For the past few months there has been a learner’s permit sitting at my desk, staring at me – and it’s not mine. It belongs to some sixteen year old girl with a Spanish last name. I had found it when I was running months ago. It lay on the ground helpless and lost. Curiously engaged, I picked it up, looked at it and read the address. I pocketed it and continued my run, making a mental note to drive to her house one day and return it to her. Meeting people for the first time – and first and only time – is always exciting and fun for me because and solely because I don’t know what to expect. This rush of uncertainty at the thought of the experience of meeting someone and seeing their reaction to seeing me pumps me up, strangely. I don’t know if I’m perverted or not, but surprising people, even people I’ve never met (weird, right?) excites me.
Two months pass and I haven’t returned the permit due to school and stuff.
I got a call today by Ate Sherry. She says she’s coming home soon, in around thirty minutes or so. Seeing the permit on my desk in my room, I ask her if she knows how to get to the address of the sixteen year old girl. I’m excited to hear that she does in fact know and that she’s willing to pick me up as soon as she gets home to bring me to the girl’s house.
My hands are clammy and my body begins to engross itself on an adrenaline rush. About fifteen minutes pass by as I sit at my computer. Then, my mouth opens and out comes do-do-do’s in the rhythmic motions of a song with intense drums. I get out of my pajama pants and change into jeans, keeping my same top on – a blue shirt over a white, skinny long sleeve. As I hit the climax of the song in my head, I leave my room to get my jacket and put on my shoes.
Ate Sherry’s here, yes!
I leave the house, locking the door behind me, and run to the car. Oh I’m exhilarated.
Ate Sherry tells me that she knows the place because she and Jeremy run there all the time. All the while I’m hearing the intense drum song in my head, making for myself a soundtrack for my mission of returning the permit and finally meeting the person whose picture I’ve seen on my desk for months.
We’ve reach the place and Ate Sherry pulls the car over. My heart is pounding like hardcore dance music. It’s turned into a techno beat. I get out of the car and jump over the black ice that has made their driveway perilously accessible. It’s not until I reach their front door that I realize the driver’s permit is warm and a little wet from my sweaty palm that was hovering over it. Letting go of the permit, I ring their door bell, which is loud and clear, even from the outside.
I see moving shadows behind the opaque glass and count. There are two of them: one is taller than the other.
The wooden door opens slightly, but the storm door is kept closed. They peer and look at me. I see a mother and daughter – the daughter is the girl on the permit. She’s cut her hair but the eyes are the same, I could tell. They’re both very protective of themselves. I could see it in the way they take their time opening the door to me. Every little move of theirs is checked first with caution. That’s understandable. The mother pushes the daughter away and says something to me from behind the storm door.
“We’re not interested.”
In my head I laugh. But when I see them starting to close the door, I say, “Um . . . uhhh, no, no, wait.” I find my eyes have widened as I begin to rummage hastily through my pocket and take out the permit. I shove it quickly against the storm door right before they close the wooden door entirely.
The mother’s face comes closer to the glass until her nose flattens against it. The daughter from behind widens her eyes and yells in surprise, “Mom, that’s my permit!”
I smile and nod, acknowledging.
“Oh, honey this is yours!” Finally she opens the door, however hardly though, and takes it from my hands. After glancing down at it, her daughter behind her shoulder, the mother looks back up to me.
“Thanks so much.” She forms a smile of appreciation on her face.
“It’s my pleasure.” That’s an understatement.
“How did you—”
Oh that’s right; an explanation is in order! “Um, I was running near Silo park and I found it on the floor,” I say plainly.
They both glance back down, looking at the permit. The mother closes the door without looking up at me. I hear her daughter screaming in delight as I leave the driveway.
As I enter the passenger seat, I tell Ate Sherry everything that has just happened.
The drum song has turned into a slow beat -- that of a sleeping heart.
