My Brother Left for Canada

My brother left for Canada today. He really left. He said he would do it and then he did. I feel like the whole thing was decided overnight. I’ve been in Baguio and Novaliches for the past two weeks and I wasn’t really around for any of it except for today: the last day. The fact that I even went on those trips might hint to you that he and I weren’t at all close. I love him as much as one could love a brother who he doesn’t drink with, he doesn’t go to for help or even talk to outside of calling through the bathroom door asking, “are you done yet?” I originally wrote “loved” in that last sentence and went back and erased the “ed” I guess that’s telling as well. He’s gone. Last night he was driving me home from dinner with our grandparents (my parents had brought a separate car because they’d planned to go to Heckle and Jeckle again). It turned out we had a lot more in common than I thought. He wanted to stay in the Philippines but his major concern was financial, he wanted to live in different places all over the world and other more personal things as well. Today, I wasn’t even sure I was going to the airport to say goodbye to him (I hadn’t really gotten a decent night’s sleep since Tuesday) but I’m glad I did. Despite the insightful evening and all 30 or so minutes of what was quite possibly the longest conversation I’ve had with him since we were boys, I still caught myself exasperated at some of the things that went on in the car ride to NAIA. He hadn’t distributed his cash into different places which was traveling 101 for me, when I told him that liquids weren’t allowed in his hand carry, I would have expected him to move his facial products into his suitcase even if my mom said that the limit was 100ml but she wasn’t sure if it was in total or per container, but he didn’t, little thing like that that made it hard for us to share much more than a bathroom. Some part of me was even annoyed that I couldn’t talk about the writing workshop that I had just come back from and was still excited about because I didn’t want to make everything about me. And so, we unloaded his luggage, he hugged my dad and then my mom and kind of awkwardly put his arm around my shoulder. He let go and looked at us and his face became pink, and scrunched up. His shoulders began to jerk and not so suddenly, we were brothers and we cried. My parents were surprisingly calm. My dad told him to think of it as a vacation, if he didn’t like it, he could always come back. On the ride home, I was quiet.

Unsent e-mail

Don’t laugh

I finally got around to reading Harry Potter (don’t worry, no spoilers) and I feel like I’ve lost a dozen friends. It’s not because of what happens in the plot or anything but just because it’s the last time that Harry and his friends will ever be written about (Although part of me wishes that JK Rowling will do some kind of prequel about James, Lily and Snape). The seventh book was my last party with them, my last three day/one year journey and I feel like it came and went. Having lost all those fictional friends, I thought I’d write to my friends in the flesh.

It’s just that, its not only sad in itself but - and I’m not sure how much sense this will make but – its sad that its not so sad anymore. And that goes for all of life. Its sad that its not so sad that we’ll never go through LM induction again. Its sad that its not so sad anymore that we five never get to see each other anymore. Its sad that its not so sad that Tammy, Nana and I are graduating and will soon be leaving behind the biggest chunk of what we have come to understand as our lives as we know them.

I used to get really obsessed with these things as a kid. Final Fantasy 8, A Knight’s Tale, Harry Potter, I’d really let myself go, let myself believe and to be taken into these impossible worlds in words or on screen, embarrassed of the indirect relationship between my age and my level at which I’d been smitten. I took suspension of disbelief to a different level. I’m sure I’m not the first one but I wanted to go to Hogwarts, I wanted to joust on horses and win a princess and, I wanted to fight monsters with my gang of friends. It’s sad that its not that sad anymore that I can’t see myself doing those things ever again. Maybe I’m having an early quarter-life crisis but I used to believe that the word “Idealistic” was a complement. Now its fast becoming a synonym for “Naïve”.

I guess it’s really the same thing I was saying before about relationships. I was afraid that I’d been damaged or numbed. I think it’s the thought of having lost potency. The thought of being less than what I was, weaker, deficient and somewhat calloused.

I - thank - you. Hahaha.

dru

Know thy Characters or Become a Body Builder

Damn, it’s been a while. Two months! I’m not going to get into the reason why. It’s time to just get right back on the horse.

In Abola’s class, all my works were character driven. I’d know the character I wanted to write and I simply wrote about that character, found out where he’d bring me and what he’d do. He’d take on a life of his own and I was simply the stenographer of my own creation, a writer of biographical (although fictional) slices of life. The problem was that I didn’t care which details were really merited and which should be left implied.

In Suchen’s class, I’ve tended to start with big ideas and work from there. A man finds himself in a cloud of grasshoppers with little kids picking off the oblivious creatures one by one. How does he get there? A woman masseuse finds herself smitten by her client’s daughter. How do I show the novelty in the event? When exactly does the attraction come about? How do I contrast this to her usual mechanical sessions with other clients? Suchen described it as “adding salt here and adding pepper there,” and to build off of her analogy, without first knowing whether I’m cooking chicken or beef, noodles or soup. I don’t know my characters.

