I Speak No Longer

One day in the middle of September, I decided to stop speaking.  It was not an idea I just woke up with.  It wasn’t like a decision to go to the mall and get some pancakes.  This was something I had been meaning to do for quite some time now.  And now, I have been at it for quite some time as well.

People have asked me why I suddenly no longer speak, but since I cannot respond, they are mostly left guessing.  A sore throat?  A dare?  A girl?  An accident?

I’d love to explain to them that the point of my Silence is to get over the need to constantly explain myself.

I did have a press-released reason – addressed to my truest friends and family – the day before I started:  “To honor those who I have hurt by speaking too much – especially those who no longer find it in their hearts to speak to me.”

That was the half of it.  The truth was that I had intended this to be one part Self-Flagellation (Retreat) and one part Social Experiment (Exploration).  A long-lost friend of mine called me out for a sinister third part.

“See, silence can be used as emotional blackmail... to get someone on the defensive... to buy you time either to regroup your defences, or plan a better attack... to find your own special wallow-in-misery place inside your head and/or heart...”

In tagalog, she meant to ask “nagtatampo ka lang ba?” (“Is this just a tantrum?”)

Yes.  Touche.  I may have started out that way, and I can admit it now, but as my days of Silence wore on, I stumbled into a pleasant surprise.  I had wandered off to wallow – to gather hate or force amnesia – but found myself in a place where the weight of my misery melted away.  Gone, along with all the foul words I have kept so close and used often for far too long.  Just two days into it, I was already feeling an extremely bearable lightness of being – and I felt like I had discovered the tip of an iceberg.

All three parts faded to the background as a fourth part surfaced:  Did I unwittingly purchase a ticket for a spiritual journey into a world that has been there the whole time, waiting for me to notice it?

Yes, and I notice it more and more each day.  With my mouth shut, other things opened up - eyes, ears, pores, mind, heart... I notice:

I am much nicer to everyone when I am Silent.  It’s actually very simple: it is hard for me to be nasty when I am not speaking.  My negative reactions are limited to my two middle fingers, so as long as I have a drink in one hand and a sandwich in the other, all I can do is smile.  Silence has taken away my ability to insult and complain, and I can no longer accidentally say the wrong thing when I am not saying anything.

Everyone is nicer to me when I am Silent.  Because my communication is pretty-much limited to a smile, people are not likely to be nasty to me either.  Whether I am perceived as a deaf-mute or just a lost foreigner, I have found that smiling and saying nothing gets me more slack.  (On a trip to my province, it backfired and got me a one-hundred-peso tricycle ride, but I only accepted that proposition because I was being nice!)

Silence allows me to be greater.  The obvious skill-upgrade is that I am an infinitely better listener now that I am not thinking about what to say when you are done talking.  I am no longer waiting for my turn to speak, so I am able to allow you to try to talk my ears off.

Since I did not want to be limited to being the smiling deaf-mute-lost-foreigner, I’ve had to come up with ways to communicate more efficiently – or rather, to communicate directly and briefly.  If I absolutely had to say something, I would have to write it down or look you in the eye to telepathically insert an idea into your head.  Both methods seem to work equally well.

That means two very important things: One, whoever I was communicating with had to come closer; and Two, whatever I wanted to say was limited by how much I wanted to scribble.  That meant there was no longer any room for my tirades.  Nobody would stand there and wait for me to scribble three notebook pages of what I thought about the way he did his job...and then read everything.  Whatever I had to say, it was reduced to only what was essential.  Only what had to be said.  I found that eight words or less usually did the trick.

Having someone physically closer meant we were more likely face-to-face, with plenty of now-necessary eye contact.

You have to understand:  I grew up in a house where people had a lazy habit I call “shouting through walls to communicate.”  Basically, instead of anybody leaving whatever room they were in, they would just shout and hope that whoever they were talking in the other room was listening.  A phone call would have been just as lazy (my mom uses the wireless phone to call our other landline to tell the maid to bring her a glass of water), but at least a phone call gives you some kind of guarantee that you are in fact communicating with somebody. 

In my silence, shouting through walls was no longer an option, and neither was calling the cellphone of my sister in the other room.  I had to physically move to be with the target of my communication.  It had become more personal.  It would be quite hard to ignore a six-foot tall mime standing next to you trying to tell you something.

