Nostalgic
Wow … unbelievable how it is, that my tabulas site is still breathing, considering my last journal input is almost two years old! I offer my most profound thanks to Roy. My hiatus could simply be put as … adjustment … new confirmed position in the company, new rules, new goals. Although these may seem lame on the surface, it was, in all reality – a struggle. I have been negligent on a number of things, which I intend to amend without delay. Off the top of head, the most recent significant events in my life would be the discovery of long lost friends and acquaintances from way back to my elementary days. Considering that I am well into my 30’s, it’s actually quite amazing. My first trip down the nostalgic road began with an inadvertent meeting of a batchmate of mine in Makati. I have this strange talent of remembering faces … something he obviously didn’t possess 
. Either way, I had to reintroduce myself and we finally got to talking about our high school grad class and the website that a few able friends drummed up. So began my first step unto that nostalgic road.
Having communicated regularly with the timelessly beautiful and witty site administrator, Ms. Angelica Manigbas, I was able to acquire the telephone numbers of the few friends I have made from our batch. My phone bill must’ve jumped a bit, as in my excitement, decided to call as many as I could. It was heavenly … drawing on the bits and pieces of memories almost two decades past and sharing it with people who understood the bliss of renewed friendships. It couldn’t have been more pleasurable. I have even taken time to contributing a few snippets about some of my friends then, as I remember them. A few weeks later, a batchmate from grade school found me in the names database …another rollercoaster ride for me. Through her, I was able to experience another range of emotions. I hardly recognize the names exchange that went between us … and even in that moronic stage, I was happy.
Two weeks ago, through a common friend, I met the current vice mayor of Baguio City. As chance would have it, we graduated from Electrical Engineering together … and he was a very close friend. At least at one stage in a person’s life, a person must experience this same thing … to be able to reach back to memories stored in the most dank, dusty, and obscure corners of his or her mind and reminisce, for wasn’t it through those friends and acquaintances of yore, that we have become who we are? For good or ill, they have helped change the once naïve and innocent youth to the stronger and more mature people we have come to be.
To all that continue to share this experience, have fun.
Posted by tuliro at 01:17 PM |
Necessary Pain
It is our nature to want and to belong … human nature to seek another of similar ilk to share common passions and analogous needs. The cycle of discontent thus begins when you know that what you currently possess, is but a shade of what you really want. People are not built to drastic changes. They may, at times, try to … but in the end return to what they were before. Personality is ingrained and no hell or high heaven will truly change that.
Adolescence may not then be as trivial as just a learning stage. Rather, I have lately come to believe that this is the basic platform … the foundation of any future outcome. One may flippantly dismiss the experiences of youth as stepping stones towards maturity and that naiveté and curiosity as excuses for stupid, fucked-upped decisions. No … I beg to disagree … almost each and every conscious decision made have repercussions on what one will be in the future. Butterfly effect? … probably.
I make an effort to convince myself that I have no regrets on any decision I have made in the past … that should I have a chance to live my life over, I would do exactly the same things I have done to reach this point in my life. I look at myself in the mirror and know that this is bullshit. I could have done better … I still could have been a better man.
My son … my anchor to reality … eight years old … smart, sensitive, and pure. You have no idea how many times you have saved me from insanity. When the seduction of surrender has never been sweeter … you were there to keep me grounded. When the embrace of regret has almost squeezed the life out of me, you held my hand and smiled … and drove all my demons away. Despite my desire to change a portion of my past to be, the better man … if I had to trade my past for you … and if all my steps, no matter how outwardly petty they may have been, have been laid towards you … then I would without an iota of doubt, taken on this same road. Knowing this, I know … that any desire … any want … any need that I may have … should this path lead away from you will be nothing but necessary pain.
Posted by tuliro at 11:30 AM |
Nice Guys Finish Last
Although this is not a sweeping statement, this is generally the case. Nice people often finish last because of that one single fact - they are nice. There are no embellishments to this, nor are there any periphrastic speculations to its cause … nice guys are nice.
I once had a teacher in grade school that hated the word “nice”. To her, it was a vocabulary anomaly … anathema to her being. She postulated that “nice” had no meaning and severely lacked substance. It was neither a compliment nor invective, neither praise nor insult.
I digressed … ah yes … “Nice guys finish last” … Depending on one’s perspective, being nice may be a sign of weakness … the need to be accepted, to give in to those stronger in personality … a convenient haven for the innate coward. A wronged individual, who remains non-confrontational and hides behind a façade of likeability, is … “nice”. Nice people, they say, have immensely high emotional quotients … hmnnnn … hell yeah, if the person is scared shitless to piss authority off. As we teach the younger generation to be stronger individuals … to be go-getters … to improve themselves … some nerdy scientist pokes his head from beneath the creases of his notebook and says, “EQ is more important than IQ”. Yeah right … just as bogus as the saying that “Beauty is skin deep.”
We all know how judgmental society is … how, despite our vaunted civilization, the strong still prey on the weak … the poor are still oppressed … and the how the gap between the rich and the poor has never been greater. It is still, survival of the fittest … only the tools and settings have changed. There will always be one holding the stick and the other, a recipient of it … it remains … and if anything, has even become more vicious.
Where then, does the nice guy place himself ? … unless he points the sunshine up another guy’s ass … will always be, at the bottom of the social barrel.
Posted by tuliro at 03:34 PM |