Granted, I’ve stopped writing “Starbucks Fiction” about shallow college kids with their idealism and their principles that they’d die for and their insistence that somehow their opinions would matter to a reader (not much unlike this blog), but in doing so, I find myself writing about characters that I know nothing about; those whose worldviews are unfathomable to me making it impossible to suspend the reader’s disbelief within the context of realistic fiction as opposed to tale telling like in A Sand Story.

I’ve lost the intimacy I’d once had with my characters. A guest speaker at one of my workshops (I don’t remember who, sorry ma’am) said that my story had the backbone of an award winning piece and that it was the language that needed improving. Like a dolt, I wrote my next piece with high school cry of “more description, more figures of speech, more details, show don’t tell!” I only now realize what she really meant by language. The language itself, the diction, the grammar and the syntax does not have to be impressive (and sometimes even gets annoying when it’s overdone). Rather, the language (and not necessarily the speech) has to suit the character.

The same teacher told me that language is a wonderful problem to have. I think she meant that an out of shape, yet experienced, ballerina is always a ballerina. She can always work out, strengthen her muscles, and regain her flexibility but a female body builder, no mater how strong, flexible or agile, would need much more work to become a ballerina. That’s what I think.

At this point I don't really care if this is well written, I just want to get it out. I just want closure.

Tuesday two weeks ago, Fr. David, my theology professor, assigned 500+ pages of reading for the next day. I had already been cramming all of my studies to make room for The Republic so I'd forgotten to write an essay assigned for another class that day. When I went home to work on the essay during my hour and a half class because I'd left the questions at home, I discovered that MS Word was bugging out. This happened once before and after deleting some big files, it worked again, so that's what I did. When that didn't work, I turned the laptop off and when I tried to turn it on again, it just didn't do anything at all. I ended up writing my essay on lined paper and not submitting my design homework that was saved on the laptop.

The next night, my mom totally surprised me when she said I might be able to get the mac I was supposed to get the year before. Soon after, I was brought down to earth when I saw her again and she said it would be better to get a cheap laptop and wait until I'm working to get a better one. That was our game plan. I would have to wait another three years at least for my mac.

On Sunday, coming from my grandma's house, we stopped by gateway to canvass on laptops. To my surprise and delight, my dad was ready to buy a laptop that they had for sale only they didn't have stock. My brother, being my brother, hit me while I was down in asking my dad if I really even needed a laptop. Of course I didn't, of course I don't. I don't really need anything but oxygen if you really think about it. But having a laptop did make my life a hell of a lot easier especially since MS office on the Desktop was a trial version that had expired months ago and there I was required to submit a type written essay without a proper word processor.

The next Monday while I was minding my own business trying to catch up for David's class my mom says, "Lets buy it!" I wanted to study but my dad had called and told my mom to get it as soon as possible so that I could use it for school. Long story short, we called half a dozen shops and finally at 5pm we decided on a good deal at PCcorner on Gilmore ave. We weren't sure if we would make it before closing at 730 but I didn't want to have wasted all that study time and have nothing to show for it, so we went. And as luck would have it, there was absolutely no traffic on the way. It felt meant to be. We bought an even better laptop than the one we wanted and I went home more than satisfied.

On the same night, as I was closing the gate after my brother had parked his car in the garage, I told him the good news. He told me the bad news. He gotten, that day, a discount for a P83K laptop, he would only have to pay P45K for it. My heart sank in my chest. We told my dad, we pointed fingers and I thought that was that. Sure I would like to have had a better laptop but with how fast I got it and the fact that I got one better than the one I had set my lowered expectations on made me feel satisfied at getting a good deal.

Yesterday, coming home from Mt. Sembrano, my sister asked me if the laptop had a webcam. Then and there I realized that the flier said it did but I hadn't actually seen the webcam. I thought this might be grounds for returning the laptop so that I could get the more expensive one or at the very least I would get a free webcam so I told my parents about it and I went to the store today with my mom. I went in alone because she couldn't find parking.

