Snatch

I’m writing this to hopefully increase awareness and to lessen the victims of these kind of unfortunate incidents.

My boyfriend and I rode a bus to Cubao from MOA (Mall of Asia). Both of us were tired of all the shopping and mall hopping that day entailed that were not just meant for ourselves but also for our loved ones. The ride to Cubao was the typical city bus scheme—a lot of people going in and going out. A few kilometers before our intended destination, the bus got filled up with a lot of people to the point that even the aisle got really congested. We had to literally squeeze ourselves through the line of people just to reach the bus door and get down.

Our destination was the long line of provincial bus terminals for the final ride home. When we got off the city bus, the first thing my boyfriend asked me was “Love, nasayo ba phone ko?” (Love, do you have my phone?) That question was mixed with a tone of panic while consistently checking all of his pockets and that’s when I checked my bag and found the zipper open. When I checked, even my phone wasn’t in my bag. And that’s when my boyfriend started walking towards the direction the bus took but we both know it was too late. I followed him aimlessly, then he asked me if I was okay and that’s when I broke down. I cried helplessly while we walked toward a pair of policemen near the terminal and reported the incident but of course, nothing could be done. What’s been taken can no longer be returned.

That final bus ride home was the heaviest I ever felt. I cried and cried thinking why now, why us. 2 days before New Year hits the world and 2014 sets in. Why now? Why us? Then my boyfriend comforted me and told me something important, he said ” Love, phone lang yan. Parehas tayong nawalan. Maybe we didn’t do anything wrong para mangyari to pero nangyari na. Yung ibang tao umiiyak dahil namatayan, dahil walang pambayad sa ospital, walang makain, walang matirhan. Phone lang nawala satin. Maswerte pa tayo dahil hindi tayo nasaktan. Mapapalitan yun. Wag tayong maging shallow. Tahan na. Kaya natin to.”

This happened for a reason. Bad things always turn out to be great lessons and we know that. Material things can be replaced. Losing them will always hit you with pain but they are mere objects. They can never equate the value of life.

To all our friends, family, and fellow citizens, please do take care when on public transport. No matter how tired you are, try to pay attention to everything and everyone. Be alert. Take care of your belongings. And most of all, take care of yourself.

Fois

Time is just—time. It is not good nor bad. It is not fast nor slow. It is never too little nor too much. It does not overflow nor run out. You don’t make time, you don’t waste time. Time is just—time.

People think that they’ve already mastered the art of quantifying time when actually, they’ve just cut it into segments to signify routine things that should be done as the sun rises and as it sets. Time is beyond us and to assign numbers to signify its essence is to admit that we are ignorant of its importance.

People always take time for granted. It’s not until they can count tomorrows with their fingers do they think back and ask if everything they’ve done was actually worth their time. Because for as long as they perceive time as plenty, they’re just going to continue to spend it mindlessly.

People get easily attached to material things. Spending most of their lifetime investing on them while rationalizing that these objects are worth it. They spend months saving up for the latest gadget but could not spare a few minutes with the people who matter to them. They spend years saving up for a house or a car, all the while setting aside the people they love which should not happen. And it’s not until they finally get what they’re after do they realize that driving a car with no person in the passenger seat or living in a house with no one to share it with is a life not worth living.

On your death bed, would you ask to see all the structures that you have built as an engineer? Would you ask to see the students you have educated as a teacher? Would you ask to see your plans that have turned to reality as an architect? Would you ask to see all the patients you’ve taken care of as a nurse? During the dwindling days of your existence, would you ask to see them or would you rather see that one person your heart have always yearned for? That one person who have always made things a little better. That one person that in a weird way, always completes you.

Think. Because if that person is the one mortal being you would want to see before you die then make sure you spend enough time with him/her while you’re still healthy. Don’t set that person aside and then just call upon him/her when you’re already in tremendous physical pain because of your waning existence, when your breathing is already labored, when you can no longer find the voice to speak and all you can manage is to look at him/her with eyes glistening in tears.

If that person’s voice is the last thing you want to hear from this green patch of earth before you take your last breath, make sure that you keep that person beside you during the best days of your life and I assure you, when you finally lay your body to rest, you would close your eyes with a smile. For lost time spent in love is not lost at all, it is time won.

Google it

Google it. Two words that people tend to give away as an answer nowadays. You need to know something? Google it. You need options? Google it. You need to get somewhere? Google it.

Everything seems to be in Google now. And well, it should. Because its name came from the word “googol” which is the number one followed by one hundred zeros which signifies that the search engine is intended to provide large quantities of information.

So right now, you’re probably thinking that this is going to be an informative blog and that thought can actually be answered by both yes and no. If you’re looking for the kind of information that is not quantified and cannot be measured then keep on reading. If not, you’ll be wasting your time by finishing this.

Now that we got that off the table. I’d like to tell you that my curiosity with Google was planted, watered, nurtured, cultivated, developed and blossomed in only a matter of 119 minutes. And visiting the headquarters of Google is now a part of my bucket list.

You still don’t know what I’m talking about here, do you?

