Coffee and Bibingka Night

I sometimes hate that a person could only live just one life. I look around me sometimes and see lives I want to live and be able to try even for just a day. We were at this coffee house last night near Pmay’s house (wonderful coffee shop by the way… I mean, wow!) that feels so much like a hub for artists and the likes. There was this celebration when we came in and I have never seen so much talented people in the same room in my life. I can’t help thinking how great it probably is to have lived and grown up with these people all your life as I see a kid definitely younger than me play Metallica’s nothing Else Matters on an acoustic guitar. I can’t help wonder how I would have turned out playing out that life. To have art and the passion for it, to be amongst talented individuals feeding off inspiration to one another…

Anyway, after a few hours when the soft music ended, we trekked another coffee shop to pass time. It suddenly dawned on me how weird we are jumping from one coffee shop to the next. Anyway, on the way to Coffee Bean, we encountered a few groups of street kids, the kind that knocks on your windows trying to see you through the tinted glass to squeeze a bit of pity at you or sell you cheap garlands of Sampaguita. I thought how different this life is from what I was previously wondering about. How much more desperate it probably is. How it would be much more difficult to overcome and rise from. It is saddening to see how much of those kids are probably satisfied with so little not knowing how much more they could achieve or even dream of. The reality that most of them would probably grow up having lives no better than the ones they have at the moment: wandering rain-washed empty streets to coerce a bit of pity from strangers who mostly are too absorbed in their own lives to care. What would it be like to live their lives? Would I have been who I am now if I came from the same background? Would I be able to do better?

What really defines who we are or who we become? Is it something innate and genetic or is it something we acquire from the environment we are marinated in or our upbringing? Is hope, determination, imagination or even passion something we have since we’re born or is it something we grow up to and unconsciously learn?

Sometimes I try to imagine myself in lives enormously different from my own to try to work out how I would live it and manage it. I would always start to wonder if I would still be myself if I was in a different life. That’s one of the allure of literature for me, living someone else’s life in someone else’s head for a brief period to escape your own life which seems to pale in comparison and yet still be even more difficult to handle. But then, I am not really keen on losing who I am at the moment. It’s like something I have finally accepted and swallowed and forced to like that parting with it seems to put all that effort to waste.

Somehow, I like myself now. Admittedly, I still have a lot more to learn and much more growing up to do, I think I would be able to get it.

Doesn’t mean though that I don’t harbor unending frustrations… but I am also a master of procrastination which is funny because a lot of people who partially know me think I’m disciplined and all. At the beginning of this year I bought a guitar with my friend Xian after being inspired of an anime series and his own story of how he became so good at playing the thing. I told myself I’d teach myself to play and now, as the year closes, I probably know just three chords and just one song that I still can’t play well enough. I bought a sketch pad a few weeks back in an effort to learn to draw. It now contains a page of useless and undecipherable doodles that even my four year old nephew is capable of doing. I feel so pathetic at times it seems so darkly humorous.

Anyway, after all is said and done, people at the office loved the left over bibingka from Galleria Estrada which is the sole reason everything in my bag smells strangely sweet. I’m overdosing on caffeine as I let the time I could never bring back fly on.