Right off the bat, they offered me an external webcam. I also noticed that the old fliers had been replaced. My motivations being secretly beyond the issue of webcam, I asked if I could just return it. What they offered instead was an inferior model with a built in webcam plus P2000 credit a their store. I didn't bite. I SMS'd both my dad and my brother for advice and (after calling her cellphone) I discovered that my mom had parked too far away for her to join me at the shop and to help me argue my point. Basically my dad told me to ask my brother and my brother told me to take the free laptop. I made my last feeble attempt at a refund before calling my mom to come pick me up. While waiting for her outside, my dad SMS'd me telling me not to give in but just then, my mom arrived honking at me to get in the car already because of the traffic she was causing. From the car, I called my dad to tell him what happened and I told him that the 7day replacement policy would expire after today and that he should get there before 730pm if he wanted to try to argue himself. He said that he wouldn't be able to make it. Again, I left thinking that everything was finally over and that that was that.

Again I was wrong. My dad was pissed. He told me that I shouldn't have given in. He told me that the webcam wasn't enough and he told me that he would go back himself tomorrow and try himself. When he asked me for the flier that with the claimed webcam, I told him that I didn't have it, that I'd left it behind. He stormed out.

Later that night (this night), he told me it was like buying an Altis and being given a Vios. He was still bothered by it. He still planned to go to PCcorner the next day an to get everything straightened out. I told him that it might be better to get it replaced with the P83K laptop that my brother had a discount on and then have the discount reimbursed. With his regular employee discount, that's how it worked. But this was a special discount, my dad told me that, for this discount, we would have to pay by cash or by check. I did not know this. Had I known this, I wouldn't have been disappointed all week about a false prospect. I wouldn't have been stressing at all because I really don't care about the webcam that I'm never going to use anyway. I could have been happy from the beginning.

The thing I got from my father was that it was the principle of the matter.

If we're talking principles, is it better to fight an uphill battle for something that you don't really need, just to prove a point even if you already got a free webcam out of it? Is it really better to stress yourself out and to stress out everyone around you and to hassle the salespeople who are just doing their jobs just because you feel like you've been cheated out of something you never really had? If the original issue was to get me a laptop as fast as possible so that I could use it for school, where are your principles in delaying the whole thing just to appease your ego?

Try This!

My Lakbayan grade is C-!

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Created by Eugene Villar.

Why I Write

After having gone through some essays of famous writers about why they write, I would like to say that it is my passion to write. I would like to say that writing is in the very core of who or what I am, animating my body and that writing is as much a necessity in my life as the food in my stomach or the roof over my head. I would like to say that I cannot stand not to write or that my writing serves some abstract higher purpose, far beyond the gratification of my own ego; that I’m on some kind of quest into the frontlines of the human mystery. I would like to. But as they say, I would like to but I cannot.

I can say that I have a strong affinity to writing but I also hate writing every now and then. I think all writers do sometimes. We write to our master pieces in the security of our bedrooms under the disguise of “just a little something I’m working on” and we pour ourselves into them until they begin to reject us and they we hand them over to our friends to critic and we say about our master piece “Please read, it’s nothing much.”

I can say that every time I spot a new irony or discover an idiosyncrasy or even when I realize see something infinitely familiar in a completely different light, my first instinct is to mull over it in written words. But even these words sometimes have a tendency to mutate for the worse when the prospect comes along of having an audience. For some reason, the snot from my nose becomes the perfect color of avocado or the gum under my desk at school is fondled by a virgin lover.

I can say try to be profound and say that why I write is exactly to discover why I write. And then I can turn around and write a piece of short fiction with no other compulsion than that which comes from requirement as an assignment in FA 111.4 Writing Workshop 4: Fiction under the Fine Arts Department in the Ateneo de Manila University.

I can say that stuff, I can probably think of more stuff to say or I can just write!

Justin wakes up with a dry mouth. He’d been snoring all night again from exhaustion. Closing it, he feels like his mouth was filled with cotton from the dentist. A film of oil had materialized overnight on his face. He feels his stomach. Empty. Without even moving them, he knows that his arms are weak now. His legs are weak now. His body feels light. With as little movement as possible, Justin reaches for the electric fan at the foot of his bed and turns the knob to zero. Without even realizing it, this is one of Justin’s favorite feelings in the world. He feels like a sponge that had been sitting, forgotten, at the bottom of a dank kitchen sink and had only now been washed up and wrung out. All the grease, soap, tiny scraps of food and sauces that had dried up on their diner’s plates and diluted into water, all that filth that had been in him was wrung out from him. Empty. His clothes from the night before almost felt like a second skin; the sweat and oil had fused t-shirt to upper back, shorts to hips and underwear to balls. He yawns. He breathes out. The final drop of filth exercised from his body. The air is taken from his lungs. He feels good and he knows it. He feels so good that he falls asleep again.

An alarm goes off. Empty. The alarm comes from his sister’s room. As soon as the awareness of his head on his pillow sets in, Justin feels the weight of guilt piling upon his chest. So much so that it makes his lungs quiver with his first conscious breath of air as if he were eight and had the night spent in another self-important tantrum.

