letters

As of late I've been reading the letters of authors I like. I like it a lot. It shows the author in a more personal light, while allowing said light to be in the literary voice that I've come to know them for. I read excerpts of J.D. Salinger's letters and have thus become obsessed. I picked up a copy of multiple letters Steinbeck's written to people. When I have enough money I'm going to get Chekhov's book of letters as well.

I like the act of writing letters. I think it's very lovely.

Written correspondence is something I want to engage in but cannot, unfortunately. I mean, what's the point? There's emails and facebooks and phones that zip messages at the snap of a finger, so who wants to wait for weeks on end just to see how someone is doing? It's hard to correspond electronically though! I tried email but that died when facebook came out. My long long long emails were rendered useless with an "lol that's nice" response in return. It's disheartening. Facebook as well. It's not like you're going to write a three page essay on someone's wall. It's all about succinctness in this digital age.

There's a much deeper emotional connect to a letter I feel. Because when you write to someone on paper you get to see the way in which they wrote their words. The hand is affected by the words it writes, and it shows in their handwriting: scribbled in frustration, sloppily in sadness, frenetically in excitement. Handwriting allows one to see the emotional impact of a writer's creation through the ink they impart on the paper.

On top of that, it's a creative project, and as such, you're going to make sure it's not going to suck! You start to have fun with it. It's not a business memo or a formal email or whatever but something very personal. It's a mini art project involving yourself. I don't know it just seems to me to... allow someone to invest more of themselves in the art of writing than one would if they committed their correspondence to email. I don't know.

I want to write letters to people but I don't know who. :(

I need to

I need to do both start writing more, and finish the things I start writing. I'm looking through this blogger thing and there's like a billion drafts of stuff I started on random breaks in the library and never bothered to finish. My undeveloped creations! Crying for the nourishment of completion they sit in their digital tombs waiting to be published but they never will, due to my terrifying procrastination. If the end of the world were imminent I think I'd save my goodbyes for the very last second.

This is a resolution of sorts, I guess.

(You're two months late but whatever)

I think I'm going to start carrying a pocket notebook around with me. People think I'm joking when I say I have the mentality of an old man but I'm really not. I'll be reading something on the internet and suddenly want to google something else, but then I'll forget what I wanted to search for when I open a new tab and just sit there, thinking of what to do. I forget books at home constantly. There's a whole mess of stuff I've lost and I forgot that I've lost them.

It's bad. So the notebook would really help. That, and I'd have a nice little thing to write down ideas when I get them. Have I told you that I'm dreaming of stories? They're not particularly good but it's kind of cool.

Another thing, I'm thinking about jumping ship to tumblr. It's so pretty! I like the aesthetics of the site, but I feel that it'll be just as neglected as this little blog that I started up. I'm not even my own number one search if I type in "hello ghosts blogspot" on google. It's some band. I should fix that. Actually I'll stay here, it's cozy.

I need to read more. It's fun and very invigorating for my brain (durrr-hurrr state the obvious).

Schedules are a mess. Let's clean that up.

On an unrelated note, I'm pretty sure my mom doesn't like my taste in women as she keeps introducing random daughters of her friends in our talks together. I could be dating the Buddha and my mom would still find fault with her; probably because she isn't Pinoy.

(Oh well)

homie.

So my friend sent me this website because he knows I have a thing for Asian girls (He also mentioned something about Andi Long, assuming that since I go to UCI I should know her and thus should hook him up). But anyway, here's the website forum thread thing in question:

http://www.superfuture.com/supertalk/showthread.php?t=65493

Okay so it's a bunch of perverted lonely dudes posting pictures of something they call kags-which stands for cute asian girls- and using the usual bits of internet colloquialisms such as "OMG SO HOT," "POST MORE NOW," "SAUCE," "FAPFAPFAPFAPFAP," etc to describe these girls. Then, after the posting of the initial random j-pop starlets and whatever, it starts to gets weird. Skip ahead like 40 pages or something and the pictures of celebrities are replaced, and the users' facebook friends start popping up much more. Along with that, all of them are Asian chicks in dresses too short, drinking too much, and passing out on couches with their pictures taken only to be seen amongst these forum users who get their jollies from jacking off to them.

Well actually, the ones that they like the most tend to be those girls who find joys in partying. The ones that take facebook photos of their clubbing nights and make out with their girlfriends and then pass out. The forum users pass judgment on girls and if they don't fit their expectations, they deem them unworthy of their masturbatory fantasies. And I know that they're only doing this because they've given up on the world and chosen to satisfy themselves digitally. Something or another scorned them from social interactions and they decided to indulge themselves in the digital world.

I couldn't figure out which one made me more sad, the party girls or the forum users who post their pictures on the internet. I mean, I SHOULD feel sadder about the forum users. Rejected by the world, they can only live in fantasy, passing harsh invectives to digital replicas of the girls that pushed them to the brink of their isolation. But I mean, they aren't really isolated. People can make the world change around them, if only they attempt to find the change within themselves. Tired of people? You say no one understands you? Then you need to try to understand them first, and I mean REALLY understand them. Stop looking at people like sheep, or formless reflections of dominant ideologies, the thoughts that pseudo-intellectuals find comfort in. Just start treating people like individuals and you'll notice a marked change in your life.

