maia’s domain

Before you read this letter, please be advised that  this will self-destruct exactly 3 minutes after the very second you hold it. So be prepared and read it at your own risk and to hell with the others nearby. Collateral damage and all that crap.

Seriously speaking, you should consider yourself lucky that I wrote you this letter. My letters are legendary and only few people lived to tell the tale. Others climbed the walls and pullled out all their hairs because of gratitude. Next thing we knew, they hid to the nearest hole and never been heard from since then. Others simply jumped from the highest building in order to ease their overflowing exuberance of being bestowed by my writing. The street sweepers had a hard time cleaning out the mess they’ve made. Others, too, simply self-destruct togther with the letter. The handful that survived were either immune to my fantastic penmanship or didn’t know how to read at all but pretended to. I’m not sure which category you will belong. But then again, consider yourself lucky. And warned.

I’m not in the habit of writing letters. Never been my style. I’m kind of a verbal person. Whatever I want to write, I say. Simple. Besides, I would be contributing a lot to the destruction of the environment since I write long, long letters. So if we consider the tons of discarded empy pens, pencil nubs, envelopes, stamps, erasers, staplers, pastes, fasteners, folders, glues, pens…..did I write pencils already? Anyway. The point is that I tend to write long and funny letters and the person reading it won’t have a choice but cry. And I hate tears! Always been allergic to it. What if the person I made to cry is allergic to tears, too? I would be at fault if the person develops rashes, then gashes, then into festering and throbbing deep wounds that ultimately ends up in scabs. I shudder to think about the scars!

So that’s why I limit my tendency to write and make it a point to choose carefully those whom I sent. That way there are only a handful of souls that will perish and less burden for my conscience. It’s not that easy walking around with all those tortured souls hanging over my shoulders. It will ruin my dignified image as a solid citizen. And those could get very heavy, too.

Now on a lighter side. (I told you I write funny letters, yeah?) This letter is probably going to end up reading like the ravings of a lunatic. My brain is mush right now with a thousand other thoughts and feelings I cant even begin to verbalize. I’m just trying to let you in. I also drank way too much coffee earlier so I’m going at twice my normal thought rate.

It just came to my mind that if you’re a nice person, others should be nice to you. If you’re an asshole, you deserve the same. That goes without saying how outrageously an asshole I was way back when I thought I was invincible. When I thought I’m way too smart there’s no other way for me but go up. When I thought that people will follow my rules and be ‘cool’ to me if they want to be accepted as my inner-circle friends. When I thought I was untouchable. Sordid. But that’s how I perceived and led my life not too long ago. How I came to realize that it’s pathetic and what a jerk I was, I’m not so sure. It just came into my mnid one day and I realized what a little shithead I was. To others and to myself.

Maybe by becoming a ‘helper’, thus part of the hoi polloi, has put me in the right perpective and made me realize that I was not having a life then. Now  I admire people who went through hard times and came out a more knowledgeable and smarter person because of it. Because I’m halfway through it. I’m not done. Not in a long shot. I still have a lot of making up to  do, considering what a total dork I was before. And come to think of it, I still am a dork sometimes.

One good example how I realized I’m now living and existing among ordinary mortals: I’m now a wimp! I hate to be in tight situations wherein confrontations entails. I keep away from verbal skirmishes as much as possible. I avoid trouble like the plague. Yes, definitely a wimp. I remember in a not-so-distant past wherein an unsuspecting soul will taste my verbal tongue lashing in only a minor error.

Another thing is how I let people who are not my boss or superior to order me around or to walk all over me. Just like when you ‘order’ me to do something in behalf of yourself. In my other life I would have given you a piece of my mind that will move you to tears. You should be hanged! You should be quartered! To have the gall to impose on me like that! That would have been my predictable reaction those days. But the beauty of it now is I let people do it to me. I mean, I allow people to walk all over me and be ordered around. I guess maturity plays a good part in my life nowadays. I still stumble, I know, but the usual steadfast recklessness is slowly diminishing and being transcended with a more mature and balanced outlook in life in general and a more tame disposition in particular.

That doesn’t mean that I will forever be meek and be trampled-on material from now on. I am still fierce if the occasion calls for it and if the person deserves it. Beware! But for the better part of these past years I have  been able to curb my tongue and play dumb. Not dumb as dumb, but damnably dumb. See what I mean?

For the life of me I can’t give an honest and straight answer why I write this letter and let you glimpse at my sole and soul, when the most probable scenario is you’ll share this ASAP to everyone and anyone who cares to listen. I don’t care. All I care about is I put to pen and paper what’s in my mind that I couldn’t articulate to verbalize. I hope you can make some kind of sense of this. You might be tempted to correct me (do it at your own risk!) on any misspellings or punctuations or grammar-type shit because I know it’s all gone downhill. It’s probably one big run-on sentence that I may sound retarded. So be it.

