If-Only-You-Took-This-And-That Craps

            Taking up a creative writing course, upon knowing, people will either scratch their heads off or keep their face blank in ignorance.  What will you do in the future? Are you going to be an author? You should have taken an education course, after all you are going to be a teacher. Creative writing? What’s that about? News writing? There’s no such thing.  Writers are born, not made.

               I’ve encountered a lot of people telling me that.  Sometimes, it sort of stirred me a bit, some pissed me off entirely, others, I seemed to have ignored to defend myself.  Then at some point in my life, I still felt broken in a way. To cap it all, although it is not reminded everyday in our lives, (those who took the same course as mine) I still feel like we are the underdogs in our school.  I can’t blame them if they think our course program is just as easy as they thought it is.  I don’t want to argue nor defend myself, go on with extreme rationalizations why our course is good or excellent or the best among others.  That doesn’t work that way.

             Yep, I used to dream of taking a more technical course, for practicality’s sake, but I found out that being in the liberal arts, literally liberated me from those ideas, that thinking about work in the future, and raking sums of money, isn’t really as important as taking a course that suits your academic preferences and interests. Well, the worst case scenario here guys, is that after you graduated from a course you deem practical, you just realized that somehow, the course that you really should have taken had just recurred, like a persistent rat that gnaws your senses.  Nobody would like that.

             There is still more to know about writing.  Writing creatively, to be specific.  Even up to this point, I envy those people who can write without ‘being touched by something divine and holy’. I envy those people who are consciously writing things, those who are not waiting for a spark of inspiration to be possessed. Writing for them is something controllable yet I still can’t discern how in the world did they do it.  It is the sudden inspiration, or else, the tip of the pen, that controls me. I am not controlling it.  Talk about spur without the curb.

              I know that creative writing will teach me how to write, anytime of the day, and maybe that is the reason, why I like it.  It’s exciting in a way, contrary to the traditional notions that it will bore you to death, Practice will help.

            And raking millions of money is not satisfying when you don’t enjoy it.  You have to really rake it hard, and rake it good.  Scrape it with much gusto, that’s even better.                 

             So now, I need not to think about the ‘practically sake’ reason why I should not take creative writing. Because I believe that when you finally realized that it is what you want to do, everything else will follow.  It will definitely foster an excellent workplace for you to work on, and surely you wouldn’t want to starve yourself to death, so naturally, you’ll work hard in your chosen field, but with much enjoyment and satisfaction.

              So whenever I encounter if-only-you-took-this-or-that rattles, I tried to be cool and then I’d smile.  Or I’ll take it out to them.  Maybe in a way, we can come up with a compromise.                         

            And anyway, if you don’t have money, I just found out that sheets of paper are actually palatable.  I have lots of them.             

          Have you noticed? It’s like a defense.

             But I’m serious, I really like my course. I think I’m in love with it.

An Evening with my Bonnet

Sshshh… my bonnet speaks.

It speaks of something I can barely hear, a murmur in the night, quite ambiguous – to think that it can almost bite my ears off. Let me close my eyes, you can close yours too, and let’s hear it together. Can you hear it? It’s disturbing, inexplicable. You might say I’m making up stories, but it speaks of things so otherworldly.

Why do you always make yourself so distant, so hostile, away from the staleness of those people? So you think you can hide yourself from that point of view? Despicable.

I can play with it, I can take it off, and I can make a fool of myself in front of it. Nobody will know, only my bonnet will.

You know, you can always put me off.

It’s clearer minute by minute.

Put me now.

Okay, I’ll put you off.

Of Honey and Clover 2, Baygon Katol and Tinapa Era

        I just watched Honey and Clover season 2 on Animax and man, it was so damn good that it nearly made me cry. Okay, wallowing if that’s the right word – but what I’m trying to say here is that you should watch Honey and Clover 2 and you’ll know a lot about love and friendship (cheesy right?) Uh huh. I am such a hopeless romantic. I’m itching to buy myself a DVD collection of it if ever I’ll go around the city proper (nah, just pirated DVDs for my own selfish interests).  Nope, I’m not kidding, I really recommend this anime for you to watch – I watched the Honey and Clover Season 1 too and it was cool. And this part 2 is much much cooler and much much better than the first one.

