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

That old brown sad-eyed sheepdog that crosses the street by himself to take a dump on someone else’s lawn. He lives about twenty meters from my house and once I stopped on my bike to let him cross.

We have these memories that we feel compelled to share to someone, anyone who would listen, regardless of context, regardless of whether they mean anything, whether other people care.

But we don’t need to. We don’t have to. We don’t need to hear the words come out of our mouths to make the memories even more substantial. As if verbalizing them would give them legs, make them real. They already are, in our heads, in another life.

These are wholly mine, these are my properties. They are my own slices of space and time and I will always have these. I should never be ashamed.

If I lose them I will never find them again; no amount of storytelling from witnesses will help me recover the sensation of the event.

***

For some reason lately I’ve been obsessing about how other people with whom I share memories with perceive those memories. Like, I’m pretty sure there is an expansive disconnect between how I remember certain events and how other people who were there - friends, exes, classmates, whatever - remember. And sometimes I tend to relive every single second, every word, every turn of the head, every action in my head, wonder what I could have done different.

But now I get it: These are my memories. No one is going to fucking tell me how to relive them. If I change them in my head they are gone from me forever. If I forget because it’s too humiliating then I lose them to the ether. That’s how I forgot a substantial part of my 21st and 22 years. That’s almost two years I will never get back.

Places and people and smells and events.

***

P. Noval and your uncle’s dinghy apartment. Laying on your bed next to you looking at the ceiling listening to what, Smashing Pumpkins? Third Eye Blind?, wondering if we were going to kiss (we never did).

***

Dottie said you looked at her Multiply account, of her pictures of when I was back home last January. Did you see me? Do you remember anything? Do you remember my friends, who loved you unconditionally when they knew that I did, too. How did you manage to conjure up so much hate so quickly? Not that I was completely blameless but I think the hostility was disproportionate. Now I know that the situation was that we never learned anything from each other; I was unaware at the time that we could; that we were supposed to. I supposed there is a possibility that one day in the future I will hear from you, maybe your daughter. I will find out if I am a forbidden word.

Noooooo0o00000000o0o0o0o0000000000oo0o0o0o0o0

If Natalie Portman were my ex and she was dating this guy I would probably run out and impregnate the next woman I see, too.

File under: Day 65 of Ina’s Forced Sabbatical about Who She Is (recommended by my shrink, one Joseph James)

Turns out that the Onion A.V Club have this term for what I think I wanted to be really badly when I was younger, which is why I kind of still am at a limbo, which is sad because I’m going to be 28 in three weeks and I can’t believe I wasted so much fucking time trying so fucking hard.

They call her the Manic Pixie Dream Girl - she’s eloquent, she’s opinionated, she’s street-smart. She’s tomboyish but not so much that you don’t notice that she’s kind of cute. She’s strange but not cookoo; alluring but not in a deodorant commercial way, more like an interesting, trippy kind. The thing is, I now understand that I was apparently on a personal mission to be this girl when I was younger - to be the friend that grows on you; the odd girl who becomes your salvation once you fall out of love with the prom queens and their perfect teeth; the ones you have intelligent conversations with and teaches you words like “trepidation”.

No harm in being a girl like that - they seem like a nice enough breed - more interesting than what the prom queens grow up to be I guess - but I guess for me when I was in college or early 20s and in this situation I was tackling it, it seems, in reverse.

You become a Manic Pixie Dream Girl by yourself first, and then other people see that; not the other way around. I was trying too fucking hard, setting these characteristics and trying to build myself around them like I was an avatar that I was developing from scratch. Haha. Must have watched Reality Bites one too many times and wanted to be Lelaina so bad. She’s not in the Onion AV CLub list, but if there was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she was it.

FFS, I’m no X-files purist, but seeing Mulder and Scully getting all cheeseball romantic - I sank lower and lower into my chair until I could take it no longer with that whole “that’s why I fell in love you with” crap you could actually hear me groan in the theater. I stopped watching the series right before Mulder left, so I have no idea what happened between them in the end - did they really start living together? It was an excellent first act, the movie. And then that whole “scratchy beard” scene, I thought that was a dream sequence of some kind. And it was kind of funny, very Coach and Mrs. Taylor in Friday Night Lights, if she was a skeptical Catholic and he looked like the Unabomber. But I was fucking misled! I’ve been had! It was like an M. Night Shyamalan twist halfway into the movie! They’re fucking, like on a regular basis! My eyes!

Like your parents having sex! Why can’t Scully and Mulder just get together for old times’ sake; why can’t they just do booty calls? Do they really need to domesticate themselves FFS?!?!?!?!

Ok, so if it turns out that the series ends with them really, like, purposefully shacking up I’d be glad I stopped watching when I did then.

So there’s this NYTime article, right, about the people behind trolls (strangely enough, the original article was titled “Malwebolence” and has since changed - I think the editors realized how very 6th grade corny that title was). It’s a long but really interesting read, if only because when you’re provoked by these kids you very often forget, or it’s easier to forget, that they’re actual people and not just low-life scum. Obviously this is a different age, and I can’t even wrap my head around the implications in terms of privacy and morality and law that come with being a citizen of the interwebs; I wouldn’t even know where to begin. But the author of the article did bring up something that I never thought about regarding trolls and how they operate. It’s that at a fundamental level they are a nuisance; how much of a nuisance depends on how they pull off their trolling and how much adverse reaction they get from everyone else:

But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

I mean of course there is something reprehensible about trolls; that’s why they’re called trolls. But it does make you wonder what that “destructive human urge” is - is it the same that compels us to go to war? The same one that champions genocide? Yes there is an element of humor in trolling; if you take them seriously people say you just don’t get the joke. But these are always the same people anyway who are never at the receiving end of quips; it’s much more human to react in the defensive; not everyone has wit at standby. If everyone was witty I guess there would be no need for trolls.

Loki is mentioned in the article - the Nordic god of mischief. In hindsight, how insightful it was for the Vikings to personify mischief as a god (albeit unpopular), along with fertility, war, wisdom. They were well aware that mischief cold wreak havoc just as much as outright spite or pure evil. Must be something about the cold weather and dry wind up there.

On a sidenote, Weev, the troll who’s interviewed in the article, has written a distinctly Valis-like response to the article. I have no doubt that, if warranted, Weev could erase my identity just like that. But let me say this: Weev, you look like you’re 14 years old. You look like all my high school classmates at fourteen, just when we were trying to get us to fall in love with each other in between Bio lecture and lab. I think it would have been super productive for you to have had a girlfriend at 14.

Speaking of Valis and Philip K. Dick, they confirmed water on Mars in case you haven’t heard. This brings to mind a short story by Dick, in which mankind attempts to colonize Mars, only to realize that mankid originated from Mars and left it, having depleted all its resources (too lazy to try to figure out what the title was, otherwise I would have to sift through about seven different books - and a google search for philip dick life earth mars - fat lot of good that would do!). Oh my God, Horselover Fat. You were a fucking prophet. It’s the end of the world as we know it. Weev was right: this is a Malthusian crisis. I’m never making my own children. I’ll have to use my baby names on future cats and akitas instead.

Fucking typo grrrr.

Last na na Alanis pramis - sabi ni Eric last last week, “Madness ang ‘Madness’!”.

Leave it to her to be passive-aggressive about something and yet be completely honest about it. Gusto ko sabihin kay ****, yung boyprend ko sa aking past life, you simply brought this madness to light and I should thank you.