Apparently the caffeine is wearing off and I’m back to my old dim-witted self. I need to recharge. Fast. Where’s my dildo when I need it most?

Have a life. And live it while you can. As much as you can.

your friend, Maia

“Sometimes that’s exactly what happens when things don’t turn out the way they should. If you have faith, you just need to trust that every outcome is always to your advantage. You just might not know it until sometime later…”

I ‘borrowed’ this phrase from someone because it hit a nerve somewhere in my solar plexus. I was gasping for breath the first time I read it in an chain e-mail.

Just kidding. I’m no longer gasping now.

But apparently, it happens to be true. I should say, in my own privileged point of view, it applies to my life. Recent and way, way back alike. I’m not sure if it applies to yours because that’s your own turf. But as I was saying, it did mine. And it completely blew me away.

Certain things happens for a reason. The reasons completely differs from one and the other. A thing or an incident that occurs in your life that is best laid to rest and be forgotten for it’s not to your liking. But it happens. For a reason. For whatever unpalatable reason that may be. But hey, it did happen! And somewhere down the road, after you’ve digested things and probably licked your wounds in private, you’ll soon grasp the lesson of the incident and concur that you’ve learned something even if it hurts you for a bit. You may land on your backside and be down-trodden for sometime, but if you have the guts (and the gall!) to move on and continue living, then you’ll put those painful and embarrassing circumstances on your belt as badges in life.

This reminds me of a saying that, for the life of me, I can no longer completely remember verbatim. It goes something like this:

“Whatever harm that was done, was done to you. In your heart. In your soul. In whatever part of you that truly matters. You have learned some hard lessons and put them behind you. What matters is what you gleaned out of it. The rest is just noise.”

I read this phrase way back in my high school days. And it left a fine print in my heart for a long time. But since I’m basically human, I typically forgot the wisdom of this saying until a few years back when I was again at the better end of a blunt pain. But I survived it! Maybe I have the gumption like the next person. And that makes the beauty of life’s existence: we live and we learn.

Get back on your feet, brush off the dust on your haunches and move on. Get-on-with-it! As I did mine. There will be more incidents to come, good and bad. But I have now this resolute deduction that everything happens for a purpose. And a reason. And it just depends on your faith to let the incident to motivate you, and to make it work to your advantage and make you the best man out of it. It may not happen right away. But it will. You’ll see.

There’s nothing like acknowledging a first time and savor its uniqueness.

Most often than not, I take for granted a thing or a word that I have seen or heard for the first time. A ‘new experience’, in all the sense of that word, needs to be savored and cherished since it would no longer be a ‘first’ the next time you encounter that experience. It would be a completely new story.

Another shebang.

Another ballpark.

And in circumstances that you’ll keep on encountering that experience, it became ordinary and just a part of the background.

Ignored.   

Neglected.

But when it’s suddenly gone, you’ll begin to wonder why. You’ll be literally taken aback of what’s amiss.

**Published in TF Newsmag (HongKong) November 2008 Issue.

Have you ever experienced a feeling wherein you have been in that place where you’re at before? (am I making any sense?) Or, you have seen that place before? And it’s infuriating when you can’t pinpoint when or how did that happen?

I am constantly besieged by these nagging feelings nowadays. A scenery. A sound. A scent. Or just a part of a conversation that I overhear. It’s like: now I’ve heard that before! Or, I’ve been in this place before! Or, I’ve seen this scenario before!

But for the life of me I couldn’t tell when. Or how. Why is that?

Is it because it really happened in another life? Or is there really such a thing as another life? That what life we have now is a continuation of another phase in a cycle that is not even coming full circle yet? That we still have a few life cycles ahead of us, in another lifetime perhaps?

Apparently, being a pragmatist that I am, I elucidate these feelings of deja vu as a subconscious reminder that: yeah, it happened before, I saw it before and I have heard it before because I dreamed and yearned these feelings and things before! Call me nuts but that’s how I simplify these feelings that are way far out of my intellect’s grasp. Like for instance I imagined for a beautiful scenery when I’m saddled with a dry and boring existence for a long period of time. I longed for this rapid-fire but melodic sounding conversation that I comprehend when I’m overwhelmed by this horrific sounds of unintelligible, Greek-sounding-voices-being-chopped-on-a-chopping-board. I yearned for an existence wherein I am treated as a homo sapiens and not as a sub-strain of a sub-specie. To be accorded respect as a human being deserves, to be given the benefit of a doubt and not be generally ignored because of one’s status in life.

Yeah, maybe. That’s how I simplify things that happens in my life that I couldn’t literally figure out.

