Filipino Happiness

Travelling towards town on a Sunday, it is inevitable to meet our foreign talents from the Philippines. (Some may argue that they shouldn't be classified as talents but i'd rather differ)

Our country struggles a love-hate relationship with these visitors. Knowing this, as well as considering the events occurring in their homeland now, I stand amazed at how they can still put on a smile as they dress up in their 'nicest' clothes on their way to Church and/or rejoicement with their friends.

Despite the topic being taboo in the mainstream media, many Singaporeans regard our foreign talents who are not employed to work at an office desk as second-class immigrants. A sense of disdain is felt in the expressions of locals as they enter the public domains of transport and city centers in their cultural groups. Easily recognisable in their attire, lingua franca and volume, many the locals maintain a distance. Its funny that individually, they are trusted to care for our homes, feed our families, guard our children, and yet as a collective regarded as pesky, overflowing and alien. Is it because they are not directly contributing to the local economy? Is it that they live with a more carefree attitude than what Singaporeans should?

Unfortunately, the bias is unfortunately diffused to those who are 'gainfully employed' next to us in our workplaces. Many are treated with distrust as they "take our jobs" and by definition, our money.

Could it be that at the core of it all, we are jealous of our friends that have made our land a cash cow. Could it be that we envy their temporary contentment. Maybe, its the fact that they have something to live for at the end of the road. Do we?

Art, Schmart (Speakeasy, Artistry, Jan 17th 2014)

Something so raw and visceral that is art, an expression that has no start, nor end, but an at-present feeling. No records, no videos, just, now. I sit here absorbing the sight and sound of a 'performing artist', as vague as that description can be. I sit, absorb, recoil, resist, recline with a sinking feeling of anxiety and intense insanity crawling up my bowed spine. My hurt ears suggest my lack of belonging and yet I stay seated.

The Problem with Jay Gatsby / Jim Halpert / The World

I recently watched Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, a spectacular film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's book. However, what i wasn't prepared to was to feel a kinship with the title character.

Now I'm not a student of literature or film. But I do realize that any statement that is repeated in a work of fiction is meant to be a point remembered. And what was repeatedly mentioned about Jay Gatsby was his optimism and how unfortunately, he asks (or expects) too much of others. And this is why i can relate.

Jay's a giver. He gives and people take, every weekend, every day. His name penetrates the milieu of society's rich and yet, nobody really knows who he is. The only thing I notice that he takes back in exchange for his givings is his liberty. Its peculiar that the people who spend hours on end at his estate have yet to actually met the man. And all the riches he has gained, all that he has done was to achieve a simple goal, to return 'her' to his arms. The irony is that when he finally haves her, though limited it was, when he stops giving...when he chooses to take what he feels he deserves...he is rejected, abandoned, forgotten. Is that what happens when you choose to think for yourself rather than for others? And he was not rejected simply by the strangers but also his 'loved' ones.

This brings me to Jim Halpert from The Office. Everybody loves Jim....everybody.... from the first season as he gazed longingly at Pam from his desk, to the day he took a break from his 'dream job' to spend time with his 'dream wife' and family. If you're a fan of the office, you must have rejoiced when Jim and Pam first embraced each other in the office. Now, Jim's a giver. He supported Pam when she went to Art School. He bought the house they lived in. He cut off his tie at the wedding to cheer her up. But when he took up his dream job....

Dear world, treat your givers well. Because if they give up hope...

Seven

Sometimes I worry. Sometimes I worry that I do not have her patience.

Don't know whether its simply my body telling me to catch up on my rest, but i get so tired...and not just physically. Choose from the following options: A) mentally, B) emotionally, C) spiritually, D) all of the above.

Don't know whether its just seasonal. It is the point when we indulge in our familial bonds and catch up to our realities, all different passages yet forever intertwined. I lay my head but the pillow sinks too much.

Imagine yourself, another body, another life, another soul. Would you take the paths you have chosen thus far? Give and take. Ask and answer. Stay and leave. Live and not. Trust and abandon.

Love. An organic curse that pulls our heart to make choices blind. It pushes and pulls with reasons never clear. Funny how it drives us every day but nobody can help us understand.

