You all have my good friend Mark Cayanan to blame for this: Mark brought this up a week ago as a prospective text for one of his Lit classes in Ateneo, the manuscript that got me into my second UP National Writers Workshop circa when I turned twenty-five, the very same workshop where I met Mark himself.
It's called Brief Exercises In Youthful Blasphemy, which was what I used to call this blog during those years. It was a series of essays supposedly functioning as footnotey elaborations on Instructions For The Inclined, which was the front act essay. I elaborated on its creation in yet another essay called Dazzle Them With Brilliance / Baffle Them With Bullshit! which still earns quite a few visits in this site every once in a while.
This is the first time I (sort of) reread Brief Exercises. It's funny, reading over the shoulder of the younger me as he writes about some things that had already passed and a few that was still over a few hills in the horizon. My twenty-four-going-on-twenty-five-year-old life was in progress, with all the relevant issues and whatnot. It's interesting how I seem to have fulfilled quite a few promises made in the essay, how some things measured up to what I had in mind, how I've failed in bits of it, how I've surpassed a few to get from there to here. Life takes its time to happen.
I wrote this at around November 2006 after a year-long hiatus from writerly community stuff, and felt I was being too literarily idle. I made a promise to myself that I had to do something substantial for my twenty-fifth year, and if it didn't succeed, I'd stop pursuing the Writing Thing and maybe take up Computer Science or something just as useful for the Philippines at large. It's March 2010 and I'm still writing.
I am presenting this essay untouched. Like much young adult autobio, it starts rather abruptly in the middle, and finishes just as abruptly, life lying suspended in the pages, in between, towards the start and the end. Lotsa stuff happened between Brief Exercises' final "?" and this blog entry's initial "You." I want to send my twenty-four-going-on-twenty-five-year-old self a few of my PDFs (especially the new one!) and tell him, "Hope you're not too fucken disappointed, man." My twenty-four-going-on-twenty-five-year-old self would have rapidly reliably replied "Fuck you, fatso!"
It's called Brief Exercises In Youthful Blasphemy, which was what I used to call this blog during those years. It was a series of essays supposedly functioning as footnotey elaborations on Instructions For The Inclined, which was the front act essay. I elaborated on its creation in yet another essay called Dazzle Them With Brilliance / Baffle Them With Bullshit! which still earns quite a few visits in this site every once in a while.
This is the first time I (sort of) reread Brief Exercises. It's funny, reading over the shoulder of the younger me as he writes about some things that had already passed and a few that was still over a few hills in the horizon. My twenty-four-going-on-twenty-five-year-old life was in progress, with all the relevant issues and whatnot. It's interesting how I seem to have fulfilled quite a few promises made in the essay, how some things measured up to what I had in mind, how I've failed in bits of it, how I've surpassed a few to get from there to here. Life takes its time to happen.
I wrote this at around November 2006 after a year-long hiatus from writerly community stuff, and felt I was being too literarily idle. I made a promise to myself that I had to do something substantial for my twenty-fifth year, and if it didn't succeed, I'd stop pursuing the Writing Thing and maybe take up Computer Science or something just as useful for the Philippines at large. It's March 2010 and I'm still writing.
I am presenting this essay untouched. Like much young adult autobio, it starts rather abruptly in the middle, and finishes just as abruptly, life lying suspended in the pages, in between, towards the start and the end. Lotsa stuff happened between Brief Exercises' final "?" and this blog entry's initial "You." I want to send my twenty-four-going-on-twenty-five-year-old self a few of my PDFs (especially the new one!) and tell him, "Hope you're not too fucken disappointed, man." My twenty-four-going-on-twenty-five-year-old self would have rapidly reliably replied "Fuck you, fatso!"
0 comment(s) to... “(Bring Back The) Memories Of Our Dreams”
0 comments:
Post a Comment