The Faith Factor

A couple of months back, when mom was still pretty conscious of filling the whole unit with an eighty decibel audio from whatever it was that she was watching at that particular moment, I heard Kris Aquino over the tube. It was on one of those considerably less stressful Sunday afternoons, me headset-free and what-not, and after her emoting over something I don’t exactly remember anymore, she ended her tried-hard-to-be-dramatic-but-didn’t-quite-pass-off-as-such speech with a cliché. “Choose your battles,” she said. It made sense, weirdly enough, even though I’m sure it didn’t really quite tie up with whatever it was that she was saying anyway. Even so, it’s pretty much lived with me until now.

I’m not exactly into reliving my defeats and failures from the past. The fact notwithstanding, three weeks ago, I lost a bid to become N.E.C.E.S.’ vice president for logistics and documentation. I think here’s where I’m supposed to insert bitter comments about how my pessimistic tendencies dictated it was never going to work out in the first place.

But I won’t.

Because I won’t make a mockery out all of the experiences I gained from that point onward; there were a lot of lessons learned, new friendships formed, bonds with old friends that got strengthened, and a particular one that takes special mention for being renewed – you know who you are.

And then there are the offers. Of course, a lot of things have opened up for me after that. One’s being delegated the task of organizing workshops for the same club that I ran for, which is nothing short of being nailed in the proverbial coffin. But I’m barring the two more that I’m essentially considering up to now; I’m indecisive like that, I guess – that much still hasn’t changed at all.

Because after everything I’ve purportedly been through over the last couple of months, I’m no stranger to having cold feet. Right after the loss, my resolve was complete; there was nothing left for me to lose. I gave myself the green light.

Yet as though on that line-up less Saturday redux, I’m having second thoughts about taking one more. What if I’m having too much on my plate? What if precisely because of that, I end up undercooking all my commitments? What if I haven’t chosen my battles well enough?

How committed are you? The last line read.

People will have you believe that ultimately, you should let go of your inhibitions. As for me it’s not a question of having guts of steel or having a face four inches thick, but rather it’s the prohibitions It’s all about firmly believing that I can do it all.

I guess the only question now is: can I?

The Faintest Chances

This, on a day when everything seemed to crumble right beneath his feet. Sure, it felt – and he sounded, no less – like a broken record, never mind that he’s used to throwing the same arguments and lament at the selfsame insecurity that’s always been flung a quarter of the way across the room. Admittedly, it was deplorable, his state; he’d only have to think that he’d only a little more than a year left and things were done, and he figured he’d have something to look forward to – that’s what he told me before: I suppose that’s how bad it really was.

Not that it was fair to begin with. Too many times, I’ve seen him try his hardest to do what he believes in his heart to be right, which was to reach out, really, despite whatever sense of belongingness they were withholding from him for no obvious reason other than that they were jerks. It was something which would consistently spur sporadic fits of self-imposed isolation on his part, though at the end of the day, he’d manage to overcome his own tendencies and give things another shot, only to fail again. From this, I guess, you could see he was nice as it is. Maybe he wasn’t the nicest person in the block, and maybe he never received some outlandish award for always trying, but he tried and he was certainly nice enough than most others who only pretended to be something they’re not. Instead, he found that people actually patronized hypocrisy – I guess that’s what really bothered him in the first place. And yet he still trudged on, quite unseemingly, probably, though he did.

“So where’s this strength coming from?” I’ve often asked him, I recall, a question to which he’ll merely give a virtual shrug in reply.

I managed to talk to him again a couple of hours back, and he was, I surmised, more aggravated than usual. He came home from a particularly frustrating day at work today, with stuff probably going on as usual, if not any worse.

“You think something’s wrong with me?” he went.

“Why?”

“Feel ko kasi laging ako ‘yung outsider. Parang laging ako ‘yung hindi na-a-accept since dati pa, samantalang ‘yung iba hindi naman nagkakaganun.” He then proceeded to have dinner.

It was most definitely surreal, when, two hours later, he’d come back to message me about a friend of his who was apparently in a crossroads of a different kind, as though he’s completely forgotten what we were talking about before we suspended our conversation.

“You know, she deserves to have everything,” went a spontaneous message from his end.