My Silence allows others to speak.  My cousin insists on calling me on the phone despite knowing he will be doing all the talking.  Surprisingly, people get used to this condition sooner than anyone expected.  My cousin, my close friends, they all talk to me on and on as if nothing had changed.  This is either a testament to my Silence being more conducive for them to open up to, or I am just finally noticing how goddam much they really want to talk.

Silence allows me to leave my Ego at the door. I discovered – rather painfully at first – that the quieter I got, the more judgement I had to be defenceless against.  I can only sit still while a friend rips into me for living the life I’ve lived.  I could only sit still and be on the receiving end of a vicious judgmental assault where my entire personality was blamed for everything that went wrong.  It was all I could do to resist the urge to call time out and give my friend a piece of my mind strapped to five pounds of plastic explosive.

I can fight the urge to speak, but I do not want my silence to be a result of fighting the urge to speak.  If I am silent, it should be because I find no need to speak.  I am learning day by day that, contrary to everything my rational genius-level IQ tells me, people do not have to be corrected.  No matter how wrong I think they are (and goddammit, they all are!).  Silence, Ego!

Silence allows me to allow others to be greater.  Without my Ego running my mouth, I create significantly less opportunities for me to try to “be better than” everyone. 

I am the kind of guy who ALWAYS wants to win.  In the context of a conversation, “winning” is being the first guy who comes up with the answer to a question.  Winning is coming up with the wittiest retort or the perfect comeback or the funnier anecdote or the sharpest side-comment.  Winning is saying whatever it took to invalidate the other peoples’ ideas to make mine supreme. 

By not talking, I allow everyone else to come up with “winners” - I bite down hard on my lip as my mind screams “I thought of that a good five minutes before you said it!”  But they do not have to know that.  It’s surprisingly nice to let people win.

One of my saddest memories – one of those super rare things that I wish I could change – is the way I could never let my own wife win over me.  Whether it was a video game, a board game, a philosophical discussion, what to wear, or what route to take from Paranaque to Pasig, I always fought to win.  It makes me infinitely sad to realize that I had been trading the smile on her face for a notch on my belt.  I gave up all those opportunities to make her a winner!

Silence makes us all pay more attention.  I pay attention because I have no choice.  I am no longer planning my responses, so I can notice the situation better.  Also, when we communicate, I cannot pacify you with the non-committal “uh huh” – I must look at you, and you must look at me.  There is always that playful suspense when the person I am with wonders if I might actually suddenly speak.  While they wait, and when I do, I know they will be paying attention.

I notice the true source of noise.  The honking cars and revving engines are just a small part of the noise.  Most of the noise is chatter from people filling up the silences in their lives.  I dined with a few friends at a mall one time, and I was astounded at what I noticed:  If I recorded everything – every single word – of the conversation, and then accidentally deleted the recording, no one would miss it!  Every word was completely expendable!

And then there was the time I laughed at an anecdote and someone said “Huy, bakit ka tumatawa (Why are you laughing)?  Hindi ka kasali dito!  (You are not part of this!)”

Ah, my own mother!  Apparently, I was not considered part of a conversation if I did not contribute to it.  Apparently, listening is not acknowledged as a valid contribution!  What pathological talker invented this little social rule?!?  How many times have we been told to “Make some noise!” to be part of the community?

It is easier to be silent when there is much noise.  When the noise disappears, suddenly my mind is the only source of chatter.  In those moments I honestly struggle.  Alone, I might simply start talking to myself.

It is easier to be silent when I am with people who are not close to me.  When I am alone with people I know intimately, the urge to speak is at the maximum.  The irony is that these are the people I am most likely to hurt when I do break my silence.  They are the ones I have been most reckless with.

Silence is contagious.  I suspected this at the start, but I had no idea how true this was until the day my driver stopped speaking to me.  It was not because he was ignoring me, mind you, he was still very much communicating with me.  But instead of speaking, he has taken to typing messages on his beat-up Nokia 3310 and showing me what he wanted to say to me:

“w8 kita here, ok?”

And then as I get out of the car, he would show me his phone again:  “God Bless!”

The people I dine with have taken to falling silent as well – and not because they are tired of talking.  Whereas my driver is silent out of support and empathy, most people match my silence because they are comfortably (or unwillingly and uncomfortably?) quiet.  Finally, food is enjoyed the way it should be.  We eat mindfully.  Buddha would be proud of us.

