and grace.

I scare myself sometimes.

I don't know what I need what I want. I've always groped blindly, trying to make all the right mistakes. I fall some, and it's so hard to pick up the pieces when you don't know where you've left them.

Last night, my hands were dancing and by the dim moonlight I imagined myself to be outside on the grass. Singing with constellations and galaxies to be born still. But I didn't want the entire sky to reach endlessly. I needed the trees and the soil and the sand to anchor me, to be within range, because I knew I could get dizzy and I could fall out into space.

I needed an anchor. I guess life really is lonely. We live and breathe and die alone. Defining moments where you need someone to hold your hand are defined by their very absence, by the inability of them to reach through space and time and touch you when you are at the lip of the grave, pull you back.

I forget the point, sometimes.

Sometimes, I find strength in looking into eyes that don't look back, and somewhere deep within me, my heart opens and the universe comes spilling out in song. Sometimes. But not very often.

We search for things in places high and low, and we never really find the place to put ourselves into. Is that the test of life? To see how well you can make a place in the world, to test and stretch limits, to lose and never find, to search and never conquer?

There are no ideals, only compromises. Only systems. Only war and disagreement. We just wade through it, try to keep afloat. Is this a test?

No wonder we believe in heaven.

on newfound and lost love

hmmmm, it's been a long time since i've blogged here...
well, i don't want to make the comeback all about bad energy, so i'm not going to blog about ate camila....


let's see.


I guess, I just want to say again how completely amazing you are. I can never completely get my head around that fact. The reality and stability of you. Your confidence and your humility and your steadfast belief in this wonderful mistake we made.

I used to read books and watch movies and I'd cringe, and I never really got how you could get so lost in one person. Grow so dependent and so intertwined with that life does manage to look like one path, instead of a separate two. I'm so in over my head, rendered so completely and utterly silly, that at this moment, the logical voice in me can't even come up with a good objection to that.

Why not?, I breathe. Why not, indeed.

Karen Tividad texted me this emo quote thing once, but it's in my other phone, so I've probably lost it. It went along the lines of her asking me, who are we to decide when the right age is to love? who to love? what love is or isn't?

Does it really matter if we've known each other for a day, a week or a year? It comes when it comes -- thousands live by it and even more die without it. Who gets to say what it is or when it's supposed to come?

It's here now.




We're here now.

to(last)night

it was a good night. a good day.

i didn't particularly enjoy the execom meeting part. haaaaaaaaaay.

but i liked doing stuff for him. it made me feel useful. i liked the feeling of kinda sweating and having to be patient and doing all sorts of dumb stuff just so i can make life easier for him. specially since he's not exactly in tip top condition nowadays.

haaaaaaaaaaay. i think i want to do that often. i hope you'll let me do that more often. :)



then we went to his house and played cranium with his younger siblings and cousins. it was fun. :))



+++
note: fell asleep on the couch. have not done anything for CWTS. adam, don't kill me. haha.

a list to remember

bold letters: have read
in green: i think i have them and should read/reread
in red: i should buy

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Complete Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia Series - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres Mais
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

i guess i ought to type everything out before i forget it...

day 1:
mmm, slept through most of the flight and got a really sore neck. there was a really cute marching band (who was not marching?) that greeted us as we got down from the plane tho. HAHAHA! and me and mama funny danced.

mmmm i don't remember much from the first day except the crocodile farm with the really huge crocodile bones and remains and the partial head of a sperm whale and holding the little baby croc that peed on me i think. ah well, sinasakal ko ata sya sa sobrang tense ko. hahahaha :P

oh and we also went to the butterfly farm with the annoying lady shaking the branches. biznitch.
and to iwahig with all the inmates just roaming around. :| hmmm.

and we ate in badjao seafront!!!! can you say NYORM? NYORM? NYORM??? nyorm nyorm nyorm...


day 2:
we went to the underground river! :] pretty beach there and i was still bleeding so i went emo-like and built a mound of sand somewhere and put a leaf on it and put RIP. and nicki was all. :| when she went to get me. the waves looked big and fun and i didn't want to be there while everyone else had wicked fun. nyarrr. drama drama drama happened..

anyway, gandaaaaaaaaaaa.underground river cave stuff was pretty damn cool. AND SCARY. in the total bleeding darkness, and i was holding the light and the water was i dont remember how many meters deep but DEEP. and the highest point of the mountain was like FTW SCARY I AM A SMALL INSIGNIFICANT BEING kind of thing because i have no idea how that shit formed.

ooooh and the outcropping with Jesus' face on it was pretty cool. even sandra was like woah. which says a lot. haha.

and there was a doctor person who died there in that beach just outside. around 10 years ago, at a doctor's convention and sina tita inday were there too! and swimming there just the day before he died. ftw.