Ahh, but what a rush it was! It ended a bit abruptly, but still.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Short story: "I Know What Flying Feels Like"
The other night I had this freakishly awesome dream. I was a criminal and had stolen someone’s car, some guy’s whom I didn’t know. It was a dark blue civic, nothing spectacular. I first hijacked it, threatening the man with a gun. Once I got him out of the car, I drove it. I drove it fast and hard. Then, feeling extremely guilty and scared, I decided to get off the highway (yes, I was driving on a highway) and at the ramp, I drove the car into the ditch. Luckily I didn’t get hurt much, but I now found myself without a ride home and with possible coppers chasing me. So, I flew home. What else could I do, I thought. I gave myself a running start until my feet were no longer on the empty asphalt.
Then, voila! I was sky high flying over the city. I wasn’t horizontal like Superman; I was more like walking, except my steps covered a lot of ground. I found myself over my house and flew in through the window over the kitchen sink. By that time I had already forgotten I had stolen a car. Kuya, Steph and Ate Sherry were home. Even Ate Sherry’s friend, Jeremy was there. They all saw me fly in and immediately asked how I was able to do that. I thought about it and fount it tremendously difficult to elucidate such a high feeling. I ran a little in the kitchen and started flying. “Like that,” I told them, knowing they probably still had no clue how to fly. They all started running, but never took off. I was the only one who could fly.
The feeling of flying was so amazing. It was like defying gravity with an attitude because I was smiling the whole time. Weightlessness. It made me a little lightheaded but in an addicting kind of way that was somewhat pleasurable?
When I woke up, I realized something weird. I felt like I really knew how to fly, even though I never did anything similar to it, in real life.
This dream is the basis for this short story that I came up with.
"I Know What Flying Feels Like"
By Bernadette Tinio
“I know how it feels like to fly.”
“What are you talking about, old man?”
“I know what flying feels like.” The old man’s lips curled into a smile that quickly erupted into a puff of raspy giggle.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re just a crazy old man, with a banged up leg from war, who’s going blind, you know that? Thought I should remind you.” The old man continued to giggle aimlessly, looking into the smoky air in front of him.
The garage was gray, cold and cluttered with tools that haven’t been touched in ages. They flooded the garage, taking it over with aggression, as if they had the authority to do so because of how old they were. The tools were in total denial of the fact that they have now been deemed useless and obsolete by its owners, like a king’s not giving up his throne much to the displeasure and annoyance of his people, seeing as he, the king, was already past his prime. Honor held a permanent place in the hearts of the tools, which people have long gone overlooked. Even the table the four men sat at was proud and yet blind at how it was too old for its own liking, being on the edge of total dilapidation.
It sat four elderly, balding men, all in their late sixties, except for the extremely old man, who was nearing his eighties. Donald, whom the old man was talking to, dealt the cards around so they could play another game of Texas hold’em. The cards spewed out of his yellow stained fingers and trembling hands. “Bleh,” blurted Donald, coughing up phlegm, looking for a garbage can, and then, not seeing one, swallowing it down with premature resignation. He was too lazy to look or ask around for a can in which to spit out his phlegm; plus, he often lost his breath easily just walking around because he had given almost forty years of his life to smoking, limiting his lung capacity-- and had gone bankrupt because of it. Now he lived in his son’s garage, much to his own chagrin and loss of dignity, playing poker with the three other men around the table every Friday night, with nothing else to do. “Crazy, old man . . . flying . . . crazy,” murmured Donald, speaking to himself as if he were confirming reality and denying the old man’s flights of fantasy.
Raymond shot Donald an eye of annoyance, saying, “Give it a rest, Donald. Let the man have a go with it. He’s near the end anyhow.” It wasn’t that he was siding with the old man. It wasn’t even that he felt sympathy for him. The old men was simply a nuisance, a pestering, old nag.
“Hey, pass it around, don’t keep hoggin’ it,” added Raymond. He was an obese man wearing a buttoned shirt that looked like the buttons might explode any minute. Many years ago, when he was still married, his wife had bought him that shirt from her department store for Christmas. It used to be a well-fitted button down, forest green shirt with pale, yellow stripes. Raymond insisted on keeping it even after his wife had left him for reasons along the lines of his choosing food over their sex life for the umpteenth time. She was a feisty one, and he didn’t always used to be obese. It was as if he were the one who got bored first, and now he was paying the price in his wifeless corpulence. Charles passed Raymond the rolled up weed and he smoked one good hit. “Ahh, that’s the stuff.” He scratched his large stomach and then, after looking down at it, sucked it in. If only, he thought.
