Do you know about the place?
That is cool by day and warm by night?
Where the day is shaded and the night is bright?
Such an odd place, peculiar and strange
The feelings, invoked on all range
You are relaxed yet passionate
Tucked up yet animate
It is a place of vacation and vocation
Of serene sounds and gorgeous view
Lest you forget of what is due
Yes, it is the place of to be and to do
It has my heart too, it has my soul
It is the place where I become whole
And just like magic tales, the name has three words
It's so beautiful, only the third, the last one can be heard
Something something Miranda
The place
The home
The high above
The woman that I love
I've found that item sharing for the game Grim Dawn is scarce, so here are my saved characters. Feel free to download and use the items, or test the characters, or use one to farm the Crucible (Holmes). I've collected quite a few mythical legendary items.
Despite its sizable potential quotes, there’s a line from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love that is surprisingly stuck with me. It is said by the protagonist’s inner voice when she was on the brink of a mental breakdown, not knowing what to do, and wanting to run away from her life. The line was simple and nothing extraordinary. “Go back to bed,” it says. Yet it was the thing the protagonist needed to hear.
For the past few days, lines just like the one above have crossed my path. And also just as the one above, I have come to like them. They all have something in common. They are simple, they are real, and yet, they work.
I believe I’m somewhat an optimist, but I certainly have little care for fairy-tale hopes. Movies like Serendipity, as much as I am entertained by them, don’t hold a candle to my real-life perspective. And it doesn’t help that I was raised Catholic, which mostly involved a heavy dose of embracing reality as it is. I am mostly detached from words that leap too far from reality. Overly optimistic promises of love, success, health don’t ring much in my soul. And so do every life advice that are based on those promises.
However, unlike those advices, the lines that I like are not built on over-the-top promises. When the protagonist in Gilbert’s novel heard her inner voice, it didn’t tell her to leave her life, or stay with her husband. It also didn’t tell her how everything would pan out. It merely told her to do the only thing possible for her at the moment. “Go back to bed,” the voice said. And so she went to bed, which so happens ultimately led her to where she was meant to be.
Another line, “Everything worth doing is worth doing poorly,” also have come to my liking. It is not about doing your job irresponsibly, though. It is about not letting too-high expectation prevent you from doing something good. Amazingly, it doesn't only work for people who have more grounded perspectives in life, but also for people with depression, or people who have lost their hopes. If you can’t shower, wash your face. If you can’t exercise, go out from your house and have some sun. This kind of thought invites such people to move and do something. Because just like how sometimes form precedes essence, doing something, no matter how mundane, enables hope to reemerge. And for the people who are already with hope, it does something greater. If you can’t do kindness to the whole world, do it to this person in front of you. If you can’t write something that will touch a lot of people, write something that will touch yourself. Because everything worth doing is so worth it, that doing it a little is better than not doing it at all.
And even when such lines turn to more optimism, they still remain within the bounds of reality. Just like in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which despite its flaws, has delivered one of the best lines that answers the question about why we should hope. “And even if we fail,” the character Gwen Stacy said, “What better way is there to live?” For me, this simple line answers the question of why we should hope beautifully. It doesn't jump into promises of outcome that it can't possibly keep. It stays in the real. It answers the question by giving value to hope itself, and not to what it aspires to attain.
In the end, I guess the reason the lines attract me is because their comfort doesn't require me to believe in something that may be far-fetched from what I see everyday. They only talk about the now, what you can do, and how valuable it actually is. They don't talk about some prize at the end of the road, because the prize is already here, in the form of the simple actions, and in me doing those actions.
There's a scene in the movie Moana that I like the most. It is the one at the start of the movie. It is cute as a button yet as deep as the ocean (pun badly intended). It tells about innocence in such a beautiful way that it deserves a writing of its own.
However... this is not such a writing.
Instead, this is a writing about how it is redundant, pointless in the perspective of storytelling.
The scene shows Moana who was still but a little child, playing alone at the beach. She was greeted by the ocean, which offered her a stone, the heart of the Goddess Te Fiti. It was long taken from her, causing bad things in the world. In time, Moana would restore the heart to Te Fiti and lift the curse. But at that exact moment, she was just too young to understand anything. When her father eventually came and carried her away, the ocean silently took back the heart until the time it fell on her hands again when she was already a teenager.
