Lately, I am being bombarded with all these realizations; revelations that cut through me like hot knife slicing through butter. After all, despite all the stoicism and jadedness you shoved down your throat and mastered as defense mechanisms, your emotions still throb underneath that stubborn surface.

I can not love him.

I wish I could. But our arrangement dictated otherwise.

I hate this.

I chain-smoked the previous evening, legs crossed on a couch heavily patterned with florals of unknown kind. A wallflower, I was. A wallflower, I have always been.

The repercussion of feasting on Marlboros: a bruised throat; a metallic-blood after taste. Water never helped. Chewed on ice cubes for two hours: futile.

My bottle of Perriere water is the worst little evil in that room. Overpriced carbonated water for recovering alcoholics, for people who wish they could down alcohol because it looked Hollywood-ish but can not because alcohol is like bile with a price tag.

The room: mahogany, reminiscent of the fictional Corleones. Heavily curtained. Sunlight: unwelcome.

Then, I just had to sleep.

Tomorrow, who knows where I will be.

Do you remember the impertinent email featuring a fetus-munching Oriental oddity which circulated the web community sometime in 2001?

I was a terribly neurotic medicated mess the time this godforsaken 'urban legend-posing-as-reality' bull was hot.

A college friend forwarded me the dang email one dog day afternoon. I fumed and my spleen shot up my one nostril that I emailed her back a very sarcastic and contrary 'Nice one'.

I have a problem with obsession-compulsion so on the third day of brewing over it, I did a series of research.

I learned that the photographs of an alleged Oriental man munching on a barbecued fetus were actually created by a Chinese surrealist named Zhu Yu.

Zu Yhu exhibited these photographs in some underground art show after the Shanghai 2001 Bienniale curators slapped the rejection papers to his schizo face believing that such an art is too controversial (what is plain controversial and too controversial, anyway?)

The very controversial piece is entitled, Eating People (literally, mind you) and Zhu Yu stressed, perhaps to only shove himself down further the cuckoo hole, that he stole the fetuses from a medical school and actually feasted on them for "art's sake".

Cute.

Alarmed by Zhu Yu's supposed cannibalism, Scotland Yard and the FBI conducted an investigation (of course, the superhero-compex stricken FBI of America must always be involved or we could all plunge to hell hole). Know-it-alls later argued that Zhu Yu could have easily constructed his 'fetuses' from doll parts and animal carcasses and fooled half the world into imagining that the whole baloney is actually authentic.

My personal conclusion is, Zhu Yu must have seen too much of the Twighlight Zone or he probably was going through his formative years when the Jeffrey Dahmer trial was on BBC every night.

Or perhaps he is just one of them artistes--profound and misunderstood beings from the planet of blah.

Coffee shops in Manila have been turning up like frog stools and spreading throughout the metropolis faster than one can say 'coffee in a copper coffee cup'.

In this cause, I asked a friend, "Is there a growing number of intellectuals in the Philippines?". He asked me why and I responded, "Because of the coffee shops that have been popping out everywhere lately."

Case in point: In The Block, North Avenue, there is a row of coffee shops located by the Hypermart. These coffee shops are Seattle's Best, UCC Japanese Coffee and Go Nuts. Technically, Go Nuts is a doughnut shop. However, the 'intellectuals' come there to lounge and dip their glazed diabetes doughs in capuccino and read the day's paper over cups of overpriced Nescafe.

Fine. People go gaga over coffee shops because of the ambiance. They like tapping fingers to the beat of Milton Banana Bossa Nova. Perhaps some find caffeine intoxication calming. Whatever and ever amen.

I was at Starbucks with Zoo three Saturdays ago. I insisted on having an in-the-house tap water served in Starbucks' little posh paper cup and Zoo had espresso. I observed the twenty somethings and the Brent co-eds in their faux Pradas. I expected to hear a bull session on Plath's obsession over death and rebirth or at least the connection of existentialism with Spear Britney's recent well-publicized emotional breakdown.

Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zippo.

Instead, the suckers for the Starbucks corporate whore coffee were discussing their recent one night rendevouz with some stewed boozehound while the popularly supposed upwordly mobile twenty somethings were updating each other on missed Princess Hours episodes.

Yawn.

Let us face it, label whores: The Republic of the P.I. is facing severe economic crisis. Starbucks is nothing but a slap of mockery to this economically-challenged little nation.

Sure Starbucks serves delicious coffee made from the best godforsaken coffee beans harvested from some faraway Brazilian coffee farm. Sure Seattle's Best employs people with toothpaste commercial grin just so you won't lose a lunch. Blah blah. But do you really have to shell out so much for a caffeine fix?

All right, some would argue "I have the money to satisfy a Starbucks craving." Sure. Here's a Marie Antoinette button you can wear around town.

Maybe I am just being the bitter anti-positive that I have always been.

I am bad.

The Benildean Press Corps (an organization of De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde's campus journalists where I work as Editor-in-Chief) launched BLiP (Benildean Lifestyle and People magazine), the corporate issue.

I authored BLiP's book review for this year's release:

[click on the image to read the review]

There's only an hour left and 2006 is history. So what do I do to celebrate the near-bygone year? I rid my yahoo inbox of spam emails sent by African widows and star-crossed heirs of some Carribean fortune: bloody hogwash.

I have been reading up on Sylvia Plath's unabridged journals again to hopefully cure the mounting boredom caused by the two-week remission from college. It is not ironic that the biblish book is black. A few pages--not even half of its entirety--recounts of Plath's early years which are all hopeful and spirited then moves on to pure blackness and deadweight. I was told: Read up on positivity and love and life. It will help. I just can not. As early as the book's introduction, I'd get all bored and searching for the next un-read book in my collection underneath my bed.

It is so much like a warfare out here. The people and their stupidity at handling fireworks are just too much. Such retards.

Also, people from the college paper have been bombarding me with all these schmaltzy positivity about the eventual 2007, most of which are forwarded messages sent earlier by an equally schmaltzy relative or some pollyannaish friend who reads too much of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.

I need to hit the sack. These whole warfare-like noise are getting the best of me.

It must be the coffee.

I came across an article, Christmas Day, about the re-appearance of a Nepalese boy believed to be the reincarnation of the Lord Buddha. Ram Bahadur Bomjon, nicknamed Nepal's Buddha Boy, has been seen collapsed in deep meditation, clothed in dirty tricivara (triple robe) under a pipal tree in the middle of a Nepalese forest. He began his meditation May of 2005 with hopes of achieving enlightenment in six years. Reports from the Nepalese media furthermore recount the boy's notable persistence to stay seated peacefully and in a prayer stance, refusing food and water.

A good, normal person would, of course, contemplate to himself and end up with a conclusion that the boy is a schizophrenia-suffering youngster who traded soccer, alocohol and speed dating to months of fasting and meditation in exchange of the sought-after experience among Buddha-believers: spiritual enlightenment.

Good thing for the Nepalese boy, he was not raised in a Science-believing, technology-controlled, money-obsessed society. Otherwise, to avoid humiliation from their college-educated, up wordly mobile circle of friends, his parents would have locked him up in a loony bin to suffer the consequences of not living a streotypical life expected from a highschool boy.


Sure, he's mental. But at least he's got personality.