The gift

On really bad days, when the bawling gets really intolerable, and when its mom does her best to worsen the crying situation, I imagine handing her a kitchen knife or just about any kind of knife we have in our modest kitchen and suggest that she initiate the end of all of our troubles. Hers, primarily. It’s a scene straight out of a tele-serye that nobody wants to watch. Some scenes I’m just glad I never tried to act out in real life. It’s a little too ambitious to want to orchestrate this particular act so most of the time I just grit my teeth and, what else, roll my eyes in frustration.

At this point in its life, I am 90% certain that our house baby was born to fan an already incorrigible flame. I’ve never viewed the pregnancy, the series of resentment episodes that led to the birthing of our screaming creature, as something of a blessing. Because people automatically assume that a baby, whether intentionally made or not, is nothing but a Gift, doesn’t make it any easier to see it as nothing more than an added curse to an already insufferably accursed home/family. Some gift. Given my take on things, this is hardly surprising, even as I just recently vowed to think less evilly.

I’m also 90% sure that it’s not going to see me as a family member but as a hurdle, a sorry excuse of an uncle that would do everything in his power to make its life unbearable. But a funner thing to bet on is that like its mother, it will grow resentful of absolutely nothing in particular but it will choose to be rebellious anyway. It will make it its life mission to screw the rules which were never strictly laid out for him to begin with. But even as there are no set of rules made, it will find a way to make us wish we had made one so that it can prove its being a gift. Just we wait, and when it’s capable, it will graciously give us all the gift of headache. What it wouldn’t know is that no other person would understand more than its sorry-looking uncle its need to vent. But I intend to be out of its life before it gets within my orbit of possibly bad influence. I can at least do it a favor by doing that.

Meanwhile, our gift amuses itself by destroying everything in sight. It’s only a matter of time before it sets the house on fire. No one else will be amused except maybe for its mother. No one will be able to bear more screaming so I’ll restrain myself and try not to hand everyone a knife and suggest the inevitable. It’s too early to rouse yet another homicidal fantasy. I swear that if it could just stop screaming for one day, I’ll gladly become the childless uncle who spoils the evil nephew. For everybody’s sake, I hope that doesn’t happen. We might both set the house on fire.

Pretender

Like the average pretentious moviegoer, I usually insist on seeing Oscar nominated films as if I’m preparing to have random discussions about them with a fellow pretentious moviegoer first chance I get. I don’t jump into any opportunity to discuss anything and I am almost incapable of contributing anything useful to any conversation which is why I mouth words most of the time. So no, I don’t choose to see Oscar movies because I want to discuss them. It’s that there are less people who want to see them.

Juno is probably the most appropriate movie for me to see this Oscar season because it’s very cute. I think the writing has a lot to answer for whatever negative was said about it but it’s too charming to be dismissed as anything as less than excellent. It is filled with dialogues that are way too witty for a movie that takes on a slightly sensitive, but ultimately comic topic as teen pregnancy, and every character in Juno sounds like someone off of an Oscar Wilde creation. But the upshot is that it’s funny and you really wouldn’t mind hearing JK Simmons, Allison Janney and Ellen Page throwing off these lines that occasionally felt like material for a sitcom, because they spit them out well. Jennifer Garner, who did not make much of a splash here, almost equaled Juno, cuteness-wise. And I’ll say this for the soundtrack: I’ll buy it.

I’ve never cared much for the artsy, Oscar nominated films such as In the Bedroom, Traffic, Gosford Park, The Pianist, etc., movies that are ostensibly smart, but I may have given the impression that I loved them simply because I was able to follow the stories. I was such a pretentious twit. I don’t scramble now to see There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, and all the other Oscar nominees and I’m sure they’re all great but their distributors are hoes who don’t trust people enough to have the good sense to screen them on more theaters so that more people can pretend to want to see them. But there’s no way I would have missed Juno. And I don’t pretend to like it. Even if it is Oscar nominated. And that’s more than I can say for the rest of the nominees.

Drop

My head sometimes bleeds and my hair, certain parts of it occasionally gets streaked with blood and every time it does, it looks mighty. It doesn’t hurt and the blood doesn’t smell although it looks like it should smell because there’s green and some yellow, but it doesn’t, so there’s no cause for alarm. If I were to be worried about something, it would have to be my growing incompetence at my job which I adore (the job, not the incompetence). Without it, I am quite the garbage. And I know it’s boring to hear someone self-deprecate all the time but that’s all I have, the reflex to flagellate myself.

I was supposed to have Moved On from something. I can’t or I wouldn’t. Technology is really a bitch. Memory sucks. Bitch, sucks, that’s almost my entire vocabulary. If it’s any consolation, I found out about an ex’s vomiting. And since I attended mass yesterday, I won’t be hoping for the vomiting to be a symptom of what ought to be a terminal illness like herpes or impotence, which I realize are not enough to kill but which are likely to make one want to kill one’s self. No, I wouldn’t hope for that. I should attempt to just really move on, harder, but having to do that sucks. It’s a bitch.

In 1995 or 1996, my brother and I decided not to be on speaking terms. This we had to endure in our tiny little house where we share one tiny little bedroom. This was when he called me a fag, and I had to punish him severely by pulling on his hair very hard (sabunot), which I thought was the manly thing to do. Obviously, he’d been very, very wrong in his estimation of his tough little brother. Years before, I’d planned to poison him because he just wasn’t such a good brother to me, and you’d probably think I’m the one who deserves to be poisoned, and ok, I might be deserving of that too. And I’m so relieved that I didn’t, and I suppose I should be for deciding not to murder my brother then. Still not crazy about him now and thank God for passive-aggression.