It’s been such a long time since my last update. I just can’t seem to find the time and energy to write about the things frothing in my brain. I do want to babble about how Godforsaken out country seem to have become, disgusting and poor journalistic taste that most TV news display nowadays, the storm Frank and why Sulpicio is still operating in spite the fact that they killed more lives than the 9-11 tragedy, office blabs, my dog’s eye surgery..but maybe some other time. I do not really want to bore y’all.

So instead let me focus on some very happy news.

Early last month, I bought Nooki, a Sony Cybershot DSC-H3 camera. To say that I’ve wanted this for a long time is an understatement–I’ve wanted to try my hand at photography ever since I first read Robert James Waller’s Bridges of Madison County, and I was just a high school sophomore then. I’ve never had the budget for a camera of my own, so I’ve had to make do with my Sony Ericsson K750i phonecam.

Thanks to my boyfriend and his mom, tita Love, I was able to get Nooki. And I’ve been a happy shutterbug ever since. Though i can’t say much about my skills in photography (or lack thereof), I can definitely say that I’m happy getting to know Nooki. Made me want to travel more, if I may add.

Also thanks to Ely, who has been housing this blog, for helping me set up SnapBites. As of this writing, it only has four pictures, and nothing at all spectacular. Comments and (constructive) criticisms are very much welcome–hey, a noob needs as much help as she could get, right? Right.

So, it’s yet another blessing for me. Didn’t I say that 2008 seems to be a good year for me?

I’ve said before that I believe in soulmates, and I know that my bestfriend is one of mine. Our friendship is not necessarily long, but I’ve never met any other friend who could understand me as well as she could. We share the same beliefs, values, and even our experiences have some level of similarities. She’s my Christina Yang, my Serena van der Woodsen (because I fancy myself as Meredith and Blair, ha-ha). We think alike so much that most of the time, we don’t need to tell each other what we’re thinking. We just know.

There are people that you grow up with, and there are people that you grow with. And while everyone grows up with someone else, it’s not as easy to find people you can really grow with. And I grew with her. She understood the inexplicable (and terribly stupid) way I have of always taking the backseat in my past relationships, because she’s the same way. We share a love for kids, and we make decisions out of our emotions. We moaned about professors, and problems both petty and grave. We witnessed one another go through a slew of relationships both serious and not, in pursuit of someone we can share the thing we’ve always wanted–a whole and happy family.

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I was once a very prolific blogger. I was the blog-every-teensy-detail-of-my-life, oversharing kind of blogger. While I must admit that what I write these days, mundane as they may be, definitely surpass the blabs I wrote during my prolific-blogger days, it’s still pathetic that I’m down to one blog entry per month when I used to put up an entry every day.

The problem with blogging is that you can never tell who exactly may be reading your thoughts. I’ve since come to learn that there are some things that are too trivial to be worth the bother–and there are just some things that are too deep, too special, too meaningful to share. And since my life has been full of semi-trivial and overly special, uh, life events lately, then where does that leave my blog? In a corner of the cyberworld rotting and developing its own mini-ecosystem, I suppose.

Anyway, let me just share a few things that I’ve been thinking of.

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Odds and ends from my 22nd year, which is rapidly coming to a close.

JOBS
I have to confess that of the two jobs I decided to take, money has been a big factor. And that is not something I am ashamed of. When you have responsibilities apart from yourself, you cannot, unfortunately, thoroughly dismiss The Money Factor when taking jobs. But God has a way of teaching us things. I sometimes think that even though there are gazillions of people with different personalities, He knows each of us like the back of His hand. He knew I will never listen to lectures, and theories, and well-meaning yet tiring sermons. He knew that the only way I will learn is by experiencing it myself, and when I didn’t get it the first time, He sent another lesson-slash-experience. And now I know, satisfaction in a job is something that money (although I do not overlook its importance entirely) can’t buy.