Serendipity. Fate. Grand masterplan. Fuck.

Dear Beloved

My goodness how long it has been since the first time we met. I can't truly say it was love at first sight, even though you are indeed a sight to see. I am an emotional person, which I admit i do try hard to hide. I consider myself a perceptive person, and yet many times I fail to learn what is on your mind. You intrigue me my love, sometimes to a point of infuriation that I try to discover what lies beneath.

Thus far in our long romance, I have settled on the fact that I will never fully understand you more than any man can truly realize a woman. This does not mean that I surrender to the unknown, simply that I will continue my pursuit of this knowledge til my dying breath. I promised once and frequented reminders that I will take care of you for as long as you allow and I intend to keep this promise, for now and ever more.

Nothing can truly compare to what I feel for you. No chambers of time, nor steel segments can encompass the depth of emotion I have with you. All the words in the world can be verbose enough or validate my heart's desire. But I give these to you freely as inklings of the joy you bring to me in this life.

I hope you believe that I love you sweetheart with all my heart, body and soul. I thank your parents for bringing you on this date those years ago, onto this lonely Earth. I thank you for choosing this path which has led you to me. And I thank God for allowing me to have you by my side all this time. Never a regret have I considered in this journey of ours. You bring me a certain calmness, the value in my life I can never compensate.

Happy Birthday my darling! My best wishes are for you. Know that I will always be behind you,and more importantly by your side holding your faith, in every endeavour you wish to achieve.

Shallow Dreams and Pent Up Feelings

Family. One day I want to build one...one of my own. But considering the situation I am in...the state of mind I am experiencing at this current point in my life..., my inner self chuckles a sinister laugh at this want of mine.

I hear his words ring clearly in my thoughts..."Why the hell would you want to do that, you stupid bastard?"

And I know he's right. The economy's in the shitter. The world of politics is losing its mind. Media celebrates pastiche way too much for our own good. Technology is advancing so fast that half of us always seem to be trying to catch up. And our education system....don't get me started with the education system...

The world is in so much of a transition that we...as part of the generation that went through these changes first-hand...must ask, "Is there a future for us?" Don't get me wrong. This is a personal web log but i am not trying to sound all that dramatic. We are part of the first generation that is ill-prepared for our adult lives. We take up many jobs that didn't exist 5 to 10 years ago. Many of us are in some kind of debt before we reach 25 years of age. And most of us anticipate going into another in the near future. So what lies beyond for us? Nobody will know.

Whatever happens, we have to prepared, no matter how ironic that sounds. I choose to hold on to my dreams of a fluffy career and cosy family home. Nothing or nobody is going to change that. Instead of griping for your comfort zone, I dare anyone to take in the challenge of change. In the words of Tim Gunn, "Make It Work!"

I'm sick of the screaming. Bloody fucking nonsense. It doesn't make sense, and it doesn't serve any purpose besides making everyone more agitated. So what's the point?

I have to get out.

Being angry is tiring...I see it in so many people and I myself try to keep it in most of the time. But sometimes it just creeps in...

I cried today, with no reasonable explanation besides I had to. Don't you love the holidays...

Not how I wanted to start today. The sad thing about the people we love is that we undeniably put the highest expectations of them. Looking at your life, the people who can rile you up the most are most probably your loved ones: parents, siblings, girlfriend, wife, children, etc.

And this is not the "I want to scream," angry I am speaking of. It's more towards, "Why do you hate me so??? If I didn't care for you so much, I would be strangling you right now!!!"

Life: Tough luck, dude. Move on.

Hello void. It has been a while since I've spoken. It's been a while that I 've encountered anything substantial to speak about. I was going to submit a film review. Alas, the motivation was missing. Regardless today, this entry will pose as my dream diary. And as good dream diary entries go, it would require a title. Today's title would be

"I want to slap my nephew"

Before anyone goes on a tirade of battle plans against a child abuser, please note that 'want' marks a feeling of intent and does not exactly refer to an action. I, for one, did not slap my nephew but I sure hell wanted to. Do not get me wrong, I am not a violent person, this fact the closest among friends can attest. I have only raised my hand to my nephew once and I had regretted it immediately, just because the realisation came to me that I was angry not at him but the ugly situation in which I was in. He was merely one of the elements that make for a shitty feeling. This morning I encountered the same, upon waking up from a strange nightmare.

