Thoughts on sex (Part 2)

This is an addendum to Somebody’s thoughts on sex (Part 1)

“You told me it is not anymore important to you.”

“Yes, but it does not mean it is not anymore important. It definitely is, still.”

I have nothing against constricting my sex life in a straitjacket, or more appropriately a chastity belt, as this is a normal consequence when one gets himself involved in a strictly monogamous union. I welcome this as a restful respite from years of reckless abandon and unhinged debauchery. Sometimes I already find it hard to see my old self in the context of my new life. As if out of whim, but definitely a result of careful introspection, I woke up one day and came up with this foolish idea of denouncing promiscuity and sticking to the one person whom I derive sexual pleasure from and with.

http://open.salon.com

When it stops being cheap, sex gains the greatest of values — bliss.

I remember writing ‘off to my third job’ (I currently hold four) as a Facebook status recently. A female college friend left a comment asking me ‘Wala ka na na social life, Fev, eh? (Do you still have a social life, Fev?).’ I remember how I used to equate social life with sex life and that the only meaningful form of socialization, excluding, of course, with my family, friends, students, and the people I work with in academe, is having sex with the other party. I, however, avoided having sex with another party if the other party happened to be coming from a different species, of supernatural origin, or a non-living thing.

Aside from finally deciding to retire from the repetitive courtship game of luring and being lured because it has gone tiring, stressful, I eventually felt that I derived nothing from it but dirty pleasures and the icky feeling of having contracted something malevolent such as syphilis, herpes, or worse, HIV.

But I guess this is the normal progression of things. When one grows old, he realizes there are things more important and interesting than getting laid.

Something rough

Everything begins with something rough. A draft.

Since I’ve been missing a lot in my blogging, this post, as is directly observable, is something unpolished, a kind of just-so-I-can-post-something post. This I wrote while I was doing nothing and my students were toiling on an activity I assigned to them.

It’s interesting how in our less backward society, where computers proliferate like eczema, drafts have ceased to be a physical entity, and that on a computer monitor, a writer can have as many as 10 drafts without being aware that he has actually made those number of drafts.

A draft is only physically possible on a piece of paper but not on a computer. A monitor of a computer poses different challenge when it comes to writing a rough draft (a common redundancy) such as the number of copies made (virtual copies that got deleted should be included) and the supposed apparent corrections but have gone invisible (virtual corrections are counted as corrections still).

Unless written in script on a piece of paper, I think it is too much a task to ask writers to come up with real drafts when they’ve already done several virtual drafts.

It’s redundant to say so, like the word “rough drafts.”

Inceived

“ This is a curious question,” I began with all seriousness, and dove head first to, “what is the verb-form of inception?”

“Let me guess,” after a long pause, he blurted without any remorse after, “Inceive?”

I gave him an incredulous look.

We tried looking up for the word in his iPhone dictionary application and found out that the word is yet to be coined, assuming that his dictionary is as comprehensive as the Oxford English Dictionary. My closest guesses are ‘intercede’ and ‘intercept’ but none seem to capture the meaning of the word as it is used in the latest Christopher Nolan film, Inception. Probably none exists because the idea is, with all the technological limitations, only a figment of Nolan’s imagination, or if the idea does exist and is possible, the part where in it is subjected to in-the-flesh tests is non-existent, at least for now.

We watched the film together at SM Megamall, a walking distance from where we stay, last night catching the last full show that was scheduled at 9:40. We thought it was but proper to reward ourselves with a good movie after a long week working and a long day working on a weekend (!) that day, and for another reason that will is not be mentioned in this post.

We arrived at the cinema late, the movie already on its fifth minute; this meant we’ve missed important minutes alloted to backgrounding that will aid us in understanding the development of plot and characterization. This tardiness can be traced to that same reason why we had a quiet dinner in a Japanese fast food prior to entering the cinema.

None of us said anything during the entire run of the movie, even a whimper, which I secretly liked because I wanted to concentrate on the things I was seeing on the dusty screen of moving pictures before me rather than mundane concerns about our work or profound subjects that deal with our individual lives.

I admit I was lost in the first half of the film. This is a well-kept secret of mine which I am finally divulging here: dialogs in English of most Hollywood films I watch are senseless mambo-jumbo to me. I hardly get them or if I do, I do not get the details, only an general idea that a character is angry, happy, incontinent, or in the middle of a mind-blowing orgasm. This does not mean that I cannot comprehend; I should be ashamed of myself for having gone this far in my life not comprehending a single English film.

What debility this brings me however is that I do not usually ‘get’ the humor. So while the rest of the audience are laughing (or pretend to be laughing) to their lung’s content, I am left scratching my head not knowing why they laugh (or pretend to laugh) like a demented lot of about to-be-slaughtered sheep.

Before I meander even further, what makes Inception an interesting film to watch, aside from starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, and Cillian Murphy, is this unique characteristic of being amorphous. While it lends itself to light, detached viewing-for-base-pleasure, and pedestrian approach to a film, it can also be a challenging one to follow for people who take film viewing a serious endeavor, a business worthy of a critical reading.

