the zeppelin of burning dreams

Spoilers galore.

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I didn't like the movie.

Sure, it was eye-candy goodness from here to Atlantic City. Spirits Within looked like a sophomore attempt when compared to the grand CGI direction of Advent Children, considering that it was shown in the big screen. And it was great seeing better versions of old friends. I know I felt all giddy when I saw the CGI of Final Fantasy VI characters; it was the same with Red XIII and the rest of the FFVII cast. The movie was beautiful to a fault.

And then we come into some of the details that tilted the initial anticipation I had for Advent Children into abject boredom.

Let's check the action sequences first. Part of the charm of the first Matrix movie lay in the conservativity of the action sequences; the next two were overkill. We see the same gratuitous display of high-flying action in Advent Children; every five minutes, you'd run into an action sequence that ended up wrecking acres of land. I've seen Steven Siegal movies that had more consideration for a movie's tension.

This isn't to say that they weren't good. I liked the Buster Sword MKII, and the bikes. But too much is too much eh?

There's also the one thing that wrecked the original FFVII for me. The story revolved too much around CLOUD.

CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD.

He's almost as bad as FFVIII's moody main charachter Squall Leonheart; in Advent Children, you'd think he'd taken lessons from the man. He's oh so quiet, suffering like the brave lone ranger. He's also inhumanly strong, rides a fantastic bike, weilds a fantastic sword. Short - he's boring.

Where were the rest of the characters whilst Cloud was trying to fight the Sephiroth trio single-handedly? Where are the story elements?

What else happened? Does the world revolve around girly-man Cloud?

No question about it. Cloud ruined the whole movie for me. It was a good thing the Buster Sword and the bikes were fantastic.

If you're living a lie, some of the most fantastic things you can come up with have a way of hitting you right where you hurt.

Sometimes, I'd trade a lot of things for the life of a corn farmer.

Anybody know of a corn farm I could apply to? :D

I'm 22 years old.

I've been in college for a grand total of nearly six years. Half of that time, I spent writing. I wasn't worried (at least during the first part of that timespan) too much about my studies - I knew about the importance of schooling in my life, especially since I was city-born, city-bred. I just didn't care; I was of the opinion that schooling is overrated. And I maintain that it still is; in today's society, schooling is a must, a degree is one of the most important things you could earn in life. But the way education is glorified seems so wrong to my sense of judgement.

And here I am, still struggling through college (my third, in fact). Five years after graduating from highschool. What have I achieved?

I have a band.

I have worked somewhat extensively in the journalism business (catering mostly to magazines).

I have published two short stories.

I've won a minor literature award in my first college (sheer months before I left it).

I've worked my band to what it is now.

And that's it.

One of my friends, one of the people who got himself kicked out of the Ateneo, is graduating this month. We went into college together, and he got out of Ateneo a year before I got myself kicked out of UST.

I wouldn't be the first to admit it, but I'm desperately searching for a job. Not because I'm out of money; I still live with my parents (nakakahiya). But because I'm sick of having to depend on my parents. I'm sick of them badgering me about my grades. I want control over my life.

Hell, I'm almost as bad as another friend of mine. :D Control freak. You know who you are.

Anyway.

I'm once again at a crossroads. I bloody need a job. My last sem wasn't so fantastic. My love life's going good however. But that's a small shelter in this war-torn universe called my life. I'm thankful for the shelter, more than thankful = if I could build my whole life with love as a cornerstone, I would. That's more or less all that I have going for me right now.

But

Love won't feed you honey. Neither will it shelter you from the atomic rain of your pride.

Nakakangawit na eh.

At a glance, there are three mainstream styles of creative writing that does not focus on the essense of the written work and its contents, but rather, on the more aesthetic aspect of the craft.

One of these is mine: an attempted mix of figure and jargon aiming to both impress information and entertain at once; this style has roots in classic science fiction, modern journalism, and of course, the commonplace textbook.