You know how sometimes you encounter a great dream and upon waking, you simply want to return to sleep to continue it again, be it that you were on a literal dream vacation or spending an amorous time with a dream partner. This never works. (I will explain why this cannot happen below) Miraculously, this happened today. It was just unfortunate that it was a nightmare instead. I woke up feeling uncomfortable at 6.30am, by the sound of my alarm, but only after my second wake do I remember details of this nightmare. My send wake up call was my nephew telling me that he is late for school. Before we move on to my waking life, let us visit my dream which has been split into two parts.

Part 1. Dreams never last. And they rarely begin from start to end. In this preliminary dream, my body was not existent. I was there, it simply did not register that I was a human, with rules of reality holding me down. I felt like a specter floating across the dream space. This dream space was a series of chambers separated by steel airlock doors. And these chambers are fit like a tunnel path that stretches across either in a submarine or space station. Each chamber is made of metal. However, being a specter, I felt that you can also look into the chambers from outside like how you may see the characters through walls in film and television. In my mind, I was evacuating these chambers, metal airlocks like the covers of tupperware closing doorways one at a time. And in one of this chambers was a creature that in my dream logic registered as extra terrestrial, not unlike the ones in James Cameron's Aliens' series. In its last seen moment, this alien was jumping towards the closing door with its claws thrust forward. One the door closed, that was that and there was silence. This is when my alarm rang.

Part 2. I decided to snooze my alarm like any other day. I plan my alarm to be 15 minutes before I should wake to allow me this snooze time. This might sound to some people as counter productive but I like this system I have. Upon going back to slumber, I find myself a human, with a human body instead of the specter I was before. We revisit the chambers which are now old and blackened with soot and dust, from where I cannot confess that I know of. You do not really analyse dream logic. To you, it just is. (Haha. Sorry. Bad inside joke.) I realise I am one who knows what existed in these chambers, like a recurring character in an alien series. So I thread the chambers one by one. Opening and closing the chamber locks, one by one. In one chamber, as I stepped foot it, I sensed a movement in the soot. I barely make out through the dust that there was a creature standing only a mere 3-4 meters ahead of me made of skeleton and humanoid in structure, although stretched longer than any human. On its head, I notice a pair of sunglasses. Do not ask me the significance of this. It seemed to be sensing the sound of my entrance and gazes its humanoid head towards the door. As cliché as it sounds, I stood rooted to my ground, not daring to make a sound. But all of a sudden, the creature lunges forward towards the door, right as the lights of the chamber lit up, exposing its horrific glory to me as it flies past and hits its head into the metal door. Almost by instinct I grab hold of its neck, feet flat on the door and I pulled with all my dream might, attempting to dislocate the long neck from the creature's head. Right as I groaned to pull with all my strength, I woke up at the sound of my nephew telling me that he is late for school.

Awake. My nephew annoys me because when he wakes me, he is never late. When school is barely 10 minutes away, it is hard to be. But there he was repeating again and again how it is late and he will be late for school, as I stagger out of bed, grabbing my glasses, cell-phone, house key and a t-shirt, pull myself into the bathroom to splash water on my face, walked out into the living room by the door, dropped myself on the couch and waited just a moment before I had to stand up and walk out the door to send the kids to school. Yes this is pretty much my daily routine.

I force myself to revisit the bathroom for another attempt to wake up before towing my body out the door as my nephews again tell me how it was late. I walked silently throughout the journey, still disturbed by my dream. I believe the feeling of horror, sense of completion and the annoyance of incessant whining did me in. I so wanted to slap my nephew. Alas, what would it accomplish? Nope, nothing much at all. Just another day. Let's hope it gets better.

Give and take. That's the plan.

