And I’m not feeling up to creating an original, year ender/beginner post, I’m following Riz‘ footsteps and I just collated snippets from previous blog entries (from my Tabulas, Multiply, and this). And anyhow, I can’t dream up a better year-capper anyway. So, here we go:
Mitch Albom’s second novel tells the bittersweet tale of a man named Eddie, a maintenance person for an amusement park where he spent his whole life doing seemingly mundane things. Eddie feels that his repetitive days and routines were the “be all and end all” of his existence, and therefore saw himself and his life as a waste. When one of the amusement park rides threatens to kill a little girl, Eddie dived and saved her–sacrificing his life in the process. He then wakes up in heaven to find that his life and death on Earth is not really the end–in fact, it was only the beginning.
The first sentence of The Five People You Meet in Heaven grabs you by the neck, breathes into you and leaves you gasping and holding on until the novel’s very last word. It shows how nothing in life is an accident, how souls are interconnected, how lives–even those of strangers–intersect with yours. It takes you to a world where no one else quite imagined–a heaven that has many steps, a world where you get to “make sense of your yesterdays”–and what more of a heaven could you get than the opportunity to have peace, to understand why you lived the way you did, make amends, and learn to forgive?
Gripping, touching, and eloquent, the novel has gained plenty of praises and good reviews and has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide and is now the most successful hardcover first novel ever (via Albom.com).
“A powerful book” -Time Magazine
“Transcendent” -Atlanta Constitution
“A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers” -The New York Times
On a more personal note: Simply put, I cried like a baby while reading the book. And thanks to Ronan, my secret Santa, who gave me the copy.
On an even more personal note: My heaven has changed. Now, it would be in a field in this old familiar place, where I used to spend my evenings with a certain dimpled boy, lying on the grass, talking about tomorrows, and waiting for stars to die.
One of the reasons why I like Christmas is because it comes barging in and makes its presence felt with a bang: Christmas carols are suddenly “in” again, and bright Christmas lights blink at me from some stranger’s house, each blink like a friendly little wave peeking from an inky black night.
Another year has gone by and I can’t believe I’ve been working for almost a couple of years now. It’s tiring to be an adult, and it’s pathetic that I still haven’t made that FULL transition from a kid to a full-pledged woman–hence, the frequent bouts of sickeningly existential Quarter Life Crises. It makes me feel old when I no longer receive gifts and moolah from fond aunts and uncles and ninongs and ninangs, instead I am now expected to give gifts and moolah to the, er, younger generation. And nothing makes me feel older than the fact that one of my cousins, whose diaper I used to change, is now big enough to carry me.
Years and years of failed attempts made me lack faith in resolutions, particularly the ones I made around the New Year. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to change and improve, the way that life is made in a circular manner–where everything is just a cycle–render resolutions, at least in my case, useless. And so instead of resolutions, I have created a list of goals, “baby steps” as we dubbed, that should serve as the star, or the light at the end of the tunnel, or whatever it is that people call them:
Read the rest of this entry »
Tell me, if your company’s Christmas party had an “MTV Red Carpet” theme and super raffle prizes (laptops and HDTV among others), and you have a beautiful venue and great food and everyone dressed to the nines, how could anybody fail to have fun?
Photo taken by Nan
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.
Hey, my name is Camz. Welcome to the loo.
A friend got me started blogging way back in 2003, and that blog I kept for almost 4 years. It saw me through sucky professors, suckier boyfriends, and practically my whole college life is tabulated in that little space–a big reason why I stayed there for so long, even after seeing better and nicer blog platforms. I’m a pack rat, even online, you see.
I no longer blog there, and I’ve since moved to a better, but temporary blog, until I got this. Many thanks to a generous officemate, who let me host this domain for free. This was never meant to be anything else other than a personal blog, so what you see at my old ones? It’s basically the same crap that I will put up here 
Except, perhaps, told in a hopefully classier way.
We all need to grow sometimes. I thus welcome myself to my new blog. Yay!
P.S. Link love, pretty please?