But hey, maybe I did experience those things before and I just completely forgot them. Like this morning. I woke up with a piece of chicken nugget in my mouth and I thought, “man! I guess I experienced this sensation before.” And I guess I did. I was munching on chicken nuggets while watching TV until I fell asleep last night.

Figure that out.

** Published in TF Newsmag (HongKong) November 2008 Issue.

When was the last Broadway show that you’ve seen? You can call me bragging but I just did. I DID just brag. And I DID saw a Broadway show recently. Now I may sound naive and pathetic that I’m blabbering about something that any sophisticated suburbanites call it a (yawning) normal past time. But as a typical country mouse like me, all I did before was read about it in the newspaper reviews or saw a teaser in the telly or heard in the radio. (psst….that was when the thing called the Internet was so unheard of.) If there was a Broadway show being performed by pros in my country, it’s either: a) I didn’t hear about it, b) I did hear but the venue was, like, in Timbuktu, c) I did hear but the ticket price costs my arms and legs and a portion of my neck, or d) I didn’t want to hear about it because I didn’t know what in heaven’s name Broadway show was.

I can still remember back in college when Mama Mia!, Jesus Christ, Superstar!, The Cats, Miss Saigon and all the other Broadway hits have these smashing reviews both in print and audio media. And I was, like, drooling because I didn’t have the means and opportunity to see all these shows and I can almost taste it but can only read it in the reviews. Well, don’t get me wrong, but all the “Broadway” shows that I’ve seen were all school programs’ adaptation of the hits. The cast were my fellow school mates, some I even participated in. Not by pros. Pros in a sense that the cast are all seasoned Broadway actors with a few hit shows under their belt. Just a few years back, I did have the resources, and the venue is not that far as Timbuktu, but due to horrific constraints, like curfew (God almighty!), I was still unable to see one.

The thing is, I haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing a real, live, feel-the-throb, authentic Broadway show done by professionals in my life. Until last Sunday. I saw the Cats! And it was so awesome. Surreal. The music, the dance, the lights, the costumes. The performance! It’s like you’re in this kind of other world, surrounded by music and sounds that is so thick and heavy you can almost taste it. And the audience! Well, it was a matinee show, so 90% of the audience were seasoned Broadway goers. But you can feel in the air the anticipation, the awed silence and the suppressed laughter during a light comical banter in the show. And the surge of energy by the applause during the curtain call! As a neophyte, I did have a good and heady feeling that I was a part of the audience that afternoon. An experience like that doesn’t come everyday and I intend to savor it until it lasts. The afterglow of the experience still surrounds me….

To be honest, I’m not fond of reading non-fiction or any self-help books. I’m more on the fiction genre, specifically best-sellers. Furthermore, I’m a self-confessed snub when it comes to authors, to the point that I won’t take a book seriously if I don’t “recognize” the author. Yeah, pathetic. Not that I don’t experiment and take some risks. Nah-uh. That’s when I “discover” authors by their merits. I read anything that I can grab but once it doesn’t catch my attention, then it’s just a waste of my time.

I saw on the Internet a clip about a book of a dying man and talked about his life’s dreams during his last lecture, and I thought: another bio. Add to the fact that I don’t know who that professor was, or the one who wrote it on his behalf. But once I read a part of it’s synapse, I was intrigued. Well, the usage of collocquial English is good, to the point that it’s beautiful in its simplicity. Lay people (like me) can easily understand it. So I grabbed a copy….and devoured it overnight. Now don’t gt me wrong but I cry easily: when I read a sentence that really touches a nerve, when I see a part in a movie that really moves my tear ducts to open….I use the word “really” since I’m moved to tears when it’s deserving to be cried about. But I do cry easily, mind you. I’m shallow, you see.

But this book by Randy Pausch really did made me cry. Buckets. And I laughed, too. Seldom did I read a bio that it’s so self-deprecating and beautiful in its humbleness. Joking about oneself takes an awful lot of self-awareness and dignity, as far as I’m concerned. Honesty to the point of being painful without making the reader pity the writer takes a lot of understanding in himself and makes the reader more aware of his vulnerability in this life. And this is the kind of book that I love to share to anybody who is aware that he is still lacking in that thing called “self-awareness”.

I’ve been known by friends to urge (i.e. nag) them to read books written by a particular author, never did I encourage them to read a book by its own merits. (Told you, I’m a snub.) But this is a different cup of tea. Trust me, this is a good one. And once you finished reading the book, watch his Last Lecture online. Or vice versa. Whatever suits your fancy. But I do urge you. And if you’ve already read/watched it and in your opinion I was just bluffing and pulling your legs, then give m a piece of your mind. Or sue me. No, you can’t sneer at me. I won’t see it.