I was lost.

And he went on to explain everything.

“So you had dinner putting your actions into question and go on to comfort someone who’s wondering about her own future,” I teased. “How could that be possible?”

“Well…” he stuttered for a good minute or so.

“Well, what?”

“I guess we’ve always listened to each other is all. Not that she needs me, though – I know she has a lot of friends who she doesn’t need to feel awkward talking to over a cup of tea. It isn’t her fault either, but…” Another long pause.

“But?”

“…but she was always patient with me. I’d have to admit she was one of those people who allowed me to hold on to my faith. You know I could have lashed out at those people anytime, one year to go or not, but she always reminded me of positivity. Now, the roles are reversed. I figured the least I could do was to let her know I was there.”

And suddenly, I thought everything was answered.

“You know what I really think?” I beamed. “From the boy who’s having doubts, to the girl who’s having doubts – they say it’s called holding on together.”

The Much Needed Inspiration

Out of wanting something that might even remotely help me in keeping tabs of how far I’ve come in learning the things that interest me, I rummaged through the drawers in search of anything that would rise up to my needs. At the top of the plastic bags that neatly categorized one class of paper to the next – from the leaves of yellow pads to the packs of construction paper I used in art class back in high school – I found a little notebook, its pages yellowed out, presumably, it seemed, carelessly thrown inside as though someone had rushed to hide it as someone was approaching. I turned the cover, flipped through the pages out of innocence: I realized it was a diary.

My diary.

I probably left a huge gap on my previous blog at the end of 2006 leading to the first quarter of 2007, as the written entries were dated from December to January of the said years. It felt a bit surreal.

Of course, there’s the usual things, albeit they’ve been done in a slightly different fashion: bullet-pointed metaphors and hasty little scribbles that probably suggests what they faintly mean, all capped under a bold-faced highlighted title. There were the things that blew me away – those that made me recall how fascinated I was with the French, from the titles that ranged from itineraré to trés raison – and those that were outright weird. It seems I’ve despised this particular someone since second year, though I’ve always imagined that I only learned to hate him last term; he’s been arrogant from day one, apparently, and been wanting to outshine everyone else at the outset of everything.

But it’s the littler details that really caught my attention. On the first page, for example, it quickly became obvious that I was on the second term of our second year in the university, as it made mention of my itineraries for a given week. At the top of the thirteenth, it read:

PENDING: Integral Calculus, integration formulas and transformation.

Physics, mechanisms of heat transfer and the first law of thermodynamics

Philosophy, modifiers and the principle of double effect [ test on January 10, 2007 ]

There were checkmarks and crosses, beneath a header that said STATUS, teeny additions to a list as the day progressed, and lists that went on for a good two pages or so.

A couple of days ago, I told Niko I felt as though I’ve barely accomplished anything. Today, I realized it just might be possible that I’ve never been more misinformed.

From the day the last entry was made up to today, I’ve lost something, I guess.

I realized I’m a memory buff, though I don’t mean it in the sense I’m the sort of guy who has a knack for remembering things that everyone else has forgotten. I mean I figured I’m the sort of guy who holds on to anything that’d remind me of the past. I’ve been keeping letters I shared with some of my high school friends in a neat box on my closet for four years now, refuses to delete quotes on my inbox unless the memory stick fails me, or deletes them but only if I’ve been able to transfer it onto another notebook. On that respect, I guess I’m that sentimental.

But on the other, I always wanted to see how much I’ve accomplished from a given point. What spurred this entry, in the first place, was a product of that wanting, after all. I’m a sucker for posterity.

From a society that demands things to be done from an eight-to-five shift, admittedly, life’s been a rush, really. It seems we’ve been programmed to measure our success in two discrete steps, the intermediates somehow getting disregarded. Yet why is it that we’ll always look at the bigger things, without appreciating the little steps we’ve taken to get there, when they’re probably every bit as important?

I have an idea.