Justin feels tired. His eyes open, gaze directed to the scotch tape-scars on his bedroom wall from photographs long since removed. Below them, his cluttered desk sits under an even blanket of dust which protects it from use. On the other side of his room is a bookshelf decorated with half worn spines. Mandatory college and high school readings serve as fillers to his lack. Justin holds his breath and braces himself to get up out of bed. Ten seconds pass, fifteen, twenty-five, now fifty-three. Justin allows his lungs to deflate but he’s still in bed.

Potential daw

Let it be said ngayon pa lang (now before anything) that the ideas that follow are not solely my own but they are my interpretation of the general sentiments of persisting in the minds of myself and my peers, mainly the core group of Martin Villanueva, Khaye Apay, Cindy Custodio.

Agian, I don’t claim to fully represent the ideas and views of that have been expressed in my little group of amateur writers but what I intend to reiterate is more of the general sentiment among us. That is that we are afraid. Pride aside, we have been stunned by the progress of our own skills in relation to the outside world of creative writers. We have among usa a winner of the Carlos Palanca award, fellows of the National Writers workshop in dumaguete and a handfull of hopefull others. The truth is that we are afraid of many things. The most obvious and underlying problem and the most discussed among us is the very practical problem of mere economics. We don’t know how to make our bread and butter as writers. We don’t know if it’s even possible for people other than Dalisay and Yuson. We have each taken different and extreme approaches to respond to this problem but the problem remains, and I’m sure it’s not only limited to Atenean students of the Creative Writing program. Survival is the word. Some choose to revel in the demand of the immoral writing college papers in exchange for dollars, others seek new vocations in full knowledge that their writing will suffer, their first passion will suffer. One in particular (not I) turns toward the raging tsunami and says “fuck it! Everything else will follow.” But none the less, we are all afraid. We are of our own progress because of the abruptness of it all. Truth be told, as a creative writing sophomore taking my introductory class in creative writing, my mentality was an to wrap myself in a protective shell of disinterestedness. The plan was simply to ignore all comments sacrificing productive criticism for my tiny ego. I had somehow convinced myself that I was a mere novice ergo; my works were amateurish. I had prepared myself not to care how much my teachers hated my work because I was determined to be a writer. The only thing that could have eradicated my barrier of hard headedness was exactly what came next: praise.

As a student of creative writing in a university at the age of eighteen, you think that everything you have written is only relevant in context. I wrote this for a school project. I wrote that but really the main character was me. I wrote, I write, no one reads.

Considering that, I thought it would take me years in order to produce a piece that anyone could stand to read much less praise and consider again that these complements were coming from well renowned Filipino writers. My guard fell. I became vulnerable. Like Cebu Pacific whose vision it was to be the aircraft of choice for the Filipino traveler, I had achieved my goal and was faltering at the confusion of “what now?” The world was ready for the taking. If not now then when, if not I then whom? More importantly: at this point, who needs determination anymore? I’d been acknowledged, not as a student writer but as a writer. “Eighteen years old and he can write like this, wait till he really learns to write.” Wait till he masters the art of metaphor, the scrutiny involved in fleshing out a character, the objectivism of the narrator to plot. Now I am afraid, no longer that none would appreciate my works (in fact I don’t give a shit whether anyone ever reads my past “good” works again) in comparison to the prospect that no one will ever read my future works, in contrast to the idea that good potential turns into a flat tire. I am afraid of being stagnant in my potential. I am afraid of being called lucky. I am afraid of being a called a fluke. I am afraid that I am on the tarmac ready for takeoff when the engine overheats and busts into flames prematurely. I am afraid of my past work: the creature that has grown beyond me. I am afraid of my former self. I love, too much, the sanctity of potential and the shell that is anonymity.

continued

I was sitting in mass today and I got to thinking about something somewhat related to my last entry. I stopped writing that entry because I just didn’t know what to say. I had no conclusions and I didn’t want to make excuses for myself anymore. Now, I think I got it and simultaneously, I’m beginning to see one of the more practical uses of having a journal or web log.

