Good Reads: Why I'm Sick of Adele

It's rare that you find very funny yet true bashing articles in the web. As a feature writer, I appreciate her approach on a matter that is relevant and up to date. Adele is now a worldwide phenomenon, why? It's because of her latest album, no fillers, just every word jam-packed-and-overflowing with what Irene Zutell says as "excruciating pain". Yet, given her circumstances, it's inevitable to get sick of Adele when every single time, you just feel ugly heartbroken, or you just don't have the time to sit at the corner crying over a loss so great. No one could have written the article any better. It's funny and oh so true.

Read it here!

[Photo]

Heap. Pile. Tower.

Recollections. The HARING LEAR memorabilia I had bought. It features photos, videos and a lot more. But the best part is the Packaging.

As of now, I am under loads of stuff to do! But not to fear! I shall keep posting - for this is the only thing keeping me sane right now. My Zoology classes have been piling like crazy, Chemistry is now accululating under my feet, and not a single word has been written for my PI 100 (Philippine Institutions 100, A Study on Jose Rizal) Literature.

But what I would like to discuss now are the objects of interest in this blog: The Literature and The Arts. Under Literature, I have under my wing are a list of PI100 requirements (an Essay about an Essay, a free-verse and a pantoum about a poem, and a short story on a minimal character in Noli Me Tangere), contributions to WAYWAYA, the university publication, and a HUM1 redo of my previously posted review on HARING LEAR. My professor - but more likely I - has given me a short time to accomplish this make-over for a possibility to be published in some paper/journal/hard material. While I am under a lot of pressure in thinking of topics for new material for the "mini-book" of the university.

In the arts, I am tasked to play the role of King Lear in a HUM1 class rendering of the eponymous play. So here's to a week dedicated to a slur of lines to memorize - or read from a dummy sheet. HARING LEAR was supposed to be the wood to start the fire of the play going and I ended up thrilled and scared shitless to be leading it. At least with it, I have now cleaned my colon.

So, here's to the rest of the semester and hoping I make it out alive. :D

P.S. I'd like to comment on the amazing packaging of the memorabilia above. The post apocalypse in the setting is well reflected by the pamphlet that even the lead is encased in a sheet of plastic, much so the part where he has finally turned mad. His eyes are covered with a paper similar to onion skin to give the strange lingering feeling of being bound to such madness.

Bound to You

Bound To You

Christina Aguilera

There is something very eerily beautiful with Bound To You. The richness of Aguilera's voice to the sincerity of each word in the composition. And by some things I could not grasp, I fell in love with this song above all others from the same movie.

Starting with the composition, I could really tell the honesty of every word. The emotions of a woman too strong for too long, needing nobody, now finding herself falling for someone for the first time. The fears of a first love and the greatness of giving in to it, forgetting your past, forgetting your fears and diving in head first to the murky future, with your love leading you and guiding you through. This battle of letting go and clamming up is a timeless beauty.

Then with the sounds, Aguilera's voice is perfect for this song, nearly tailor-made for her and her now-whole and rich tone. Each word and note comes out clean and heavy, thus making you feel her pain and struggle, which is furthermore expressed in her strains in her high notes. In the song you don't hear much layers in the vocals, just a few background vocals here and there, but there is none to be found post-bridge, unlike most pop songs, thus focusing on the seriousness and singularity of the ballad. The composition of the instrumental is phenomenal, with its chorus cadences, and an after chorus return to the simple beat, a classic Sia work of art. By doing this, it makes you pay more attention to the words better with the simple violin-accompanied piano, and come the chorus again, there is a surge of complexity which continues to the bridge and the final chorus which finishes off beautifully with an note signifying an enlightenment.

The music video come from the movie itself, which is a beautiful production, a green draping dress and a white flower in bunched up hair, with a light behind and just you on stage - one of Xtina's finest looks.

End note: Let it go. Let it go. Beautiful. Give in. Let it go.

Of Fading and Abrupt Blacks

Celebrate.

We always celebrate starts, why don't we celebrate ends? Doesn't one entail the other in an endless cycle? Is an end always so wrong that we seem to think that after it no starts come?

We have grown in such a society that an end is a loss - and dead ends, a surrender. We are further simplified into a cycle of despair at the face of this end that would even have it's own end in Acceptance. And if we see it in omniscience, we just see our lives like two wires connected to a loop of sadness that until we find in ourselves a feeling of succumbing to what will become of us, we will never reach that other wire. If that is the case, we are then electrons running our lives through every metal atom until this loop and we forever fall into nothingness.

But that is what we are made to see.

Human life is not just some metaphor of wires and story of electrons that we come to waste everyday for light and pleasure. Think of life as something we do no want to waste but wastes either way, but in waste, we benefit until we are left as shells - remembrances of what we have done and what we used to be. And even in our calcified ends we still become a start for another generation. 

Have you ever wondered why the Oblation is that way? In everyday we just see its form, we never come to actually realize its function. Man, maybe in his 20s or 30s, naked, standing rain or shine, looking above with arms open wide. We never see his face. I never saw his face for he lost all sense of looking down, upon me, us, the people, for he concentrated in his work - his work that is sacrifice. Oblation, from the Latin Oblatio, means offering, a losing of oneself for a cause, a means that any human's shell is never forgotten, a sense of giving up, an acceptance of a dead end that no one else would want to take for another. Oblation is in flight, arms to the sky - to God - him calling out and willing. And now I see his face.

So, what end would we partake? What first-worldly-minuscule problem should we give up so that a community could be happier? I would first give up the hatred on an end, the seeking for a beginning that already happened after the ever afters, to make people feel the sense that lingers when the show goes black: something that causes the end of me to be the celebration of theirs. I want a sense in my life before I end.

