Random Dump of 2006 Stuff

I'm the kind of writer whose inspiration does not come as often as daily or weekly. If it comes, this writer then rambles on with kilometric prose (again taking his sweet time to type out the words and sentences), edits, hesitates, contemplates, and edits some more before finally coming up with a masterpiece of a blog entry. Consequently, some entries that are in the pipeline suddenly become outdated, or some parts are edited out lest the entry becomes a boring full-length essay. Thus, before these thoughts become so last year, I present to you the never-before-written paragraphs and deleted parts of Highway Drift for the year 2006 (Ugh, it sounds like a DVD special feature!)...

-oOo-

I went home to Naga City last September for the Peñafrancia Fiesta after five long years of missing its fun and blessings. I could've churned out lots of entries exploring different aspects of this nine-day-long festival, but I didn't. Fortunately, it's an annual thing, so I most probably have another shot at it next September. If you can't wait, well, check out the links in this paragraph.

What was the thing about this year's fiesta? It's the time I seem to have reached the culmination of a trend I've noticed in the few times in the past five years that I managed to go back home. It's as if the city has moved on without me. Significant changes have taken place among my relatives and old friends, in the schools I have gone to, and in the city itself. Changes I am not party to. Changes I approach as a stranger, and in turn these changes also consider me as one, an oddity from a different time, five years ago to be exact.

At the same time, it's as if I have moved on while the city stood in time. My friends and relatives speak with an ennui that makes me think of them as static beings. (What's up, I ask. Nothing new, they answer. It's always like this.) While I contemplated moving back to take a break from polluted and hectic Metro Manila living, I was confronted with the fact that I have to deal with baggage from unresolved feuds (petty, childish feuds as I view them now) and unchanging attitudes of long ago (and I when I say long ago, I mean way before I was born). Then I'm hearing of rumors that I was spared, for now while I am away, from new baggage that formed in my absence. Perhaps this disconnect is partly my fault too. I am not the person that would burn the phone lines to keep in touch. I operate more on the mantra out of sight, out of mind.

Perhaps it's a way of telling me that Metro Manila, how ever resentful I am with it, is where I belong now, where I have friends from college and in work, where I have a job and other business opportunities, where I can avoid the mistakes of the past, where I can make for myself a new life. I guess, for a change, it's time to keep in touch with these friends, and not lose them this time, not with all the technology available to connect, not with all those fond memories formed back then, not with more great memories to be formed in the future. It's time to take the job seriously, or at least do what I'm supposed to do while still avoiding stress; else it'll be tough if I get booted out. It's time to make new friends with the neighbors and with the officemates.

And lay off the drama, geez...

-oOo-

I didn't blog about my birthday, for crying out loud! That was last October, by the way. "I'm 22 for a moment," the song 100 Years by Five for Fighting croons with melodious melancholy, and that's the only part of the song I can relate to; I'm deprived of being "on fire" with a significant other, more so "making our way back from Mars."

On a positive note though, some people still think I'm a college student, like the jeepney drivers, for instance, who charge me with the student's fare. And I can still blend in whenever I visit my college to bask in nature and nostalgia. The one particular episode I remember was when I bought tickets for Da Vinci Code in Market! Market! The sales lady, who appears to be of the same age as I asked how old I was. Rather than be immediately flattered, my first reaction was to be slightly irritated by the fact that I will have to compute for/recall my real age. Then I was annoyed that Dan Brown's thriller was R-18 primarily due to hype and unfounded fears. "T-t-twenty," I stammered. "No! I'm twenty ... twenty-one. Yes, twenty-one going on twenty-two," I managed to mutter. Then I was flattered.

But all these mean nothing when the children I'm tutoring exclaim "You're only 22! We thought you were..." Kids don't lie, do they?


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