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Somebody hid the
reset button somewhere.
And I hope everything pays off in the end if we choose
to pursue this pro bono life, which continuously takes
too much of our sanity, patience, and energy. Maybe
they’re right. Maybe we were just too complacent
lately, not spending enough time with the “masses.”
And all we’ve got left is our bourgeois –
god, the beauty of the word, that boogey man of a word
– delusions.
The tragedy is we know too much obscure philosophies.
We were always ten steps ahead of ourselves. Once we
recoil, a torrent of self-reflection decimates us. We
know ourselves too much, enough to crush every argument
we haul at ourselves. We’ve crushed every urge
to pick that option, which we’ve always reserved
for ourselves at the last moment – the option
that once we get home, all we have to think about is
what DVD to watch, what books to read, and every second
was allotted for us to imagine a better life than this.
I always told you that no matter what, we will always
have a choice. The only question is if we can live with
it. I left the States and its promises. All I have now
is a thankless stint writing for this infamous publication,
100 pesos in my pocket, a patched-up cell phone, and
a sh*t load of anxieties. The problem now is that I
don’t know if I can live with this, nor can I
live with the prospect of permanently residing there.
I’m spending every waking moment lately asking
what the “catch” is. What’s the twist?
When can we finally live at the denoument? We’ve
certainly given up on a lot of things, spending nights
trapped in this office atop Vinzons, struggling to keep
the publication running, bleeding ourselves dry of words
just to finally send these pages to the printer, just
to see them in a trash bin somewhere or the dark recesses
of forgotten drawers. Maybe I’m already tired
of always making a point, of ruminating on problems
which are not my own, of proposing solutions to the
country’s dilemmas when I can’t even fix
my own. And, in the end, we are ridiculed for being
obstinately militant.
The tragedy is, everybody seems to ask more from us.
If I could find that reset button, I’d probably
choose to live a normal college life, take a course
on Math, Science, or Engineering, rather than writing,
which we both know won’t even rake in enough cash
to rent a decent apartment.
The tragedy is that we know better.
And as you said, we shouldn’t allow ourselves
to simply perish. We don’t belong in the bowels
of anonymity and irrelevance. # Philippine
Collegian
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