I used to think I was a Ninja. I could skip and run and pirouette and fingerfuck myself on the street and nobody would even notice. Nobody would take a second glance. Nobody would wink, would sniff, would raise a single goosebump where I had been a microsecond ago.

It's not a problem of attention deficit. I prefer to be anonymous than popular.

This popularity is a myth of our culture. To be seen by multiple eyes. To be gloated over, to be desired, to be appreciated, to be wanted, needed, salivated, praised, worshiped, adored, immortalized.

We all want to leave something.

Change something.

Just to be remembered.

But all these, we'd prefer to be queens and kings, princesses and princes, celebrities and models. We want to please other people's eyes and transform ourselves into a magnet.

This magnet of sex.
This magnet of beauty.
This magnet of youth.
This magnet of success.
This magnet of wealth.
This magnet of power.

With this power of the killer look, you can easily draw people in at the first few seconds. But fail to make them stay, get hooked, get addicted.

These people, they're omnipresent, everpresent, forever and ever, in all ages of all time.

What I'm yakking about, I don't know. I have stories to read for UPWC and chess problems to solve.:o

Why am I here?
What's the point?
Why are you here?
Why have you reached this very line?
Why do you keep reading
when every line you read right here is just
an illusion of meaning?
A pretense of words
that serve no purpose
but to say things
as they come to my mind?

Talking in tongues. All this BLAH. Is just to write an entry, really.

For boredom strikes, alas: I write.

But as I was saying, I used to think I was a Ninja.

I have fancied myself living underground. Living underground like V. Collecting books, listening to classical music, wearing a smiling mask. And practicing my ninja kicks on dummies with faces like President Goblin Tyrant Hilly Mole In The Face. I have fancied assassinating people. I have fancied wiping out a whole nation with just a single atomic noiseless fart. I have fancied surviving on just eating my fingernails and dead skin cells. Eating myself, an independent self-preservation. I can revive myself by drinking the vitamins and minerals from my piss.

If you come to think of it, you breathed amniotic fluid through your nose when you were a fetus. (Useless trivia: fetuses masturbate, yes, in the womb.) What you don't know is that your accumulated piss from age one week to nine months, those were mixed with that fluid. This piss, it entered your nose, filled your lungs, distributed throughout your body from your digestive tract, and leaked out from all your bodily orifices, back into the amniotic fluid, like the fish we all are in the sea. This never changing life cycle, the shit we go through, before even being born.

The Piss Talk. Ninjas drink their own piss. Diseased people drink their own piss. The logic behind it being: Your immune system beefs up if you eat your own toxins. Cancer patients, for instance, drink their own urine which contain their own unique cancer cell antigens, creating antibodies that boost their immune system. Survivor's tip: an earthquake victim trapped in the rubles of a building lived nine more days drinking his own piss. That person was a Ninja.

Urea, the main ingredient in piss, is the major element in almost all beauty products. People actually put piss in their faces. People actually put piss on their fresh wounds. People actually put piss to moisturize their skin.

What's this talk about PISS?
Why don't you just piss off?
Why do we piss each other off?
Why is PGMA a pissy son of a bitch?

Why do I write when I have more pressing things to attend to?

But I am a Ninja. I can finish all that bullshit in one microminute.

I am alone in the house today. We have a housemaid but I don't consider her human so: I am alone in the house today.

I don't consider our housemaid human because she is a ROBOT.

All day everyday for all eternity she watches dreamland MTV.

When you look at her slouched at the couch gnawing on her fingernail, eyes fixed at the screen, you can see words materializing in her thought balloons saying:

I want that flashy car.
I want that body.
I want that hair.
I want those flashy clothes.
I want that flashy house.
I want all those flashy shit.
They're pretty.
They make me happy.
They make me satisfied, meaningful, purposeful.
And finally, when I have those, I can die in peace.

She works her butt day in day out to earn money and buy herself glittering clothes and glittering shoes and all that glittering bullshit. She guzzles water instead of eating to shrink her waist to the size of her wrist. This girl, she has breasts the size of a pornstar's. And she uses my sister's push-up bra to raise her breasts up to her collarbone. And then she wears horribly tight clothes that make her look like a sausage.

Today is her rest day. This afternoon she walked out the door a glittering sausage. Went out to the mall to buy more glittering things just to go back here and work some more to buy more glittering bullshit.

This is sacrifice.

The price we pay for the illusion of happiness, beauty, youth, immortality, power, success.

Beyond that, she can't even differentiate vinegar from soy sauce.

All housemaids from far-flung regions of the country think the same way.

They want the city.
They want the pollution.
They want to breathe filthy air.
They want to eat fastfood cardboard crap.
They want to saunter in shopping malls.
They want to roll their eyes over them millions of advertisements and billboards everywhere.

WHY?

Is it their fault to be thoughtless, mindless, hypnotized zombies?

As I was saying, I am alone in the house. I am alone with a carbon-based she-robot (or fembot) in the house.

I wore shorts today. I wore shorts because all my pajamas are in the laundry. I never wear shorts. I wear shorts only when I am alone.

I am alone so I am wearing shorts. I missed wearing shorts ever since the fire accident two years ago. But I stepped out of the house today wearing this pair of shorts. I went to the sari-sari store to buy a bottle of brandy. All those people I walked by, they were staring at my legs with WTFOMFGJESUSCHRIST! faces. At the sari-sari store, this group of guys who were talking animatedly, they fell silent as if they've seen a ghost. They've seen Mother Mary patterned on the burn scars on my legs. Their eyes stopped blinking and flies entered their mouths. They died staring at my beautiful legs. My beautiful legs with beautiful third degree burn scars.

Why did I walk outside wearing shorts? Of all these years, why? Why just now?

I'm thinking, who gives a shit, so.

I wasn't a Ninja today. People stopped and turned and stared.

I existed.

Who gives a shit?

I used to think I was a Ninja.

I watched the world go by in slow motion. Nobody would notice a falling eyelash but me. (Think: Jose Ma. Sison's blah poem The Guerrilla Is Like A Poet.) Nobody would notice the air molecules we share and breathe but me. Nobody would notice this jeepney driver throwing a cigarette butt on the street but me. Nobody would compare the guy in a bike and the guy in a 4×4 Nissan Terrano. Nobody would notice that invigorating whiff of tuyo. Nobody would notice a nobody watching MTV. All these things we take for granted, nobody gives a shit.

Every tiny detail, only a Ninja notices. Everything else is blurred out of focus.

I used to think I was a Ninja.

But UP Mountaineers changed all that.

I can't fucking whizz past a ten-kilometer run.

I can't run at lightning speed, therefore, I cease to be a Ninja.

Any moment I shall die running to the finish line. I shall die, I shall die, oh, I shall die.

The Ninja is dead. Everything in bullet speed kills the quality of the moment.

Why do we run?
Why do I run?
Why should we run?

I just don't get it.

I have all the brains and skills that would compensate my weakness for running ten fucking kilometers.

But why, why, why?

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