Achieving Happiness

Sometimes I think about all the other things I enjoy doing and wistfully wish that I could be employed as someone other than what I primarily am, a person who writes (it still sticks like a fishbone in my throat - adopting the label ‘writer’. It carries so many pretentious undertones, somehow…No offense to friends and colleagues who have no problems appropriating the title).

I’ve frequently come up with lists about alternative employment I would liketo get into; and ever so often I would revise these lists and dream that I can spend a few blissful years doing things other than just writing.

In any case, in a universe parallel but infinitely kinder than our own, I would be

1. Comic and book store supervisor. Major perk - I get a free copy of every book, magazine and comic that we order from the publishing houses.

2. Orchidarium or cactus house tender. I would study all about the different kinds of  aerial plants and the hardy desert and dry soil dwellers,and maybe create a few varieties which I’ll name after Andres Bonifacio, Crisanto Evangelista, Edgar Jopson and Lorena Barros.

3. Tea and coffee bar proprietor (said bar co-owned with Anthony Ian Cruz and Janice Lee Monte). Bring your own mug. Jang likes to bake, and Tonyo loves coffee. I’m a tea person — next week I’m going to a local museum here and sit in a workshop about archaic tea ceremonies.

4.  Reseacher, scriptwriter for National Geographic specials on marine life and elephants. Of course, this means that I will also get to travel with teams of scientists and marine biologists etc etc.

5. I wouldn’t mind being a dishwasher at a high-end hotel. For a month, just to get the feel of it. Then I could move on to becoming a potato peeler and garlic crusher.

6. Carpenter. I really wish I had carpentry skills. I have the will to be a carpenter nevermind that I yell bloody hell whenever I hit my thumb with a hammer, and I can’t cut through wood even with the sharpest of handsaws. Carpentry, to me, is a worthier skill than cooking. I would much rather learn to be a carpenter than to, say, learn how to ballroom dance. I used to want to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity International. I want to create something solid and tangible and physical and real.

7. High school journalism teacher. I will make sure that my students grow up with clearcut biases for the poor and exploited; and even as they learn objectivity, they will already know that there’s a propaganda and information war out there (apart from the real, actual war) and they won’t any qualms about taking definitive stands.

8. Tuna cannery factory worker.

9. Cemetery cleaner and greenskeeper.

10. Executive producer of a political talk show.

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Last Tuesday night I finished Douglas Coupland’s ‘Eleonor Rigby.’ Among all his books, I think this is the most well-written and the least…contrived. Okay, so I haven’t read ‘Hey, Nostradamus!’ but I do have a copy already back in the Philippines (my Tita Agnes sent it from DC), but I’m willing to bet that Eleanor Rigby is much better.

It’s a book about loneliness and how it takesover people’s lives. Loneliness for some is a disease that they cannot ever cure themselves of. Some have a propensity for it, or a tendency to be lonely even in the company of others; they hate it, but they  can’t do anything to end it.

Unless something particularly out of the realm of their immediate understanding and belief happens.

No,it doesn’t have to be a UFO landing in your backyard; or a billion dollar jackpot at the lotter; sometimes what shakes us out of our apathy for ourselves and our immediate surroundings and context is something we have done in our past that lay dormant for a while, but reawakened, rekindled, and our rediscovery of it is what takes us out of ourselves.

In his book, Coupland analyzes lonely people as people merely struck in a rut, and they know they’re stuck but they don’t have the motivation to break out of it. They yearn for change, but they don’t have the energy for it; or they don’t have the inspiration or drive to do it.

Loneliness is when you are incapable of change, and the amalgam of ennui, boredom, general dissatisfaction cements into a shell that protects you not only from being hurt, disillusioned or disappointed; but also from discovering and experiencing new things.

(I think, though, that loneliness, sometimes is simply other people. When you’re stuck in the company of people you have nothing in common with; or you share no happy history with; or people you simply do not like you feel that you’re better off on your own. You are not inspired or encouraged to push yourself to do more, to be more, to show your true and happy colors, even if they appear pale and muted to the world.)

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It’s a wonder that the more or less liberal or even progressive readers of the Inquirer don’t run amok every morning when the open and read their newspapers. I don’t drink coffee while I read Inq7, but every morning, I click on the site with trepidation and dread: What now?!!

Oilspills nobody wants to take responsibility for.

Lawmakers as law breakers and highly-paid professional liars.

One life of a political or human rights activist a day is viciously ended and a government defends the killers it paid and awarded with medals to perpetrate the killing.

These days it really takes a cast-iron stomach to read the news. 

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