Everybody else is doing it, so why can’t I?

I really, really, really like this post.

“Aesthetics”, in literary criticism, has become as question-begging a term as “realism”. Both assume a narrow vision of important concepts, like what constitutes aesthetic pleasure and what exactly realistic representation entails. The traditionalist tells the punk rocker that he prefers music which “sounds good.” For those of us who are interested in novels which continue to push up against the walls of our expectations and heave away– for those of us who have read “Daisy Miller” and like it fine but don’t need to read yet another author rehash its style, voice and structure– ceding the definition of the word aesthetics is to give up the game. What constitutes beautiful and moving art is precisely what we are arguing about when we argue about literary greatness.

I actually bought the Dave Eggers-introduction copy of IJ a few months back but of course have not gotten around to reading it. I wish I heard about the IJ summer project before it began so I could have joined in, I suppose (not to sound pretentious or anything but obviously for me peer(hah!) pressure is as good a motivator as any to begin reading a novel). Ok, so maybe I’ll get around to doing it this summer. No more excuses.

It’s been a year since I arrived in Ireland.

If you told me a year ago that I would be where I am now in my life I would say have said, what the fuck are you talking about.

Sometimes I think about what I was like in Denmark and I know I was a difficult person to live with back then. I was not psychologically prepared to be away from everything familiar to me, much less to live in an isolating, myopic place like Denmark. And I really, really lost my bearings, and I was not strong enough to fashion new ones on my own, and so I sort of ended up trying to cling to norms, hoping it would lead someplace familiar.

After a year in Denmark I kind of knew I would leave as soon as I could, but I didn’t know how to do it.

It was difficult to try to be perfect, not just Danish-standards perfect, but to also be the type of person that someone like * deserved. There is no harm in wanting to be a better person, but given how much work it inevitably entails, you have to have a certain mindset to attempt it. To have a certain level of maturity that no amount of trying will achieve. Either it just happens or it doesn’t, and we did not understand that at the time. But that’s why it was so difficult, because it just never happened to me (I don’t think I’ve still even reached it).

When I knew I was moving to Ireland, I somehow had the naive viewpoint that I would simply learn to be more responsible and more adult. For years and years I wanted to be “mature” and somewhere along the way I kind of stopped associating that term with “fun” - I had fallen into the fallacy that they were mutually exclusive.

Apparently not.

Apparently if you stop trying so hard, growing up is much easier. At least you don’t have the weight of your failure being someone else’s disappointment. At least if I mess up once in a while, I only have to deal with my own judgment.

I did not imagine that living alone in Ireland would introduce me to a feeling of liberation that I have never had. I thought I would spend every evening miserable, crying over cat videos on Youtube. I thought I would be like other immigrants that I see in the city sometimes, shuffling home quietly with a grocery bag of that night’s dinner, watching Friends reruns on TV. That’s how I spent the first few weeks. If you want to do that, fair enough, that’s your choice, not mine. But that’s the thing: for the longest time I didn’t think I had a choice. I didn’t think I had options, I was too busy going through my life as I thought it was supposed to be, never taking risks, never being adventurous. Because, why bother? I thought I had all the ingredients already to a life that I was meant to live: a job, money, someone I could spend the rest of my life with. And I thought if I just mixed it all together I’d make a fan-fuckin’-tastic cake. Why bother with the sprinkles?

To be honest, I learned more about myself in the short time here than I have in my entire (albeit short) adult life. I’ve learned to accept my flaws: my pettiness, my arrogance, my tendency to roll my eyes a bit too much, all those things that I felt I needed to keep in check but eventually became too exhausting. And because I accept them I can tackle them in a much more civilized manner. I’ve realized that I’m not so bad, really - I have nice eyes, someone once told me I had a great smile, a girl I barely know told me she thought I was cool (sure, she was drunk at the time, but I’ll take what I can get, thankyouverymuch). I’ve learned to shut up and pick my battles, to ease my verbal diarrhea, to not seek approval from everyone all the time. I feel much nearer now in trying to figure out who I am.

Not that I don’t have any work left - I have loads. But I feel like I’m in a good place, both literally and figuratively. Ireland’s frustrating in a lot of ways, but its flaws are familiar, like me I guess.

—

Addendum: The irony is that we both finally get it, what we wanted from each other, now that we’re apart we understand what we were both trying to say to each other for so long. Ironic because what it took for that to happen was for “us” to cease existence. But I agree, we can never get a clean slate back. All we can do is learn from our mistakes and move on. We will always be someone to each other, there’s no getting around it. But at least we both have all this space to come to terms with the events of the past year, and someday this will all settle and then we can be friends.

I can’t dance - I’ve mentioned this several times in the blog. I was not born with anything even closely resembling grace, and I tend to trip over my own toes. Nowadays I’ve managed to not make myself look as dumb as I used to, but I still kind of bop around like a chicken with its head cut off but still hanging to its neck by a nerve.

The reason why I never danced before was because I was painfully shy - unbelievable but true - ridiculously self-conscious of my lack of dancing skills, I would turn red just thinking about getting up on a dance floor. Add to that the fact that Filipinos in general are graceful, and the possibility that I would be a digital pixel in a sea of analog movement was considerably large. Ex-boyfriends used to snicker that I could not dance. So I didn’t.

Over the course of the past year, though, something happened. Maybe because here, most of my friends are crappy dancers, too. Maybe because no one knew me here and I could start again, unjudged, clean-slated. I could be as ridiculous as I wanted to be, as long as I owned up to it, and it would be ok. After a certain point you just kind of learn to not give a shit. Dancing is energy unleashed. It’s contagious and should not be denied. I have never felt so alive as I have after dancing my ass off for an hour straight.

