When I lose the feeling in my legs

I resort to art.



"The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within." - Plath

- which is essentially how I have been feeling everyday, and when I think about how I might have gotten better at living, I end up doing otherwise. (But everything is fine because I get used to it, maybe just not too immediately.)

Growing up, you reach a point where the things you do that, in retrospect, had you thinking might effectuate change in yourself or in the world, do not matter as much anymore. It is an almost unavoidable dead end. How do you cope with that? You turn around, retrace your steps, and go back to the beginning.

It is exhausting.

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About the video: A friend showed me this earlier. I really like the contemplative nature of this profile; it gives the viewer an intimate understanding of how artists feel about their work, which, I think, is something often subjected to prejudiced opinions, especially from people who are not involved in the industry.

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Begin Again, Never Give Up

is what an upperclassman from my university put in his entry to a shirt design contest held by a local clothing line two (or three) years ago. The design won. Upon seeing it (in material) for the first time, I felt an impassive air pass between me and the shirt; it took me two years to understand how brilliant it is.

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She Lives

If only this came with a "Dress for the future" edition

I have been constantly complaining about how awful last school year was for me. In both semesters, I earned the lowest grade average in my entire academic life and had to take removal exams (yes, in both semesters, one for advanced Calculus and the other for organic chemistry). Anyone of you who knew me in elementary and/or high school will find this hard to believe; I am not being conceited, but I was always one of the better, if not the best, students. I say this with basis.

When one graduates from my high school, he or she is expected to take a science-related course in college and enter the workforce as a contributor to the technological and physical development of the country, since my high school is a semi-public school for the sciences. I always had high marks in science and math during grade school so I thought studying in a science high school would secure my future, which, predictably, it should.

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The Unfortunate Limitations of Intellect

It holds true that when you know less, life is much, much simpler. I remember, one of my college professors mentioned in her discussion,

"Knowledge is happiness! You should be proud that you know all of these things!"

She must have a very unconventional way of living because that is not true at all, especially if you work in the field of the sciences, or at least live in a country where scholars are numbered. Despite this, I respect that some people do consider their knowledge as "something that induces pleasure" or "the ultimate good" but I feel bad because most of the time those people have a very conceited image of themselves and are prone to acting like pretentious dabblers in their respective fields.

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"Kapag May Time"

An interesting exercise I am planning to take up this summer:

Her face was the moon, and I wanted to protect it. She was carved out of the remains of a greater cause, one that could have possibly altered the universe, yet she chose to emanate what wasn’t hers. Light from The Great, she used to say, is already enough. I could live with a face on which you can see everything and everyone. It was a risky choice. She could have been so much. I used to run after her, grappling for that little tail on the robe she forgot to tie closed, gathering momentum from each passing dust particle -

A hundred words of fiction each day, inspired by a contest Reader's Digest Asia put up months ago. In this way, I will not regret wasting away my summer to physical retardation. My friends visit the gym "regularly"; of course, I did not accept their offer to come with them. I am not good at sweating. Ha, ha.

I might do some jogging soon, though. Cheers to living in an equatorial country.

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Spring Cleaning!

I am spending more time in the city than in the Charity House now that I have Wednesdays off and (very) early dismissals so the compulsion to keep my room clean and clutter-free has spiked to an all-new high (this does not imply anything). I can't do this, though, because I have so many little things sprouting up in one corner and then another; some things I do not even remember owning/buying so I automatically assume they were given by magical entities (i.e., unicorns).


The best solution to this is, of course, to sell the items or to give them away - whichever option works fine for me - so I am putting them up on eBay.

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Nights When -

- we choose to be more human.

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Les Miserables! + Our Pet Tortoise

2012 is a good year for the film industry!

I haven't read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables yet, unfortunately (and disappointingly, considering it is among the staple food for bibliophages) so I am threatening myself right now that if I haven't read it by the end of  my month-long semestral break, I am going to feed myself to my pet tortoise.

Yes, I, in actual fact, have a pet tortoise; only it isn't entirely mine or even mine to begin with. Yesterday, my best friend celebrated her birthday and for some reason the cosmos decided to throw a tortoise unto her doorstep (literally. Take note that I do not use such juvenile idioms if the situation does not demand it.) She brought it in a paper bag to where we stay in the university. It was hilarious.

After about twenty minutes of debate, we named it Cumin after one of Ted Mosby's Halloween costumes. (Marshall was Salt and Lily was Pepper.) I'm not particularly fond of reptiles but I'll take what I can get.

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I Suck at Writing Essays In Under One Hour -

- which is why, although I was given the most answerable question about same-sex marriage, a part of me died. It was a decent experience worthy of the usual Pinoy litmus contest craze but I think I just trampled on what could have been an opportunity for... something.

Nevertheless, let us choose to ignore that.

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Pisay at 20

Everyone hates turning twenty -- well, everyone except Pisay.

Some of my friends and I made a trip to our high school, which is celebrating its Foundation Week. We arrived just in time for the field demonstrations and intermission numbers (perfect for us alumni, who never even considered just standing onstage when we were their age) so I made this short video:



Pisay Foundation Day 2012 from Mia Judicpa on Vimeo.