Raymond passed it back to Charles who, like Donald, smoked for most of his life. However, on top of that, he had also married alcohol. Bottles of booze were in every corner of his lonely, small house: under his bed, under his pillow, in his closet, and even in the bathroom cabinets. In fact, next to the chips he had won in poker so far, he had a bottle of beer. Alcohol was his right hand man, and had always been there for him, especially during his divorce with his wife, who couldn’t take his beatings any longer during his drunken nights. Charles gulped down a quarter of his beer and remembered for a split second the night he had slapped his wife for talking back to him. Really, all she had asked was where he had gone that night, but he saw it as a cancerous jealousy of hers. Was there in fact another woman? No, unless alcohol wore breasts.
Charles shifted in his dark gray corduroy pants after leaning over to retrieve the weed from Raymond. He inhaled the rolled up paper, closing his eyes. After a while, he exhaled and immediately gulped down half of his Heineken. Smoke filled the garage like fake smoke filling up a stage, for musicians. Certainly the musicians in this garage were the old men, complaining about their lives in used up voices and tired accents, while they played poker and smoked pot. This was what life came down to, for them.
The old man, shuffled his dealt cards, and coughed. His old, wrinkled arms made their way to Charles’s hands and took the small, rolled up paper. After inhaling, he waited and then exhaled. Giving it back to Charles, he giggled something about flying, until his coughing resumed, escalating in a huge cough that made him bend over the table, the other men patting his back. He took the weed and smoked again, exhaling with an air of finality and relief. His eyes shot wide open and the widest grin monopolized his face.
Looking up at the dangling light at the ceiling, the old man yelped, “I’m flying. Yippy!” The other men ignored him and continued to play with the cards. In his mind, the old man saw that he was indeed flying, touching the ceiling, no longer limping on his legs. And from up top, his vision seemed to have improved so that he didn’t even need his glasses. He took them off and set them on the table near his now empty seat.
“What are you doing, old man? Put your glasses back on,” said Donald, who grabbed the old man’s glasses. He tried to hand it back to the old man, who, to him and the other men, was still sitting at the table. The old man waved his hand as a child would resist vegetables, absolutely refusing to put his glasses back on. In the past, when he was wearing glasses the old man had always felt older and so unlike his youthful self who did not used to wear glasses, at least not until after the war. To the other men sitting at the poker table, the old man was annoyingly and stubbornly refusing their help to put on his glasses, but in the his mind, he was flying near the ceiling, using his arms like fins, swimming through the air.
“Can’t you see that I’m flying? Charles, Ray, Donald, come fly with me,” said the old man holding onto the top of a shelf that carried rusty, outdated tools that were probably as old, if not older, than the old man himself.
“Quit you’re talking about flying. You ain’t flying old man. You’re sitting down. Now shut it!” yelled Charles, who took the old man by the shoulders and shook him.
At the table, the old man’s eyes flew to the back of his head and his mouth opened, displaying his false teeth and releasing the potent stench of too much mary jane – more than he could handle at his age. He bent over the table again, except this time, his head fell and banged the middle of the table causing the poker chips to pop up in the air and clatter as they fell and hit the table as his head just did.
“Raymond, call 9-1-1!” yelled Charles, guilt rising in his face in the form of worried eyebrows. He tried to wake up the old man, pushing him back on his seat, and slapping his face, right smack on his stubbed cheeks. “Come on, come on, old man! It wasn’t me, honest fellas!”
“Look what you did! The man was just having some fun. You didn’t have to kill him!” yelled Raymond. Perhaps he was sympathetic after all.
The old man, still at the top of the shelf, let go and flew around the room, his mouth gaping in awe at the feeling of flying. Giggles continued to rise from within him like little children being released for recess time from the classroom. He was happy up there, giddy almost.
