“God’s truth is out: It’s murder here
What life’s about is so unclear.
I want to break!
And when it feels like I’ve had all I can take…
In walks you
And you make me feel like everything’s okay
Like everything’s gonna work out…”
-‘In Walks You’ by Tim James
Something’s been at the back of my head lately, and I think the events in the last few days have put them to the fore. As I type this, the live action drama of Honey & Clover is playing once again on my DVD player. Trust me, it’s not because I want to watch Ikuta Toma play Takemoto Yuta for the nth time, more like I need to hear a language I know few words of to concentrate. Also, because watching Honey & Clover has made me long for something I have not really done in it’s genuine form.
Here’s my first thought:
It’s easy to get comfortable at a certain place once you feel you’re needed there. But are you really where you ought to be? Aren’t you supposed to be in a journey? Isn’t the point of leaving one place getting to your destination? I reckon people get lost because they leave but they don’t know where to go.
It’s been three nearly three years now since I left CSB [if it were not for my papers required for an application abroad, I really would not want to set foot in that campus again]. Truth be told, I was very unhappy in that place. The happiest moment I had there was perhaps when I got-up, still stoned, went to school and back home, without even remembering all eight hours of it. My experiences there have left me quite jaded by the time I had decided to leave. My only regret was not having done it sooner. This is nothing against anyone whom I have met or come to know from that place who I still hold genuine affection for, it’s just something I had to say; and by no means do I think of some of you any less. That place, it changes people… and it wasn’t for me.
Ever since then, I have been practicing production design full time until recently when circumstances came to be and I had decided to rest for a while -as a friend had pointed out, he wouldn’t actually call what I was doing “resting“.
Lately I have been thinking, I had settled into the pace of a career designer -that’s it- I had settled. I look at the people who I went to school with in the Ateneo some years back, and I see the things their doing now and I can’t help but think if there’s something else out there for me.
Last December while I was looking around at Rustan’s I saw an old friend who said to me, “I’m happy for you, you get to live the dream.” Actually, there are companions to that one I heard from someone else, “Out of all of us, you’re the only one who pursued a theater career full-time and didn’t sell out.” And my most favorite of all, “Wow, you’re still doing that, huh?”
Wait a minute, are these people implying something? Are they expecting anything else of me? Am I not where they had thought I would be? Alan would always tell me, “It’s got nothing to do with other people.” Well, at the time, he didn’t take his own advise as well. Seeing him lately kind of made me look at what else I could do, where else could I go, and what else could I learn.
I still have these notebooks where I have written down my ideas, drew some things, wrote things that I want to remember like that movie from the 1980s called ‘Sing’ where the song ‘We’ll Never Say Goodbye’ comes from or that the first Bioman action figure my mother ever bought me was Pink Five.
I have been reading them again… I hate youthful idealism.
Do you know what those things are? They are plans, they are a map to that future we had once seen so bright. They represent some destination that reflects a genuine desire to be somewhere else from where you are.
We are where we are because God has a perfectly good reason why we are there. My dear friend Sandro and I have been saying that to ourselves lately. I’m at a crossroads, that’s what I think. Someone has conveniently called this a ‘Quarter Life Crisis’ -there’s even a television series about this in the late 90s; the title was ‘Wasteland’ [the quote above is the song in the show’s opening credits].
So, Should one just move on without a clear destination? Well, I used to have what I call a ‘ten year-plan’ -trust me, my current reality is far from that I conceived. The best laid plans and their clichés…
In a few weeks, Alan will be starting his training to be a flight steward. A far cry from being an Electronics and Communications Engineering graduate and the related jobs he has held before. I wonder how that will go for him? There must be some tear in the space-time continuum when the most precise and decisive person I know throws all that out of the window.
I wonder if I should do that as well...
We’ll continue this next time
Thus spake the Barefoot Baklesa -who refuses to succumb to a quarter life crisis.
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