Pardon the shots. I had limited access to space and it was too hot outside the viewing area. Windows Live Movie Maker is actually very easy to use but I hope Microsoft will add more commands to future versions. The interface is too limited; and what happened to the timeline, which is practically the most important part of a clip editor?


(Vimeo messed up the quality/aspect ratio of the video. Meh.)

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Today I am Optimistic

It's the last day for the year 2011 and just like every other day I've been living this year, it's bland, tasteless, and just plain boring.

Nah, I'm kidding. The weather's actually less lethal. I chose to stay home so I could help out in cooking but considering I've put on some weight, I guess I haven't been of much assistance around the kitchen.

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Eat it up. It's good for you.

There is no limit to hatred. Although most of the time people generalize different levels of dislike as hatred, the fact that we don’t like someone is just the manifestation of how human that person is. At the worst possible times, people who abuse our broad concept of hatred disturb our perfectly placid lives like fungi feeding off self-sufficient plants.

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Metaphorically banging my head

. . . because for some reason, a heavy cloud of gloom has descended above my head. It's so heavy it should just be labeled as an abnormally gigantic piece of hale.

This post is of no particular relevance but I've been doing a little thinking lately. I'm not happy. I don't know. It's not exactly the presence of misery; just the complete absence of happiness and, well, satisfaction. I don't like the way my life is going right now because in the first place there isn't anything to like-- it's not taking the course I originally planned it to take. Sure, I may be heading somewhere, but I don't know where that somewhere is. I really want to become a doctor but my "getting there" is not how I imagined it to be. It's very confusing. I don't like losing control of my life.

I'm writing because I want someone who might be in the same position to say something. You can start with a statement about the education budget cut. Just no consolation. It makes everything feel awkward.

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I'd Rather Die from Insecticide Overdose

After today’s hearty lunch, my friends and I planned to have a movie marathon in the waiting shed near my dorm (that is, in actual fact, not a dorm. Explaining the grounds on which I was allowed to stay there is getting really exhausting so let me call it “charity house”.) We ended up dividing into factions. There were five of us: one wanted to finish this thriller movie, Amusement; three huddled up in a corner to watch Friends with Benefits; and I, being the sore, emotionally widowed woman I quote myself to be, wound up writing this blog post.

We dropped by the charity house to retrieve my and my roommate’s laptops. What happened next was sort of life-changing in an optimistic sense . . . But immensely gross in another.

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Why I Can't Write and Writing About It

She sat in front of the computer; or, rather, the computer sat on her lap. The advancement of technology welcomed the spawn of computers the size of notebooks a few years ago but that certainly did not pose as a remedy to writer’s block.

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Missing

Sometimes I am afraid of getting too attached to someone because coping with his/her departure involves a lot of insubstantial antidepressants. I am terrible at missing people. Most of the time I just spend the day thinking how it might have gone if they were here, then I end up wasting time staring off into a conjured fantasy.

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Good Morning, Sunshine

It is imperative that you know how I operate in the morning.

I am not a morning person-- definitely not a morning person. I don't necessarily hate mornings, or the connotations of new life, songs of birds and bad breath, but I get cranky to the point of mindlessly bumping into things just to get them out of my way. I don't wake up like actresses do in television. In fact, my morning routine is so methodical it's already robotic. Of course, there wouldn't be anything wrong with being a robot if my mind operated like one, too.

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This Rare Breed

Given the situation below, what would you do?

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Mental

My first feat this month: I have survived five whole days outside the virtual world created by HTML, CSS and Javascript. Right now, I'm home (from Miag-ao, it takes about an hour to reach the city) and happier than ever to be within the vicinity of free and unlimited internet connection yet again. The university requires students to have their laptops registered in order to avail of the rights to social networking and other Worldwide Web benefits, including Nyan Cat. Aside from the extreme hassle of filling up a registration form and deciding which physical address is the MAC address of your laptop, it takes several days before you can actually use the wi-fi connection.

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Moving In

Today I moved my stuff into the house my friend and I will be staying in for college. It would have been swell and all, you know, if it weren't for the sun. The sun's always the culprit, isn't it?

I haven't had the chance to take photos because arranging the furniture took a lot of time, and my father eventually had to haul us out of the house because he still has a trip to catch up to. I'm pretty happy because although we were given a smaller room than the one we initially planned to take, the folks we'll be living with are the type of people you can easily approach. Mister actually looks like a tanned Santa. They even invited us (I was with my parents, of course) to lunch.

Our room has a faded blue hue, with windows on two adjacent walls.  The floor is covered with vinyl tiles that are already smudged, which give me this persistent impulse to wipe them all off. The folks let us borrow a large table we can use for studying and eating (very thoughtful of them!), and our cabinet is big as well, but we only get to use a part of it. It is painted off-white and the wood is sort of chipped. The bedroom doesn't feel like home yet, but we will get used to it. Especially once we get it dirty.

School starts in less than two days. Until then, I shall immerse myself in YouTube and my bed-less bedroom.

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