So I should more sad for the girls then? I mean, they brought the cameras out with them, they got drunk off their asses and posted the pictures on facebook, and thus they should understand the implicit consequences of publishing incriminating evidence of yourself on a media easily accessible by the public. In short, understanding how the internet works. And then I saw this:



She looks like a 15 year old but hey she could be my age for all I know. She looks Filipino but then she could be any dark-skinned Asian, but yo when I see this girl parading herself like that I feel a certain responsiblity to say something.

Homie.
Brown-skinned beauty who I feel
I have a certain cultural connect with.
Or lack of, I don't know.
As the son of immigrant parents
I tried hard to forget I was Filipino,
and instead tried to be Filipino-American.

I would never white out my skin with bleach,
bathe myself in phosphorous to look a little
less brown. But I would turn down my mother's food
because it was too pungent, or acidic
to a tongue too used to hamburgers and pizza.
If someone asked me what my ethnicity was,
I'd say Asian.

Now I know that you're not doing this
to deny the weight of a heritage
you feel is burdened on your shoulders.
As the daughter or granddaughter or descendant
of a culture not rooted within America,
it is the duty of your blood to be aware
of every aspect of your culture.
Wearing it like a mask until
they forget which is your real face.

You're just doing this for fun, I get that.
And I used to do the same thing too until
I realized that it's not just a foreign culture,
not just a different set of practices
implicit in our blood. It's different.
Memories fill our veins as well.

Take a moment to take a breath,
to trace the roots of your family tree
still rooted across oceans in the home land.
Remember a grandfather who didn't pregame,
but drank. He drank to dull the razor edge
of an empty life of working from sunrise
to sunset, for a people who frankly
didn't give a damn.

Or your grandmother who wakes up
every morning at 4 AM, rises before the sun
to tread across 2miles and a river
in order to go to church. Every single day,
a 3 hour trek to and back-that's 6 hours-
a quarter of her day spent devoted
to the reverence of God.

There are still memories living with you.
When you're embraced by your mother, who
when you were little would hold you tight
and tell you that if you work hard your
dreams are possible. Remember too
that she would spend sleepless nights
by a candle studying human anatomy
so she could become a nurse.

Let memories sear into you
a certain kind of dignity
to carry yourself with day to day.
Because it hurts to see you
carry yourself in that that way. Because
as much as we like to joke about
"immigrant guilt," of Asian parents,
the silent cuts of their disappointment
are still the most palpable feeling
along the generation gap,
the cultural divide.

R.I.P. Nujabes

I was disenchanted with hip-hop as a whole when I met you. The most bombastic beats on the radio devolved life into this eternal chase for paper, and I generalized the whole genre as deteriorating into that singular message. It was a loveless corporate sound that I couldn't get behind. The first track I heard from you was "Counting Stars," and I wouldn't say so much that I fell in love with the genre again as I would that you completely revived my feelings for it. I swore off contemporary hip-hop, dropped it like something detrimental for my soul, so hearing your tracks was a panacea, a revitalizing water purging poison from my veins. Your tracks were my catharsis, and I became addicted to that feeling, that sound. I sought musicians that sounded like you, trying to discover what it was that hooked me so. I can say it now, that the feeling was simply love. I was addicted to you because you shook my heart like the very first girl one falls in love with. Behind every beat you made, every song you composed, was the irresistible tinge of enjoyment that someone imbues in a work they created with the utmost love and care. And just like that very first girl, that very first sound, they leave this indelible print on the heart that one carries throughout the rest of their lives, this feeling they want to impart upon everyone they meet, everyone they see, everyone they hold close and dear. It's a feeling of gratefulness, for having something shake you so soundly that even though songs may end, times may pass, relationships can fade to dust that indelible feeling still stays with the soul, carved into its deepest foundations.

I cannot thank you enough, and I hope you passed onto a happier place.

Don't sweat the small stuff I guess.

Normally my posts are attempts to sort the mental baggage within my head. Thus, they take on a very serious nature, and when I reread some stuff I wrote I want to tell me to calm down! Sheesh, why you got to be so serious all the time. Life is as hard as you make it Rante!

So I'm glad to be writing about the Pokemon Gold remake I downloaded last weekend. The DS remake, Heart Gold, would normally be an instantly addicting game in itself, what with all of the crap you can do in it and whatnot. I don't want to go into detail, but the sheer scope of the game combines the simple and the complex in such a way that an RPG head like me finds oddly captivating. But to say that this is simply another game I'm playing would be a false observation.