I've said that the scene is redundant and now I'll tell you why. It adds nothing to the plot. If the scene were taken away, it would change nothing. Moana would still receive the heart as a teenager and restore it to Te Fiti. She didn't even have any recollection of the event due to her young age. And because there was no witness, it was never mentioned again in the whole movie. The scene was an isolated event, detached and lost to everyone in the movie.
Well...
Except for the audience.
It is also why the scene, as pointless as I think it is, remains the scene I like the most.
Most stories I know have an unwritten rule. Pointless scenes get pointed out and ridiculed, and for good reasons. Such scenes clutter the story and take away the meaning. However, this scene does exactly the opposite. It gives another dimension to Moana's quest, a divine aspect. She didn't just make the choice to save the world, as fantastic and noble as it was. She had always been meant, or expected, to do so. What was considered a simple human endeavor for all the characters in the movie was morphed into a quest of the divine.
And let's remember that this perspective is only given to the audience. It was absent to all the movie characters, even Moana herself. She never knew about the great destiny expected of her, not at the beginning nor the end. Only the audience understand that she not only needed to take the quest, she had to. And they get to keep the perspective as they go through every scene that comes next.
It was something I admire in storytelling. I like to write, and the mechanism never crossed my mind. The idea that you can add depth in a story by giving a personal, private, special perspective just for the audience and the audience alone, captivated me. It was genius. And maybe for people longing for a hidden layer of meaning inside their lives, assuring.
Please kindly play the next video before you continue reading.
It has come to my attention that in my articles, I often quote questionable sources. For example, in Finding God’s Will, an article that is obviously about God, I quoted Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift. And in Encounters, an article that is about truly connecting to someone, I featured a cigarette commercial. This habit supposedly comes from my love for pop culture. However, as I have come to realize, that is not the sole reason. The other one is unexpectedly, my wholehearted love for the lives of Man.
Joe Dirt
In the comedy Joe Dirt, a movie about a man who’s trapped in a perpetual bad luck but stayed positive and happy no matter what, there is a scene I adore the most.
Joe Dirt, who worked as a janitor in a radio station, was mopping the hallway at night. Everybody had gone home and he was all alone. When he reached a room with the sign "BOILER ROOM" on its door, he stopped and looked around. Convinced that there was no one, he cautiously opened the door and stepped inside. Right then, we could see that it was secretly his living quarter. He had no money to rent a place so he turned the station’s boiler room into his home.
After closing the door, Joe Dirt sat on his bunk. He took two photographs that he kept on the table. They showed a blonde girl with her dog. We know the woman was not with him anymore because he was living alone. Yet we also know that she remained in his thoughts because of the way he kept the photographs.
Joe Dirt lied on his bunk...
He took a good look at the photographs...
He smiled for a while...
And then he went to sleep...
And all of this happened while Crash into Me by Dave Matthews Band (the video above) played in the background, undeterred by any sound because there was no dialogue.
I wish I could explain why the scene captivated me but I doubt if I can. I can tell you this, though. In what otherwise a loud, raunchy, and slapstick movie, I got to experience Joe Dirt in his silent moment.
And it was a sweet moment.
Movie moments like this stay in my heart. And they fill it up with warmth.
That’s also why I love the horror movie It. Not because it was a good horror movie, which of course it was, but because I love the protagonists, the children in the Losers' Club.
Their interaction with one another was so adorable… and familiar. You can’t help but feel for them. And the stuff they had to put through… oh God. They had to fight an ancient evil entity while they couldn’t even open a blocked door without working together. They were really just kids, who found strength in each other.
And have I mentioned the poem?
When one of the kids, Ben Hanscom, fell in love with the red-haired Beverly Marsh, who was also a member of the Losers' Club, he wrote a poem for her on the back of a postcard.
Beverly Marsh
Your hair is winter fire,
January embers.
My heart burns there, too.
It was the best poem I had experienced for a long time…
I friggin' love pop culture.
It's good.
And sometimes… sometimes, they capture moments... recognizable, familiar moments.
In the movie Before Sunrise, Celine said, “If there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between.” I used to foolishly take this almost literally. But now I picture it as His presence in the wake of life, our actions, struggles, feelings, about each other, and also our lone moments when we long, when we’re connecting to some... thing, whether it is a distant memory, or just the presence of our surroundings. He is there in the moments. Or if I may dare to quote another great movie, V for Vendetta, “God is in the rain.”
