A bad dream.

“We’ll take up where we left off, Esther,” she had said, with her sweet, martyr’s smile. “Well act as if all this were a bad dream.”

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

A bad dream.

I remembered everything.

I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco’s diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon’s wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull. Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them.

But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

Just finished reading The Bell Jar written by the astonishingly depressed poet Sylvia Plath. Raw, honest and vulnerable writing from a soul consumed by insecurity and self-doubt. I think Esther spent way too much time inside her head, and maybe that’s why I emotionally connected with her. But I just wish she gave the world a chance.

I did get bits and pieces as to why she considered the world a very bad dream. Maybe it was the early passing of her father, her ambiguous love affair with Buddy, or the superficiality of the fashion magazine world. But I didn’t fully comprehend the reason for her sadness. I believe it was meant to be that way. I can never totally understand where she was coming from. It’s the same with anyone’s state of being inside their own bell jars. Apart from ourselves, no one else will get it.

But then again, who am I to even just get a glimpse of her profound sadness? I live in the future.

The timeliness of reading this novel didn’t also harm my appreciation of it. To twentysomethings who feel isolated in a city of a thousand dwellers, this will be a good read. The only thing to look out for is that it could leave you as melancholic as the tone of the storytelling.
 
 

Version 2.2

I didn’t sleep today because I just rolled out a happier, colorful new web design for The Bayonologues! I don’t know if it is considered a legit web design because it’s basic HTML coding but let’s just leave it at that. The first time I experimented on HTML was way back in high school when I had a blogspot site. There was this site called Blogskins (I think it’s still running as of to date) that provided bloggers ready-made layouts. Those shiny new things fascinated me. They were like a piece of art to my untrained eyes. It was a really cool thing back then. It was perfect timing that I was getting the hang of a used-to-be unfamiliar software called Photoshop (I got into it in the first place because I was curious about airbrushing) during that time so I figured why not learn how to tweak HTML and incorporate my own designs into the codes.

It was probably the first time I got myself into doing something creative and artistic, not just for school requirement purposes (because we had those “art classes” in high school, emphasis on the quotation marks) but for an expression of myself. It was then did I realize that making ideas happen delighted me with a certain joy that only a creative process can provide. So yes, that’s it for my quickie history on my amateur web designing skills. B-)

Original theme by Doinwork.

Raymond Lee said it all

“Masisisi natin [ang mga tao] for mindlessly tuning in to mind-numbing TV shows day in and day out, and in general for not putting a value on critical thinking, pero sila ba ang gumagawa ng quarter-baked (hindi lang half), regressive, and regurgitated romcoms? Sila ba ang nagdecide na hanggang d’yan lang ang kaya ng taste at comprehension ng Pinoy movie audience?”

“Maraming natatawa na sinisisi pa rin nila ang video piracy sa paglubog ng industriya kesa sarili nilang kapalpakan. Pero in a twisted way they are right. Piracy has liberated people from the tyranny of their mediocrity. There’s access to good films that used to be out of reach to everyone but the elite. So in a way mas tumaray na ang taste ng movie audience.”

—

Hear, hear Mister Lee. 

(Source: philstar.com)