            Anyway, I digress.  Ah – I think I’m being drugged with this katol – it’s emitting totally foul smell while I’m typing my critical essay here. Well, I’d say the mosquitoes are feasting in my feet and legs and I’m too distracted with them so guess I have to endure it for the meantime. I just hope my essay will be over soon or else I’ll poke myself in the bathroom because I’m too drugged with this thing. What can I say? It’s rainy days, so need I say that it’s time for these damn mosquitoes to breed and multiply?

            Noodle days are finally over at the boarding house – but on a different price – I am welcoming the Tinapa Era! Yeah, last month was definitely noodles noodles and noodles (this is the primary reason why my hair kinda curly last month)! But this month? Tinapa never fails in our budget list and to brag even more – it’s as if I can compile a Tinapa cookbook for I think I have already mastered the art of different recipes in it. It’s always me who’s assigned to cook it, that’s why. So you need not to be surprised if a book came out entitled Khareen’s 99 Best Tinapa Recipes. No, I’m not kidding, if you think I am. I just hope I wouldn’t end up blushing the whole time (as a side effect for this tinapa thing) whenever my crush is around or the worst cased scenario would be me transformed into a huge sardine – human sized – walking tinapa girl.

            Okay, I’m drugged now – the katol has finally taken its toll on me and it just blurred my brain.

Heck! Why Creative Writing?

      

         There seems to be lots of things that I want to do in the future, I say, and sometimes I can’t contain myself being excited about it. When I was in grade school, I wanted to be a space pilot; the notion of flying in the sky fascinated me. But when I reached high school, I realized I have a motion sickness, and an intense fear of height, and so I resolved that I wanted to be a lawyer.  A friend of mine warned me that being a lawyer is a dangerous thing; you might die young and penniless. That sort of freaked me out.  So by the time that I was in my fourth year, I was at lost what to say to my mom what course I’d be going to take in college.  Or at least, there seems to be really lots of courses I want to take – and I wanted to take them all at once. 

            These were some of the courses that I considered back then:

1.      Electrical engineering – as I am fond of wires and splicing them. I also dreamed of owning a hardware store in the future.

2.      Computer programming – I wanted to know how to make softwares, as much as I enjoyed some of them, like games for example.  (in fact, I wrote that I wanted to be a computer programmer in our yearbook, and that’s the reason why I hate browsing through it).

3.      Nutrition and Dietetics – I wanted to be slim and sexy (a very weird it’s-so-teenager-idea).  But I realized now that I was so stupid to reason this way.

4.      Teacher – an English major I supposed.

5.      International Studies – I forgot why.

6.      Electronic and Communications Engineering – because it was a hip among us, so I thought I might try as well.

            I might as well say that ‘creative writing’ was never an option to me, although the closest thing to it was being an English major teacher.  When the UP admission test was announced, I wanted to study there, badly.  I never dreamed of being in UP Diliman, or Los Baños, as I didn’t want to study too far away from my family.  So I concentrated on the courses in UPMin.  The closest thing to Computer Programming is Computer Science, for Nutrition and Dietetics it’s Food Technology, and for an English major teacher, it’s English Creative Writing.  My sister researched the course outlines of these three course programs.  I was taken aback at how many math subjects I’m going to take if ever I’m going to take the first two, when I used to nearly flunk my high school math subjects.  So I just chose Creative Writing instead, as I found out that there is no trace of a math subject to be taken.  And that’s how I chose Creative Writing.

            You might say if I’m good at writing. Well, it’s creative writing so I expected that it’s not too much grammar and it’s more on writing poems, and short stories.  Yep, I have a short background in writing, being in a school publication staff but I’m not too proud of it.  It was at those times when I really wanted to have that feature and literary post in our school paper, but I am always shunted in the news part and the sports post.  I tried for three consecutive years just to have that feature and literary post but I ended up writing the headlines in the news section.  During workshops, I would be classified as a news writer.  Maybe I was too objective and too stiff.  Making news is really boring, I concluded. 

            And at this point in time, taking a Creative Writing course, I realized that it is somehow fit and right for me.  I am the only person in our high school class who took up an English related course – heck, all my classmates were mostly taking either Engineering or Nursing.

            I have no intention to shift to any other course.  I am going to stick with this course ‘til the end.  I think this is more fun than solving math problems.  There seems to be lots of things to know about this program, which is really exciting, like knowing literary icons and their motivations, epic tales and adventure novels – or simply, if drinking is really a prerequisite for an excellent literary work.  J