cursed

i have been cheating on work. somehow. my mind has been wandering a lot lately and it takes me a bit more time now to finish a task, although by normal standards that’s still pretty quick. i am preoccupied and restless. lately i couldn’t wait to get home, and then i get home and i wonder what i was supposed to do. often i just distract myself with playstation and computer games and then in the middle of being a fierce all-powerful mage i am attacked by an intense feeling of…forgetting. it is like something hovering around me, a sense of another possibility, another way to count down the hours. i feel constrained sometimes. even trapped. today i had a searing tumble into the age of dreams. and i saw myself as i am now, colorless and fading, barely registering on the dream radar, a wraith, a ghost, a pale representation. i am weighed down by too much anxiety for things that i don’t really care about. my soul has atrophied. and it is a very sad thing to see. upon my back i bear the burden of the dust of every day, accummulated in sackfuls. enough to fill my own grave, a plot of dry hard land where flowers will not grow. my bones will be as brittle as the coarse cement sand that has scoured away my propensity for dreams. i am dying now and i am running away to nowhere near life. full circle. with old eyes i behold a fragment of my soul remembering. if i listened closely it could tell me something. maybe something i need to know now. maybe something i need to do. but my senses have dimmed. i retreat into the false light, pretending to see, pretending to hear. i am mute. i cannot speak the words of blessing. i have become cursed.

i’m decluttering my room. my whole room. freeing some trapped energies, making space for the new, clearing away the old. maybe it will help if i make the room ready for a kittycat, like the universe will just have to make it happen that the kittycat comes and stays.

i came across one of my HUGE journals and i felt quite sad for not being so intensely creative and passionate anymore. it was a journal fashioned after Nick Bantock’s books and had drawings and collages and bits of feather and beads and stuff stuck on the pages. it also had poems and copied quotes and really, really beautiful passages from various books i’ve read throughout the years. where has that soul gone?

my life right now is a series of worry and stress. i am slave to work and imprisoned by templates and whipped into pleasing clients. i am fucking tired and getting quite bored.

well. it’s 8:24 and i haven’t done much. nothing as concrete as a finished report anyway. i’ve been resizing the photos for pasting onto the powerpoint slides, interspersed with tons of phone calls — now why is everyone calling me up today?

we had dinner in cafe bola. i had my usual adobo flakes with cottage cheese. oh my god i am beginning to feel sleepy. must.not,give.in. i have to work through the night if i want to present anything decent on thursday.

why am i so bogged down with the mundane? i bore myself.

this is the worst time to feel lazy. and yet i find myself shutting down involuntarily, like my other selves only want to sleep. there are tiny planets of rebellion spinning inside me. but i have to finish this one presentation and be ready for an internal on thursday. aarrrgghh. i feel so out of it somehow. my brain knows what should be done but the rest of me refuses to function accordingly. i can only think of making pictures and writing about something else totally, like the lives of shadows, for instance.

slowly, so slowly, i am inching my way away from handling this big client of ours because it has gotten too caught up in templates. i hate templates.

today i attended a business development meeting with the bosses and my dream-king (who is still blonde and i don’t like it). my dream-king kept on touching me to make a point and i throw it all back to seven years ago so that my past self will be delirious.

venus (she ain’t got it)

this is a long overdue telling of a dream. i had it like almost two weeks ago. i dreamt i was in some archaeological dig and there were all these old men and women fumbling around a stone tomb that has cracked and crumbled. they all seemed to be looking for something. then the archaeologists come in from another room of the excavation and throw a huge slab of marble on the floor shouting “here it is!”.

it turned out to be a piece of venus’s or aphrodite’s vagina. puzzled i looked back at the old people and the women were prodding the men to hurry along. the old men shuffled towards the marble slab.

i went through the door that the archaeologists came in and found myself in a huge hall that resembled a church or some worhipping cavern. unearthed on one side is a huge marble statue of aphrodite, locked in a cage too small for her that she was bent uncomfortably. her face was etched in pain. an unnamed god marble statue stood over her, one arm raised to strike. it was freaky.

then the cavern was suddenly underwater and i was swimming in it looking for a way out. i swim towards the very high dome ceiling, remembering snippets of screenshots from a lara croft game and realizing that i was moving along like she would and then i reach the ceiling, and there was a series of trapdoors that had to be switched and turned. but before i could open the last trapdoor i wake up.

sometimes i wish to be glamorous.

vanished

i had this pocketful of entries about two nights ago but the schedules got so busy and now i am trying to reconstruct the words that had profusely flowed into my eager soul-hands. but like water they slipped through easily and now my soul-hands are dry.

bonetired

i’m in an internet cafe in cebu city. i am so tired i had moments of going blank while doing the interviews today. i couldn’t wait for the interviews to end so i could…study? do more work? sleep? time has become so short. i want to study and work on my research method paper but my body begs for sleep. my eyes glaze over and my heart slows down of its own accord and goes into sleep mode.

i realize i’ve been writing about being tired for months now. i don’t know what it means.

i dreamt of the dream-king again a couple of nights ago. we were together and he owned a bar and he was quite mean but he supposedly loved me most of all and he was never mean to me. why am i getting these dreams?

i go around the mall and the rational part of me nags about what i need to buy and look for. then i go off, like a light, with only a babble of thoughts crowding in my head and i don’t know what to do. then i mentally raise my hands in surrender. i just want to go home and sleep.

recently i have been getting a lot of flashing thoughts at random points during the day. thoughts like: what if i just not show up at work? what if i just walk out on a project? what if i played sick and disappeared from the office for a week? what if i started screaming how goddarn tired i am?

