Adventures in Theoretical Physics

You would not believe the things that make me happy. Not the least of which is the brother telling me maybe you should start a blog. I am humbled. Truly blogs are the landmark of arrival.

King said something about size before that never really left my mind. Listening to Greene's Hidden Realities (and perhaps the inappropriate amount of time I spend watching and re-watching Fringe) sometimes brings tears to my eyes. I'm not sure why. There's something majestic about the laws of the universe when seen in the scope of human experience--and by that I don't mean the empirical.

For instance, I believe that pain and joy both summon energy, and therefore mass, not from nowhere, not really, but somewhere, and it doesn't matter where, only that they exist when we say they do. And by "say," I don't mean "say" inasmuch as I mean to "think up," or "give attention to," or "summon from the cosmos."

What of implications? I have them all somewhere inside me, but if forced, I might say that love does breathe life into everything, and that love is space, the space within space, the great animator. And that there is good in pain and in fear, because you know you are creator, you are not here simply to take up precious space. You can feel, you can inspire alternative realities, you can choose to be where you want to be.

It does make me cringe, sometimes. Emotions have no place in the sciences, but I'm the kind of girl who doesn't believe in walls, and separation and division and in not using the principles of one to apply to another.

I can't help writing about myself. I made a deal before I slept last night, to take away someone's pain in exchange for my life. I don't know what it means that I'm alive today, that we're both alive. The truth is you can say both there is no God and that there is a merciful God. And both apply, really and truly, and this makes being here all the more fascinating.

Today I will do secular, domestic things, but that doesn't mean my head's not in the clouds.

I Swear This Is Positive

I just got off of a long, debilitating train ride, the kind that sucks people in. In this tiny train, life was slow, but it never stood still, and the piped-in music from the other cars were jarring and overly loquacious, a hundred different angry people speaking at the same time. In this tiny train, you ever really only have one thought. No one loves you, even if they say they do.

They make you wear shades in there, so that everything you can see outside radiates with a blood-red sheen, so that everything's depressing and unfair. The air is dry inside, and you feel eternally dirty, and there are books scattered all over the place, but they are books without endings, page sixty-fours through page one-eightys.

But this post is really about the trip back. If the slow train brought you to a wrong place, the sad truth is you can't just get off and then get on the fast one. Things happen to you, and the things that happen to you don't really go away. The shades for instance. Trade that in too fast for a new one and your eyes will bleed. Understand your eyes, they haven't been seeing the light for some time.

But that's okay. The point is you are making that trip. The point is there are hundreds of you. The point is there are thousands now, who are already there.

So relax. You'll get there. We can run. Let me join you.

Bawal Daw Huminga

Don't know who's making the rules around here. Things, quite suddenly, feel right.

First Month Down

Well, everything worth saying has been written down anyways, so no point rewording reworded recipes for success from self-help books.

But this, what it means to me, one month down and the amazing thing is things have been going great at work and while I am frightfully honored at being part of this circus I still feel strangely inadequate.

I feel like Zohan. You should get that.

This is my landscape now: hands buried in the brown, murky waters and clean pebbles, looking out at the endless horizon knowing the way is hard but that my feet can take it.

I feel better now, whole. And red-hot unstoppable.

Six-Month Countdown Begins

You have no idea how hard I'm trying. I take pills to keep me happy, I jog, I run like crazy, I blast my ears with upbeat songs. But really all it takes is a blank and we're back where we started. I tried running away from it while jogging, pretending it were a monster chasing me to get me back to hell, but there it was just the same.

I really do want to be happy now. But not here. Not like this. Being boss-less is a sacred family tradition I'm all too willing to uphold. And I've invested so much, too much, to still be fucking sad at the end of the day.

And fuck you all hypocritical people who know too much, who say everything you feel is your own fault. I know it's my fault, stupid, I'm the one doing the feeling! But I hope to God you get ten times what it feels like to be sad. Because when someone is sad, you don't tell that person to shut it. You sit beside her and tell her everything's going to be okay.

Because we all know it is. And frankly it's just nice to be kind to each other along the way.

Sober Assessments

You can't beat the bell curve if you don't know where you are in it, so. It's not that we care, or should care, or that any other place is better than the other, but the point is in being somewhere, and then in the future being somewhere else. Progress is creation.

I'm working at a security company (not a securities company) as, essentially, a writer. I am turning thirty this year. I have not had a real dyadic/romantic relationship since birth, and people often wonder why that is so. I wonder, too, but it is what is, and there's no denying it. I am the younger of two, little sister to Bartender Extraordinaire, and we are both smart in different ways which is why B.E. lives for teaching, businesses and projects, and I live the sheltered life of 9-to-6ers.

