Why My Room Smells like Mothballs

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Ever had that feeling when you just want to go home to that all too familiar room of yours. That special room of yours that holds all your secrets? That dark empty room where everything you need is kept?

I guess my room is no different from everyone else's. It has a creaky door, although mine has a unique twist in it, it doesnt have a lock. It doesnt even have a door knob. Sad. Not so sad when I try to think of everything that ever occurred in that very room with a "doorknob-less-door".

Another unique thing about my room is that its located between the living room and the masters bedroom and its dark. Even in broad daylight, it still feels like 6 in the afternoon. This is the main reason I call it limbo, because everything starts to feel weird when in my room. Like sudden disappearances of some, if not all, the food stored in the masters bedroom and the leftovers are found in my room, its all a blur, I can't really tell what or who. The thing is, weird things happen to food in my room. The room walls are bare, except for some traces of pencil writings, stray marks of permanent markers and the "unknown bizarre objects" in the walls. This "unknown bizarre objects" makes me come to a conclusion that the previous owner of the room has some sort of civilization only known to him, after all, my room is weird.

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Now you ask why my room smells like mothballs. It happened one fateful morning. My mom started fixing my room, well I do fix my room, every now and then, it was only by chance that she had to, really. You know how mothers are when they visit your room after a month or so. They have the keenest eyes. She really is a blessing, she actually found at least 50 pesos worth of coins lying all around the place. Another thing she noticed while cleaning my room was that it had an ominous odor about it (not mine, I smell great). We guessed it was because of the hidden leftover food and the unwashed laundry. I could not contest with the findings because she had a jury led by my sister and younger brother. And aside from that, she also noticed a lot of roaches roaming about the room. The house is really old, like a hundred years or so and made of wood. Roaches are bound to procreate there, its natures way of forcing people to migrate to better, cement made houses. So there were choices, I could transfer to another room, or share a room with my sister, or better yet, get me a new apartment. The only problem was, those options were never realized by the jury. So they opted for their own option which would prove to be catastrophic. My mom bought mothballs, I don't know why, but the fact that the smell was so pungent, maybe roaches hated them too.

The first time I entered my mothball fragranced room, there was this sudden clash of senses. My eyes wouldnt send messages coinciding with my nose, it was like smelling Christmas in the middle of summer. That was then I came to see those small balls, white in color, almost like marbles, only white. I threw myself to my bed and let out a little sigh. Then again, what's worse that could happen? Its limbo anyways.

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In case you didn't notice, I exaggerated on some parts on this one... but yeah... you did notice it... *wink*

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Weekly Digest 1

My first blog is a weekly digest, and yes.. I hear you.. Its unheard of. But nevertheless its something I know I can do in just minutes, or in this case, 49 minutes and counting. I'm never too good with remembering things and this is actually a good way for me to record whatever has happened to me within this week, and yes, it will be whiny... only because I am.

To start off, work has been pretty shitty this week. I was absent for 2 1/2 days. I'm actually doing some sort of research on the lifespans of mathematicians. I came up with this idea because with my 2 weeks of counting, sorting, making formulas, and keeping track of numbers, It seems I already have a tiny tumor throbbing inside my head. The location is not exact of course because every time it hurts and people ask me "where?", all I can say is "here!" (points on head). Counting small things from 1 to 10675 pieces is not just exhausting, it's actually a good anesthetic for the brain. Every after work my head does feel numb for an hour or so.

Work aside, everything else is still shitty this week (I warned you, it will be whiny!) I still am in my struggle to make ends meet for myself. I am still struggling with whatever responsibilities I have. Sad thing is, nothing else, or the better term would be, no one else seems to be doing anything to make things better for me. A lot of times this week I was feeling like I was already on the edge, I dubbed it the "On-The-Edge-But-I'm-Not-Too-Sure feeling" because whenever I felt like it was gonna end, I pull away almost instantaneously. So much for decision making.


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Warning, everything you will read below will be very mushy. If you don't have the stomach for mushy things, kindly skip this part and save yourself the agony of reading through somebody else's misery.
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This week has been one of the many very tiring weeks for me. Relationships actually make things easier for me, or so I've thought. There really are times when a heart fails to realize when enough is enough. When too much is just too much or when you know a no-good person when you see one. I guess that's just how love goes. You make very big adjustments to yourself because you would never want the other person to get out of her comfort zone. Sad thing is, when you over exert, and the other side ain't doing anything. It gets tiring, so tiring. You settle with what is given, hoping things will change for the better. Until when, nobody really knows. Like what "All-Knowing Mom" told me last night.