The second is what I'd like to call the hotshot's penmanship. This style is hard-hitting and eccentric, working up the passion in a given piece - often a violent, up-tempo emotion, such as righteous indignation or outright fury - and utilizing such lines (the more words and the faster the beat of enunciation seem to be key elements in this style) that evoke dormant feelings. The composition of the sentence can be made up of anything, from a single exclamation point to a paragraph-long marathon.

And finally, there's the lambent style. If you're used to fast-paced reading, you'd label this as boring; look up the notables list of the Oprah Winfrey book club and they'll be rife with these babies; they concentrate on spelling out the emotion for readers, giving a cloth pattern of undignified fury. These are the quiet books, rich with minute details yet seemingly lackluster.

A friend of mine - with whom I had a decisive and final argument, thus rending the friendship - falls on the third classification, and is a promising, if not brilliant, practitioner. In honor of her (and as an attempt to jumpstart my own sorry ass back into writing), I decided to come up with a poem that dealt with the lack of life in a particle. Cheesy as though it may be, the aforementioned poem starts with the word


Minute.
It's quite a difficult
task, this; to imagine
the business of a life
singularly lived in the span,
and the space
of a microsecond.

Think of it as
living decades in
full automation.

A gamut of emotions, the
sandwiched sum total
of hate, gluttony, love
and betrayal, lust and
violence, sloth and indigestion
felt in the span of a
second.

Within these
emotional twisters
is the maelstrom of
philosophy;

Freud in twenty milliseconds.

Nietszhe in ten.

Jesus Christ in four.

and yet, when the
variables stumble upon
the ephemeral question
of being
of living
the inherent computers
do not stumble.

Can love hold
a place in this highly strung
environment?
Where things happen
in hyper-reality, where
a lifespan
lasts in the
expanse of a
minute?

It's been quite a year. And bloody hell, it ain't even over yet.

But then, I'm looking back as early as October; I'm thiniing that so much can happen in a year. In a heartbeat, this much time's elapsed, but then you look at yourself and essentially, you're still the same.

An individual, stay the same? Constant, in the time period of 12 months? Is it even possible?

If you're working with Lea Rose's entry-exit theorem as applied to life; wherein you enter life with a fixed set of qualities that don't change all the way to when you finally kick the eternal bucket, then yes. The human psyche is a tabula rasa in many aspects, but the important feature of this tabula rasa is not so much as what you write into it, although in the long run, this is what makes the man. But the man, as it is, has been pre-made. To an extent, at least.

All them philosophers forgot about the slate.

What is the human slate made of? Let's assume that, for each person, the slate was slightly different. Let's say, that my own slate were granite, rough and tough, intrinsically volcanic yet heats up only at high temperatures, is devastating when in molten, fantastic material for stonemasons and builders. Don't you have a personality type to build upon right away? From the very onset of your first smile, you have been practicing socialization the way you were preconditioned to act.

You carry this initial conditioning - called childbirth, incidentally - throughout your existence; shaping the slate is one of the hardest things to do, therefore essentially, the slate remains one of granite.

I'm guessing that all them philosophers and sociologists have gotten it all wrong; the individual is the last thing to change in a society. The big societies are never constant, since the hustle and bustle of a million lives affect the building block of any isolated civilization - minds. Now, these minds aren't the slates of humanity, but they are both the channel and the medium of information, and just like radio waves, mediums are a lot easier to tap into than sources. You can affect something that is mobile. You can't expect to move a cement post easily, but the cables are chicken feed, given the right equipment.

How does this relate to how society sees me today?

If you don't change, essentially, then the change must have come from another force, an external force. Society does not change instantaneously, but it can shift its views. Example: trends. Fashion trends are some of the fastest social variables, since it has to cater to a billion immovable blocks that have different desires each.

Society changes because society needs to adjust itself for the individual.

The individual then, is in danger. When exposed to such a rough environment such as a fast-changing society, nothing remains unweathered. Thus the individual protects himself by limiting the amount of society he is exposed to.

