random bitchings 1
On rotation:“Hide U,” Kosheen (Resist)
“Fast and Loud,” Stéphane Pompougnac featuring Juli (Hotel Costes Vol. Quatre)
“Dream Machine,” Mark Ferina featuring Sean Hayes (Hotes Costes 8)
“Did It Again,” Kylie Minogue (Impossible Princess)
“Be My World,” Milky (runway music for the Zac Posen Winter 2006 show)
“LSF,” Kasabian
“Soul Sista,” Bilal (Love and Basketball Soundtrack)
“Love Song,” Tori Amos
“Candy Man,” Cibo Matto
“Muscle Car (Sander Kleinenberg’s Fast Pace Mix),” Mylo feat Freeform Five (Hed Kandi Twisted Disco 03.06)
“Doctor Pressure” Mylo vs. Miami Sound Machine
“Train,” Goldfrapp (Black Cherry)
I just love it when my fingers dance around my keyboard as if I was playing the piano and paying more attention to how the ivory keys feel instead of whether they gave me the right note or not. Which happens, like, 90 percent of the time I try to write. I often misspell words and often I have to prod the Backspace key many times before I could start over with remembering the poor sentence that just flew out of my head midway in the process. When people come into my room, they complain either of two things, or of two things at the same time: either music’s playing too loud, or my typing’s trying to do a loud, clicking karaoke improv of “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head.”
It’s crazy, and I’m thinking maybe this is the only reason I got myself into the whole writing business. Maybe I’m just giving myself a reason to tap the keyboards more often.
I’m a frustrated drummer. In a dear friend’s studio apartment I tried joining his band’s sessions by jumping at the percussionist’s gracious offer to take his place in the African drums. The song, more than half of the time, would mercilessly get butchered by my off timing and my half-hearted tap (which is caused more by my self-consciousness to the other people in the room than anything else). And most of the time, I’ll just try finishing the song doing a controlled beat that sounds so labored, calculated and mathematical that I’m often better off clapping my palms red and counting the cigarette butts I made for the entire session.
But that’s not the point. Sometimes I’m just wondering whether I should just drop this whole writing schtick altogether. Just this morning, I tried to try finishing work on a commissioned article for a national daily. It took me three hours to finish my interview with my subject. Pretty easy; I had my questions all planned out 10 minutes before she walked in. But because the article has no deadline, it took me three weeks later to get all guilty about it and finally sit down and write it.
The outline came in easily enough, but the gap between writing the outline, the transcription, note-skimming (I love transcribing taped interviews as much as I love doing military presses. Ew), and the actual writing itself (I call that the writing lump. Not exactly a lump in my case, more like a goiter) was so wide and far in between that it’s often torture alone to watch me do it, much more to experience. This has happened before, many many times before. And even if I know I can do everything in an hour if someone stuck a knife to my throat, still. It still takes a knife to my throat for me to make any form of clockwork headway.
Although I often attribute this to what sir Pete Lacaba calls his “agony writing” in one of the interviews he gave for Ateneo de Manila’s Heights literary folio in 2002, I often wonder whether I’ve taken it too far. I always had to have the right music. I always had to drink some Extra Joss/Red Bull/Lipovitan/pure concentrated caffeine. I always had to watch at least three hours of trash TV beforehand. I always had to write really late at night, when it’s quiet and everybody’s asleep or less prone to making irritating sounds and moves to disturb me. And I always had to reverse my body clock (Read: I have to sleep through the day), judging my output to how much I email my bosses at 6 a.m. before I jack myself off to sleep. I had to go these pretentious lengths – under the imaginary assurance that these will help me yank out a good story – that it just sucks. And in those times of frustration, I dance around the idea of giving up. Sometimes I do; I just default altogether.
It’s so frustrating, that sometimes I’m wondering if I’m just a poser in the midst of all this. I have to confess this: the CD review you saw below took me four hours (and dregs of minutes later to trim it to size, check for accuracies and fire it off to my bosses via email) to write. The Candid Camera article way below (it came out in Sense and Style by the way, August 2005 issue), took me 7 hours and four shots of combined Extra Joss and Red Bull. Revising my thesis proposal (which involved substantially rewriting large chunks of text) took me a day and double the Red Bull. And now this.
Years back, I’ve consulted some of my best bitches (“really really close friends” in Danospeak, hehe) about this. Some say I’m holding back, that maybe, I’m not really letting go when I write. Another holds that, maybe, the process of organized writing could hold meaning to my mind as what a saddle could mean to a wild horse. That I’m so caught up in giving my pieces cadence that I end up depriving it of any. Still, another possibility could be that maybe, I’m just born this way. I just don’t write fast enough. Deal with it. But maybe, it could be that I’m having such unreasonable expectations of how my final drafts should look and sound like that I tend to see the entire writing experience as daunting instead of exciting. Like constipation to diarrhea, I suppose.
It’s not like I suddenly slowed down. I’ve personally taken pride in myself giving every story I write much thought before anyone else sees it, sometimes to the point of risking a butchered deadline. But the chronic-ness of the whole situation makes me question the normalcy of it. Do I really have the heart for this? When I do graphics design work, either for print ads in my advertising class/gigs or layout work for a website or a publication in journalism class, it’s always a light, feel-good session. When I do art direction, when I style people, it’s always adrenaline rush. When I do staccato-structured scripts for video pieces, the whole process just slides right through me. It’s a different story with writing. Sometimes I have to yank myself, turn myself inside out, or spearhead a vendetta against myself for something good (or acceptable, at the very least) to come out of it.
In case you’re wondering, this didn’t take half a day to make, or three bottles of Red Bull. I am writing this while I took a self-declared break off writing my commissioned story. I gave myself one hour for this, and I didn’t fall behind schedule. Maybe because I won’t get scolded for having the outline of wayward pick-up sticks in this one? You betcha.
Right now, it’s really my family, my convictions and everyone I care about who’s making me push myself a little more, allow myself those little vendettas and the occasional knives to the throat. I want to create my own person, I want to give justice to everyone who believes in me like you don’t want to fail anybody who believes in you, I want to give myself direction in my life, I will have to work with what I have to do that. Not that I can’t do anything about it. I’m thinking right now, of course I’ll work on my productivity. I’ll have to feed myself on my own eventually. There’s really no excuse out of it. But maybe, I’ve been craving the feeling all this time, it’s just that I’ve been keeping it as a secret from myself for so long. Maybe the feeling’s great after all, especially the climax, everytime I write my last sentence before hitting Ctrl+S.
Until I finish this dang story, which I just now realized needs a follow-up interview to finish, I wouldn’t know even if I tried.
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