Still Lives

Regardless of what I’ll come to say as whatever else sinks in between tonight and tomorrow morning, I’ve come to believe that it’s the familiarity of others that is refreshing, but the familiarity of myself that’ll ultimately become my undoing. Somewhere, sometime down the well worn road, I’ll have to speak with a petalled tongue, maybe blab a bit more randomly, definitely talk more sensibly, convince someone of my (er…) undying love. That’s taking things too far, of course, borne, undoubtedly, out of a mix of some forgotten figure of speech and more fistfuls of twisted logic than I can probably force you to imagine. But hypothetically, if the meet up with Jackie was a first date, I would be busted.

But it isn’t.

Thankfully.

Once in a while, there are things that make me think about how far I’ve come. Think more than usual, I mean. Say, I’ve long since lived with the mantra of: if it isn’t who you are, move on. Get over it, look for people who you don’t have to pretend to in order to be accepted, in order to be friends with. If you have to go against your moral fibers to have a circle, whatever that means, then you can kiss that circle to hell.

To tell you frankly, I haven’t been too far off from where I’ve been. My tongue’s still uninitiated, to say the very least. I talk as dryly as the next nerd does, I couldn’t make eye contact as seeing faces make me giddy, I still stutter badly as I did in high school, I couldn’t tell jokes even if my life depended on it. I’ve been the sort of guy who’ll hide behind a monitor on the first chance that he gets and “talk” to someone online. A double click here, and a ding there, a smiley, and an audible when I still used Yahoo Messenger I’ve gotten along quite fine with not so long ago. It had always been the foolproof escape from my point of view: no fumbling for words, no wracking your brain to thinking of a follow-up, no spit projectiles hurled toward your friend to worry about. That’s how bad it is.

But escapes are just that: escapes. Eventually you’ll come round to actually having to face the things you’ve long been avoiding. The long overdue meet-up with Jackie, while obviously not avoided, has, well, left me thinking a second has to be in place, to put it mildly. Jackie dominated most of the conversation: the economic crisis, fulfillment, work related stuff, career-oriented brothers, a formal yellow polo-shirt, cute toddlers in Starbucks, yearbooks, how thin I’ve become after four years, and something else: you name it. The silence on my end, however, almost killed the both of us today.

I won’t squirm my way out of frilly metaphors and whatevers: I’m orally inept, green-minded jokes aside. If I were to concede that I’m good at writing and attribute it to something, then it must be because I’ve done it at the expense of enduring long awkward silences over iced caramel macchiato. I’ve disappointed. I’m cynical.

I can’t help but wonder whether everything had been a product of selfishness. Sure, being yourself is one thing; but not wanting to change for your own good is another. You can’t always expect people to understand you all the time, can you? If it’s for your own good, why resist? There’s something good that can be done, if only I’d acknowledge it.

And I have.

There will be a next time.

The Way of the Kelly

Walk. Past the roulette. Past the slot machine. Against the crowd.

“Can I interest you in a game, sir?” Think. Think it over. What the heck? Nod.

Sit down. Look to your right. Hawaiian shirt. Look to your left. A diamond necklace. Look around. People are watching.

Place your ante. One. Two. Five red chips.

Shuffle. Pffffffffrt. Again. Pffffffffrt. And again. Pffffffffrt. Cut. Whack.

Deal. Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh.

Take a peek. Three of hearts. Seven of spades. Dead end. Smirk coyly. Bluff.

A fold to the left. Did she see you smirk? Adjust. Settle down.

Raise. A blue chip? He’ll only fold. White? It’s too conservative. Three red chips? That’s it. Slowly. Patiently. Hope it suckers him in.

Look over. He peeks at his cards again. He thinks over. And over. And over. Weighing chances? Reason with yourself.

He calls. Doesn’t raise. Calls. Hold your breath.

Four of hearts. Deuce of diamonds. Queen of diamonds. Nothing, still.

Seven red chips. Did he hit something? Maybe. Maybe not. Dismiss it. Call.

Ace of clubs. Sheep. I have to win this one. Three blue chips.

He’s flabbergasted. Squirms in his seat. He shifts to one side. Then the other. What the hell is happening?

He looks over. Reads you. Tries to read you. He squints his eyes. You look at him. You smile. He peeks at his hand for the third time. He folds. Good.

You won’t have it. You won’t push things too far.

Get up. Leave. You don’t need to prove anything.

Save your reputation. Or whatever’s left of it.

Quit while you’re ahead.

Are you?