Sunday, March 28, 2004
"Jas, I finally splurged. I bought a new badminton racket."
"Really? Oh, how much?"
(I say the price)
"Nge, that's not splurging noh. Splurging is Joyce's P30,000 expenditure on seven pieces of clothing."
That's why Joyce is legendary in the office, and I don't know the word "splurging".
But I do know that I'm going to be one happy badminton player from now on.
***
I believe in karma.
Every action has a corresponding reaction. The equation of nature will always be positive to positive, negative to negative.
I am super duper mega to the max scared of the negative karma. And I try to repel it by coming up ways to punish myself.
Nope, nothing physically violent (though I sometimes slap myself silly or hit my head hard with my hand whenever I remember that I did or said something really really stupid. But nothing seriously life threatening).
Instead, I make movies in my head where I am
not the superstar. I am the villain, the anti-hero, the antagonist. I play different roles: the irritating
tsismosa who thrives on the nastiest gossip, the self-righteous bitch, the egotistical know-it-all and the infuriating boombox.
The practice doesn’t make me a better person. I don’t even think it counts as penance to the people I’ve offended. But I feel chastened when I put myself in others’ shoes and learn how much I must have hurt them. And it also makes me learn the things I don’t like about myself.
Take note, I feel reprimanded, but I don’t change a thing. Not because I don’t want to, but it’s because it’s who I am. I am the gossip, I am self-righteous, I am egotistical and I am infuriating. Even if I don’t like myself for being all those things, that’s still me.
I am depressing as much as I am the optimist. If it frustrates other people, it kills me.
I can share my laughter to other people, but I have my venom too. Like I always say to other people, I’m happy but I’m not nice. I’m gullible, but it doesn’t follow that I won’t get my revenge in any way I know how.
I don’t like myself for it, but it’s factory defect.
***
”I don’t explain myself, my friends understand, other people don’t care anyway”
I used to have a small poster of this slogan hanging in my bedroom wall. At the time, I bought the poster because I thought it sounded nice.
But I never fully understood it, until now.
I realized that the type of endearments that I’ve shared with my friends sometimes doesn’t work with new acquaintances, which is, admittedly, my mistake.
I always curse my friends in their faces. I always deny them stuff. I always threaten their existence. But they always curse back, "steal" my stuff anyway and come up with more imaginative ways of killing me.
I know, with friends like that, who needs enemies? But we know it’s just one of our juvenile exhibitions so we could deny the numbers that dictate how we should act. Let’s not even talk about how juvenile my friends and I could be.
My mistake was I forgot that I am living in the dreaded Real World. That I have to be always careful with my actions and I have to be mature.
Now, butt-slapping could cost me harassment charges, slander for any curses, and borrowing without permission, theft. (Just so there will be no confusion, no charges were filed against me.)
I’m just frustrated. I still want my share of horseplaying, I still want to be treated with irreverence, I still want to drive around with some of my friends half-naked and scream at the top of my lungs. I want to be immature, dammit!
But those moments, I’m afraid, are over. More mature Ruth is born everyday. Yikes, frightening.
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