Maybe I am helping people discover that Silence is not that bad a place to be in.  It is a place where nothing is being said because nothing needs to be said.  I cannot think of a better way to spend an evening than to sit across the love of my life and look into her eyes while we run our fingers along each others’ bodies...

Silence is just the beginning.  I need to be wary of my Ego.  It is constantly trying to creep into my silence and undermine its peace.  It starts by creating a wall between me and the rest of “The Fools Who Speak.”  It is telling me that I am the “Enlightened Silent One” and sneering at all the “Talkers” - This is NOT why I am Silent.  I am silent so that I can learn to accept things and take away my nasty impulses to correct people, to beat them, to win, to be heard, to be right...

One word from my Ego, and all this noise re-enters my life.

Perhaps Eddie Vedder said it best when he sang:  “Once divided nothing left to subtract. Some words when spoken can’t be taken back.”

For someone who no longer speaks, I still talk too fucking much.  I am still hemorrhaging words but at least now I am trying to bleed responsibly, and not all over your living room.

I have been asked how long I can keep this Silence up.  How much longer will I be on my “Silent Retreat”...?  I cannot properly answer that question, because I am no longer in retreat.

This silence is where I live now, I moved here.  I mean to dwell here.  I am not here visiting or punishing myself.  It is not a tourist attraction or a prison.

This has been a nice visit, but I must return home now.  Every once in a while I may take another “Speaking Retreat.”  We can talk again then.

See the day-to-day journal of my journey Into Greater Silence on http://ispeaknolonger.blogspot.com/

Without Further Ado

Why is it that the person who needs no introduction often takes the longest to introduce?  Seriously, if this person is so well known, why do we spend so much time reminding everyone what they are already supposed to know?

Perhaps we have awarded the mantle of “Needs No Introduction” much too lightly!  We have awarded it to CEO’s, authors, politicians, artists, and entertainers.  All great people in their own circles, to be sure, but someone is always bound to have never heard of these people.  So they do, in fact, still need introduction.

Jesus, Hitler, Michael Jackson.  I can’t think of anyone else right now, but next to these three, we should all just accept that we are nobodies – or at most, just a notch or two above nobody.

We require so much introduction, in fact, that we often spend our time with nothing else.  When I speak, I find that it is often just a continuing self-introduction:  “This is my name, these are my achievements, I have been there, and I have done that.  These are the other things on my list – things I am working on – more things I would like to achieve...”

“These are the people I’ve met:  people who, like myself, also need an introduction if you are to appreciate me in relation to them.  CEO’s, authors, politicians, artists, entertainers... This is how I think – and I hope you notice that I think like some of them...”

All this talking just to set up a thing called Credibility.  So that whatever it is I am preparing to actually talk about (when I am finally done talking about myself) can be believed.  So that whatever I say post-intro can be colored by my Preface – an interesting word to me because it feels like a conjunction of the words “prejudice” and “facade.” 

The Super Secret Law of Building Prejudice Towards my Facade:  The point of an introduction is to set up a system where one can be judged the way one wants to be judged – based on the criteria set, and not based on the actual essence of the words and actions.

When I refer to these introductions, I also like to use the word Preamble – to me, a conjunction of the words “pretentious” and “ramble.”

I used to go on stage to perform at open mics (as an emcee or stand-up comic) and musical events (as the frontman for a rock band).  I always knew full well that my time on that stage was very limited, but I still managed to waste most of that time with my preamble:  a rambling brief history of time, centered around myself, and addressed to a small uncaring group of complete strangers seated in darkness who only really want to have a drink without someone trying to make them laugh or sing along to melodies about love and loss that are completely unfamiliar and probably irrelevant to them anyway.

As you can see, I am quite good at speaking in run-on sentences.

These people I introduced myself to, they do not remember my name, much less what school I graduated in.  They do not remember the backstories of my songs.  I am pretty sure they do not remember a single joke.

And I am to blame, because I spent all that time preambling, the floor director waved me off the stage before I could get to the meat of my act.

In case it hasn’t occurred to you yet, I am waxing metaphorical.  I am actually referring to how we may be spending our lifetime.

Is it a lifetime of building and massaging my ego?  Is it a lifetime of laying down disclaimers before I do that special thing I was meant to (and really really want to) do?  Is it a lifetime of preparing to be perfect before I can be with that special somebody I deserve?

Like my stage routine, I need to cut out all my preambling so I can get to the doing and/of that special someone.  Like my stage routine, I have to adjust and do away with all the useless preambles in my life the things I say or do to that merely introduce what I am really trying to say or do.