It's raining, finally. Every year I wait for the rain. For a reason I do not know. Something about it calms me down, telling me that everything is going to be allright. I always loved the rain. Think of it as nature's washing machine...or a de-congestant. Here's to another year, great void.

You know those people who are always looking for problems. I mean they can never be truly happy. Sure they'll be happy once you aid them in a dilemma. But they seem to skip a breath and just move on to the next one. Trust me, I'm am trying not to be that person. Really. Sometimes you realize you have everything you need in your life. Yeah...I'm still waiting for that to register. Cheers!

District 9 Review

It has been a while since I've written a movie review. It's been a while since I've seen a movie that moved me to ponder a long time after. Mind you, I watched a copy that did not have the subtitled translations for the aliens' speech. Surprisingly I still enjoyed the film. When you begin to watch it, you will find yourself hating or maybe irritated by the main actor Wikus, either because of his accent or his cheery but condescending demeanor towards the prawns (aliens). But when the shit hits the fan, you will tend to root for the poor sucker as he falls into his abyss of trouble.

If you're the kind of person who is looking for a straight-out alien invasion, or action movie, turn away from District 9, because it is way more than that. As disgustingly gross the aliens are in this movie, you will also see the humans as the enemy, a reflection of humanity's fervent effort to capitalize on resources made available to them. District 9 poses, forgive me if I may sound pretentious, a question of humanity and what it means to be human, regardless of its relative definition. The movie is about the struggle to survive and our fear of the unknown. We see the humans in the movie find all these unused alien weapons and yet the authorities continue to treat the aliens as uncivilized, unintelligent, scum of the universe, which do not deserve rights as a being of intelligence and culture should receive.

What is humanity? Intelligently, culturally and/or morally superior of other species? Looking at the treatment of these aliens in the movie and even people of relative culture, ethnicity and gender in our real lives, does it make us really human? Another recent film addressed similar ideas - James Cameron's Avatar. But you become easily overwhelmed by the graphical nature of that film. And seriously, humanoid-cat looking aliens...making out...gross. Whereas District 9 is not afraid to get down and dirty. The aliens in this movie were not meant to be beautiful in any way, neither was the land they occupied utopic. So if you're not afraid to re-consider what humanity has become through the years, pick-up a copy of District 9 and decide for yourself.

Pride. Everyone has it. Everyone. But sometimes, you might forget. C'est la vie.

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I'm overworked, underpaid, under-appreciated and unintelligible. But somehow, I feel blessed. Wonder why....

I'm tired, so fucking tired.

I do not know how to say this besides how it is. A guitar string broke today. The 6th. It seems to be a sign of impending doom in my pursuit to conceive a skill in creating music. Sure, there are 5 more strings, but each does not signify a life; 5 out of 6. You need all 6 to play it. Instead it is now 1 piece short of a whole and thus cannot live on. Of course it can be repaired, but this begs the question: will it be the same as before? The horror of it breaking and its repetition continues to torment me. I've put the guitar aside. Not wishing to see the damage even though it already has burnt itself a hole in my head. There is no hurry, there is time, I tell myself rather unconvincingly. I will take care of it another day. Procrastination, you might call it, pessimists would refer to it as delaying the inevitable.

Dear God, give me strength.

Every single endeavour we undertake, out of passion and not our abnormal human quirks, we perform with the slight consciousness that it would affect the future of our genetic line. We seek knowledge, we pray and preach, we take risks with our wealth and our lives, not for any rational self-benefit but with hope that the descendants of our kind may live in a better world. We fight our wars, of strengths and wit, we conserve life, preserving nature's best and it is too hard to simply point these as altruistic acts in our endless desire to prove that there are better ways to live. We save, engineer, innovate, do it all, for the kids. Tell a mother that she needs to die for her child to live and she will not hesitate for a moment. But tell the same mother that her child needs to die to save others and the task would be gauged for much longer. We make similar choices everyday, if you think about it. The question is, are we trying too hard? We try to believe that providing our future generation with entities of which we ourselves did not enjoy in our time would enrish their lives. Are they? And is there such a thing as trying too hard? Right now, I think the real challenge is merely getting through the day.