The Internship. Vince Vaughn. Owen Wilson. If you haven’t heard of this before, Google it. If you have heard but haven’t watched, grab a copy now. If you have watched it, then you know what I’m talking about.

Life lessons. (Alanis Morissette: An old man turned 98, he won the lottery and died the next day…) Isn’t it ironic that life lessons are learned in the most unlikely places and in the craziest ways possible? You finally learned the meaning of the word “commitment” then the day after, the other person gives up. Everybody drives beyond the speed limit, you do it once at 2 am in the morning and you get a speeding ticket. You have never smoked a stick of cigarette in your life, then you end up with lung cancer. You were just learning how to smile again and boom, life drops another atomic bomb in your life.

You need to feel pain. You need to fail. You need to be lied to. You need to feel unworthy. You need to be left out. You need to lose yourself. You need to have regrets. You need to receive a lot less than you deserve. You need to feel what it’s like to be left by someone. You need to lie awake at one point in your life and ask when things will get better. You need that. You need all of that because you need the pain of the negative things for you to appreciate the value of the positive things.

That’s what I learned with this movie. Life will always be there to knock you down because it was never supposed to be pleasant. I’m not saying that life should be about pain. I’m just saying that having pain in your life is the thing that makes it worth living in the first place.

You complain of having to try more than a dozen times and failing every single time. But if you know in your heart that it’s the thing you should be doing, then don’t give up. God will not put a fervent passion in your heart if first, you couldn’t do it and second, if you didn’t deserve it.

And that’s all I’m trying to do right now. That’s what we’re all trying to do. That’s what humanity’s grinding for. We just have to get the hang of it. Because in the end, life is not about success. It’s about seeing things through.

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This is where my blog entry comes to a close so if you still don’t know what i’m talking about, Google life. And good luck with the results.

Kill the Fragile Me

I haven’t written in a long while. It’s not that I didn’t have anything to write about, I just didn’t want to write about what I have. I refused to write and just like what Franz Kafka quoted “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity” so naturally, I decided to go back to being a sane writer.

For the past few days, I engaged my mind in reading just to keep my hand from writing. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas—that’s what I’ve been reading. I’ve read it four times over the past week if I’m not mistaken. It’s not about a love story that most people would think a 21 year old girl like me would read. It’s about murder. There maybe certain points of love, yes—but mostly hate, blood, intent and violence.

Why would I read something like that? Because solving a crime makes me think. Constantly trying to get ahead of the writer’s thoughts takes my mind off things. Meanwhile, love stories dull my senses. And I guess that’s the reason why I’ve never finished one before. And that’s also the reason why I’ll never touch 50 shades of grey. I would probably watch the movie but I’ll never read the book.  I’ts not that I’m bitter when it comes to love, I just realized that you should focus more on building your own love story rather than reading a hundred different versions of it that will never become your own.

So much for that, now on to my reflections.

“Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” Those were words uttered by Lady Macbeth which were also mentioned by one of the characters in the book that I read. Of course in the novel, it was meant literally—a dry, shriveled up old man and yet when he died, there was so much blood in the room. But then again when I read it, I thought of myself—a young, carefree girl and yet, in her thoughts lie constant doubt and an insistent war for worth and truth.

“Blessed if I know. But it’s damned disturbing.” I guess this is something that all of us feel but never really speak about. A fervent, unyielding desire to figure things out, to understand the fabric of reality, to comprehend the purpose of our existence. And the constant dissatisfaction of this desire disturbs you, haunts you, plagues you and eventually leads you to a life of obscurity. If these things never bother you then you have settled for mediocrity. But if they do, then you need not worry, for where there are questions, there will be answers.

“The character of the victim has always something to do with his or her murder.” So what kind of forces have your personality set in motion that you think will lead to your death? For me, I think that my passion to know more about things will eventually dip my nose into something I was never supposed to know—something that could probably force other people to want me dead. Okay, now that’s a bit theatrical and over dramatic but still, the above statement holds true. If you get murdered then that will more or less have something to do with the choices you made, may that be 15 years ago or 15 seconds ago.

“When Simeon Lee was killed, his son David was playing the Dead March. The wish to kill was in his heart. It passed out through his fingers and died in waves of sound… That is the truth.” How do you distract your emotions? How do you shift from wanting to die to wanting to live? How do you turn hate into love? Be careful. Because your methods of distraction may just be another door for more pain to come in. Be sure that your escape routes from reality are not highways to a bigger complication. Be sure that your means of temporarily forgetting is not an avenue for other people to be forced into forgetting you.

“For a man does not live and die to himself alone. That which he has, he hands on—to those who come after him…” Whoever it is you decide to be and whatever it is you choose to do, it will leave an impact to those who know you. You have a personality as unique as your own fingerprint and it will always leave a mark. You made them happy, you made them sad, you made them believe, you made them lie—all of which will only be immortalized after you die. For after you take your last breath, all that’s left for people to hang on to are memories. So right now, while you’re still breathing, think about what kind of memories you would be handing to those people standing around your grave, watching while you get buried beneath the earth, beneath their sight and beneath the hands of time.

Life may be lived in a billion different ways but still, death is the inevitable finale, so I don’t think it would be a bad idea to live each day with the end in mind.