Raymond heard the ambulance outside and rushed out the door, his stomach jiggling as he breathlessly ran across the lawn, waving his hands like a drowning swimmer. Once the ambulance men were in the house, they rushed immediately to the old man and laid him on the stretcher, skillfully placing a bag valve mask over his mouth.
The ambulance rang across the town and Donald’s car, holding himself, Raymond and Charles followed.
All the while, the old man’s hands held the top of the door frame, his face turned upward toward the starry night sky. Moments later, in his lower peripherals, he made out the white-blanketed earth and sprinkled lights of red, green and yellow.
--------------------------------------------
Donald, Raymond, and Charles sat in the waiting room. An abyss of guilt overwhelmed Charles, The immense guilt forced him to say aloud, “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t shake’m too hard. The ol’ man was just going out of his mind is all and I wanted to snap him out of it.”
“No, it wasn’t your fault,” said Donald, patting Charles’s shoulder. “Maybe this is his time.” He looked at both Raymond and Charles. Right in the eye.
Raymond, who had bought a pack of mallomars from the vending machine, shook his head violently, causing his cheeks to wobble. “No, no, no, this isn’t his time. You’re just sayin’. It was all your yellin’ at him. It wasn’t Charles’s shakin’ that did it. It was your yellin’ at him.”
Donald’s right hand rounded into a fist, hiding his yellow-stained fingers. “You want to fight, fat fella?”
Just as Raymond started to make a move to the other side of the vending machine for protection, the men heard a doctor call, “Stat, Watson unit!” A simultaneous gasp escaped the mouths of Raymond, Donald and Charles.
Suddenly it didn’t care the cause of the old man’s state.
-----------------------------------
The cold air filled his lungs as ice cold lemonade might fill the stomach of a carefree little girl in the summer. The night was cloudless and naked, save for the stars and the full moon. There was no smoke from factories, or night time flying airplanes. It was pure deep purple and with sparkles of piercing white. The moon was a feminine sun, a welcoming doormat. To what?
An unbridled smile and laugh grew permanent on the old man’s face. They began to define him. He swam through the air, higher, higher, and higher yet. It got to the point where the cars were no longer discernible as separate moving ants. Cities looked grouped together. And then the world itself soon looked like a ball a child might play with.
Surrounded by complete nothingness but the happiness emanating from his blissful soul, he looked to only one place: the moon.
-----------------------------------
It was that sound. The one that sings of death in utter indifference. A machine’s voice laughing at the technological accomplishments of man because it was made to hurt the living as it proved someone had died. A dreaded song it was indeed. The cardiac monitor sang its solid, single, sustained tone, as flat as the old man’s body lying on the hospital bed, surrounded by the downward-facing faces of doctors, nurses. Raymond and Charles, a look of disbelief on their faces. Donald just stared at the dead old man.
Out in the night, in the universe, the old man was flying, higher and higher. “I’m coming!” screamed the old man, swimming closer and closer to the moon. His knees bent youthfully, his eyes could see as sharp as it was when he was sixteen, and he had the energy of a strong horse. In high volume, as loud and dignified as possible, a choir of angels sang the ending of Mozart’s “Lacrimosa,” as he neared the moon, smiling that smile.
Then, voila! I was sky high flying over the city. I wasn’t horizontal like Superman; I was more like walking, except my steps covered a lot of ground. I found myself over my house and flew in through the window over the kitchen sink. By that time I had already forgotten I had stolen a car. Kuya, Steph and Ate Sherry were home. Even Ate Sherry’s friend, Jeremy was there. They all saw me fly in and immediately asked how I was able to do that. I thought about it and fount it tremendously difficult to elucidate such a high feeling. I ran a little in the kitchen and started flying. “Like that,” I told them, knowing they probably still had no clue how to fly. They all started running, but never took off. I was the only one who could fly.
The feeling of flying was so amazing. It was like defying gravity with an attitude because I was smiling the whole time. Weightlessness. It made me a little lightheaded but in an addicting kind of way that was somewhat pleasurable?
When I woke up, I realized something weird. I felt like I really knew how to fly, even though I never did anything similar to it, in real life.
This dream is the basis for this short story that I came up with.