"A heart will go through lengths. A heart will go wherever it needs to just so it will get to where it feels it is at ease. But a heart has its limits. Its not unbreakable, and at one point, it will get tired"

Actually, mom never really said all those things, the sense is there but I made all the words up though. Love is never in question, because I know I am at my best right now. It all just seems as if she's not ready for me.

Weekend Wonders: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Because I write to ease the pain, literally!

The Good - One down! This week’s good is an ode to one of my wisdom teeth; I hope to see you in teeth heaven

This morning I woke up a little bit nervous knowing that I’ll be going under the knife. And, no... I didn't wake up as a chicken. I meant surgery. It's not like I am dying or anything and I was really cool about it (or at least I made it appear like it) but I just know that when it comes to procedures involving the oral cavity, it's going to be bloody like a Russian...

And painful like love... well, yeah sometimes. But I don’t want to really talk about love right now because I am in a lot pain.

The best part is I met a girl named Anesthesia. I last met her on April 22, 1998; that's like, almost thirteen years ago. We were both young then. Actually I was being circumcised (and it was bloody like a Russian too!).

This time around, Anesthesia came a few moments before a procedure called "Impacted Wisdom Tooth Extraction". It's got a name that long because dentists don’t like baptizing the things they do with scientific names.

Anesthesia, she can be a bitch sometimes (and I love it!) and she made me choose between her and the tooth and it sure felt a lot like choosing between wisdom (the tooth, I named him wisdom a few days back) and love. It sure felt a lot like choosing between reason vs. emotion; brain vs. heart.

Anyway I chose Anesthesia, end of story... or is it just the beginning now?

I don't get it; sometimes it’s not our fault that we feel pain. In my case, those very lazy wisdom teeth grew old while lying down (imagine how lazy they are). More than that, they were starting to bother the other teeth. If only I could save them all...

As for anesthesia, well I guess it’s really my fault; I knew that she'll leave me eventually and yet I expected her to stay longer. I really don’t know if it's her departure that’s causing the pain or if it's the fact that I got dumbfounded once again.

it's really painful to find yourself left dumbfounded by the same person. Even if you knew she'd leave you again. Twice. Thrice, after a month from now (read below).

In any case, I know it'll be easy to replace her. Actually, another girl named Ponstan is doing the job (the clean type of job, that is) expected of her. I heard her cousin Advil work's faster but the thing is she's from the Ibuprofen family so she's really not that good when it comes to dealing with the swelling.

But the thing is, the first girl you love? She will always be irreplaceable.

I'll still yearn for Ms. Anesthesia a lot.

First love never dies… especially if you first met her while you were being circumcised.

P.S. If you why Alaxan never came by to help me ease the pain, It’s because he's in Los Angeles pampering the Pacman.

The Bad - one more to go

The thing is Wisdom has a brother which also goes by the name of wisdom. It was a mix-up waiting to happen but the dentist was good and he got the right one.

And the one that's left is the one on the left.

Anyway, the wisdom that's left of me has been served and in a month, it'll most probably get evicted. I'll get to see Anesthesia again, after all... and that will be worth another blog post for sure!

The Ugly - Nothing!

Nothing ugly for this week except that I will most probably cut things short here...

I'll be fine don’t you worry about me... and yes Ms. Anesthesia, I'll just be fine without you!

Light, Peace, Love

by: Randolph Reserva

I wasn’t raised in a home where the sciences were (in any way imaginable) equitable to a meal’s worth of intellectual discussion, so it was simply impossible for me to have fallen in love with science at such a very young age. But as I grew up there came a point when I had to spend a few years in a science high school; a few years enough for me to acquire a sophisticated taste for logic, science and the seemingly inevitable obsession to explain everything in concrete and logical terms.

But since everything falls in a love-hate relationship of sorts, numbers and formulas were never enough for me. So I turned to literature and the vast bloom-fields of “quotation books” (the books where everything is quotable because there are nothing else but quotes) which astonishingly explained everything else that science can’t.

