else it was reverie

the concession of “I do not understand” is the prelude to the bigger thing which is striving to change that fact. 

I can’t imagine how it is ever truly human to surrender to the onset of that realization, and more urgently, to move given — or on the basis of — those lacunae in our (ideally) ever evolving human wisdom.

The disgusting gall of us all to say that we love and are of love! If some infernal plague purged the earth of those who have not at the very least attempted to truly love, the entire human race would probably cease to exist.

We fail to understand that to love, among many other things, is to understand with our hearts.

Or, at the very least, to try.

Not all

who tire

are graced

with the presence

of weight.

Calm seas don’t make for good stories.

Searching for a violent peace will allow you to find that the waters never cease to bash, forever impaling scars upon shores. Find its music, and let it fill your heart’s empty cup.

There was I, thinking of and planning — in meticulously assembled detail — my career path in space travel when I was woken up by a phone call from a pyramid scam company asking me if I could join their evil business forces at Ortigas.

Sometimes, the message can’t get any clearer, when reality gets in the way of dreams.

Dear God,

You have loved me in my every flaw and weakness with a reason that goes beyond what my human mind can ever comprehend. Countless times You have heard me give you thanks and praise, though I know that the one genuine response is to accept and be moved by the greatness that Your love is and will always be. 

And move, in so doing.

Teach me, Lord, the ways of Your Son.  

Teach me to love the world that has become so impossible to love, to understand it with my heart when all capacity for reason and patience has failed. 

Grant me the strength to find strength in moments where You ask me to be strong, the wisdom and discernment to know and recognize those moments as battles worth fighting for because it is those that lead me to You, and the courage to go beyond what seem like realities that hinder me from being and bringing Your Son wherever I may be.

Lord, please have nothing but Your way in me and in my heart which, despite all restlessness, desires nothing but to be like Yours.

For Your greater glory always,

Amen.

My life will not be defined by the number of moments I waited for it to happen, but rather, by the moments that happened when I wasn’t waiting. 

1. Araw-araw na lang ba akong susuko sa kamalayan sa ganitong dis-oras ng gabi?

*hikab*

Kamalayan ang sadyang sumusuko.

Ang hassle sa feeling nung akala mo natatae/tatae ka pero kapag umire ka na, utot lang pala. 

Parang pag-ibig.

1. Every time I remember that Rimbaud wrote Ophélie at the age of fifteen, I ruthlessly question everything I have ever done in my life. 

1.1. Everything, a couple of extractions: love poems for my mother and father during high school; I was not a lesbian but I ran out of whatever it was I ran out of and wrote pretty verses for a pretty girl; I gazed at the moon instead of counting stars; I didn’t like poetry and preferred good prose over it so I read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being like I understood a single sentence; I found God in a godawful place; I had failed to turn my first confession of love into literature; I prank called Bantay Bata 163; 

1.2. “On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping / White Ophelia floats like a great lily;” 

1.3. I’m frikking hungry.

1.4. That rhymes with “lily.” I want my words to float, like a lily.

2. But as I think of how Wassily Kandinsky began painting studies at the age of thirty, I lament less.

2.1. Don’t tell me what it is. Composition X is a burger, fries, and a large fancy glass of soda.

2.2. We can’t eat (Kandinsky’s) art (even if/because it is so spiritual).

2.3. Lamentation, in abstraction: hunger 

My first of December blog post is dedicated to the observation that Santa Claus is such a stalker that it’s immensely creepy. 

“He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake.” 

:|

And what can be more freakishly suspicious than the fact that he doesn’t want us to cry nor pout because “he’s coming to town?”

So I spent a great deal of tonight looking up on beagle epilepsy and how to treat canine seizures on the internet in between watching over Beagie (yes, my Dad’s aptitude for creative nomenclature shows! Good thing my mother took charge of naming us, otherwise my brother and I would have been Boy and Girl[ie]) and making sure we were there when he suffered from his cluster seizures. As the entire cosmos is aware, I have a severely ridiculous but genuinely solid fear of dogs, cats, and arguably anything that moves which aren’t human beings, and so since the day Daddy brought him home, I have denied myself any kind of proximity with him. 

