It's a wild world

It's the series that makes Gossip Girl look like Sweet Valley with contrived connivances. It's British. It has some of the most breathtaking, lavishly languid photography I have every seen since Wong Kar-wai teamed up with Christopher Doyle. It has a tastefully rockin' and eclectic soundtrack each episode and lots of cleverly written scenes. It has such tragically beautiful characters like a delusional anorexic slut, a desperate trampy girlfriend and a confused teenage Pakistani. It's honest, unapologetically funny and spot on. No series has ever captured contemporary chemically driven teenage angst like this series has. It's like a hazy trip down memory lane.

It's the series almost everyone I know has mentioned at least once since last year but only a few have seen. And because I was finally compelled by a bootlegged copy I fatefully ran into a few days ago, and yesterday was a such a painfully boring hot day, I lit a joint and spent the whole afternoon and evening with the first season.

I gotta say, anything that can reinvent an old song and put new deeper images to each syllable is a winner in my book. So for now I'll let Cat Stevens linger in my auditory memory and pinch me over and over.

It's not easy being green

Tonight, as I sat at the back of a carpool, on my way home from watching an extremely hilarious movie about stoners on the run from their dealers, which beared such classic lines like "Can't you see my armpit? It doesn't have hair. I'm totally aerodynamic when I fight. So you should be scared.", I was staring at the damp asphalt floor of EDSA.

It reflected the dominant colors of yellow and red from all the Mickey Dees & Jollibees and Shell gas station strategically located along the road. In color theory, warmer colors dominate less warm colors but when there is complimentary cool color, it will stand out in the foreground, dominating both warm colors. And in one particularly fascinating moment, there was a convergence, rarely seen in cityscapes, of a mild yellow light from a motorbike beside a sedan car that had a luminous aqua halogen lamp. Both light met, drenched with fresh rain water, lying on the busy road of EDSA. It was a particular shade of green. Perhaps emerald. It was beautiful.

Death is always synonymous to justice for the emotionally injured party

There was once a boy, whose last name was Paraiso, who went to my school a few years ago. He was a swimmer for the varsity team. He was, as my professor this term fondly remembers him, a very considerably proper young man. He dressed very dapperly and had a very meek countenance. He attended my professor's Tuesday and Thursday classes, usually a few minutes late but still always present. Though he would often head straight, in a very low inoffensive manner, for the back row. One Tuesday meeting, after my professor's lecture, he voluntarily offered to help her gather up her things, as she didn't ask anyone because she didn't interact with her students then in a manner as casual as she does so with her students now. The next Thursday, surprised by the boy's sudden absence, my professor was prompted to comment to the rest of the class present then about the boy's absence. To which the class reportedly answered that the boy earlier mentioned was stabbed to death. Now, according to my professor, there were three versions of reports offhandedly being spread around the school. One was that the perpetrators of the stabbing were people who have had a long running bad blood with our very honorable protagonist. The next one was that the boy was dubiously suspected of participating on gang wars and the incident was like those kinds of incident that inevitably happen to these sorts of boys. The last one, which my professor strongly attests to believing the most, was that the boy had a couple of rounds of beers, just enough to get one very well buttered up for easy conversation, with his friends. That these said friends were arguing about something most college boys argue about, and that the boy was left with no one on his said of the argument. Now the boy, noticing this predicament and being the proper young man my professor so eloquently illustrates him to us to be, politely excuses himself to head home, which is a high-rise a few steps away from the bar, which is a block away from our school. While he was slowly going his way down the stairs of the bar, the said drinking buddies suddenly starts attacking him with their knives and leaves him to bleed his guts out on the deep black painted steps. The boy was rushed to the nearest government hospital but wasn't able to arrive in time. Mr. Paraiso is now in Paradise.

Interestingly, my professor commented that the last version sounds so statistically familiar. That in most news items in my country, about drinking and stabbing incidents, occur with friends doing it to their friends.