“Pwede ba magtanong?” (“Can I ask you a question?”) is a good place to start cutting.  Variants of this sound similar: “I have something to say – hey, listen, can I tell you something? – I really want to tell you this, but you have to promise you won’t get mad...”

If I have a question, I will ask it.

Terms of Agreement are pointless if I will never disagree.  This is most popularly manifested in the End-User License Agreement (EULA) that pops up when I try to download or install new software - that stuff I scroll down through to get to the part where I can check the goddamned “I Agree” box.

I’d like to meet the guy who reads through these and says "you know what, NO, i don't agree!"

I did try to read through a EULA, but the second I started my eyes glazed over and in about two paragraphs I was thinking of the miserable Cleveland Cavaliers and why Lebron is a nitwit... There is probably a line in there somewhere that says “You must sacrifice your maternal grandmother to The Prince of Darkness” …but I will never find it. My maternal grandmother is old and wise, she will understand and forgive me.

So, I AGREE, let’s do this.

I am reminded of that part of the wedding ceremony where the Presiding Genius asks this question: “Do you accept this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?”  It’s like Windows always asking me if I am sure whenever I want to do something on my computer.

I may just be the kind of guy who would say “Hmm, you know what?  I do NOT.  I thought I did, but I picked up some disturbing grammatical errors in her marriage vows...”

But even if I did have a change of heart, I would not realize it at that moment, would I?  That kind of realization takes a long time – it has to be nurtured and buried so it can fester and eventually burst out in the form of a newly hired secretary with big boobs.  This kind of realization could take...weeks.

So, yes, I DO, let’s get on with it.

Now maybe this is just me, but have you ever been to a Sunday Mass and felt like you were at an open mic?  EVERYTHING leading up to the communion feels like a useless preamble.  Let’s face it, just like a company outing or a free seminar, people are there for the snacks and freebies. Everything else is just “stuff we have to sit through before we can partake.”  If you arrived at a mass and were handed the Body of Christ up front, would you stay till the end?

Bless me, forgive me, and let me go.

The Fastfood Counter Lady’s conditioned responses are not necessarily a useless preamble, but it does insert a lot of extra time between “ordering food” and “eating food.”  One, she always take a full second to respond.  I have to accept the laggy silences in our exchange like it was a phone call to Alaska.  Two, all they do is repeat everything I say any way.  They even interrupt me to repeat half of what I am trying to say before I can finish saying it.

I like to order everything exactly the first time out and not give them a chance to interrupt.  If they can just listen, I can guarantee that when I am done ordering there will be no further questions.

“I will have a cheeseburger meal, upsize the softdrink – a Pepsi – but keep the fries regular. In addition I’d like an order of spaghetti ala carte – not the meal, just the spaghetti.”

A pause, while the information travels to her brain.  And then, “Dine in?”

Wow.  I’m stumped.  I did not think she could ask that at a drive thru.

Onstage, I learned to shorten my self-introduction to “Hi, you will remember me as the tall guy with the goatie.”

But I often share the stage with another tall guy with facial hair – and he was more talented...so I went with “Hey, I’m Ron.”  (“rom? – did he say ron, or don...?”)

And then I realized my name does not actually matter – so I just go: “Hey.”

Because I want to immediately get to the point of my presence.  I want to become someone who needs no further introduction.  Whether I become Jesus, Hitler, or Michael Jackson, as long as I stop planning and start becoming, I should be fine.  Instead of selling you words that promise greatness, I want to present you with actions that inspire!

...fifteen-hundred words is preamble enough.  So without further ado, I invite you to join me as I stop talking and start walking.

Are We Happy Yet?

When we were kids, my father organized a lot of family trips, and I was always the last one who got in the car.  I had a notion in my head that if I moved slow enough or pretended to be asleep, there was a chance that they would just leave and I would get to stay home.  I was under the impression that I had a choice (and ample time to make it) when it came to these things.  I always thought he was just kidding when he said, “You are coming along and there is nothing you can do about it…”

Well, actually, there was always one thing I could do about it: I could decide to have a great time…But it was never easy for a bratty little genius who was not conditioned to make a decision without a proper interrogation.

BEFORE I decided to have fun, I needed to cover a few bases. 