So congratulations to this guy who managed to make that obvious:

From next month’s The Atlantic:

positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

Days like this I feel like it would be much better if I just shut up and maybe not think so much about how I feel about certain things because I’m sure one of these days it’s all going to crash and then I’ll be all like, motherfucker why did I get myself into that whole trainwreck. I should have seen it a mile away.

Someone broke my ego once - the kind of snot-filled, instant-diet, drown-your-sorrows-in-beer breakage that you wake up from weeks or months or years later and say, what the fuck was that about - and I swore that that would never happen to me again. Ever. I would never let myself be humiliated like that again. And so I guess that’s why I’m twisted in the sense that I would rather dictate when breakages happen, regardless of whatever is broken this time. This makes me a fuck up. I know that.

When you bring the word “love” into the equation it becomes a different game. The rules change. This is an error in human nature that I feel must be corrected. Therefore, eliminate the offending word.

When I was a kid we had these little books a little wider than playing cards and about an inch thick (I don’t know what they’re called), and they would feature the classics, or collections of classics, I forget. The left page would be a picture, and the right page would be, I guess, a retelling? Or maybe an abridged version? What did we have, Aya? Jack London, I think, and Sherlock Holmes, and, I remember vividly, Edgar Allan Poe. Vividly because one of the illustrations for “The Cask of Amontillado” was of the guy being walled in alive. Not something you’re likely to forget if you see it when you’re eight.

Everyone’s heard how Poe could write better when drunk; I imagined him as a slobbering, destitute man with long, wild, nested hair, writing feverishly as if possessed, his penmanship crooked with his hunger, the pages splattered with ink. It turns out that he was just poor, and very stubborn, and too snarky for his own good.

There is a great write-up on Poe from the New Yorker this week - great because I did not realize that the detective genre literally (no pun intended) started with him (how often do you realize when a genre is born?). I also did not know he was extremely interested in puzzles and cryptography; his reputation as a drunk in my mind meant that he was incapable of reasonable thinking.

I was also surprised to learn that he thought he was smarter than his readers. Money quote:

Poe calibrated and recalibrated. Just how many ways can a writer insult his readers and get away with it? If you take Poe’s best horror stories at face value, they are wonderfully, flawlessly terrifying; they are also dripping with contempt. “Half-banter, half-satire” is how he once described them.

Whether or not he appreciates being remembered best as one of the greatest horror writers ever, we’ll never know.

We have the disease of inertia

- My cousin’s friend, talking about why Catholic Filipino girls stay.

So I’m back after a two week trip to that wonderland of sausages on sticks and In-n-Out burgers, land of milk and honey &c &c. I landed in New York on a Thursday afternoon, went out dancing Friday night, promptly caught a bug, and was pretty much sick the rest of the time. But did I let that get me down? Of course not! I trudged my way around Long Island, Universal Studios, and San Francisco like the trooper that I am, even though I felt like crap and all the shopping I did was limited to two outlet stores.

I was really supposed to go to the US in April for a rendezvous. When the bottom fell through from that masterplan I just said, Fuck it, I already promised my cousin I would go visit her in New York. And Ross and Gio were always asking me when I was going to go visit them so I might as well.

When I landed in California the first thing my aunt said to me was, “Don’t na marry a Filipino”. The second was, “Your father wanted me to remind you to buy him night vision binoculars”. You know, on account of all his reconnaissance missions and all.

New York is big and sprawling and on my first day I didn’t quite know how to deal with the unfriendliness that comes with living in a big city anymore. I used to be an expert on this - you don’t survive Manila without mastering a bitchface. But living in two small (populations maybe a tenth or less of Quezon City proportions) foreign cities that are predominantly white has sort of developed in me the demeanor of someone who smiles more often that frowns, and says “Thank you” way too much. But then one day I was riding the subway and the car was full of black and Asians and then two white guys in suits came aboard and looked around nervously and for the first time since I left home I didn’t feel different.

Los Angeles is big and sprawling and you really do need a car to go around. I was extremely stressed when I was there - I was befuddled and conflicted and had too much on my mind, and I was sick and coughing and my eyes kept tearing up. I must have been allergic to something in L.A. The air? I spent a lot of time with my aunts, including one of my godmothers that I hadn’t seen in 16 or 17 years, so that was excellent. It’s different and mind-boggling and unnerving at first to be an adult and be actually treated as an adult by your relations - but it feels good.

San Francisco is beautiful and picturesque and I will never drive stick there. I only spent two days there, but they were really great days, and on my last night Gio and I went to Gerry’s Grill and it was good to eat grilled tuna and kare-kare and sisig again. The morning that I was supposed to leave I sliced my finger with a butter knife as I was fussing with the leftover tuna. Good thing Gio lives across from a hospital, all we had to do was cross the street. I must have been in shock because I was grinning the whole time I was there - it was one of those things that can only happen when you’re on holiday. Also the kind of story people will think apocryphal. I didn’t buy any souvenirs from San Francisco because I already had the scars to prove I was there.

But overall I think really that the US is not for me; I don’t regret not moving there, not having made plans to live there. I suppose because I think it would be easy to integrate and it’s kind of a common path that a lot of people take. So maybe I’m just resisting because again it’s something that people typically do, and I kind of hate being typical that way. Needless to say, if I was forced to move there, say for a job, it might be different. But I think I’m lucky that so far the places I’ve lived in are plenty interesting enough.