peculiarhours

This past week, I have been reading a blog about this man who was distressed about his life situation. He had a job he hated and had become disconnected from the friends and activities he once cared about. He said he was depressed. He said he felt like he had lost himself. He said he hated how he feel trapped.

That sounded familiar. That strangely sounded like my subconscious, and that I just do not want to admit it.

But then why not quit? I thought. Then it dawned to me -- both of us had become accustomed to the lifestyle, familial obligations, among others that our job can afford. So quitting it was out of the question.

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They say the people who struggle with the so-called “life purpose” question, always complain that they don’t know what to do. But the real problem is not that we don’t know what to do. It’s that we don’t know what to give up.

In a way, my so-called life purpose crisis is a luxury, something I allowed to have as a result of the amazing freedoms the modern world has bestowed upon us.

It is very common nowadays for people to complain about work/life balance. There are articles all over the mainstream media debating whether it’s possible to “have it all” — i.e., is it possible to be an all star in your career and have a healthy family life and have cool and fun hobbies and be financially stable and have that sexy bikini body and cook organic soufflé in your underwear while buying beachfront property on your new iPhone 7, all at the same time?

What’s changed is not our inability to manage our time or “balance our lives” between work and play. What’s changed is that we have more opportunities for work and play than ever before — more interests, more awareness of every potential experience we’re passing up.

And we’re made aware of this in a terribly connected way each day (see social media). Every person who decides to sacrifice their dating life to advance their career is now bombarded constantly by the rambunctious sex lives of their friends and strangers. Every person who sacrifices their career prospects to dedicate more time and energy to their family is now bombarded with the material successes of the most exceptional people around them at all times. Every person who decides to take a thankless but necessary role in society is now constantly drowned in inane stories of the famous and beautiful.

So how do we respond to this new, overly-connected culture? How do we manage our Fear-Of-Missing-Out?

The conventional answer, the answer you’ll find in most bookstores and at most seminars is some variation of “do more with less,” “practice time management, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

While other people will complain about a the typical work/life balance, woe-is-me complaint we always hear: “I have all of these things I want to do and not enough time.”

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I have always been told, as a child and growing up, that I can be anything i want, and that I can do a lot of things for the world.

But what if the answer isn’t to do more?

What if the answer is to want less?

What if the solution is simply accepting our bounded potential, our unfortunate tendency as humans to inhabit only one place in space and time. What if we recognize our life’s inevitable limitations and then prioritize what we care about based on those limitations?

A Sadhu in Bhaktapur.

Tonight, I'm sleepless in a concrete jungle.

When did it become normal for human beings to dwell stacked on top of each other, to have nothing alive around us but cold hard concrete floors and walls? Our bodies are designed to rise with the sun and rest after sunset to function well, but we've become so unsynced with nature. After living and seeing different parts of the world on a budget, I woke up today in the country I have struggled living in for 5 years feeling claustrophobic and suffocated. There's visible smog all around us, the sky is dull and colorless even the powerful sun fails to shine through. What bothers me the most is how people just walk around on autopilot mode, mindlessly walking or driving.

It was the same after I went back to Manila for a quick time-off. When did we start to think that it's normal to be constantly rushing, swerving from one lane to another to get ahead and violently beeping at everyone who gets in the way? An hour and a half of traffic, to and from work if you're lucky. That's three hours of your day completely wasted when you could be spending it doing something you love. People seem to compete with each other for everything. To earn more money, be more popular, have more power. Like they've forgotten how it is to just be human. Romanticism aside, there are many places where life is easier, the quality of life vastly better. And you don't even have to move out of the country. You just have to be open to all the possibilities and maybe sacrifice some luxuries. We don't buy things with our money, we buy them with hours from our lives.

So in the past few weeks I watched two movies that left me with something to think about. First was Lobster, and A Taste of Tea. 

Both of which resonated to me and made me ponder about the irony of human relationships and finding one’s passion. That is, for instance, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — In this case, I could say is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved (at least for me), and a very tedious process of refining the truths people can tell each other.

...But among the dualities that lend love both its electricity and its exasperation — the interplay of thrill and terror, desire and disappointment, longing and anticipatory loss — is also the fact that our pathway to this mutually refining truth must pass through a necessary fiction: We fall in love not just with a person wholly external to us but with a fantasy of how that person can fill what is missing from our interior lives.

Let’s admit it:

All love stories are frustration stories… To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had (of one’s formative frustrations, and of one’s attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction. It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. What further analysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing — nothing comes of nothing!!! — but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies.

