Friday, April 08, 2005

4:38 PM | Oh, Come On

Like my gorgeous writer friend Wanggo, I am in a constant state of emotional repair and hopeful skirmishes with human life. All life's a battle, someone wise -- and probably chastened with living -- once said; sometimes I suspect it is even a full-fledged war, the goal being perfection. One lives in a sustained effort of high expectations. Kuya Moe tells me this is the very prescription to disaster and dissatisfaction. I have no heart to tell him that I have no choice: I am a Leo, and my kind roars for details kept precise. It calls for the absolute illustration of being in control -- and sometimes, I feel, also its underside: the loss of it. Life must always be lived on the edge of things, teetering in an obsessive-compulsive paradise. Otherwise, when we choose to let go, when we allow everything to "hang out" as they are, our world stumbles into darkness. Today, for example, I see my pad in shambles again, when I can still remember having cleaned it from top to bottom, like it was only yesterday. (To be precise: only last weekend.) The place screams, for me at least, to be swept clean and arranged to exactness. When I was a kid, I used to drive myself to distractions, letting everything in my bedroom "fall apart" from the utter chaos of everyday living. I'd even help things along by deliberately putting clutter on the floor, by not making the bed, by leaving bread crumbs all over the desk, by making the books on my shelves become disorganized by defying the Dewey Decimal System. This would last for a day or so, until my skin itches from the sheer reality of the pigsty. And then, in one inspired moment, I'd pick up and scrub everything to perfection.

My life has always been the same, even since then.

It can be infuriatingly repetitive. Oprah-like, I begin every week with mantras of controlling a life I've felt have gone astray from a prescribed path. "Today is the first day of the rest of my life" is the usual anthem, complete with a wholeness of emotion, a fullness of determination. That has been put to use promising of stories to pen, projects to finish, wishes to finally bring to fruition. One recent episode had me promising to read at least one book a week. Another one is to do one thing I haven't ever done my whole life in the same span of seven days. Like diets, they fall to the wayside, and I am the savage again, berating myself for being so weak. Sundays are beautiful days for such promises. Thursdays witness the slow crumbling of resolve, the descent to the animal I thought I had killed by all those Mondays. Resurrection, precise as clockwork, comes by the weekend. Another resolve. I have such talent for self-delusion, I even believe myself.

It's a cycle.

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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