It is an intelligent film, though hardly original, the idea of lucid dreaming, that is, for most films that attempt to tackle or question our very idea of reality, is doomed to be intelligent. I heard people around me in the cinema murmuring something unintelligible, probably finding affirmation from the person beside them that they completely understood the film and that the filmmaker had not taken them for fools.

Despite the hula-baloo about the film’s superb story-telling and impressive visuals, I think that the strongest point of the film is its ability to amuse and amaze both the dumb and the damn smart.

A very entertaining spam comment

Before the advent of spam blockers like Akismet, the default blocker used by WordPress, spams would leave one’s site flooded to the waist, its owner wading in hundred of useless comments that sell anything from how-to-learn-English-in-30-days DVDs to boring porn.

But some can be very engaging and hilarious such as this:

HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia penis enlargement and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forum! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. They’re coming back now. Vimax. Please send help!

It sounds like these companies have been employing impressively creative copy writers who never reached college and hurl these masterpieces for all the web to see.

I want…

I want to eat peanut butter, just peanut butter. I want to have a straight eight-hour sleep, not three, four, or five. I want to ride a tapir, not a tricycle, a jeepney, or a train. I want to stay home for a whole day and finish everything in my reading list. I want to swim some more lapses. I want my mother’s laswa soaking in hot Dinorado rice. I want to go to Pampanga and be with my sister, I miss her doting kindness. I want to ride a plane, now. I want to see a giraffe kicking a hyena in the face. I want to fill this page with non-sense. I want to splatter Jollibee spaghetti on the first person I meet wearing white. I want to insert my wet middle finger in the electric outlet behind me. I want to shout at the people living in the room facing ours and tell them how gay the color of their curtains is. I want to glutton on a gallon of stale vanilla ice cream. I want to drink the water from tap downstairs and wait if I contract cholera or die from typhoid. I want to seal the room shut, turn off the air-con and find out how long it will take before my lungs collapse because of asphyxia. I want to have a fishbowl, without a fish, because I can’t have a fish. I want to have a birdcage, just the birdcage, I cannot have a bird inside. But if I can, I want to have a myna and teach it how to eloquently blurt all the expletives I know.

I want to take a shower. I want to eat, I am hungry. I want to wash all my dirty pants by hand. I want to confess to the owner of the stray wi-fi signal named Belkin_e0d37a that I am having a free ride and that I am willing to pay him for the time I, unintentionally, used his signal to publish several of the posts here. I want to delete my Facebook account. I want to apologize to my readers for me having written this far and for them having read this extent.

I want to extract all my molar teeth using a pair of pliers. I want to shout at the top of my lungs that I am          . I want to think that I am being read. I want to think that what I have to say matters. I want to.

I want to simply continue writing this. I want to clean the house. I want to water the plant I have always wanted to have, but never had. I want to see my vibrantly verdant bougainvillea (it would have been this species) crawl and colonize the house until the living room resembles like a Peruvian sarcophagus. I want to know why I am entertaining these thoughts and have mustered enough bitter gall to publish them.

I want to think that by writing these things I want but cannot have or do I am finally acknowledging that some things go nowhere. And that other things, the nonsensical ones especially, get to be written down here.

On the background….

I was tinkering with WordPress themes, thinking of probably changing the current one if something interesting comes up. But nothing caught my fancy. Until I remember I have this UV exposure of a street in Paris which I am presently using as background.

I know the background does not pander the eyes; it strains them. But I am holding on to it for a couple of weeks, in keeping with my erratic thoughts and life these days.

The politics of staring

Ralph Waldo Emerson said it no more succinctly than this, we cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened.

Many people hallucinate and hear voices when no one is there. Society call them mad, out of their minds, demented, or a little loose in there (saying the word ‘loose’ while raising their hands above their heads and gesturing that two irritating Vs and checking if somebody else is listening). They are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. The other kind, the more villainous of sort  are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing, write their rants and rambles the entire time while they stare at their own wall of emptiness all day.

Spoliarium by Juan Luna. Photo taken by Randy Solis.

After work, and if I still have time left, I would spend it ensconced in front of my computer trying to decipher, by looking at the blinking cursor, which I hope it may, in all its humbleness, tell me the secret of the universe.

In my many attempts to unravel this secret, this cursor might have already revealed it to me a long time ago, only that I failed to stare at it as intently and did not recognize what should have been completely obvious. I missed it. Or because of my whining while writing, it decided to slip from my sight and decided never to manifest itself to me, ever.

The author before the painting Spoliarium by Juan Luna. Photo taken by Randy Solis.

But I am not the over-determined kind. I am not beholden to anything or anyone, even to the noble quest of knowing the secret of the universe. I guess it is because of this over-determinism why some people go mad. The wall stares at them and they thought it’s God. They stare back, and from that moment on they irretrievably fall in to a spiraling abyss other people call madness where no one will escape unscathed.