"I Know What Flying Feels Like"
By Bernadette Tinio
“I know how it feels like to fly.”
“What are you talking about, old man?”
“I know what flying feels like.” The old man’s lips curled into a smile that quickly erupted into a puff of raspy giggle.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re just a crazy old man, with a banged up leg from war, who’s going blind, you know that? Thought I should remind you.” The old man continued to giggle aimlessly, looking into the smoky air in front of him.
The garage was gray, cold and cluttered with tools that haven’t been touched in ages. They flooded the garage, taking it over with aggression, as if they had the authority to do so because of how old they were. The tools were in total denial of the fact that they have now been deemed useless and obsolete by its owners, like a king’s not giving up his throne much to the displeasure and annoyance of his people, seeing as he, the king, was already past his prime. Honor held a permanent place in the hearts of the tools, which people have long gone overlooked. Even the table the four men sat at was proud and yet blind at how it was too old for its own liking, being on the edge of total dilapidation.
It sat four elderly, balding men, all in their late sixties, except for the extremely old man, who was nearing his eighties. Donald, whom the old man was talking to, dealt the cards around so they could play another game of Texas hold’em. The cards spewed out of his yellow stained fingers and trembling hands. “Bleh,” blurted Donald, coughing up phlegm, looking for a garbage can, and then, not seeing one, swallowing it down with premature resignation. He was too lazy to look or ask around for a can in which to spit out his phlegm; plus, he often lost his breath easily just walking around because he had given almost forty years of his life to smoking, limiting his lung capacity-- and had gone bankrupt because of it. Now he lived in his son’s garage, much to his own chagrin and loss of dignity, playing poker with the three other men around the table every Friday night, with nothing else to do. “Crazy, old man . . . flying . . . crazy,” murmured Donald, speaking to himself as if he were confirming reality and denying the old man’s flights of fantasy.
Raymond shot Donald an eye of annoyance, saying, “Give it a rest, Donald. Let the man have a go with it. He’s near the end anyhow.” It wasn’t that he was siding with the old man. It wasn’t even that he felt sympathy for him. The old men was simply a nuisance, a pestering, old nag.
“Hey, pass it around, don’t keep hoggin’ it,” added Raymond. He was an obese man wearing a buttoned shirt that looked like the buttons might explode any minute. Many years ago, when he was still married, his wife had bought him that shirt from her department store for Christmas. It used to be a well-fitted button down, forest green shirt with pale, yellow stripes. Raymond insisted on keeping it even after his wife had left him for reasons along the lines of his choosing food over their sex life for the umpteenth time. She was a feisty one, and he didn’t always used to be obese. It was as if he were the one who got bored first, and now he was paying the price in his wifeless corpulence. Charles passed Raymond the rolled up weed and he smoked one good hit. “Ahh, that’s the stuff.” He scratched his large stomach and then, after looking down at it, sucked it in. If only, he thought.
Raymond passed it back to Charles who, like Donald, smoked for most of his life. However, on top of that, he had also married alcohol. Bottles of booze were in every corner of his lonely, small house: under his bed, under his pillow, in his closet, and even in the bathroom cabinets. In fact, next to the chips he had won in poker so far, he had a bottle of beer. Alcohol was his right hand man, and had always been there for him, especially during his divorce with his wife, who couldn’t take his beatings any longer during his drunken nights. Charles gulped down a quarter of his beer and remembered for a split second the night he had slapped his wife for talking back to him. Really, all she had asked was where he had gone that night, but he saw it as a cancerous jealousy of hers. Was there in fact another woman? No, unless alcohol wore breasts.
Charles shifted in his dark gray corduroy pants after leaning over to retrieve the weed from Raymond. He inhaled the rolled up paper, closing his eyes. After a while, he exhaled and immediately gulped down half of his Heineken. Smoke filled the garage like fake smoke filling up a stage, for musicians. Certainly the musicians in this garage were the old men, complaining about their lives in used up voices and tired accents, while they played poker and smoked pot. This was what life came down to, for them.