We share the garage with a dog named Barack, who is one part Spitz, one part Chow-chow. I am tall, slightly overweight by my standards (although several people can still attest to my beguiling slenderness), and I have shoulders suggesting latent masculinity. I had my appendix removed in third year high school, and I am very allergic to dust.

Like you, I have dreams. These dreams don't matter in my sober assessment of myself, because, really, unless they're out there, they're not out there, but this only speaks of my lack of faith in my ability to follow through. In the end this is all that matters, not my skin color or my height, not my friends or my family or the people I work with and see everyday. Faith in the universe, but I am getting ahead of myself: I am a statistic, located in Marikina, breathing the same polluted air.

What makes me different from you is the illusion that I am not you. That I am separate, that we are separate, that we are different inside. I don't know whether it's true or not, I'm just calling it as I see it. I am left-handed, I write like a madman, I sometimes start stories I never end. To date I have published stories somewhere out there, but not in literary journals or in places where it would matter: a poem about my mother, a short story about an awkward proposal.

It's the ones I like that haven't seen the light of day: a story about a secret race of Watchers and a dormitory situated on top of an ancient house of evil, a story about a boy who falls into a river and acquires the power to recognize nodes: decision points in people's lives where new alternative realities are created, a story about a teenage boy in the middle of a lawless desert community who tries to solve the murder of a waitress found skewered in the outskirts of town.

My parents support this. I like unlined notebooks. I started liking metal ballpoint pens. I like bacon and SPAM and raw fish. I like computers and trees and wide open skies. I am you and I am not you. Like you, my ultimate dream is to be loved unconditionally, but like you I could not help myself when I instead look for love in pain, in situations I've called impossible, in needing and wanting and wanting so bad. We are human like that. But we are also wrong.

I do not know why we are wrong, only that we must be wrong because loving wrongly hurts. And we only hurt when we're in a bad place. Why stay in a bad place? We are as capable as the others to not be in a bad place: stories have told us, facts have told us. People overcome the strangest obstacles in the strangest ways.

We are ID numbers, names on lists, a nationality, a citizen, a patient, a customer, a face on a bus. But we are also energy fields, objects of affection, reasons for living, reasons for dying. We are the greatest entities in the known universe. Why must we feel so sad?

Hello, Fellow Prisoners

We are at war with ourselves everyday. We stare at these walls like they will eat us alive, like they are eating us alive, gnawing at our flesh and feasting on our blood. We feel compelled to fight--how else do you get rid of that almost suffocating restlessness? Move, keep moving, keep punching the walls.

Me and some of the guys, we crept near a corner, the one with a tiny hole. We're not sure how we found the place, you never really look back and check why you are where you are unless you have time or you're bleeding or you're lost. Beyond the hole there were moving creatures, creatures made of light, creatures moving so fast so we couldn't keep up with them, creatures making sounds, sprightly, tinkling sounds, like tiny bells. They were saying, or singing, something, but not one of us understood their language.

You grow tired, sometimes, of clawing out. So sometimes you close your eyes and think of nothing. And in those tiny moments, nothing more than milliseconds, really, the walls disappear.

They do. They become like cotton candy, and then cigarette smoke, and then they disappear. Sometimes when I feel they've disappeared I'd jump from where I was standing and make a break for it, but then the wall is still there and it hurts when you've launched yourself bodily into anything.

I have a sneaking suspicion that that's what the creatures have been saying all along. So I listen to them. I become older, and edgier, and my skin is drier than the prison floor.

When you listen real hard you can figure them out. Really simple things that can rock your world. "The universe is at your side," they say. Or, "Love is the point," and such. I say this to my fellow prisoners and they look at me with pity. I began to feel alienated here. Our main business, to escape from these walls, has become a thing that became less convincing the more time I spend noticing other things.

Like the smell of unwashed hair: unbecoming and old, but human. Like tiny tongues of moss colored green and black, ugly, yes, but so bare-facedly biological you just have to have some respect for them--organisms from a million years back, still alive here in our tiny hell holes. Or my fellow prisoners' light banters suggesting hints of a friendship, a kinship, we are here together and we will keep trying to break free.

And every day, since I started noticing things, the walls start to waver. Not for everyone though, which is why I sometimes think I am making this all up. The walls waver and become pliable, a billion little vertical strings you can part somewhere and climb into and out of.

There was one day, in the middle of a specially difficult day, when I actually broke free. It was beautiful.