I usually end my writing with a long-thought sentence. However, it doesn’t feel right this time. I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’ll leave you with one of the best songs to hear in the lone moment, at least for me.
I hope you will always find your moments. And may them fill your heart.
Ever since I heard the phrase in Bridge of Spies, I have been captivated by it. In the movie, Colonel Abel used it to describe the quality he observed in his lawyer, James Donovan. He said the words after watching how resilient Donovan was in defending him. Stoikiy Muzhik, or standing man, the man who keeps standing back even though everyone tries to put him down, ignites something in me. What can be more mesmerizing than the thought of a man who just won’t back down? And the funny thing is, it is not his resoluteness I admire. It is not the strength, nor the conviction. The thing that captivates me the most is the reason. The why. Why does he keep standing? What enables him to go beyond his supposed self?
There is nothing new in my question. It has been brought up numerous times in books and movies. Just like in The Matrix Revolutions when Neo constantly gets back up. Agent Smith asks him why he keeps standing. Is it freedom, truth, peace, love? Neo finally replies because he chooses so. It is an exceptional answer. It is an answer that emphasizes the greatness of a subject that is man, the ability to choose. But it is not the kind of answer that I currently want to write. Right now, I want to write about something that in the perspective of spiritual enlightenment, goes a bit lower. I want to write about the reason that comes not from the inside, like the ability to choose, but starts from outside the person, something that deeply mesmerises him to go beyond his usual strength, something like an ancient overplayed concept, something like a simple love.
I have a friend that I haven’t seen in a while. There are many things about him, but one thing that stands out is his experience with a girl he loved. He once loved this girl so much that he kept chasing her for more that twelve years. Mind you, I never thought of him as a standing man. I would think that the reason that drove a standing man would have to be something greater than mere infatuation. It would have to be humanity, or peace, or something similar. It couldn’t be love.
John Keating in Dead Poets Society
However, my recent experiences has put another perspective on the matter. Why can’t it be love? Isn’t it a grand thing? In the movie Dead Poets Society, John Keating says to his students, “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” They are what make life, well... life. They are the reasons we fight so hard to survive. They give meaning to our survival. I have also heard someone said, “Loving is like having a song in your heart.” I know what it's like to be depressed, and I know what it’s like to be so happy that you want to sing. I imagine someone who has a song in his heart, whose heart is constantly singing, to be nothing less than jubilant. Isn’t it the drive of countless great people? Love is a good enough reason to sustain someone beyond his self. Love is more than enough.
Still I think, the rough patches he must have gone through. Twelve years must not have come easy. Happiness in love comes and goes. It can’t be the only thing that sustains him. Then I think that perhaps he managed to go through because for him, the whole deal was who he was. There are things that have put me in pain and distress, and one of those things is having to do something that contradicts my honest being. Maybe it was harder for him denying his heart than going through the twelve years. Maybe at least when he’s with her, he is at peace within his own self, and everything makes sense. It is something that I can only suspect, remembering that when he’s with her he was the most vibrant and giving person I know.
Poetry, beauty, romance, love are what we stay alive for. For the Stoikiy Muzhik in my life, it's what kept him standing. It is what matters. I imagine if I had asked him to pick between living pain free without love or having the chance to pursue a great love, I would have known the answer.
Today I had lunch with a friend. She was telling me about her love life when she said something about how she picked a significant other. She only picked someone whom she thought would make a good companion. She wasn’t bothered much about his status or wealth. A good companion... That was her criterion.
There’s nothing revolutionary about the above paragraph. However, like most old, overused ideas, its sense of weight only grows larger as I grow older. I too, can’t agree more. A good companion... That is also what I’m looking for.
When I wrote Encounters, I was talking about how although it doesn’t seem likely, people do meet and connect. It is this kind of bond that I crave, a relationship where you truly see and be seen. I remember when Patrick Jane, the protagonist of the series The Mentalist, spent his days in seclusion somewhere in Central America, he had no one to talk to. Everyone was speaking Spanish, a language he’s still adopting. One day, he met a woman at the beach. She was an American. Patrick Jane eagerly tried to start a conversation with her, anything he could think of. It had been a long time since he talked in English and he missed it. “Being understood is an underrated pleasure,”he said in a reflective tone.