I thought: my goals were different last year. My dad and I are alike in one defining way. The way that I tend to sacrifice the things that I have going for me for whatever I feel like pursuing at the time, my dad has a tendency to commit to things that he considers better alternatives to what he really wants. If my dad wants liempo for dinner, he’ll convince himself that pork chops are healthier because they have less fat. When he’s eating the pork chops, he’ll remember that he likes the fat and he’ll spend the rest of the evening complaining about how liempo tastes better than pork chops. Usually, we’ll end up getting with pork chops for dinner within the same week. Now take that little quirk and multiply it by a gagillion. We’re not just talking about dinner anymore. We’re talking about hundred-thousand peso televisions, we’re talking about buying cars, designing our house and recently, whether or not it was a good idea to move here from Canada and whether or not we should go home, now, more than ten years later. But this isn’t a “bash my dad” entry. Reading what I just wrote, you might not get why I think my dad and I are so alike but actually you have to see the difference before you can appreciate the likeness. The way that we make all of our decisions from the trivial to the life changing may be different but the results are the same. We always end up regretting them. We both have a quirk, we both know about our own quirk and we both persist or rather give in to what we each think is the best way to make decisions. We know it, we see it coming, and then we choose to ignore it.

In a way, looking at my dad has taught me a lot about myself. In fact, what I do is exactly the opposite of what my dad does. Instead of settling for something I’m going to regret settling for, I opt to take the best that I can have without looking back. If you pull a string to tight, it will snap, if you don’t pull it enough, it won’t play. Unfortunately, my only encounter with Buddah is was from the movie Little Buddah starring Keanu Reeves back in the day so I can’t double check that quote but I’m pretty sure he was talking about some kind of instrument.

Blogs are hard. I can’t stay coherent and spontaneous at the same time. Without planning the whole thing before I even get started.

Now that I know that my dad and I are exactly the same in being completely opposite, every frustration I used to feel about my dad’s little problem, just became a frustration of my own. My shoulders are beginning to weigh down on me.

Narcissist or just boring?

To put you into context. For more than a year, I haven't written anything that I feel, shows what I'm capable of as a writer. Pathetic as it may sound, I feel like I've already peaked as a writer at the age of 20 when I became a fellow at the Heights workshop in Ateneo and I can't seem to find my voice anymore. My peers are pulling ahead, winning various national awards and more importantly, writing very impressive works. I, on the otherhand, just started writing a blog. I just started writing this blog.

In the last year, I've had ideas for stories, I've jotted them down on scratch paper and keyed them into my cell phone, typed them into a word file that never seems to go beyond page one. And now that the pressure is on to write again and hopefully finish my last year of college with a boom, I find myself resorting to compiling these bits and pieces of story and trying to write them as one. So far, the result is turning into some creature that I never meant to write at all, but more than that, I'm worried about how easily I was able to stitch all these different characters into one without coming up with some kind of contradition in their personality and traits.
I've come to the conclusion that they're not far enough away from my own personality to be characters in themselves. This leads me to two possible conclusions, either I'm a narcissit who thinks that people would find my own life so interesting that they'd read about it or I'm just plain boring. I have no good ideas. I might as well give up or worse, I've already given up.

To be continued...

Third attempt and other garbage

As the title of this entry so bluntly states, this is my third attempt at a blog. Needless to say, the other two are dead. They're kulangot the network of nasal folicles that we commonly refer to as the world wide web. They're e-grabage and i-shit.

Truth be told, I don't expect very many people to read this blog but I need to practice my writing and the thought of how many half filled journals I have lying around the house from my childhood to my late adolescence makes me cringe with the idea that I'm wasting one more leaf off of one more tree that should be out there providing us with oxygen to breath and nourishment to eat. On the other hand, maybe if I have a blog and a journal, the options might help to motivate me. But that's a digression not meant to be elaborated on for today. Besides, that would totally pull the rug out from under the fist sentence of my second paragraph.

A little bit about myself:

I write.
I climb mountains.
I go to college
I go to mass in a Catholic church.
I love my parents.
I travel as far as I can for as long as I can get away and as frequently as possible for as cheap as remains convenient.

But more importantly:

I used to climb rocks and walls.
I used to run.
I used to play the piano.
I used to design posters and t-shirts.
I used to sketch pictures.
I used to go boxing.
I used to go rowing.
I used to play capoeira.
I used to read books.
I used to be in a band.
I used to do archery.
I used to bike everywhere.

I have a tendency to sacrifice everything that I have going for me in exchange for one thing that I feel like doing at the time. My entire life, my mom has been telling me that I should learn to balance my work. I have yet to learn.

I would have left the country to follow my second girlfriend to the states and I almost left the country for Japan on scholarship (that I didn't get) effectively leaving my current girlfriend behind.

In those video games where you get to choose your own character at the begining and you can never go back and change your mind, I always choose the most well rounded character like Ferrik from Children of Mana and the red mages of the Final Fantasy series. I never choose the ones that can be experts at weapons but weak in magic or vice versa. Then I'd get tired of him and play with the other cool characters.

Oh yeah, I'm twenty-one and I still play those kind of video games.

My name is Andrew Robles.