Just like what I'm doing now. I'm limiting my exposure to what I call the outside world; I have, in a sense, the semblance of what a friend calls the "night life," but then you are limited by an army of reasons, number one among them ever dwindling resources.

But then there lies my quandary.

It doesn't take much to realize that to get ahead in the speedy evolution of the society today (humans don't evolve anymore these days, but the summa total of humanity does; anothe support for the individual versus collective theory), you have to ride the tides and weather the storms. In my business as a freelance writer, you can't make much without rubbing shoulders with magazine editors and their ilk. For the band, you can't get gigs if you don't socialize with fellow musicians and bar managers. In love, you can't progress without action. In school, you won't learn without studying hard. At work, you won't come up with much if you don't get off your ass and start sweating your pants off.

My inner me - the voice of reason behind my ID - is telling me that the time has come to retreat from all these worldly collisions. But then, my superego is saying that I have friends and loved ones to attend to.

Unfortunately, my ego is sipping iced tea in a bar where there are flying monkeys for bartenders and the bouncer has a fettish for ducktails. So there goes my referee.

On one hand, I want to isolate myself and just not care, even for just a few months. On the other, I'm this glorified people nanny-bot. What a choice.

Charlie Brown, in a Peanuts comic strip, screams out "How long, O Lord?" But then, Jawaharlal Nehru replies with a sarcastic "The time for religion and tradition is over - now we must look forward to science and spirituality."

And the bottom line is, even though you know how much of an immovable slate you are, you can't help but ask yourself once in a while: just how much did I change this year?

And the next fearful question is: How much are my loved ones willing to care?

What a year.

This is a hella long entry, and is mostly me showing off how many words I can type. Don't read on if you find me boring, which you probably do. :D

Who'd have thought that coffee shops would make such a big mark in the lifestyle of the average city-bred Filipino today? Starbucks and Figaro, Coffee Experience (my personal favorite: they serve Oreo cheesecakes at 55 clams) and the odd shops like the Coffee Indulgence just across the P. Noval exit of UST and this little coffee nook at the promenade of this building alog Taft just beside Burger King - these cafes are like the 7-11 of the new millenium.

I'm a coffee addict myself, but since I'm lacking in the golden honey called money for the more exquisite taste of say, the Starbucks refillable drip coffee, I end up making my own coffee at home, where my good family has two very reliable machines for such an endeavor: the spanish classic espresso maker, and the drip coffee tumbler.

The espresso maker was my favorite, back when we were grinding the Thai coffee beans my mother brought home from her education seminar in Bangkok. My grandmother would watch me with amusement whilst I sat on the floor with the grinding machine, crushing the beans to a roughish texture just perfect for the espresso maker. This machine (espresso maker) isn't like the mechanical espresso machines of today - this was an hourglass-shaped iron coffee pot that would produce no more than a cup and a half of good coffee for every five minutes' worth of cooking. The machine was separated into two chambers; the bottom held the water for boiling and evaporating. The evaporated water would then travel up through a tight funnel and settle in the filter amidships (that is, between the two vessels) where the ground beans would be.

This is where the cooling down process would begin; the evaporated water would cool down enough to leave moisture in the filter, but the main thing happening at this stage is coffee saturation; the moisture would soak up all the goodness of the grains, but then the filter (also made out of iron albeit thinner than the machine's outer shell) would be hot enough to keep the evaporated water going up, up, away from the source of the heat and into the second vessel - where it would finally condense into hella good strong coffee.

I use the past tense for this machine, since the dumber of the two housekeepers at home happened to lose the filter, thus rendering the machine useless.

The coffee brewing pot I use now boils at most two and a half cups of milder, yet highly aromatic, coffee. The house coffee at present is a huge jar of pre-ground kapeng barako, which I mix with a smaller can of Canadian hazelnut coffee. Nothing like the espresso maker, but the brewer is an industrious worker.

I've had two cups of coffee for the day, as I type. I plan to have at least two more before the sun sets. :D

Which leads me to think: why is it that coffee shops have had quite an impact on Pinoys? City dwellers, at that?

