Unexpectedly

The concept of land and sea breezes is one of the first things I remember learning in gradeschool, back when I was still a science geek. I won't bother trying to explain it here, but it accounts for the fact that if you live near the coastline, the wind moves towards the land in the daytime and towards the sea at night. Though I live relatively near the sea in Davao, I never personally experienced this phenomenon. So you might say my learning was vicarious, which is the case with most of what I read in books. But recently, I've been noticing that walking along Padre Faura, which happens to be a street perpendicular to the Manila bay, I sometimes find myself facing the wind when walking to school in the mornings and walking home in the late afternoons. It happened again today, and it's just now that I noticed that this concept I learned early in life (and thought of at most to be something nice to know) would actually be working to my advantage at present.

Because sometimes, when I walk the street and find myself facing the wind, I forget the stench and ugliness that surround me and find that there are still some things in this congested metropolis that are beautiful.

Things are Working Out

Today I scratched off another annoyance: KOM 3 is officially done for good. I just took the final exam this morning, and it felt great right after. I still have to study though. There's the third exam for Math 100 tomorrow, and the finals on Tuesday. There's Soc Sci and (maybe) the Chem finals on Monday if I want to take it. But I feel like a seasoned veteran by now. I can handle this. I won't screw up.

Tired

My left hand is still numb from writing. Funny - it's been a while since I subjected my fingers to this much stress. And the results are just perfect, too. No, I did not write something meaningful and important. No, I did not take another important step towards discovering who I am. No, I did nothing to fulfill the greatness that is my destiny. I did less than that. Much less. The kind of 'less' that reminds me of dirt that gets stuck in between my toes when I walk outside on my slippers.

I woke up at 8 this morning, and I immediately realized that my Zoology Lab Manual was due to be passed at precisely that moment. That's when adrenaline started pumping through my veins. Fact: Right then, I had filled up less than an eighth of my manual. Fact: I had all weekend to do it, but I spent all my time trying to postpone the dreaded chore until the last possible moment. Fact: I started on it last night but I got tired and discouraged when I realized just how much work it would take and reverted to reading my current book instead. Fact: Exhausted, I slept at around 3 am and promised myself I'd wake up after a short nap. I didn't.

Bummer.

So I started filling up my manual like crazy and it took me until 3.30 pm. Perfect. Thirty minutes early for my Chemistry exam. I should have been happy, except for the fact that I knew literally nothing, as I mentioned previously, and I had thirty minutes to cram in as much information as I could. As expected, it didn't help much.

I won't talk about how I think I did on the test. I won't say how I felt when I saw my Zoology grades posted on a bulletin board later in the afternoon. They're not important. What's important is that I have, once again, disappointed myself.

Back to my hand. My fingertips are hurting. Not the satisfying kind of hurt that happens when I manage to write down something with a pen and paper that captures my thoughts almost perfectly and makes me feel like there's a point to living. The hurt is more of a reminder of how, hours earlier, I felt like a piece of dirt that gets stuck between my toes when I walk outside on my slippers. And now, well, let's just say that it's not just my left hand that's numb. Because my thoughts are just a big, resounding blank.

The Deed Is Done

So. I finally got done moving from blog-city. I thought it would take forever, with me being an HTML ignoramus and all. But I did it. Big smile.

This is my first official post with blogger, and I know I should talk about something interesting and important. But all I can think of is that I have a sudden unexplainable craving for a cinnamon bun. It's stupid, really. I pass by Cinnzeo almost every day, on my way to the mall, and I can't remember how many times I thought about going there and deciding against it because I'm really not the cinnamon-and-sweets type. Must be the fact that I'm really, really hungry. I haven't had any meals since yesterday. Come to think of it, I haven't eaten anything yet today. I woke up at two in the afternoon, which isn't out of the ordinary since I like to sleep in on weekends. Right after that I decided to work on moving my files from blog-city to here, and making everything look decent. Just goes to show how much effort I put in for this.