Being understood is a great pleasure for me too. And also of course, if I may add, understanding someone. Perhaps it’s because secretly, I’m afraid of loneliness. Perhaps it’s because like the thinking behind The Celestine Prophecy, I’m an incomplete person, looking for completeness in the soul of others, making it some kind of a defect that I have.
I don’t know.
Although, sometimes I think it’s simply because deep down, I believe that happiness doesn’t mean a thing unless it is shared.
I don’t like people in general, so that is an odd thing for me to say. I’m a quiet extrovert though, so it kinda makes sense. And although I’ve often times said that I hated people, it amazes me that almost all my fondest memories always involve someone. May it be a moment with friends or lovers, I’m happiest when I’m with someone. It’s funny.
When the film Into the Wild was released, my friend warned me not to watch it. I had always shown a tendency of doing things alone that he was afraid it would make me worse. I think he was dead wrong. The film was about a young man who was disgusted by people and the social structure and so lived his life in the wild in isolation. It didn’t work out for him. His supplies ran out and he was forced to eat plants, accidentally eating the poisonous one. In the last moment of his life, he wrote his realization in his book, “Happiness only real when shared.”
I guess the theme resonates in a lot of hearts, because a lot of films seem to adopt it. After having a great success without the presence of his wife, Jerry Maguire said, “Our little company had a good night tonight. A really big night. But it wasn't complete, it wasn't nearly close to being in the same vicinity as complete, because I couldn't share it with you. I couldn't hear your voice, or laugh about it with you.” Even Barney Stinson of How I Met Your Mother said, “Whatever you do in this life, it’s not legendary unless your friends are there to see it.”
I’ve always wanted someone. I guess I’m one of those miserable people who were born to share. There’s hardly anything grander for me than a true and honest connection. It's a must have for me. We may come into this world alone and leave it alone, but I think... it doesn't always have to be that way.
While most people may lose some sleep over contemplation on grave matters, Sleeping Sixty lost hers because she’s busy pondering the difference between the word slip and skip.
Sleeping Sixty is a 28 year old woman with the enthusiasm of an 18 year old and gullibility of an 8 year old. She is an expert snoozer and is always on the six of all things tasty, hence the name Sleeping Sixty (so sixty is not how much she weighs). Her mind is sadly clouded with paraphasia, a type of language output error. That means she can say cupang (hickey) while what she means is cuping (lobe), two very different things. She can also say towel or milk while in fact she’s trying to say antibiotics, proving the severity of her condition. I once read her message in horror when we were talking about a spirit haunting the laboratory. She told me to whisper her regards into the apparition’s dens caninus (fang) when she really meant auricula (ear). I, for one, certainly don’t want to be anywhere near the ghost, let alone her fangs.
It is not strange then to have Sleeping Sixty awake in the middle of the night thinking about slip vs. skip. She knew that both words were very different, yet she couldn’t figure out why they felt eerily similar. She tried to come up with different examples on how both words could be used interchangeably, but ended up empty handed. Sentences like “We just skip this night” vs. “We just slip this night” or “The meat slipped between her teeth” and “The meat skipped between her teeth” crossed her mind but they just didn’t work.
I, who happened to be an innocent bystander messaging her at the time, was also unenthusiastically dragged into the problem. Slip usually means “to fall” (she slips over the puddle of water, the profit slips in November) or “to move quietly” (he slips through the night). Skip, on the other hand, usually means “to hop” (he skips on the road when he is happy) or “to omit” (she skips breakfast). In a glance, there’s really nothing in common about the two, yet I too secretly felt what Sleeping Sixty felt. There’s a sense of similarity between the words.
It wasn’t until the next day that I found out an example where the two words could actually be used interchangeably. It is for describing the word attention. For instance, "The matter slipped my attention" vs. "The matter skipped my attention." In it, the word slip and skip may have different meanings (“to move [out] quietly” vs. “to omit”) but the end result is the same. Both sentences mean that one matter is devoid of my attention.
Sleeping Sixty turned out to be right. There are times when the words bring out the same meaning. Another example, although basically the same, is for describing the word mind. For instance, "Sleeping Sixty rarely slips my mind" vs. "Sleeping Sixty rarely skips my mind." It’s a terrible example, I know, but you’ve got the point.
