The Flight of the Rocketman

It was the kind of day in which you forget words and drop things and wonder what it is you came into the room to get because you are standing here for a reason and you have to tell yourself it is just a question of sooner or later before you remember because you always remember once you are here.
The thing is communicated somehow.
- The Body Artist by Don DeLillo

My hair refuses to grow any longer and just stays up here at the same length. It probably is growing, like, half a centimetre a day. Sometimes, when I'm really lucky, two-thirds of a centimetre in twelve hours. It's quite annoying, actually. There is this ugly period when you grow your hair and I'm in that period as of the moment. I did everything my cousin told me to do and I've shampooed my hair more than twice a day. I brush my hair often. Even if I am just at home. Nothing. It still has remain the same.

I'm going farther and farther into Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. It's getting more and more interesting. You have to admire the amount of discipline that the Spartan's possess. The kind of training that they go through. Their training is equal to real life situations sans casualties. That's amazing. Can you imagine College, where you actually make and lose money as a sort of training ground for the "real world."

I hate that, you know? When they tell students that they are preparing for "the real world." As if College isn't real enough? The pressures that they apply to you in social group, in inter-University competitions, in just individual projects that they have to submit is difficult. It is the real world. It is just that they have less to lose. They have the fallback of their parents and they have no expectation to make money and survive on their own. But it is just as real in school as it is outside, after graduation.

When I was a teacher, teaching Art Appreciation, Philippine Literature and World Literature, I made sure that the choices the characters had to make in the stories and poems and plays that I taught, are choices that my students will recognize when they graduate. These moral, social, individual choices that they have to make sooner or later. That is how I want to prepare them for the real world. Look at all the poems and stories, we wouldn't be taking them up if they weren't good and they are good because not only are they told well, but they have something to share to us about living, about being human. And we have to see these situations from the outside so that we can make our judgements. Because later on, we will find ourselves on that same situation and we won't be able to see from the outside. We will be stuck there and making a decision inside the oven. But if you remember the stories you've read, the poems you've felt deep inside, even the artworks that you have seen, all of these will help us move ourselves away from the situation and make a better decision, a smarter one.

I don't know. I'm not really in the mood to write right now. Something just didn't push through and I have a lot on my mind. New York. Do I want to go? Should I go? It's really a complicated matter and I don't know what I am supposed to do and what I am supposed to think.

I'll step back for a while. I switch my 'baby' to auto-pilot and just lean back on my chair and watch the many stars in space. I'm looking for Pisces, my star sign and hoping that any of the fish will give me a sign so I know whether I should go one way or the other. It is always one way or the other. We can never take that road that will lead us to both destinations.

I'm sorry. I think I'm lost somewhere between Pisces and Aries. I can't read my star maps properly today. And going back home to Earth will not help. The answer is out here. I just have to find it.