Now that this is finally over, I'm eating. A lot. The mall is closed by now, sadly, so I can't get the cinnamon bun I'm craving for. But there's a convenience store where I'm staying, and I'm going on a junk-food binge. And then... well, there's another exam coming up this Tuesday. Chemistry. I used to like it, you know. Better than Biology, even. But now things are different. Because I am in Chemistry hell, along with everyone in my class. Hell being defined as a teacher who has everything in common with the Energizer bunny... she just goes on and on and on. To be fair, though, she isn't really a bad teacher. Too good, maybe, but definitely not bad. And she's a decent person. It's just that, well, I mentioned earlier that I'd been sneaking out of class without her noticing. The truth is, there wasn't a single lecture she gave where I listened. I managed last week's exam well enough by reading our course module. I'm hoping to do the same thing for Tuesday. The problem being that the exam isn't even covered by the course (we're taking up Chem 14, General Chemistry, and the Tuesday test is from Chem 18, and I don't even know what it's about) and I have to read almost the entire Chem 18 module, as opposed to reading just a few chapters.

I'm confident I'll be able to pull it off, though. I've gotten out of worse situations. I'll get out of this one.

Everything's Eventual

It's been close to a month since my last post. I can't claim to have been unusually busy, although, as one classmate very aptly put it, the latter part of this semester has given a new dimension to the phrase 'Hell Week'. Because, as I mentioned earlier, I had been expecting several Hell Weeks to pass as successive waves of departmental exams for most subjects, but the phrase Hell Week implies periods in between when things are not as Hellish. Unfortunately, we didn't have them. So our Hell Weeks dragged on and on and are more accurately termed collectively as one big happy Hell Month. I won't go into detail and complain about how our insignificant, unimportant subjects reared their evil heads and made their presence felt with unreasonable requirements totally out of proportion with their designated GPA values. I can do that later.

My point is that all the added stress isn't really the reason why I haven't been blogging. You see, when you have a lot to do you're supposed to get busy and go to work. But since I have an inherent aversion to work, I didn't do that, and I ended up doing nothing. And every time I thought about blogging I would get myself in front of a PC and start typing but I couldn't make the words come out. And sometimes I'd be too lazy to even get myself in front of a PC and the thoughts I'd been keeping in my head stayed for a while but they probably got tired of being there so they left.

A lot of things have happened. I have made decisions and I have yet to reap the consequences. I don't want to review stale news, but there are a few things which I think are worth mentioning:

Last weekend I read two books. The Stranger by Albert Camus and We The Living by Ayn Rand. Both got me thinking. Because disregarding the fact that the stories are entirely different, and that one is pessemistic and the other ends with a kind of optimism, I realized that the two are essentially the same. They both talk about what it means to be alive. And they are both honest. And from entirely different perspectives they send the message that we are responsible for how our lives turn out and we need to choose to live and value our existence.

There is a song called 100 Years by Five for Fighting. The melody is beautiful. It's one of the songs I gradually learned to like. It's a story of someone's life that passes by as if years were just precious moments contained in a verse. There's a line in it, when that someone is about to die, that says, '...[there's still] time to buy and time to choose...'. And its true. Because until our last moments we keep on choosing what we make of ourselves. And when we do nothing, it's still a choice.

A few hours ago I decided to watch a movie. I did it because I needed to study for an exam in Zoology tomorrow and for another exam in Chemistry the day after that (both of which I'll fail if I take them right now), and because I felt like I would throw up if I did. So I watched The Butterfly Effect. And I was stunned. Afterwards, I couldn't stop thinking. I have always been haunted by all the 'what ifs' in life. What if I wasn't born a Christian? What if I lived somewhere else and met different people? What if I could have lived a completely different life that would give me everything I could ask for, but instead I am living this, and there's no way out because this is the one life that I have, and so I'm forever be denied of that better possibility and since I don't see it, to me it wouldn't be anything at all? These are things I've been asking myself ever since I can remember. And these are the questions the movie addresses. The movie made me realize that what we do to ourselves is so powerful and has so many repercussions, and that our choices can literally turn us into completely different people. It made me see that I am not bound to my concept of myself, that I reinforce my view of who I am and how others see me in every moment through my every action. And by simply not taking things for granted, I can change the entire course of my life, and the lives of others around me.

I remember, some time ago, that I read Stephen King's compilation of short stories, Everything's Eventual. I don't particularly remember the title story, but I remember thinking that I wouldn't want for the statement to be true. Because I can't accept that I don't have a say in how things turn out for me, because I think that when I change my whole future changes, because I think that life would be so boring when we can't decide for ourselves.