On Family

I was scratching the cat in the Faculty Center earlier this afternoon when a certain professor briskly walked past me, a little girl held in his right arm. Instantly, I lost track of what my companion was saying - which was pretty irresponsible, considering we were discussing how we would handle our report next week given two of our groupmates have completely evaporated - and got to my feet, following said professor with my eyes as he walked on, completely oblivious of the stare glued to his remarkably clean blue shirt. (Ehem. Let me clarify he wasn't exactly Best Dressed Faculty Member of 2007 when he taught me.)

I thought he would keep that pace until he reached SC, which is where I think he goes whenever he walks via the Freshie Walk, but when I saw him again - I was momentarily distracted by the perfunctory goodbye I threw at my groupmate - he had turned left of the road, down the literal untrodden path, into the woods, and whatever cliche you wish to use for Diliman's lagoon area. He wasn't exactly talking to the little girl, but I'm sure he didn't just wander off that way because he was looking for the proverbial fertility tree. Seeing him, the little girl held close, I thought of my father, what we must have looked like fifteen years ago...

And then, yes, perhaps the thought of a certain friend being a dad did cross my mind.

***

Eiga Sai is here again; it's depressing my schedule won't allow me to watch everything I wish. Good thing though, that my father came for dinner late, so I managed to watch 3/4 of TOKYO TOWER Mom and Me and Sometimes Dad starring Odagiri Joe.

It was honestly bizarre, seeing the guy whose name I'd been playing in my head forever - fine, ever since I discovered Kashii Yu was married. Surprisingly, he's not just a handsome face; he actually made me cry. Or maybe the actress playing his mother did. Either way, it was heartrending to see the cancer slowing sapping away his mother's life. I never want that to happen to my family, to anyone I love. And just when he was starting to make it up to her, too....

Stagnation

16th August, 12:29 AM

Has it ever bothered you that 12MN is also known as 12AM when it actually follows 11PM?

Had a long, enjoyable, enlightening talk with Chinnie at the Araneta complex earlier. We sat on those stone borders separating the Araneta Coliseum plant life from the sidewalks, chatting for hours, pondering the behavior of our friends, discussing the concept of stagnation.

Stagnation. To me, it seems the complete antithesis of progress. So if one doesn't progress at all, that's literally decay, even if one does manage to produce "something". Personally, the idea is vague to me. I'm not an artist, or even an artsy type, so I don't know how to gauge my "progress" as a person. Is growth measured by the number of friends you accumulate in your Facebook account? Is it the steady rise of your grades from freshman year to senior year? (Empirically, I would argue such a case is close to impossible, but anyway.) Is it the number of books or movies you've read or seen, including the amount of reviews you've written about them? What is growth? How do you know you're maturing, developing as a person?

Is it always something other people have to point out for you to understand? Must your opinion of yourself always be based on what other people - regardless of whether they know you well or not - have to say about you? Doesn't that mean that somehow, your happiness is hinged on what other people think of you?

...

On a lighter note, Sassja and I saw Orosman at Zafira, the 3PM screening today. That was my second time seeing it, and I believe it's gotten better. I didn't recognize most of the faces onstage this afternoon, but all the same, the production was beautiful. Some pictures from the show:

Good show, good show. Makes me proud to be part of the UP family, even if I'm not DUP at all.

Schoolgirl Tendencies and Long-Forgotten Twinges of the Heart

During my inner-child bonding moments, I tell myself I will never subscribe to my peers' tendency of talking too much about their love lives - both real and imaginary. It's not that I don't enjoy the hormonal fluctuations that leave me feeling high for weeks on end - because I enjoy kilig stories just as much as the next girl - it's just that there are times when I feel talking about "love" is excessive. For example:

Oh my God, I just saw him today, and he was so cute!

Despite that random impersonation being an utter failure of an illustration, I'm sure you get the idea. I do not enjoy going fangirl over people I see up close on a regular basis - the idea of seriously stalking a person and dreaming about being together with said person just didn't appeal to me.

Lately though, I've (involuntarily) been waking up to the image of one person - and it's becoming increasing difficult to pull myself from dreams which I find lucid enough to be alarming. (This snooze syndrome has "encouraged" me to cut through two early morning classes this week alone - but that's another story.) What's worse is that during my supposedly waking hours, I also think of said person - the WORST part is I actually enjoy thinking about him.

Whatever happened to the me who was cynical about "love"? Katkat once commented I was "too young to be jaded"; this she concluded after one conversation - in McDo Philcoa, no less. I've never been particularly emotional, or prone to posting love-related status messages on Facebook. So why why why does my balance go berserk with a single thought of this person?

I wanted a solution to this personal dilemma. Predictably, I turned to signs from heaven for help:

If, on the 23rd of July, any of these three events would NOT occur, I would quit him for good:

1. Airplanes by BoB feat. Hayley Williams playing somewhere

2. Seeing Baby James Yap anywhere

3. Sunny weather from 2:30PM-4:00PM

The morning flitted by uneventfully - though I dreamed about him again, I managed to get out of bed 45minutes before my first class. Early afternoon came and I was beginning to feel depressed; owing to my absent-minded nature, I actually sang Airplanes to myself. Also, I had scoured the day's PDI, and there was no sign of Bimby on any page. Around 1:50 in the afternoon, I was sitting in my NatSci1 class, wondering how the day would end.

And then thunder boomed. I knew it was going to rain, tsk. What I didn't expect was for the skies to pour all its pent-up raindrops - hoarding, just to spite the presently-smelly people of Metro Manila - from 2 to about 4PM that day. God's just got the funniest sense of humor, doesn't He?

After that, I knew this was my customized wake-up call; the high was just too good to be true. And although this evening, I came across a picture of the Aquino-Yap family (minus Josh) on the cover of Buzz, wala na, alam na. I'm surrendering. I'm too transparent to lie about my feelings anyway, so nipping a potential love story in the bud is my best course of action.

I'm posting this rant here just to humor myself. Ma'am Grace, after my heart broke that year, told me that one day I'd look back on everything that had happened and laugh - which was true. I'm hoping that at the end of this year, when I look back on this post, I'll laugh. And I'll think how hilarious it is that I was so frustrated by a scenario that was too vague to cause any serious problems in the first place.