Where are we going?  Why would we want to go there?  What are we going to do when we get there?  Do I even know how to do that?  How long to get there from here?  What are we going to be doing on the way?  Any stops?  I hate stops; can we just go straight there?  Except to eat, because we need to eat, right?  And to pee, then we have to stop…but where are we going to eat?  What’s good there?  I don’t even like fish, you know that?  Ackley?  Is that you?  I didn’t know you were invited… So where are we going again?  And what’s with the hand basket?

Some years into the future, when I learned to type, I would create a form to fill out: it would have all the pertinent questions, and you would just fill in the blanks.  Until that day though, it was as if a porcupine sat on a water balloon...

The question that all these others are leading up to is actually the simplest one:  “Are we going to be happy?” 

As if someone will ever say "Actually, now that you mention it, no."

It was a flat out Stupid Question.  The reason it was a stupid question was because they were ALL stupid questions. 

The Super Secret Law of The Road Trip as Foreplay:  “Destinations do not matter in a journey because destinations are the end of the journey.”

To put it another way: Unless you are watching “The Hours” or “The Phantom Menace” you really do NOT ever want a story to end.

When I am out with a date and I volunteer to bring her home, it’s not because I want to verify her address before we part ways.   And even though, as a nice little side-benefit, I may get to find out how many brothers live with her – and if the window to her room is accessible from a tree branch – to me the real meaning of the words “Can I give you a ride home?” has always been “Can we not go home…?”

There is a reason an otherwise sane man who lives in Alabang would suddenly look forward to that long drive to Novaliches.  There is a reason that a person who buys a car so that he can get to where he is going faster is suddenly driving so slowly he would have gotten there sooner if he had squatted on a wheelbarrow pushed by a blindfolded midget with one leg and a lot of phone calls to make.

The only reason I take my date home is so that I can spend the maximum amount of time with her.  This will include deliberately getting lost, and this will include the extra fifteen minutes I use to “let me just turn the car around”…and this will include the half-hour parked outside the house wracking my brain for something – to SAY ANYTHING – to keep her in the car.  This is why I keep a book of conundrums and a Rubik’s cube in my bag at all times.  The handcuffs are a last resort.  The leather whip, well, another story...

Eventually she will get out of the car, but the last words as she closes the gate – Innocent Genius, designed to keep the date going - “Call me when you get home…”

I will race home to make that awful silly ludicrous phone call – and I swear you haven’t lived till you’ve had one of these calls at least once in your life.  These are phone calls that make my drawn-out crawl to Novaliches with the popular midget a Mardi Gras by comparison. These phone calls are doomed to host what will absolutely be the most pointless and mind-numbingly boring conversations in recorded history. 

And I look forward to them...

My father would walk out of his bedroom at midnight groggily stumbling towards the kitchen to refill his bladder and I would be on the couch with the side of my head resting on the telephone handset like it was a travel pillow.  He would pause briefly to eavesdrop, but he would hear nothing.  He would then (logically) assume that the person on the other end had me wrapped up with some incredibly interesting tale that could not be told at a saner hour, but he would be wrong. 

There was only a matching silence on the other end.  This would go on for a few more hours.  Sometimes that silence would be broken by the words “Hi…still there?  Good.”

If you are ever a witness to, but not part of, this telephone conversation, you would have plenty of time to figure out which ceiling beam can support your weight for when you finally decide to hang yourself from it.  How do I explain my willingness to engage in what should be the most incredible waste of time any two people can come up with?

In this time, I could drive from San Francisco to Las Vegas…and get married.  In this time, I could see four movies… or two director’s cuts… or “The Hours”...

Except this was not a waste of time.  This was time standing still. 

This was not a conversation.  There were no stories to tell – as there was no sequence of events.  This was one event: two people enjoying the pure pleasure of each other’s company.  This story began and ended with "Once upon a time, there were two people."  The only story is that we are here.

If only foreplay could be this way:  two people being together with a total absence of Reason or Purpose. 

Unfortunately, most people – and by people I mean I – was not brought up to operate this way.  I was taught to “Git ‘er done!” 

In a world where I am supposed to achieve achievements – and objects (read: women) are objectives – no amount of foreplay can make me forget that you are ultimately just standing (read: lying) in the way!  "Being together" is read as “Being, to get her!”  I am programmed to pursue you so that I can get you and get off.  And if that is not going to happen anytime soon...

...Well, I am pretty sure it was a man who first said “If I'm not coming I'm going…”

Is that enough foreplay?  Can we go now?  Are we there yet?