that frumpy feeling

ever since that dragon and dream-king visitation i have become wary of the dream-king himself. saw him this morning and i avoided drawing his attention. he’s hanging out as usual with his cool and fashionable friends, which include LRd of course who always manages to make me feel frumpy 8 times out of 10. it’s that sashaying walk, and the pretty, pretty clothes, and the cleavage and that attitude, and the pretty, pretty shoes, and that whole “been there, done that” air.

there is a slight throbbing in my head. it is faint, and hidden, and yet undecided whether to plague me the rest of the day.

i had disturbed sleep. i woke up a number of times, certain there was something in the room. objects shape-shifted as they usually do when caught unawares. mostly they were faces of dragons. mostly they were placid and perhaps even curious.

my dreams were intermittent but one story threaded through the wakings. i fought with the dream-king. the quarrel was intense, emotionally violent, seething, bitter. i cried, i shouted, i cursed. he triggered the conflict. a piece of paper left on my desk, putting my integrity and capabilities at work into question. yet hidden beneath is his own startled realization that i have become strong and his own powers have become almost breachable. almost, because i never really intended to put him in any awkward position. if anything, i only wanted him to consider me good enough. but all these are buried deep deep beneath what we did. so my first reaction upon the message was anger and indignation. how dare he! how dare he stretch his hands over what i claimed to be mine and declare it incomplete and wanting.

i sought him out in the dream, his friends and minions sitting about, looking at me strangely, wondering at the tears in my eyes. i couldn’t find him. then i found him and we shouted at each other, and a sea of seven years glimmered between us, old stories surfaced inappropriately, and in the dark depths love fought with hate.

i felt him threatened and angry. he lashed out with words and sharp waves of indescribable emotions. i struck back, for the first time in my whole life unafraid of him. and i cried because i loved him and because at the end of it all, it probably never really mattered.

i never found out who won, who conceded. sunlight woke me, my breath in deep drowning gasps, my skin still tingling with the traces of the spirits that kept us company. the dream-spirits who watched and waited.

the throbbing in my head has dulled. there is only this tiny stone pulsing with unnamed magic settling just within my heart chakra.

ah, darn. just read through the blog of my dream-king. every time it doesn’t fail. he makes me want to get depressed. to have such command of words and images. i feel shallow and petty even when he writes about shallow and petty. i feel like my world is so small. and it’s ironic because his entries indicate that he finds his world small as well. i guess we all find our own worlds small when compared to the seeming mystery and excitement of what everyone else is doing.

just stepped out of one last internal meeting.

the first interview went well. i think a struck a nice chord with the client. my next one is on thursday. then it was a flurry of internal meetings for new business pitches, new complans and other small requirements that just decided to pop out of the woodwork.

on the other hand i feel rather cheerful and boosted. it could be working with s.e. who used to be an officemate in my previous company and who has now joined us. talking to her this afternoon easily allowed me to slip back into that crazy but intelligent mode of conversation that is almost always punctuated by laughter but littered with concrete ideas. it was very refreshing. plus this was someone who knew me from before and not some stranger just beginning to know me now. it makes a big difference because she knew me way before i became some supposed boss-person heading a department.

the internal meeting that lasted until evening was for a major account and we’re due to present tomorrow. as i eyed the people sitting around the conference table i noted that at least four of them were colleagues from way before, from my previous company (which i obviously loved a lot and still miss sorely from time to time for the last two years). so if i just focus my gaze at one end of the table i could almost capture that elusive nostalgic spirit that buoyed me up for the first seven years of my career.

hence, because i had all those nice touchpoints with the pleasant portions of my past, i was less affected by my impatience with the officemate who was not performing well and who seems to show slow signs of improvement. she just does not seem to grasp the whole concept of how she should be looking at things. everything just had to be told to her because somehow she won’t figure it out satisfactorily. every day i force myself to give her at least the same amount of attention and camaraderie i show the others but i just couldn’t block my brain from the reality that she’s getting paid the most and performing the least. i can’t help it. i think she feels and suspects i don’t like her much lately.

well, i’m getting hungry. i better wrap up today and head for home.

pet peeve

she really rubs me the wrong way, this officemate of mine. i don’t like her music. and i don’t like her whiny personality. everything should be easy to forgive if she worked well. she doesn’t. so there really is no real basis for me to be friendly and personal. i subsconsciously avoid having to deal with her more than work requires. i know this sounds bad of me. but i can’t help it. i just don’t have the patience. and i am not being paid to babysit weaklings. it’s a tough job. shape up or ship out.

i hate that music she plays. i hate it more when she sings along.

a blink of what i used to be

quickening
remembrance
the semblance of my soul stirred
hint of a smile cracking its lips, thin blood seeps out
too thin that it roused Death and made her sniff around

i feel propelled towards an inevitable path
even the forest rumored to devour all who passes
seemed to have decided to make an exception
long overdue, they murmured to themselves,
their dark hidden eyes turning to me almost with fondness

on coffee shops

there are basically three reasons why i go to a coffee shop. one, i need the caffeine fix.  two, i need a place to pass the time while i wait (literally and figuratively).  a cup of coffee is a small price to pay for at least an hour of not being bothered. three, i need to write.

right now i am sipping a tall glass of Passion iced tea.  today i decided to get my caffeine in some other way. hence the tea.  it tastes of Vigan, and of a particular summer two years ago about a love gone bad like a fruit left out in the summer’s suffocating heat.