WRITING
The only time I can remember myself actually liking being a (pseudo) journalist was during my internship with the Philippine Graphic. I liked my bosses and I was liked as well, and they helped me get my first byline. The Graphic newsroom was not as exciting (or torturous, depending on how you’ll look at it) as it would probably have been had I worked for news daily, but just the idea of being involved in producing in a respected news magazine was enough to keep me on my toes. I loved working there and that job is still a (distant) possibility.

But.. the rest of the time, I hated writing or worse, I was indifferent to it. I took up journalism for the simple reason that I suck worse than rotten eggs at Math, and I am rather good in English. Looking back, at the time I can’t imagine choosing anything else. Writing is something that comes to me as naturally as breathing, what with my nose consistently stuck in books for as long as I could remember. But writing is also tantamount to poverty, at least as far as I can see. And with someone who is not loaded with money in the first place, that requires major consideration.

But.. right now I really can’t imagine doing anything else. Nothing else so far has caused the kind of satisfaction that seeing a minimally-edited copy gives me. And thanks to our gorgeous and intellectually superior (ahem*raise*ahem) mentors, I learn things that my four-year course in journalism never taught me. Nothing else came close to the exhilaration that my first-ever published article gave, and I have finally accepted that I’m stuck with writing, and writing’s stuck with me.

TRUST
There are people you can trust with everything, there are people you can trust with some things, there are people you trust in the meantime, and there are people you can’t trust at all. I’ve been lucky to know at least one or two of these kinds of people, because I can now differentiate one from the other. I have a few of the first kind, and those are the people I keep close–literally and figuratively. The rest, I can more or less do without. I have learned that those people are just clutter, or sources of temporary fascination (it is always entertaining to watch these people). I don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to discern which type a person falls under. Often, I can tell with a single glance.

FORGIVENESS
There are people that you forgive because you must, there are people you forgive because you want to. Also, there are people you forgive because you need to.

But there are some people, contrary to what others might say, you have no obligation to even try.

In that gray place between half-sleep, half-waking, I heard ABS-CBN’s The Correspondent doing a documentary about Mariannet Amper’s controversial and alleged suicide. There must be something in that state of mind (half sleepiness, I mean) that makes you retain certain information. I haven’t stopped thinking about her since.

Oddly, I felt like the way I felt when I was reading Jeffrey Eugenide’s The Virgin Suicides.

Mariannet somehow reminded me of Cecilia, the youngest of the Lisbon sisters and the first of the girls to commit suicide. When Cecilia was rushed into a hospital after her first suicide attempt, a doctor asked her “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets. ” and Cecilia replied “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl”.

Apparently, her family’s poverty drove the 11-year-old girl to wrap a swathe of nylon rope around her neck and to exit the world in a noose. When the news about Mariannet’s suicide first broke out, the immediate reaction is one of shock and disbelief. I told myself that there must be something else wrong. An 11-year-old girl is simply too young to feel that she has no other way out–something is terribly disturbing in that picture. Even more disturbing than the fact that her family laid out her diary (her diary!!!) for all the world to see. That they let the press go open season and vulture-gobbled her memory. And now she would be known forever as the girl who committed suicide. They will never know what she was when she lived, but only how she chose to die.

Even in death, that little girl is continually soul-raped.

When the Lisbon sisters were buried, their deaths were registered as an accident. The town priest told them (quote not verbatim) “Suicide has to be an intent. It’s hard to know what those girls were really trying to do.”

It would be too presumptuous to declare that we know how she felt, that she ought not to have given up so quickly. Just like I felt when I was reading the Virgin Suicides, we would never know what truly went on inside her brain. But poverty is something I, and a lot of people, can relate to. How it sneaks up to a person and like a petty thief, snatches away your childhood before you’re old enough to fight back. How it could make you age faster than your years, how it makes you feel helpless and alone. Trapped.

And perhaps it is in this tiny acre of common ground, I find reason to send up a prayer for that little soul. They say that people who commit suicide will never get to heaven.

But I like to think otherwise. Perhaps she’s right there, right now, riding the bicycle she never had, her soul now light and free.