It goes without saying that one aspect of knowledge never sufficed; in fact in retrospect, I never adored a pure scientist or a pure philosopher. Of all the thinkers I have ever encountered in my life, I adored somebody who was both a scientist and a philosopher: Albert Einstein.

Setting the groovy hairstyle aside, Einstein was the watermark of his generation. He was, in my opinion, the best philosopher of science (which makes him a philosopher of everything else) ever to grace the stage of the world. In fact if only he was given a few more years of life, he would have solved all the mysteries of this world exhaustively and still have enough time to come up with a few mysteries of his own.

 Take for instance the General Theory of Relativity which is, to date, the best theory we have to explain gravitation. In turn, the theory also explains falling apples, falling leaves, falling stars, and falling for someone else – and no, the last example wasn’t really a kind of a joke.

Love has its own characteristics of relativity. Einstein discovered his own concept of gravitation through his studies with light, and in the language of physics, light (like love) is a many splendid thing.

Light is eternal, unbounded and unlimited. Shoot it out towards the eternity of outer space and light will travel unceasingly, even in the darkness of nothingness. Shoot it towards an object and only one of the two things can ever happen: light bounces off and continues to travel elsewhere, or it is absorbed and transformed into some kind of energy.

Love, in its true philosophical form, is just like light – spiritual, eternal, without bounds, and consistent all throughout. Like light, love knows no bounds and sees no limits; it is a feeling that defies all tangible (even intangible) hurdles and it cannot be stopped, only diverted. Shoot towards an object of affection and only one of the two things can ever happen: it bounces off and becomes diverted to somebody else, or it is absorbed and transformed into some kind of energy.

The thing is however, in relativity we can only compare love to light, and so it doesn’t really explain love. It only provides a framework in which everything can be explained in terms of – like light, love is, life is, and everything else is, like light.

So it would be a challenge to really explain and not just liken love in terms of physics and philosophy combined, in which case Einstein was already a half-foot ahead.

Quantum Entanglement; take two particles which were initially together as one, and separate them. As one moves, the other moves in conjunction to it so that even if you separate the two particles even by three universes apart, one will move in conjunction to the other. “Jiggle” the particle in this world, and you also “jiggle” the particle situated three universes away. It sounds like Carl Jung’s universal unconscious, only that this one has some science to back it up.

Or we can look at it this way; take two lives separated by distance. As one continues to live on, the other lives in conjunction with the other, so that you cannot explain one life without touching the other. You cannot give meaning to an embodied soul without giving meaning to the other.

At some point even the ancient Greeks saw this bit of reality romantic:

“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with 4 arms, 4 legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”

Quantum Entanglement seems to provide as an invisible way to link two objects separated in the time-space fabric of the universe. It seems to cross the hurdles which break bonds between similarities and differences, or of nearness and distance.

It even transcends the concept of love and attraction, as it is oneness and separateness at the same time; oneness because two objects are in a juxtaposition for eternity’s sake, separateness because they need not assume a single entity to be one.

If we are to take this further into the realms of physics, we are all entangled with everything in this universe, only separated in the motions of the big bang. This gives us three valuable realizations among many others.

First, as everything is entangled with each other, love indeed knows no bounds. In the infinity of space love can occur between two souls. Beyond every experience is a deeper spring of meaning, of which we cannot entirely explain, but we can always depend and trust on to keep love burning even in the midst of quantum uncertainties.

Second, as we all came from one singular matter on separated by the big bang and the ebbs and flows of generations, we have the capacity to love everything in the same degree, no matter the kind of love involved. Storge, Eros, Philia and Agape are all the same – perhaps only differentiated by semantics – the same energy that “jiggles” my life in conjunction with the lives of others.

And in the deepest sense of realizing that we are all entangled intangibly but nonetheless with meaning and depth, there is no way that we cannot attain the purest sense of harmony.

If space cannot provide a hurdle for interaction great enough to stop it from happening, then space, after all, may just be an illusion. Everything is still within the reach of each other so that when you send a ripple outwards, you get caught in the ripple yourself; so that when you love somebody, you also inevitably love yourself as well.

Buddha said it best: “If you see yourself in others, then whom can you harm?”

And who then can you not love?