Pokemon Gold was my childhood. When I received it nearly 10 years ago for my birthday I was ecstatic. I crammed that thing into my Gameboy Pocket and you'd assume that it was stuck in there, because that was the only game I played for a very long time. I beat the game with all three starters, I collected them all twice, I even went so far as to raise several teams based on types to imagine myself as a gym leader. All in all, I probably invested three to four times the amount of time that I had spent on Red. That number is so enormous, I'm embarrassed to say it out loud. I'll give you a hint. I remember raising a Charizard to level 99 and using it to beat the entire Elite Four on my first playthrough of Red, which took 60 hours. On my second playthrough, I decided to go back and do it right, and raise a balanced team of six pokemon. I remember being extremely excited when I hit 100 hours on that game when my family and I were eating at a Dennys. I played Red like, 5 times.

So take that number, and multiply it by three to four.

Yeah, I've always been a huge nerd.

Pokemon was my entry into the insidiously lonely world of RPGs. Before Pokemon, I had Mario and Wario on my Gameboy Pocket, and a bootleg copy of King of Fighters. I didn't know what gaming was, merely enjoying these little electronic distractions that my dad got me from K-mart. I didn't play compulsively, I didn't obsess over evolutions and stats and movesets, I didn't manage the strengths and weaknesses of a team with the preciseness of an architect. I heard about Pokemon from a friend in fourth grade, and before I knew it the game had exposed a side to me that I didn't know existed: an obsessive-compulsive addicted to micromanagement.

Pokemon got me addicted to the notion of story-telling in a video game, along with the notion of choosing how a game was to be played. I transitioned from that to Final Fantasies on Friday nights because I heard in sixth grade how the summons were like Pokemon on crack. I went from Final Fantasy to Dragon Quests, Squaresoft games, Front Missions and Fire Emblems and tactical RPGs, all the while the numbers and choices and attacks and defenses growing steadily across the expanse of my childhood, prepubescent, and teenage mind. Meanwhile, on the storytelling front, I pored over the details of elaborately designed universes, with its own histories and social systems, to the point where I invested myself in fiction because it reminded me of role-playing.

In short, I was a very lonely child who played RPGs all day because he didn't really know how to interact with people.

But Pokemon was great in its own way because it was one of a few RPGs that I could talk to other people about. Everyone played it, and if you ever ran out of things to say your little fourth-grade self could ask about Pokemon and talk his head off for hours and hours. There was a social side to it as well, but there was also a treacherous side to it. Battling was competitive. No, like serious business. And the trading cards... I learned about the dangers of capitalism from unfair trades and strong-arm tactics.

I look back very fondly at my little 10-year old self and his Pokemon addiction, so when I played the recent release my mind was blown. I'm continuing this post on the 24th of March and I've logged in about 30 hours overall during the two weeks I've had the game. An entire day and then some just playing Pokemon. It's a wonder where the time goes. I cannot stop playing this game compulsively and am entertaining the idea of giving it to my roommate to hide it for me.

It's fun though. It makes me calm down and not think about the future, and I just sit there enjoying myself like some little kid. I appreciate it not for the fact that I'm winning a game, but experiencing a feeling of nostalgia-tinged therapy.

Oh little Rante, if only you could see yourself now, playing in three dimensions.

Quick write practice 1

Sometimes I like to turn off all the nights
sit in my bed, stare at the void of my ceiling
like I'm looking over the tops of high cliffs
with my head dizzy, my ankles weak,
this weird feeling of falling
and an even weirder feeling
of wanting to fall safely.

I like to imagine that
I topple over crags and rocks
harmlessly, bouncing along
the walls like me and it
were two clearly different people
still trying work things out.
Polite and considerate,
but with the understanding
that this is still
shaky territory.

I do these little games in
the dark of my room alone
to distract me from my thoughts.
I clutch at my pillow and this
stray thought flutters in my mind
and I kind of just want someone
to be with me to scream at the night.
Which I think is kind of crazy
isn't it.

weird dream.

starting to dream in stories so I'm writing this down so I don;t forget.

People on subway train riding along subway. There's this weird phenomenon that's starting wherein at first teenagers went missing, but then the age bracket started lowering until it was 7 year olds missing. The subway train goes down an increasingly lengthy, darkening tunnel. Things change. Red lights flicker. See an entrance with a clown's mouth with the words:

"I bet you've seen something like this before."

Proceed across various signs with various messages until they enter a subway track with luminescent tubes. On the other side is s bright red liquid flowing, with what appears to be red blood cells flying around. They stop off at a station confused. It looks completely like their own station, except multiple people wander around in a daze with green skin. They respond to nothing, seemingly in their own daze.

Group is wandering around when idiot decides to open emergency door. Two teenagers pop out, one morbidly obese girl the other a very lanky boy. We rush to the bathroom stalls, lock in. They sprint like athlete runners, reach stalls, threaten to rip the doors off the hinges, and they do. They are shark-toothed, splotted with black dots. Approach, promise that they'll make us into mots, and if we eat the head of another mot, am promised big ramifications. They bite into me, at which point I woke up out of breath.