I wouldn't be surprised if the coffee shops hit it big in the rural areas, since farmwork is hella tiring, and (from what one farmer told me whilst I was spending a fortnight at their place, way out in the north) coffee is their morning water. I distinctly remember him telling me that the reason us city-folks were so waterfat - to use a Fremen term - was because we didn't put coffee into our stomachs the first thing in the morning.

Here's another case: back in the mid 1990's, my brother was in a gigantic car accident in Laguna. This was late at night. He was driving under the influence of alcohol and a stew of other brightly colored chemicals, and as a result, did a number on his '92 Honda Civic that involved a lot of spinning and a total of three to four farming fields. The only witness was one lone farmer. The legend goes that, when being asked to testify as a witness, the old timer was sipping a cup of coffee. At two am in the bloody morning. Even the officer on the beat was puzzled.

Hell, if coffee shops didn't charge such exhuberant prices, farmers alone would make up 3/4 of the cafe market.

But city folk?

Just now, Abbey tells me that us urban people drink coffee "to keep them awake during work." But is that it? DOES coffee keep you awake at work?

Really now?

I've just finished two cups of coffee, and I'm hella sleepy. Coffee doesn't work 100% percent as a stimulant. And I don't think that everybody who hangs out at a coffee shop actually drinks coffee.

Sometimes, we just sit in a coffee shop and talk. Or smoke. Or shoot the breeze. Or spot girls. I don't know if girls hang out at cafes to spot guys, but the opposite could be true.

Is it because we're private? Yeah, privacy in a cafe. Mmm-mmm. I've been eavesdropping in cafes, actually. Trust me, a cafe is as private as your average beer garden.

Speaking of beer gardens - ok, let's change that into bars, since beer gardens aren't exactly the most polite of places - I seem to see a similarity. People huddled about in chairs, talking or just shooting the breeze, or spotting chicks. Listening to music, or watching the game. Drinking alcohol.

Am I seeing double here?

Is it me, or is the coffee shop becoming the daytime bar? We're talking about venues that cater two different addictive drugs - alcohol and caffeine. Both venues allow for the presence of a third kind of drug - nicotine. In both cases, people are there to socialize.

Here's the main difference. I can honestly say that some coffee shops actually have more people than most bars.

Since the theory behind both are essentially the same - socialization and a place to sit and be comfortable - the variables affecting the turnout of customers are either A. the substance served and B. the personell.

Let's assume that the bars we're talking about are those really cool, comfy bars like the old 77 Bar and Big Sky Mind in New Manila, 6 Underground and The Hole in Makati, 70s Bistro and Freedom in Quezon City. These aren't those rattle-trap holes where the service is so bad you'd have half a mind to get your order yourself. Which really isn't that much different from the service you'd find in Starbucks.

So the difference must be in the substance.

But then, I love both coffee and alcohol. So do a score of other people I know. Its like substance addiction is the "in" thing these days, so long as that substance can be bought legitimately off a counter. And the effects, although worlds different, both affect the blood (whereas caffeine speeds up the blood, alcohol slows it down).

So where the bloody hell is the crux? Why is the coffee shop such an "in" thing these days?

And somebody whispers in the wind, "Because its cool."

And I say, "Shets."

Ah yes, so we come back to that time of year, when all things creepy and ghastly, ethereal and nasty, and downright spiritual are celebrated.

Too bad the ghostbusters are out of business.

Truth be told, I rather like this season. Everybody in Manila's off to visit relatives "back home" in the provinces. Manila becomes something like a province, this time of year. Empty streets, far as the eye can see.

Or at least its supposed to be.

For us local Manileños, the people who know no province other than this fetid city on a ditch, this time of year is like a reprieve. If you remove all of the immigrant natives of the past ten years, you'll end up with scarcely half of the population today.

So what's the friggin hold up?

Get moving, 'yo.



Damn, gas fares are up. I guess we'll be seeing plenty of natives this Halloween.


Sigh. I'll get back to that story soon. I hope.