This conscious attempt at indifference vanished at the slightest hint of urgency. Seeing Beagie collapse on the floor — eyes popping out of sockets, whole body trembling like a magnitude 10 earthquake accompanied by haunting howls of pain and attempts at breathing — is like watching, from a fifty-meter radius, an adorable little boy crossing the street alone to get a cone of ice cream and getting ran over by a 6-wheeler truck in the process. This unbelievable panorama of pain is enough to reassemble your guts, and if that isn’t enough, prompt your hapless heart to explode into torturous oblivion. And what unsettles more than anything else is that there is nothing you can do about it. 

The experience of seeing Beagie’s epileptic fits tonight has made me learn a couple of things: 

1. My family, with the possible exception of my father, doesn’t know shit about taking care of living things. Or even anything that moves, like electric fans. (I have a lot to say about this subject, but that would be another story and hopefully a thousand decent poems or something)

2. My mother is the face of hysteria.

3. My dad carries the weight of the world.

4. I am lost and at a loss for reality.

5. The diagram of a dog’s frikking skeleton. I know where a dog’s thoracic vertebrae are. All four of them. 

4. Epilepsy is a bigger bitch than Peaches (that insanely annoying family mini pincher) or Ms. Evelyn of Achiever’s Study Nook Commonwealth ever were. 

5. Beagles now embody the epic challenge of my life: challenges (and more specifically, challenges of commitment). I am constantly faced with the prospect of going beyond myself and evolving into the best Dana I can be in order to truly move forward in life. It’s always characterized by a period of suffering, struggle, a ridiculous amount of discomforting discombobulation, and growth. (Optional but more often than not: immense happiness at having turned out a better person, among other things). Getting involved with a beagle is no different; Snoopy’s breed is even the perfect example. 

5.5. When I get married, I WILL buy a beagle with my husband and fully commit to the responsibility of taking good care of it. Only then would the life partner and I proceed to consider the possibility of more advanced life forms like Andalusian horses. Or children. 

6. We are discouraged from feeding grapes to our dogs as they are toxic to them (!!!). 

7. Beagles are hunting dogs. When I get my own beagle in the future or when Beagie gets better, I WILL FRIKKING TEACH THEM TO HUNT BECAUSE THAT’S AWESOME.

8. Phenobarbital - that canine seizure medicine with possibly adverse effects, especially to the liver 

9 (and this is cheesy). Beagie believed in me despite my denial of him. Unlike Peaches, he was never stingy towards me. He would come near me with no hints of aggression and even if I tried to shoo him away, he wouldn’t get angry and still tried playing with me. I show him contempt, he would return it with affectionate and gentle playfulness. His nature seems to be essentially Christian. Sometimes I wonder if he is really a dog. 

10. Despite my fear (and sometimes hatred) of dogs and canine teeth, I love Beagie. And seeing him in this state of pain and pity immensely hurts my heart. I hope he gets better soon because everybody in this house positively adores him, and for a pretty damn good reason, too: he’s amazing.

And to the beagle of this home I say: thanks, because you have no idea how you made me aware of the things I should be rooted to, and the very condition of my misinformed living. I pray you get better soon, because I promise to feed you snacks from now on and help you hunt down Mrs. Ortiz’ pesky and promiscuous cats.

Appendix

Beagle seizure links I may want to refer to in the future (with annotations engraved on my mind): 

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/164479/what_to_do_if_your_dog_has_a_seizure.html?cat=53

http://www.squidoo.com/dogseizure

http://www.beaglerescueleague.org/?page_id=378

http://www.canine-epilepsy-guardian-angels.com/emergencycare.html

http://www.beaglesunlimited.com/health/epilepsy-and-epileptic-seizures

Gone were the days when I did everything so astoundingly well that even the nuns at my Catholic high school would kneel down before me and kiss the invisible veins of my pre-teen feet. 

Life has become impossible for the demigods turned mortal dreamers by the drudgery that is the realness of reality (something that the world to which those days belong is no longer). I must not forget to remind myself that every succeeding moment is a quest (a bastos and all-provocative one, if I am allowed to think so) to do everything much better than I ever frikking did.

MUCH BETTER! Than. I. ever. frikking. did.