The old man, shuffled his dealt cards, and coughed. His old, wrinkled arms made their way to Charles’s hands and took the small, rolled up paper. After inhaling, he waited and then exhaled. Giving it back to Charles, he giggled something about flying, until his coughing resumed, escalating in a huge cough that made him bend over the table, the other men patting his back. He took the weed and smoked again, exhaling with an air of finality and relief. His eyes shot wide open and the widest grin monopolized his face.
Looking up at the dangling light at the ceiling, the old man yelped, “I’m flying. Yippy!” The other men ignored him and continued to play with the cards. In his mind, the old man saw that he was indeed flying, touching the ceiling, no longer limping on his legs. And from up top, his vision seemed to have improved so that he didn’t even need his glasses. He took them off and set them on the table near his now empty seat.
“What are you doing, old man? Put your glasses back on,” said Donald, who grabbed the old man’s glasses. He tried to hand it back to the old man, who, to him and the other men, was still sitting at the table. The old man waved his hand as a child would resist vegetables, absolutely refusing to put his glasses back on. In the past, when he was wearing glasses the old man had always felt older and so unlike his youthful self who did not used to wear glasses, at least not until after the war. To the other men sitting at the poker table, the old man was annoyingly and stubbornly refusing their help to put on his glasses, but in the his mind, he was flying near the ceiling, using his arms like fins, swimming through the air.
“Can’t you see that I’m flying? Charles, Ray, Donald, come fly with me,” said the old man holding onto the top of a shelf that carried rusty, outdated tools that were probably as old, if not older, than the old man himself.
“Quit you’re talking about flying. You ain’t flying old man. You’re sitting down. Now shut it!” yelled Charles, who took the old man by the shoulders and shook him.
At the table, the old man’s eyes flew to the back of his head and his mouth opened, displaying his false teeth and releasing the potent stench of too much mary jane – more than he could handle at his age. He bent over the table again, except this time, his head fell and banged the middle of the table causing the poker chips to pop up in the air and clatter as they fell and hit the table as his head just did.
“Raymond, call 9-1-1!” yelled Charles, guilt rising in his face in the form of worried eyebrows. He tried to wake up the old man, pushing him back on his seat, and slapping his face, right smack on his stubbed cheeks. “Come on, come on, old man! It wasn’t me, honest fellas!”
“Look what you did! The man was just having some fun. You didn’t have to kill him!” yelled Raymond. Perhaps he was sympathetic after all.
The old man, still at the top of the shelf, let go and flew around the room, his mouth gaping in awe at the feeling of flying. Giggles continued to rise from within him like little children being released for recess time from the classroom. He was happy up there, giddy almost.
Raymond heard the ambulance outside and rushed out the door, his stomach jiggling as he breathlessly ran across the lawn, waving his hands like a drowning swimmer. Once the ambulance men were in the house, they rushed immediately to the old man and laid him on the stretcher, skillfully placing a bag valve mask over his mouth.
The ambulance rang across the town and Donald’s car, holding himself, Raymond and Charles followed.
All the while, the old man’s hands held the top of the door frame, his face turned upward toward the starry night sky. Moments later, in his lower peripherals, he made out the white-blanketed earth and sprinkled lights of red, green and yellow.
--------------------------------------------
Donald, Raymond, and Charles sat in the waiting room. An abyss of guilt overwhelmed Charles, The immense guilt forced him to say aloud, “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t shake’m too hard. The ol’ man was just going out of his mind is all and I wanted to snap him out of it.”
“No, it wasn’t your fault,” said Donald, patting Charles’s shoulder. “Maybe this is his time.” He looked at both Raymond and Charles. Right in the eye.
Raymond, who had bought a pack of mallomars from the vending machine, shook his head violently, causing his cheeks to wobble. “No, no, no, this isn’t his time. You’re just sayin’. It was all your yellin’ at him. It wasn’t Charles’s shakin’ that did it. It was your yellin’ at him.”
Donald’s right hand rounded into a fist, hiding his yellow-stained fingers. “You want to fight, fat fella?”
Just as Raymond started to make a move to the other side of the vending machine for protection, the men heard a doctor call, “Stat, Watson unit!” A simultaneous gasp escaped the mouths of Raymond, Donald and Charles.