Celebrate.

Zer0

Fairytale Choices. A Twitter conversation I had with a friend.

As an awakening from a friend's tweet, I wrote this essay.

What is it to be lacking? What is it to be outshone, thus to lack colors to refract?

But, in all of these, what for is asking for things that you have, even in the slightest degree? Why do people see what's lacking, when they could focus on what's there? And why do I bother asking questions, when I do not need your answer, but need you to see what you think of when I ask them?

We are of human character and we strive to be complete. Yes, I do understand perfectionism, for I am one in some aspects in my own life. But can't we complete with being incomplete, like being perfect though we bathe in our own imperfections? Yes? Then let us think that what we are is complete in our incompleteness.

We do not need to be all-out, when what we are isn't. We do not need to be perfect, when who we are isn't. To strive for that whole that we cannot actually reach isn't going to be something fulfilling if it is not truly what we are. If a man makes himself fully emo, when he is just emotional, would drive him into the insanity of wearing Kohl and Razors to prove to himself he is truly emo. It would kill him just to achieve a wrongfully set Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. Or the same would go for a woman who is just picky, but is called an all-out bitch, it would delude her into thinking that she is mean and would only turn her into a monster that she is not at all. To live completely by the names that society or ourselves put on us is insane, and we let ourselves get drunk on this  labeling insanity.

Then there are people who think that what they are isn't enough. That a certain thing amiss is like losing everything altogether. Grey isn't darkness, it's not given enough light, but it still is good. Like people overshadowed by greater powers: Sidekicks and Heroes, Editors and Writers, Indie and Mainstream. Colorblind is not truly colorblind. Have you ever thought of that? And when all we see are grey-scale, aren't you glad there is something intermediate between the harsh duality of White and Black? And when a relationship is gone, or is never there to start with, it does not mean that love does not exist in our hearts, for love is always there as a reason when we smile, cry, get broken, get healed, and face a new day. When something is amiss, we always have something we can hold on to, a ground that we can stand on or anything we are still thankful for.

When they take the physical, we have the metaphysical, the spiritual, the plane where other mean people cannot touch. Something we lock deep within ourselves that they can't take away from us. We always have something no matter what we lack, so we are never truly lacking. We are never Zero.

So when I think what it would be: To pay the wrath of hell by being the nemesis? Or to stay happy and proud in a condition where dimness is at my point beside who has the show? Tempting as the dark side may sound, I prefer to live what I live by and be happy with what I am now.

But when the nemesis is right all along with what he believes in, I'd go with be him.

Falling in Love

"That is not flying. It's falling - with style." - Woody, Toy Story

We all have felt falling, sinking helplessly to gravity. We have felt the rush of adrenaline through our veins, and in some sadistic little way, have liked every bit of it. And we all have had scars that we still can remember today, phantom hurts and bandages.

We are Dionysian in nature. We have destructive tendencies of liking the hurt in some way or another. We cannot deny this fact that we get drawn to heavy conflicts of life, regardless of what it is. Watching the scariest and goriest bits in a movie though we ourselves know that it is bound to happen and the scene will haunt us before we go to sleep or enter the bathroom. We tend to miss the feeling of pain in any form, that we say "I forgot how it felt like to..". And at times, we tend to repeat these things too much, that without them, there is nothing to base some things from, like fights in relationships that we see as the pillars of being together. But this insanity of self-destruction is not completely ugly, and at times would seem beautiful in itself.

We are happily in doom. It is inevitable that without these phenomena to spice up your life, it would just be some repetitive motion of happiness and surrealism. We tend to feel more human with each imperfection and this is how we see the light at the end of every tunnel. We find the things that make us happy even if it kills us, to stand on our perceptions and beliefs that is unwise, unsavory, unlikely, un-[any negative adjective] to others but we see as the truth of ourselves and point of our existence.

This is why I think we use the term of "falling in love".

We fall in love because of the seemingly never ending feeling of sinking, something that we do not choose ourselves, hence others saying "I don't know why, I just do." But why should mere man choose to fall for something called love? Is it merely because of the helplessness and the inability to overcome this feeling once it has started? Then why not "Being dragged by two muscular bouncers into love"? And here I try to justify with our nature. To like the feeling, even though there is no possible force for us to stop it. To accept the fate of endless freefall because of tripping in some way into a bottomless pit. This debauchery of intensity of helplessness is not mere negativity because for one thing, we like the feeling of being in love.

We have liked this epic feeling for too long that nearly the economy has revolved around this trait of the human character. We see lots and other products being sold by strengthening beliefs of a complete familial love, incorporating families to introduce unconsciously the feeling that by buying these items, we gain the perfect relationship. Even the music, literature and film industries have made a point of using the terms of love to hook their consumers of this feeling that people desire in different forms around the same subject. For C.S. Lewis in "The Screwtape Letters" have said that we are men who strive for something new every time, but we tend to long of the feeling of repetition. The never ending cycle of different things, the Seasons, the months, and now Chick flicks, Romance novels and Heartbreak songs (since even the lack of love pertains to love itself).

Even in my Dionysian nature, I have felt like falling is itself flying. No bird nor squirrel has ever tried to glide through the air without opening its wings (or skin flaps, whatever) and jumping off that branch without fear of hitting the ground below. To fear for something we can overcome is a nuisance to what we can do to become better and feel better about ourselves. Falling is by no means a bad thing (except if used in the sense of suicide). Falling is a learning process, to embrace what we are and what we feel to overcome fear and fault to be happy for once even if the process hurts us the most. So even falling can be mistaken for flying - and even flying for falling. Falling in love.

And here I wish to fly.