Now, this story was shared to us by my professor after someone, in class today, retorted a joke about how students in my school use knives instead of fists to a commendation my professor gave to students in my school about us being very behaved, and how in her whole career, she has never heard of an incident of brawls and fist-fights happening on school grounds, and on the same day the story about a certain double murderer was given Presidential clemency after only more than a decade of serving his life sentence, which everyone probably suspect was because of his family's connection with the government, was broadcasted. Now I've always been pro-life and pro-second chances, which is why I've always wondered why victim's families often wish their loved one's assailants death when rotting in prison for the better part of their lives is worse. What I wonder now though is how it must feel for the victim's parents, who have migrated out of the country, perhaps to help them move on, would feel after hearing this news.

The trifecta

Then there are those moments where I just want to give up. I wonder what I'm doing these things for because it used to be because it was fun. I know there will always be tough times and it's all part of the reason why the fun things are fun. How do I know, though, when to call it quits? When nothing more is left? I guess it's really true. We're here on this earth to make a mess out of our lives. To go up above our expectations and to suffer until we are scrapping the bottom of the pit. Oh the exhaustion and the high. Sometimes, when I put them side-by-side in my head, it exhilarates me. Though other times, I'm scared shitless when I imagine the vastness of how far I've gotten that I start treading with trepidation. I just look back in amazement and let out a deep breath and watch myself stare back into the void. Sometimes, I hate being this limited in such a limitless universe but, most of the time, I remind myself that we're not wired for limitless like gas or water. Not just yet.

Another thing that bothers me

And then there are those times when I feel a dire uncontrollable wanting to have the power to turn back time. During those times, I think so hard that, for a fleeting moment, I convince myself that I can. I go back to different parts of the past and make all those changes. Then I'm left wondering the repercussions of things I would change and making those different permutations of effects by those decisions. It's chronic malignancy on my personality that will probably still be with there decades later. I get a form of comfort and catharsis in these moments but sometimes I feel like I'm getting less than for the time I have bargained. Sometimes it just gets so bad that I tell the universe to grant me this one wish, even if I just go back to somewhere not far back, like earlier this year. I beg so hard that I start breathing uneasily.

You know what bothers me

Sometimes, in my deepest moments of arrogance, I like to pretend that I am, in the sheer audacity of my narrow-mindedness, one beyond my years. But then stuff like having HIV and knowing actual people who have turned tricks for drugs, and still being in college under a three year program at the age of 23 reminds me how categorically stupid and incredibly naïve I still am. What really bothers me, though, is that despite all these things, I still crave for a life of aimless drug abuse and sexual promiscuity. The mere thought of it sends hundreds upon hundreds of volts across my whole system. After fighting myself, tooth and nail, for this organized productive and moderately successful collegiate life that I am close to finishing, the life I used to have then is all I feel that can really make me happy still.

I am hesitation

I am that soft comforting voice in your head that tells you, you don't need to do a save when you're writing a one page paper. Because why else would you need a save for, when you're going to print it a few minutes later anyway? So you agree and continue typing and then seconds later, there's a brief power interruption and your computer restarts. Then you remember something every single professor you've had in every single computer involved subjects reminds the class: always save your file because you never know when there's going to be a power interruption.

I am that person in front of the mirror when you stare at it with a long-sleeve you just put on, wondering if you should wear it with the outfit. Then I'll tell you it's better if you took it off because less is more. Later in the day, I'll tell you, you should've worn it after all because you look too shabbily plain.

I tell you that that guy is probably only saying it because it gets him off more when he says "I love you" and he'll probably be screwing someone else a few days later or worse, you're the one he's screwing a few days later he said the same thing to another guy.

I am that electricity in your finger that stops you from typing "I miss you" to a message you're going to send to that guy. The same words he sends you two messages later.

I am that nagging voice in your head that comforts you by saying you haven't gotten jaded. You've just learned to patiently wait and accept whatever thing comes your way with temperance.