Suddenly it didn’t care the cause of the old man’s state.
-----------------------------------
The cold air filled his lungs as ice cold lemonade might fill the stomach of a carefree little girl in the summer. The night was cloudless and naked, save for the stars and the full moon. There was no smoke from factories, or night time flying airplanes. It was pure deep purple and with sparkles of piercing white. The moon was a feminine sun, a welcoming doormat. To what?
An unbridled smile and laugh grew permanent on the old man’s face. They began to define him. He swam through the air, higher, higher, and higher yet. It got to the point where the cars were no longer discernible as separate moving ants. Cities looked grouped together. And then the world itself soon looked like a ball a child might play with.
Surrounded by complete nothingness but the happiness emanating from his blissful soul, he looked to only one place: the moon.
-----------------------------------
It was that sound. The one that sings of death in utter indifference. A machine’s voice laughing at the technological accomplishments of man because it was made to hurt the living as it proved someone had died. A dreaded song it was indeed. The cardiac monitor sang its solid, single, sustained tone, as flat as the old man’s body lying on the hospital bed, surrounded by the downward-facing faces of doctors, nurses. Raymond and Charles, a look of disbelief on their faces. Donald just stared at the dead old man.
Out in the night, in the universe, the old man was flying, higher and higher. “I’m coming!” screamed the old man, swimming closer and closer to the moon. His knees bent youthfully, his eyes could see as sharp as it was when he was sixteen, and he had the energy of a strong horse. In high volume, as loud and dignified as possible, a choir of angels sang the ending of Mozart’s “Lacrimosa,” as he neared the moon, smiling that smile.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
New Year's best friend is time
Happy New Year!
I can’t believe it’s already 2011. Ever since 8th grade, back in 2003, I only really focused on two years: 2007 and 2011. 2007, I’d graduate from high school. Check. 2011, I’d graduate from college. Almost check – two more semesters left; I’m graduating one semester late. Time has flown by way too quickly and took me by surprise. Some nights, I’m ok with this pace, but other nights I absolutely loath it. I have this on and off acceptance thing going on, but most times I slip on a denial mask and forget my age, or the date, or the time even, and just live. Live.
This past New Year’s Eve I celebrated Christmas with my mom’s side of the family. Ate Maricel’s got three little ones: Jarian, Kelsie and Kaden. What do I think of when I see little kids? Generic thoughts, really. They can be super excited, or quiet and shy (clingy to parents), or somewhere in between those two extremes. By eight or nine, I’ve noticed, kids usually start to develop their own personality, based on any and every input of the world they’ve been exposed to up to that point. I realize that’s an arbitrary age I chose, but I truly believe we don't really develop a strong personality until our high school years, or even college years, (if you were lost in the motions and throws of high school drama and couldn't find yourself, as I think I have), in my opinion. For instance, you could predict a specific reaction of your friend's that only he or she would have. Now Kaden’s only two, I think. [Chuckle]. He’s just plain cute.
So, as I sat here to write, I was wondering how to go about saying good bye to 2010. But then I realized something. You can’t really say good bye to a specific year, or time in life. Although you can say, “I’ll see you again whenever you pop up,” because what went on in your life, how you’ve developed, or how you’ve been impacted or influenced by experiences felt during a time period, will always have some affect on your present state, or personality. There's this connection among time, experience and self- perception (how you see yourself as you are living, I mean). I claim that all life is the building of background knowledge, essentially. I like to think of it as an on-going movie or story with lots of foreshadow moments. “Of course he’d become a doctor; he always liked fixing other kids’ boo-boos,” or “of course she ended up in this mental hospital, having grown up in that messed-up household she called, ‘family’,” or when a family needs to call the dog whisperer to fix the dog they got from the dog shelter for Christmas, the dog having been abused by his previous owner. The past is always affecting the present, interfering it. Enhancing it on a good day. Or making sense of it, most importantly. Like, if someone decides to change his or her life drastically, there has got to be a reason for doing so. Perhaps in the past he or she "learned the lesson the hard way" as the saying goes, and decided to do something about it, whatever it is.
