The pizza-eating smoking hamburger who tweets... in shades.

I've just finished writing my marine science application essay, and it looks so... formulaic. Even my application letter to the dean doesn't have a heartbeat to it. I actually hesitated upon typing the word "passionate". Maybe I'll throw myself into the ocean and have myself eaten by hordes of pollutant-loving black sea urchins during my first week of graduate school.

Sometimes, I feel a borderline disgust when I look at the mirror. Then again, there's so much that light cannot penetrate, or glass couldn't reflect, and maybe it's the general collective that seems repulsive. My stomach looks like a Krabby Patty after a few bottles of beer and a regular meal. Deliciously unhealthy.

Maybe my central nervous system needs some Ray Ban aviators. It might go blind from all of these directionless irradiance. Maybe running around the academic oval with some nicotine patches on would be great, with the summer rain and all. I don't know.

If I have ten thousand pesos in my hands right now, I'd probably spend it on something unintelligible, like a sleeve tattoo, or a shelf of books, or a monster-large pizza with extra cheese. I hate the cycle of employed life. And staycations (except the part where I wake up before six am and everything is grey and still).

Black on plum and a mention of vanity and social rehabilitation

It's a working Saturday, and I can't start working. Maybe it's the uneasiness I feel about how my nails consume the microscopic amounts of vanity I painstakingly inhaled from various sources, some questionable. I can't produce a clean slate just yet, hence the black on plum. The mess is a shame for someone who has an eye for detail, and I know he has eyes not only for detail but for beauty. There it goes again, another mention of my hopeless fixation. Which just got hopeful. Or not. Black on plum. It would be a nice color for sketching his hands. Not that this information is for public consumption. It just came out of an abundance. Which is still running, as you can see. Get scared. Cringe. Now.

I am finding it easier and easier to be with the Y-chromosome bearing species, just like when I was a ten year-old tomboy in grade school. The DOST team is almost complete, and I almost didn't notice that the only one with ovaries is me. Which is a good thing. I don't feel like extracting more vanity for social purposes.

Murakami is great. No, scratch that. Murakami is relatable. For my dark and twisties-infested head, at least. Dance, Dance, Dance is a dimension of being I was once at. Or am still at. It's too dark to know anyway. The skies are the color of my nails. Black on plum.

I'm gonna go get another cup of that white instant coffee.

Mistakes, undead, and hormonal overrule

I was told that my age is the best time to collect mistakes. Coincidentally, I have picked up the message from a graduation scene in the famous "saga" of the glorified undead and the estrogen overdosed mortal that worships their existence.

After a few days of being affiliated with "outsourcing" people ("human traffickers," if you'd ask my new friend Dana -- dear Lord, bless the Jesuits for creating such a nice young lady), a morning spent sending out applications to the Katipunan area (four applications in less than twenty minutes, mind you -- again, glory be to the Jesuit heavens for sending me people who can be patient and nice under the melanoma-inducing Manila noontime sun), an afternoon of allowing hope to seep into my pathetic excuse for existence (it would be really nice to have employment at NFRDI as a Christmas gift), and an evening of talking about glow-in-the-dark toys, of intellectual masturbation, and of arguing about the hotness level of vampires and werewolves...

I realized that Amy Farrah Fowler of The Big Bang Theory and Tina of Bob's Burgers are made of the same stuff.

War With The Estrogen-Overruled Subconscious I: Amy and the Asperger's guy

War With The Estrogen-Overruled Subconscious II: Tina and the erotic undead

Post Grad: yup, that's about it.

For the past few months, I've been having an existential crisis. Being a graduate of the country's premiere state university is crazy enough, but having a lifetime of ideals and dreams and promise of greatness is another story.

Well, life is pretty simple when you are eight. You go to school, thinking that by learning how to multiply irregular fractions, you would have power enough to get through life. That proper spelling and grammar would be the key to landing the perfect job that will feed your perfect family. That understanding the life cycle of a butterfly means happiness and contentment in your entire adult life.

Then you reach twenty. You are a recent college graduate, unemployed, and living under your parents' roof. Your sanity is under the mercy of your mother's constant nagging, your self-worth is daunted by your father's unspoken yet even deadlier expectations, and your self-respect is melting away with your younger sibling's opinion of what you do. You have planned the next five years of your life perfectly when you made the choice of what to major in, but suddenly, things are not going as you have expected. Suddenly, that college degree is no match to what you have before you - life.

Post Grad was dead on. You oversell yourself to compensate for your lack of job experience (suddenly innovative was visionary, active was driven, and outgoing was enthusiastic). You detest the fact that everyone was already moving on with their lives, doing something productive and admirable and definite, while you are left behind. Suddenly, you are not so unique and brilliant anymore, everybody else is, too.

Well, the movie was not of any help to my existential crisis, as (spoiler alert) its concept of a happy ending was to quit the job of your dreams to move to a new city with your boyfriend. I think the ending was a delusional hopefulness, something I could never employ in my life for I live in a country bearing disappointments such as an education system that is crumbling down by the hour, a job market that gags you with call center agent positions, and a government already too rotten to expect anything from, to name a few.

But then again, life throws in an occasional ray of sunshine in its constant field of storms. And that would be my next story.