I am largely unable to not focus on “getting there.”  The irony, when I think about it, is this:  If all I want to do is get to home base, I should just stand there and not bother to swing because I am already there, right?  Wasn't baseball, like living and loving, a pointless exercise where you were only lucky to end up back where you started?  Pointless, until I realize that all the fun is in the first three bases – the anticipation of batting up to face the pitcher and get to first, the thrill of stealing second, the glory of sliding to third and the thought of being really close to scoring… actually, wait, I think I really might be talking about baseball now…

I was a pointless nineteen years old when I was introduced to the virtue of aimlessness.  To clarify, I was already a full-fledged aimless young adult.  All throughout my high school and college years I was notorious for having a complete lack of ambition. 

At these developmental stages where I was supposed to find myself (as if my true self was hidden somewhere amidst the textbooks, chemistry labs, and ballroom dancing classes) I could never answer questions like "What do you want to be when you graduate?" and "Where do you see yourself five years from now?"

Pssh.  Another set of Pointless Stupid Questions!  How was I supposed to decide on a destination without being provided any information regarding to the rates and amenities such a destination might offer...?

I actually walked around carrying a book called "Living without a Goal."  I hadn't read the whole thing, nor would I ever, but I just resonated with the title and wanted to be seen with it.

So yes, I was aimless as they came, but I did not recognize any joy or freedom in it.  It was not a happy-go-lucky deal for me.  On the contrary, what it felt like was that I was waiting to get lucky so I could be happy.  I was waiting for Reason and Purpose to fall out of the sky and hit me on the head like a Steel Safe dropped by Wile E. Coyote.  The only thing this much-hyped virtue called goallessness had done for me was paralyze me.  I just stood there and looked up.

I was a pointless nineteen years old when I ran away from home.

Before you start to think this is going to be a tale that rivals "Into The Wild" I will tell you right now: this is not that heroic.  I was only away from home for a month, and then I ran out of money and met up with my Dad to finally hitch a ride back.  Also, during this month of supposedly rebellious independent adventure "away from home," I snuck several visits to my house to grab new clothes when no one was looking.

I did not even have a compelling reason for this attempt at fugue.  I was not under any pressure at the time.  College had broken for the summer holidays.  I had a new girlfriend.  I was earning my own real money from working at a McDonald's.  I was driving a car.  And I was busy being a brat. 

I may have been guilty of being happy, actually.

On the afternoon of my take-off, I missed my Aunt's funeral - new girlfriends can make teenagers do this.  On the way home to the certain flogging that would transpire, teenagers are expected to fabricate a fabulous work of fiction that would explain why this gross display of negligence and utter disrespect should be excused.  There would be emergencies (more than one) - the police would be involved, a cat up a tree, a lady stuck in the tree trying to get the cat out, maybe a dying baby who needed a blood transfusion and a Brazilian Model who needed a backrub...

Not me.  I did not have the energy to tell a tall tale that night.  In fact it may be accurate to say I had no energy left at all.  An immense wave of guilt had driven it all from my soul and all I could suddenly think of was that I did not deserve anything I had.  Did not deserve the new girlfriend.  Did not deserve to drive around in my Dad's car.  Did not deserve to be happy.  Did not deserve to be forgiven.  Did not deserve to live...

...I decided I would die, but without having access to a gun, a rope, a tall building, or a Tagalog movie, I wasn't sure how I would do it.  I get queasy and faint at the sight of blood, so I was not cut out for a wrist slashing - and neither was the butter knife in my hand, now that I think of it.

So I walked out into the streets looking for an 18-wheeler with a broken set of headlights that might do me a favor.  Alas, at 3 AM, in a largely residential part of town, the streets were empty...so I kept walking...and walking...and walking.  My new plan was to walk all the way from Las Piñas to Ilocos Sur so I could crawl onto a beach and die.

Something snapped then - Well, given that I was looking for ways to die, obviously things were already broken in many other places - but there was new snappage.  Something snapped back into place:  I remember thinking:  "Hmm, if I cut out the part where I die, the Ilocos Idea actually sounded awesome!"

So, after I figured out that the part where I walk all the way there could be a buzz killer and cause unnecessary delay, I decided to get on a bus.  And I went.  No itinerary and no preparation - just a backpack with three baseball caps and one T-shirt (don’t know why).  I had no money, except for a souvenir hundred-dollar bill that I took to the money-changer first thing in the morning.  I planned on doing one thing and did something else entirely.  I was going to live, after all!

