Proceed to dazzlement, dude

Here are a few things I don’t understand. Some things, I know I could easily comprehend if I practiced some Google-fu, other things I’d rather not understand because I tend to have a naïve, misguided view of the world (snort) and I’d like to keep it that way, and other things I guess I admit to not understanding (grammar check, Nazis), because otherwise (I hate it when people say eitherwise), I’d be this pompous twit who’d rather understand everything in the world, than stop asking questions in fear she’d look stupid, and, gasp, normal.

1 – How those brown ribbons in cassette tapes record sound. And, for that matter, vinyl records. Mehn, grooves, literally, mehn. I mean, I understand it technically, I know how it works – but, well, I’m awed that it’s even possible. (I still think this way about instant messaging through the Intarwebz. See, how do people get to talk to each other by the moment, and they live so far away from each other, oceans have to be traversed, even. How do we talk in real time, when technically, people may exist in different, assigned time zones? So, essentially, I don’t understand technology.)

2 – What really happens to caterpillars inside cocoons? All the graphs and charts I’ve seen show a caterpillar on a twig, a pupa dangling from a twig, and a butterfly about to leap from a twig, one connected to the other by big arrows. But what happens inside cocoons? Again, I know what metamorphosis is. But, you know, is metamorphosis gooey?

3 – Why men get erections in the morning. What, are you aroused at the thought of beginning a brand new day? Stimulated at all the unknown opportunities and possibilities laid out before you? Titillated at the mere thought of, oh god, another fucking day, time to kick some ass? (Pancho says Yes.)

4 – How Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) created a whole cat-suit out of one leather jacket, that’s most probably brittle due to disuse, since I don’t see Selena ________ leap into it every once in a while to paint the town red.

5 – On the subject of movies, and natural disasters: If Jack and Rose hadn’t been necking on deck, would the Titanic not have crashed into an unsuspecting iceberg? Is PDA really bad after all?

6 – Why do we feel in dreams? Sometimes so intensely, that for a fraction of the day, after I wake up, I’m still incredibly pissed at someone for failing to reclaim the Golden Maggot attached to a red plastic hollow ball inside a McDonald’s playpen? Like, dude, the fate of humanity was in your goddamned hands, and you had the temerity to insist on eating that last Egg McMuffin? My McMuffin, at that?

7 – Why eating young, brown mango leaves at the tip of a twig of some old mango tree remind me of childhood. And Bagoong Balayan, rarr.

8 – Why anyone has an appendix. It’s like everybody’s been handed this useless lump of meat that’s pretty much a ticking time bomb if you, like me, have no patience spitting out itsy-bitsy tomato seeds.

9 – Why sunsets and dawns happen so quickly, compared to the rest of the day, when they’re arguably the most awe-inspiring, even the most beautiful. (I learned a new word a couple of days ago – or rather, found hidden, sparkly depths in the word – liminal, which has this red zigzag below it, because it’s not very English, but Latin-y. Liminal. At the threshold, in-between. Sunrises and twilights. Transitory times. Even places: airports, train stations. Even planes and trains. That moment when you’re not quite awake, but you’re not still asleep either. People between one decision and another. Or an issue. Or in a phase. Straddling a state line, the way Jamie Sullivan and Landon Carter did dun sa movie version ng A Walk to Remember. And so, I guess, this brings us to another thing I don’t understand: Objectively, it all seems so strange, supernatural, compelling, poignant. But when you are liminal… well, to quote Mackayla Lane: “Liminal sucks.”)

10 – That way back then, the world wasn’t really low-res, or black and white, or sepia, or even grainy. When I was a kid, looking at two-year-old me in my parents’ wedding album, I’d wondered at how I hadn’t been as colorful as I was then. Until now, I still sometimes think that the world slowly grew color, hues leeching into the smallest things first, a spectrum growing out of the first blot, then the first stain. That everything simply became clearer out of some unexplainable natural phenomenon. That certain things ceased being a soft kind of brown. That the universe, out of some unknown compulsion, over time, magnified, and then burst, highlighting the details, filling in the white dots that speckled its faces.

Addendum (I don’t necessarily not understand this, it just came to me, really): When I was twelve, back in Cavite, I had a chat with the man who sold taho, the one who’d been doing that for as long as I could remember. He said he put his kids through school with taho. Naturally, I asked him how long he’d been doing it. He said it had been sixteen years. And I remember being so struck by that: Sixteen years, four more years than my entire existence. It shook me at how that man was doing things, living his life, long before I was born, long before I had the possibility of being born. That he -- a lot of people – had lives before I came out squalling from my mother’s anaesthetized womb (TMI, I know.) That the world didn’t begin with me, that everything before me wasn’t like the prefaces to books that anyone could skip reading. Ah, the conceit of the youth. Haha. This is what amuses me when it’s story-sharing time with P. I was probably still swimming in primordial soup around the time he had this massive crush on Virginia from the bakery. Things like that, you know, things I don’t really think about much, but well, when I do, well, it boggles the mind, haha. It is so cool.