So anyway. Change of topic. Resolution-making time, is it? Last year, my New Year’s resolution was to produce awesome abs. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to make a four pack or a two pack even – I was realistic. So I just aimed at having not washboard abs, but surfboard abs, nice and flat. Lord knows that didn’t even happen at all; that was a lost goal that went in the opposite direction, lol.
I don’t know what my goal for this year should be. Should I go selfish or selfless? Or both?
Both.
My goal for 2011 is to keep in contact with people, and to help my friends however way I can. My goal is also to write more and give more time for writing. Speaking of time, I will also strive to have better time management and to lessen the number of times I procrastinate (no more staying up at freakin' 4:30 in the morning working on something due at 9:50am!).
So those are my goals. I hope I’ll have better luck with them, than I did with my humble abs.
I wonder what personality 2011 will have . . .
I can’t believe it’s already 2011. Ever since 8th grade, back in 2003, I only really focused on two years: 2007 and 2011. 2007, I’d graduate from high school. Check. 2011, I’d graduate from college. Almost check – two more semesters left; I’m graduating one semester late. Time has flown by way too quickly and took me by surprise. Some nights, I’m ok with this pace, but other nights I absolutely loath it. I have this on and off acceptance thing going on, but most times I slip on a denial mask and forget my age, or the date, or the time even, and just live. Live.
This past New Year’s Eve I celebrated Christmas with my mom’s side of the family. Ate Maricel’s got three little ones: Jarian, Kelsie and Kaden. What do I think of when I see little kids? Generic thoughts, really. They can be super excited, or quiet and shy (clingy to parents), or somewhere in between those two extremes. By eight or nine, I’ve noticed, kids usually start to develop their own personality, based on any and every input of the world they’ve been exposed to up to that point. I realize that’s an arbitrary age I chose, but I truly believe we don't really develop a strong personality until our high school years, or even college years, (if you were lost in the motions and throws of high school drama and couldn't find yourself, as I think I have), in my opinion. For instance, you could predict a specific reaction of your friend's that only he or she would have. Now Kaden’s only two, I think. [Chuckle]. He’s just plain cute.
So, as I sat here to write, I was wondering how to go about saying good bye to 2010. But then I realized something. You can’t really say good bye to a specific year, or time in life. Although you can say, “I’ll see you again whenever you pop up,” because what went on in your life, how you’ve developed, or how you’ve been impacted or influenced by experiences felt during a time period, will always have some affect on your present state, or personality. There's this connection among time, experience and self- perception (how you see yourself as you are living, I mean). I claim that all life is the building of background knowledge, essentially. I like to think of it as an on-going movie or story with lots of foreshadow moments. “Of course he’d become a doctor; he always liked fixing other kids’ boo-boos,” or “of course she ended up in this mental hospital, having grown up in that messed-up household she called, ‘family’,” or when a family needs to call the dog whisperer to fix the dog they got from the dog shelter for Christmas, the dog having been abused by his previous owner. The past is always affecting the present, interfering it. Enhancing it on a good day. Or making sense of it, most importantly. Like, if someone decides to change his or her life drastically, there has got to be a reason for doing so. Perhaps in the past he or she "learned the lesson the hard way" as the saying goes, and decided to do something about it, whatever it is.
So anyway. Change of topic. Resolution-making time, is it? Last year, my New Year’s resolution was to produce awesome abs. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to make a four pack or a two pack even – I was realistic. So I just aimed at having not washboard abs, but surfboard abs, nice and flat. Lord knows that didn’t even happen at all; that was a lost goal that went in the opposite direction, lol.
I don’t know what my goal for this year should be. Should I go selfish or selfless? Or both?
Both.
My goal for 2011 is to keep in contact with people, and to help my friends however way I can. My goal is also to write more and give more time for writing. Speaking of time, I will also strive to have better time management and to lessen the number of times I procrastinate (no more staying up at freakin' 4:30 in the morning working on something due at 9:50am!).
So those are my goals. I hope I’ll have better luck with them, than I did with my humble abs.
I wonder what personality 2011 will have . . .
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