My runaway train brought me to Vigan, San Pablo, Leyte, Banahaw... I slept in friends' houses at first, and I spent a few nights in public parks and under bridges.  As I moved more, I wisened up and used provincial buses as my hotel.  It was like a (very) poor man's cruise.  Movie, biscuits, sleep...wake up somewhere else.

If Life is the journey, is the destination Death?  Knowing this - knowing what waits at the end of the journey - who would be dumb enough to purchase a ticket?!?

I purchased many, many tickets.  As I hopped on one bus after another without regard for destination, it came to me:  Choosing anything got me moving towards something.  I could make up reasons to go as I went along, but one thing was clear:  I had no purpose but to go.  I stopped caring about the destination. 

I did not feel alive until the day I decided to die.  I was just happy to be going.  And I felt lucky to be alive.

The Super Secret Law of The Happy-Go-Lucky Idiot:  The fastest way to be unhappy was to need a signal to begin to be happy.

It was like the awkward moments at the high school dance:  a good song would come on, and I would make the conscious decision to get up and make that long walk to that area with the special tiles – called the dance floor, as opposed to the rest of the floor – so that I could “commence the dancing”.  Okay I won’t pretend.  I don’t dance.  But if I did, I would not waste time walking to where the dancing is.  I would dance wherever I happen to be standing when the impulse hits me. 

I don’t think I ever really danced till I got married.  And all throughout my younger years, I didn’t smoke, drink or do drugs either.  It was probably really because I was a total nerd, but as far as I was concerned it was because I could not appreciate the process.  To me it was like consuming raw suffering to get to the joy at the bottom of the bottle – like the decoder ring in the box of cereal that I had to eat through coz I was too stupid to figure out that I could just dump the contents onto the counter and take the prize. 

The drinking-with-friends ritual had that exact same awkwardness that I might have felt walking towards the dance floor.  After every shot, I would be looking around and asking “Are we having fun yet?” – And the textbook response from everyone else who did not have a stick up their ass would invariably be “Whaddaya mean, we’re having fun right now…”

Wait a goddam second.  If we’re happy now, why are we still partaking of this horrible blend of hot-piss and crusty toenails at all?  Here’s a brilliant idea:  Let’s just all be happy now so we can be done and go home, and we don’t have to spend money, and we don't have to clean up our own vomit in the morning!

Actually, in hindsight, I wasn’t a drinker in my younger years because I was never invited to those drinking parties again.

Once upon a more recent time, we were going to Tagaytay.  Just so you understand, imagine the best restaurant in the world, serving the most incredible food you will ever see, smell, and taste.  Now call that restaurant “Antonio’s”.  Now imagine that it is 12 noon, that it takes 90 minutes to get there, and that they tell anyone who arrives at 1:31 PM to sod off.  Now imagine that we are one person short of being on our way, and that this person just called to tell us she was just ten minutes away, which meant that she was thirty minutes away.  Now finally, imagine that this trip, which has been planned for weeks, was an old codger who just ate a bagful of prunes…

We started out excited, then crossed over to anxious, to just plain shitty and pissed at our state of Limbo. 

We were waiting for the fun to begin.  Our signal to be happy was running late.

As I continued to stew quietly in the Antonio's-bound van, our tardy (late, not damaged) last piece-o-the-puzzle arrived.  One person said "Let's Go!" as another squealed "Yay!"...and suddenly all the concerns of running late and possibly missing our reservation magically melted away.

On the road to Tagaytay someone had the awesome idea of putting “Once on this Island” in the CD player (me).  The women started singing the women’s parts and the men sang the other women’s parts.  It wasn’t long before one of the men, tired of singing with a heavy Jamaican woman’s accent, said “Do you have Rent?”

I did not.  It did not matter.  Someone became Mimi, so I shut off the stereo as the rest of them started to Light That Candle.  I quietly prepared to jump in but I never got the chance.  We pulled into the parking lot of Antonio’s.  It was1:30 PM – on the dot.  Oh.  Right.  We've arrived.  The singing had to stop.

We had already forgotten that this particular story was actually about arriving at a restaurant and getting something to eat...

As a wannabe writer and public speaker, you'd think I should be a big fan of "the point of a story."  I am, but often enough, I am not.