It is a real paradox.

However much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence.

Falling in love, finding your passion, they are all the same. They are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by.

It’s that time of the year again – moving out and clearing up. I have always been used to these changes, having moved for almost 5 times in my 2 years in this country. Always a sacred ritual, it also gives me time to put things in retrospect and allows me to evaluate what really matters to me - both in a material and figurative sense.

So, as this end of the month closes in, I’d like to give myself another go on an overhaul and decluttering to the things that I longer need in my life. For whatever I have been given in the past year: Relationships, things, opportunities, and experiences – they made me for what I am today - I will always be grateful.

Dear friend,

Here is a picture of me back in 2014 when I went for a solo trip in Batanes. Such a long time!

Do not fall in love with people like me we will take you to museums and parks and monuments and kiss you in every beautiful place so that you can never go back to them without tasting us like blood in your mouth.

I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible.

And when I leave you will finally understand

Dear friend,

Today I woke up with a really sharp pain in my back. I never knew back pain could hurt like this since I was diagnosed with kidney infection and stones when I was about 18 years old. 

I know this feeling -- from a dull, recurring pain to a sharp - poked at the back by an ice pick feeling. It was awful. So i dragged myself to the nearest PCP-company paid hospital to avail of my consultation privilege and got there at 7 am. I was first in line (no one was in there yet) -- but i got a queue number 94! Nevertheless, the doctor inspected me and gave me some muscle relaxants and a very strong pain reliever plus those uncle-liniment creams that you put on a sore muscle.

I went home and rested. Then i fell down. The pain was unbearable and I had to crawl on the floor to get on my bed. I didn’t see that coming. 

Until now i am in bed and occasionally walking like a grandpa when i need to pee or to drink water.

I never felt this grateful for being mobile and have the easy ability of doing things before -- or just being able to get up in the morning from my bed while i still can.To those people, who just wanted to move and do things, like normal people, but can’t... i feel sorry (and also for me right now) but I give my highest regards to you. *sigh*

Moving is so underrated.

Good day, blog.

As you can see, i started updating this blog again. This is a self-shot photograph aboard the train from Salzburg to Venice. I took this just for documentation purposes. 

Hello there! haven’t written here for such a long time! I think my writing skills have gotten quite rusty. So for just a quick update, I have been very busy with work, and most specifically, the adult life. It has been nearly two years since I came to Singapore, and establish my new life here -- (as you can see from the previous post) and I can say I have been enjoying it!

The photo above is one of my postcard projects that I did when I visited Chiang Mai in Thailand, last November

Funny how people talk about New Year and life and the circular setting up of days and nights suddenly having a fresher meaning. Funny how we are still deluded by the notion of time, the meaningless bastard. I have seen time skid past eons in second intervals. The first ticking of the first clock still echoing on walls beaten by disaster, pendulous between shores of despair and greater despair. i have seen its retarded frenzy staggering, drunk on the notion that things are changing.

People expect confessions and resolutions from me. I don’t know what happened between the last 365 times the sun was overhead and i could hear it screaming over me. I don’t know how i reached this 2016. i don’t know how i reached from 20 to 24 either. I grab my skin every morning and plunge into the day, every day.

People talk about news and scandals as i count the moles on their faces and laugh at how they laugh. They ask me what my plans are now and i start to doubt their actual meaning. Can they know what i am thinking? that the only check i keep of the passage of the seeming are the intervals between my contradictions and nervous breakdowns. I go through all the things i know. the horizontal life of living and the multidimensional ocean of my mind till I reallize that I plan to be looking at the stars for the rest of my life.

It does not necessarily mean that you will have more time for yourself if you live close to work and to go home early. Because it can also mean that you will be compelled to work more than what is asked for -- which is sometimes good, and sometimes bad.

You will change. And you will change your mind, change your mind and change your mind again.

People will change. And they will change their minds, change their minds and change their minds again.

You must do a lot of things in life that you don’t want to do. Consider these to be character building exercises, suck it up, and do them.

The things you think will kill you, in fact, probably won’t.

There’s no perfect path for your life that you have yet to uncover. You simply must “do you.” This takes endless sacrifice and a hell of a lot of heart.

Sometimes you will lose yourself. Just don’t lose yourself for too long.

It’s okay to question everything. Having more questions than answers means you are being honest with yourself.

No amount of money in the world is worth more than being true to yourself.

Love is a choice. It really is.

So, as a reminder to my future self: