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.