and there were bayawaks and monkeys everywhere while we ate our lunch. (ate couldn't finish hers) and we brought our feet up on the table because there were like three or four which came around and went under our table and they are HUGE and EEWW and scary and fascinating and stuff. :D


day 3:
Honda Bay! so i went snorkelling. and hindi naman ako tinagusan on the way back so that's good. the fish feeding was crazy fun. i picked up a lot of sand dollars!! :]

there was this part where we snorkelled in the open sea. it wasn't that deep at the corals part but it was pretty daaaaamn scary you know.

and it was kind of sad and fun to see the corals recuperating and gaining life and coral in some parts! it didn't have to be that way. anyway mayor hagedorn (shit how do you spell that again) is the shiznit. more on that laaaater.

what is even more sad is Global Warming and how some of the corals were starting to bleach white. :[ now, that's something we can't really do a lot about anymore. :(

anyway, i have a funny tan line because i wore shorts all day. ewwww. hahahaha.


day 4:
dolphin watching!!!!!!!! is the shiznit.. went through kanas kanas (hhahaha) and then... peace! and many many pods of dolphins all around! spinner dolphins spinning spinning even the baby ones and they are jumping jumping out of the water and it was craaaaaazy! i especially loved it when they were beside the boat and i was like ZOMG they are right there. @_@

then we bought a yellow fin tuna fish from this guy in a neighboring bangka and it was like half the length of my body and around 10?? kg heavy. THAT IS ONE MEAN TUNA.

and then we ate sashimi on the boat. >:) nyom nyom nyom


day 5:
wala. went home! ate at kaya express for ate cam's grad thing. eugene couldnt come kasi wala raw kasama si lucy sa bahay nya. and i think lucy had too much fun over there with all the attention and little kiddies. hahaha. bakasyon rin sya. :)

saw my boyfriend and kissed him silly for being such a good boy and not being a needy attention hog. :]


ANYWAY MOVING ON TO MAYOR EDWARD S. HAGEDORN AND ECOTOURISM
the environmental sustainability projects there just BLOWS MY MIND. the waste disposal, the dual solar-wind panels for street lights are only put in spots on the roads where there are people living there. CAN YOU SAY BRILLIANT? no need for electric lines and dirty, wasteful energy.

God, can you imagine the amount of investment in those dual energy panels?! and shit, the city is so clean, the anti-littering ban is crazy.

the people of puerto LOVE hagedorn, and it's not hard at all to see why. im not a palaweno and I love him!

and SHIT, they don't support mining activities, they're not allowed to get bird's nest for soup, they limit and regulate tourism so that only certain groups can go at a time and it's not overcrowded... the local community BENEFITS from tourism. it's added income! shiiiit maaaaan.

who knew?! and the thing is they get so much support from IMF, WWF, etc because that's the global trend! GEEZ! if only other cities and towns and mayors could see that!

but then again, not a lot of big cities have tourism on their side. Haaaaaaay. Basta, all i know is that... im going back to palawan

El Nido to rock climb
Tubbataha reef
Tabon caves
Pawikans and dugong

when i learn to scuba dive. GOD IT'S BEAUTIFUL THERE.

i feel bad about CD. like i don't know anybody there anymore, can't talk or relate or bond with the people there anymore.
i am only sure of three people: adam, enan and mitch.

it kind of sucks that i cant have "the best of all worlds" --> ala hannah montana. =)) kadiri.

sometimes, i feel like i have to choose.

i guess it's true that once you're attached, you have to compromise some things because, in truth, you don't just belong to you anymore. when you commit to someone, there's this some kind of unspoken agreement that you belong with that person -- you're sharing a big chunk of you. (social psych hahahaha)

i've had a lot to compromise. i let go of some of my alone time, curbed and downplayed malandi behavior, admitted to the fact that flexibility and mobility doesn't come easy anymore.

i miss it, actually. being able to move and speak and flirt shamelessly without fear of consequence. i miss not caring.

but i wouldn't trade all that senseless meandering and lonely, empty feeling for even just ONE of your hugs. i love you so much, sometimes it feels like the world doesn't need another hippie like me.

we give and we take. we lose and we gain. weight. a minute. ang corny... hahahahaha.

you know when i said that i'm not afraid, because i was so sure that we had all the time in the world to get wherever we wanted to be? well, as it turns out, im finally right about one thing.

i think. i hope this doesnt jinx it tho. hahaha.

-------------
from City of Angels:


What's it like?
What?
Warmth.
It's wonderful.
If you'd known this was going to happen...would you have done it?

I would rather have had one breath of her hair,
one kiss of her mouth, one touch of her hand
...than an eternity without it.

One.

love burns brighter than sunshine

... and suddenly you're mine. :)