Mad Max; Fury Road is an eye candy so sweet, it's deemed to give you diabetes. It has one of the simplest plots in a movie: let's take our heroes in a ride, race them with baddies, and see what happens. But the same seemingly senseless plot acts as a plate to serve what it really aims, a full-time visual spectacle.
It has diverse gimmicky characters, from the horrendous ventilator-assisted grandpa, to the wacky fiery guitarist, and finally to the war-cyclist grandmas. It's as if all the characters in Mortal Kombat, or Kill Bill, or The Raid decided to do a destructive car chase.
And the car chase, oh my... There were trucks, armored cars, motorcycles, god-knows-what scrapped vehicles, hooks, chains, poles, and obviously spilled gasoline. Try imagine them in one picture, and that's what you get.
Sometimes there is meat hidden in the dressing, but in Mad Max: Fury Road, the main course 'is' the dressing. And it is a beautiful one. In the midst of movies with hidden meanings and heavy plot, this is a welcome break. Sometimes all we need is a movie where you can scream, "Holy sh*t!"
Saturday, May 9, 2015
"To be loved is great, but to love is great too...!"
- Ifir
And why not?
It involves the action and actualization of me, arguably the most important person we have to deal with in our lives.
Three things happened to me while I was in Natuna. I didn’t lose my life, I met an old man, and I lost something dear. All of them involved accidents. Only one is still giving me aches. Two I will write.
The first case is when my life failed to escape me. It had something to do with a car, stumbling backwards, out of control, and down a hill. The engine was dead and the brake was loose. On the car’s right and behind was a cliff. After that, it was a descend of several hundred feet.
There were five of us. We were going out. I remember my glasses were thrown out of the car through the open window. I remember thinking that that was it.
And I remember the car finally stopped before plunging into the ravine.
Minutes before the crash
The accident left us with a broken nose, a torn up upper lip, four disoriented people, and one badass. The badass wasn’t me. It was the first time my legs couldn’t stop trembling, something that I thought had something to do with the steep ground but turned out to be purely hormonal. I was filled with adrenaline.
So no, the badass wasn’t me. The badass was a woman-friend, someone who could see and examine a new patient while we were still admitted to the emergency room, despite the presence of other active-duty doctors, someone who turned out having a habit of snoring on the floor like an exhausted Viking after a raid, and someone who after that said sleep, rose full alert like a Viking on raid day. And she didn’t get hurt in the accident either, which hinted her Vikingly constitution (I’m sorry for the references, I’m hooked with the History Channel show).
Anyway, the experience should count as a near death experience. And as it should, it made me grateful to be alive. It got me to be more cautious, though. I had always been a naive-everything-will-turn-out-fine kind of person. But after the event, even the view of brewing rain before a flight disturbed me. Not to the point of Final Destination visions, but still disturbing. It is a good disturbance I think. It will keep me from doing anything stupid.
The second case didn’t really involve an accident in the sense of the vehicular one. It was only a thing that happened by chance. We (the same culprits involved with the car crash) were visiting a beautiful spot on the beach that had immense round stones scattered around. Out of nowhere, out of darkness, we were greeted by an old man. This is not a ghost story and he was certainly not a ghost. We just didn’t see him because he was standing on a lower level. He turned out to be the owner of the place who was by chance visiting to inspect the place.
The old man
He showed us around and told us his visions about the place, what he wanted to do to make it better. I loved hearing what he had to say. I didn’t know it then but now I think I liked his stories because he represented what I had wanted in life. He was working a project he loved by heart, he seemed to love his wife, and he was filled with gratitude and respect for the realities. He looked like an idealist and yet he looked content. It almost seemed contradictory, the idealism and the real world. But he seemed to pull it through. I want that. I do.
The third case doesn’t have anything to do with vehicles but rather with chances too. It is also the one with aches. However, as I said above, it is a story for another time.
In short, Natuna was great. It’s got its drawbacks but generally it was good. I like how you don’t need to go far to find natural landscapes. I like how everything goes pitch black in the night. I like how the place is not packed with people. I even like how I could see the blue ocean line behind my lodge, peeking through the tight branches of trees. Although of course, after the Viking woman told me that it was actually someone’s blue-colored roof, the view had been a turn-off.
Still, I’m grateful.
Glad I got to experience everything.
I just wish I didn’t have all these deadlines choking me the minute I got back.
