Heights and Lows

First words

I want give a tip of my hat to Pau who gave kudos to my blog (it made me go OH MY GOD SHIT) and to another friend who didn't dig my posts for all its swearing. For the record, this one here has considerably less cussing.

I want to write about something else tonight.

Something else

I've never really read my posts again. I seldom look at them to see if there are any grammatical errors or if this sentence would sound better if it were written this way other than that. When I was thinking about it, I remembered what Maria Elena said to Christina* when she was breaking up with the threesome--err--the couple: "Chronic dissatisfaction, that's what your problem is--chronic dissatisfaction." It just rang in my ears.

I don't think I'm suffering from chronic dissatisfaction, but I do believe I'm suffering from something else that's chronic--a fear in the back of my head. It used to speak to me, clearly and it just makes me freeze. Now, it's gone, but faint whispers still echo in my mind.

I've always lived with a fear that my work will never be good enough. I might work hours and hours on it, but then again, some other person in class will get a better grade--and he/she barely worked on it.

I think it all started off with that week in my first semester in Ateneo.

Heights and Lows

I applied for Heights, the literary publication of the ADMU. And I thought, I'd get in real easy. After all, I take great photos and I have a great background working from the Seton Notes, my high school's newspaper.

(At this point of my writing, I'm just sighing, and it's all coming back to me, and augh, it's as if my bones are getting weak just from remembering it. So, here's how I'll tell it...)

It was a complete disaster. They asked what were the greatest works I've ever read, and I list a couple of graphic novels. It turns out that we're supposed to analyze a poem by a Filipino, and I did the opposite, and even the review I did for the wrong poem was just horrible. Just horrible. It was a poem about Claude Monet, and I read "Monet" as "Monette."

And after I failed, I was just so fucking bitter about it that I started writing about how much I hated them. And it made no fucking sense! No sense at all! But at that time, it just seemed so true--truly it did. I wanted to give it to them, slip it into their office. But no, it finally came to me that it was idiotic.^

I also passed a story called The Bar Circle to them. I left it in the room, and there was nobody there and I didn't put it in an envelope like I was supposed to. It didn't get in, and I don't know if it was because it was bad, or if it was because I didn't put it in an envelope.

I got mixed reviews for it. A friend of mine loudly expressed her distaste for it. Another called it deep. A professor said it was okay.

And I thought it was the best story I've ever written.

I haven't written anything good since then. Ever since, I've tried to escape form and convention. And I mark my work as "raw" or "postmodern" just to justify its... whatever....

At this point, things slow down, and that rigor takes hold again. And I begin to think of my dreams of being great, and I think of how I may die obscure and without accomplishing anything great, how I disappear from earth completely because I have nothing to leave to it.

But then again, right now there is only one choice to make: read my posts, or carry on.


* Forgot to say it's from Woody Allen's Vicky Christian Barcelona, which totally rocks my socks.

^ Side note: I made a short film about it called -sta-