When I am at the cinema studying the movie posters to try to decide which one is worth two hours of my time, I look first at who is starring in it.  This may seem unsophisticated to you, but I also happen to subscribe to US Weekly.  Why read a hundred-word synopsis when two words were almost always enough?  Hugh Grant, John Cusack, Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts, Seth Green, Cate Blanchett, Rachel Weisz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Derek Ramsay...

Story does not matter.  People matter.  Hiro doesn’t stop time, Friends do.

The Super Secret Law of the Lousy Travel Agency and People In Love:  "It isn’t where you’re going or what is going to happen, it’s who you’re going to be with that counts."

That means I can be sold a plane ticket to Chechnya if I was going to be travelling with my best friend.  That means I can give myself permission to be happy as soon as I know I am going to be in the company of somebody I like.  That means I can decide that a movie is going to be good because, hey, Ben Affleck is in it...

I am sure many will disagree with my simplistic sweeping generalizations.  First off all, Ben Affleck churns out a large amount of total garbage.  Secondly, if happiness was that simple, we would all be happy...but we aren't.

No. No. No.  Happiness is complicated!  I mean, it MUST be!  We must find our way through a nuance-riddled labyrinth that leads to the empty space in the middle, which is actually a mine field that somebody decided to bury happiness in.  Fuck me. I didn't bring a shovel.  Why couldn't I prepare for this treasure hunt when there were so many treasure maps out there?

Buddha's has the Eightfold Path.  Alcoholics have Twelve Steps.  The Kabbalah has seventy-two names for God.  Mountaineers must climb twenty-nine thousand feet to the ultimate summit.  And the Bible has more interpretations than it has pages.  How hard can it be to follow a goddam map to happiness?

There is actually a book straightforwardly entitled "How To Be Happy."  I cannot fathom the amount of stretching that author had to do to make the publisher happy.  If I had been commissioned to write that book, it would have had two pages and very big letters.

Page 1:  DECIDE TO BE HAPPY.

Page 2:  NOW YOU ARE.

Okay, that's not entirely true, because if you count the publishing info, the title page, the acknowledgments, the introduction, and the "How To Use This Book" section, my book would actually have a hundred and seventeen more pages. 

My point would remain though:  I am rewarded at the moment I agree to be part of the process.  The process, not the result.

I grew up being taught to judge by results. Math contests, report cards, sports, scraped knees, broken teeth... They were the basis for whether I did good or bad.  Fortunately, I was also fed conflicting lines like "It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you played the game."

So I guess it was terribly easy for a habitual loser like me to gravitate towards ignoring results.  I eventually grew up to become a professional poker trainer, and the first thing I teach aspiring poker pros is this:  Professional poker players are NOT result-oriented.  As much as poker involves a lot of luck, it is largely misunderstood as a game of chance.  Poker is not a game of chance, and neither is the rest of our lives.  We play a game of decisions.  Our first decision is to commit to play this game the best way we can.  In doing this, our chances increase exponentially over the greater population of players who just sit there praying for “their turn to get lucky.”

George W. Bush is not The Decider, I am!  I decide I can be better.  I decide to pay more attention.  I decide to stay when I am ahead and go when I am falling behind.  I decide I can win.  I decide I will live.

Decisions matter, not outcomes.  My decisions make me happy.  To be really, really specific and annoyingly simple, I decided to believe this:

The Super Secret Law of The Pursuit of Happyness Without Will Smith:  My decision to be happy makes me happy!

In one of the darkest times of my life, I turned to a LOT of alcohol.  And in my drunken haze I wrote the song that would snap me out of it:  …Spare me, spare me, Looking for joy in a watered-down J&B spending all of my life asking everybody “Are we happy yet?” - Don’t pass me another bottle, there ain’t nothing strong enough for me but me!

What a fool was I!  Turns out I’ve been drifting in an ocean of my choice…

One of my favorite things to do now is to sit in the car and drive my loved ones around.  Air-Conditioning, music, a window to the world...a highlight moment might be when we pulled over to the side of the road and park the car to eat heavily-salted drive-thru French fries.

As I sit there in the shared silence, I recall being that bratty kid with all the questions (still am), and when I finally asked the most important one – “Is this gonna be fun?” – My Dad’s reply was borne out of pure exasperation.  It turned out to be the one that stuck the most.  “It is going to be what you decide it is going to be!”

He could have just said yes, because now I can believe him.