Let me walk you through my scaldingly hectic day in unimaginatively intricate details. I have gone accustomed to the routine waking of early morning six, and since the beginning of the rain-laden mornings of July, I have always expected a dim incipience. The blue sky defeated in a vantage position by the more aggressive gray clouds; but patched here and there are little windows of opportunities where the light of the magnanimous sun slice through the insolence of rain-burdened clouds. This morning was different than the rest of the mornings I have gone accustomed of staring as I pull half of my body out of my dust-infested, mattress-covered bed. Outside, light was tangible. Shrouding every nook and cranny my eyes can set on. I reckoned then that this is going to be a skin-biting day.

I don’t want to be making an entry narrating my whole day’s activity. That is going to be bluntly boring. The things I did this day were less than quixotic, but the person I was with, made everything worthwhile. Amidst the lackluster day came an experience I’m going to be treasuring for a long time. I don’t want to say for the rest of my life, for may be, if my memory betrays me, I’m going to be forgetting what happened.

A trivia on myself (this is only to those who are interested; I could care less if you are not): I forget more than I remember. I’m still youthful, but my physicality is slowly degrading. That includes the convolutions of my brain catastrophically gone jumbled, the trigger-happy neurons gone erratic, and my reflexive joints percussively squeaking. Unbeknownst to all, I am a stark critic on the countdown of life. Why put ourselves in a position where we have to be aware of how long we have been here on earth? I mean, it’s not that big of a deal really. But the thought it connotes ruins the sensation of youth. Once you reach your 20’s, society starts to label you to be someone responsible; you must have by now finished your studies, you must have by now earning your own way out of brokenness, you must be self-sufficient, independent, and castrated your training wheels on your bicycle called life. Who are they kidding? I mean really. We never finish our studies. Learning is continuous. We learn every minute of our lives. It is not limited, as is infamously believed by the bellowing majority, within the incarcerating, fear-mongering four corners of the classroom. The school, if anything, delineates from the true nature of learning; coerced, spoon-fed at times, and reiterative. Learning should be iconoclastic. We, who are students of life, should be iconoclasts; breaking from the monopoly of the structuring of learning. As one teacher of mine in USC once said, and I quote, we should study for life. Let me append to that just a little whiff of antiseptic reality; since life is transient, fleeting, and temporary, we should not be limited only within the gates of an architecturally fabricated institution. Learning is everywhere, inquire a bit more.

Self-sufficiency and independence, two socially-aggrandized and encouraged way of living. Two idealistically extolled attributes. Ironically, both are non-existent. Why do I daresay so? Let me breakdown and dissect each first. Let me start with the former, self-sufficiency. If you tautologically expound on what that means, it just basically means being sufficient with only yourself. When are we ever sufficient using only ourselves? We need people, and I cannot stress that out as strong as I am stressing it right now. We are connected to everybody else in this god-forsaken, half-barren-half-fertile world. Have you ever heard of the “6-degress of separation” concept? If you haven’t, let me gladly introduce it to you (assuming people do read this forsaken blog of slothful conceit). It basically means that we are separated to anybody in this world with only 6 different people. In between you and anybody you think you don’t know, but you idolized, are only 6 people. Huge world, but everybody is suffering from claustrophobia. What I want to blatantly blurt out is that we NEED people. Self-sufficiency is a mysteriously, sycophantic, ever-chased but never attained characteristic. That goes out to independence also. As Morrie said, “Whatever is wrong with being dependent?” We depend on something, and since we have an adequate provenance of the thing we depend on, we obliviously take it for granted. Independent people (as they categorized themselves) just have that enough source of the thing they depend.

Society labels independence as being someone who can live away from one’s family. I don’t call that independence, I call that desultory. But if you put this ideation within the spectrum of culture, you immediately spot the difference in beliefs. As a Filipino, generally part of the eastern region of the capitalistic world, we are a collectivistic culture. We rely so much on relationships that we tend to put ourselves and label ourselves closely resembling the way society puts us and labels us. We are slaves of rumors and hearsays! It’s always better to be the best of both worlds. And I don’t mean that to be fairytale-ish. We can always have the better of two worlds. Let no one persuade you otherwise.

A squeak on the door followed by the clanging of chimes suddenly ended my nomadic traipsing. I’m a maundering vagabond. I remembered when I was lost in my walking home from a strenuous day in school. It was a silent night where only the complains of stressed-out vehicles intermittently occurs. With every step heavy, and every sway of my arms affecting my gait, I conversely inquired to myself: do we know when we have changed or do we remain oblivious until someone smacks that fact right into our heedless faces? As we know change is constant. Change is the only thing governing everything in this conglomerate of a world. If you try to refute such assertion, then I’ll rebut by saying that someday you are going to be changing your refutation. I’ll leave the answer to that question on my next entry. I’m in a hurry and I don’t want to be putting any less of a half-baked entry. Not that my entries are perfectly baked, I’m not a good baker, and I don’t even bake. These are just inefficacious tries on amusing and satisfying the wanderer side of me. For now, let me just wander for a while! =]