ANIKANIK || onebighappymess

What I like most about listening to music is I can pretend I’m in a different world, where there is only the vastness of the night sky and deepness of the sea. And I’m right there in the middle, just floating away, aimlessly, not really giving a damn where the waves would take me.

My favorite part is when the sea would swallow me up and I would drown in submission.

Over coffee and numerous cigarettes, I chatted away while he listened, occasionally nodding or giving out remarks of contradiction. He wanted to go home as soon as dinner was over but I managed to drag him to a nearby coffeeplace. It was early and I didn’t want to go home yet. For him (and probably for a lot of people), sitting for a long period of time without anything real to do but sit, talk, sip coffee and inhale smoke is a waste of time—being idle like that is nonsensical, but I wanted to convince him that it’s not. Because of my new job, my schedule has now allowed me to be part of the normal work hours. It goes like this: work, dinner, a time to clear my head before heading home, then a restful slumber for more than six hours every day. I wake up without feeling groggy or tired because I lack sleep. That moment of clearing my head acts as my de-stresser, it usually involves having dinner or coffee or a quick, aimless stroll at the mall. And I don’t consider it a wasteful use of time. Perhaps doing it everyday does seem extravagant. I must admit I don’t have that luxury, but I grab the chance as much as I can. I look forward to sharing how my day went to another person and listening to what transpired on theirs. Or perhaps simply using that “idle time” to just think about anything other than “I have a deadline on ___ and have to finish it by ___”.

Conversations like what happened this evening is important to me. I value conversations in general—over ym, coffee talks, or inuman sessions (back in college, I looked forward to having long debates with my classmates over bottles of beer or rounds of tagayan). It gives me a chance to voice out any idea or opinion I have to another human being, and in turn, also learn something from them. It helps me have a better grasp of what’s happening around me. People have always interesting things to say, no matter how seemingly trivial some stories are. Serious or comical, thought-provoking or fabrications, these stories are still theirs, and I always have something new to discover from them. It’s a symbiosis kind of thing, really.

These stories are like documentaries happening right in your face, it just depends on how you’ll make it useful as your own. Do you simply dismiss them? Maybe, if they seem irrelevant. Or perhaps you treasure them if you find them profound or inspiring. Why do we even read books, watch movies, listen to music, or get awed by amazing artworks? These all stemmed from a story, an experience from a person who’s willing enough to share it. And I think we all have this certain need, a yearning, to be part of this loop: the sharer and the receiver.

But more often than not, these stories are revealed during a particular “idle time”. It would be hard to imagine a great piece of literature or a phenomenal film done in haste. It takes a moment of reflection and remembering, dismissing the insignificant and dwelling on the essential. It’s filtering the story before revealing the end product. These things are rarely slaves of speed.

Most people would shun the idea of being indolent, and would gear on having everything fast-paced. There’s nothing wrong with this. After all, we are living in a modern world where everything is immediately accessible. But there’s also something sweet about slowness, those small talks on coffee breaks, those casual, unmonumental conversations, endless debates, swapping stories, leisurely musings. You’ll never know when something extraordinary might come out of it.

It’s been a while since I sat down and read a book. I have all my books stacked in my messy shelf above my computer, but never really paid any attention to them recently. Normally I’d blame my busy schedule, but let’s face it, I’ve just been really lazy. It’s just now upon Cheekie’s goading that I re-read Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs again, after leaving it half-read for almost a year since I bought it. It turns out we both love Nick Hornby, our first book of his being High Fidelity. This discovery was made during lunch hour while I was smoking and she inhaling the second-hand smoke (yes, she really is a good friend). And then I realized that forgetting to read your books, or simply becoming lazy to do so, is just as nasty a habit as chainsmoking.

So now I’m re-reading this non-fiction by Nick Hornby. 31 Songs is a collection of essays about his favorite music, and of course I wasn’t able to put it down since, save for this moment as I’m typing this and Youtube-ing Smoke by Ben Folds. This song is really the whole point of this entry. I’m currently on page 90, where Hornby is explaining why he loves the song—the brilliance of the lyrics primarily.

“‘Smoke’ is one of the cleverest, wisest songs about the slow death of a relationship that I know… the heartbreaking thing about Folds’s song is that it manages simultaneously to convey both the narrator’s desperation and the impossibility of a happy outcome.

In ‘Smoke’, the central conceit is that the relationship is a book, and so its unhappy recent history, the narrator wants to believe, can be destroyed by burning it page by page, until ‘all the things we’ve written in it never really happened’… Wiping the slate clean is the fantasy of anyone who has ever got into a mess with a partner, and the metaphor is witty enough and rich enough to seduce us into thinking just for a moment that in this case it might be possible, but the music here, a mournful waltz, tells a different story.

‘Smoke’ is, I think, lyrically perfect, clever, and sad and neat… it’s also one of the very few songs that is thoughtful about the process of love, rather than the object or the subject. And it was a constant companion during the end (the long, drawn-out end) of my marriage, and it made sense then, and it still makes sense now. You can’t ask much more of a song than that.”

I have that song dwelling in my Ipod as soon as I first read 31 Songs. I must admit that I was intrigued by what I read, and it’s true—the effect of that song the first time I heard it is still the same as of this moment. It’s the type of song that will make you press the rewind button as soon as the track bar is slowly starting to hit the closing lines, I myself must have played it atleast 10 times since I began listening to it this evening. It’s quite addicting in the sense that you want to savor every line of the lyrics, thus you want to keep listening to it. It’s emotional without being EMO, but perhaps “honest” would be a more apt term. And Hornby was right about it being clever and neat, its lyrics and melody gave out a new take about a dying relationship, and I haven’t heard anything like that from a pop song.

Excuse my lengthy introduction, just let me share this video I found on Youtube. This is Ben Folds performing Smoke with Western Australian Symphony Orchestra. This collaboration made the song even more amazing. :)

Upon Bimbo’s recommendation, I gave +/- (Plus/Minus) a listen, and loved their music instantly. I’ve been listening to a lot of electronic-indie-rock/pop music lately, and Plus/Minus fits exactly right in my current playlist. So a big woot that they are going to play here along with other famous local bands (Up Dharma Down, Taken by Cars and Ang Bandang Shirley to name a few. I’m really excited to hear them live. :)

Here’s the sched I nabbed from their site.

november 07, 2008
trinoma park (quezon city, philippines)
w/ ang bandang shirley and up dharma down (semi-acoustic day show 5pm)

november 07, 2008
warehouse 135 (makati city, philippines)
w/ versus (solo), ang bandang shirley, ciudad, and taken by cars

november 08, 2008
mag:net bonifacio high st. (makati city, philippines)
w/ versus (solo), us-2 evil-0 and boldstar

Wee! Taralets taralets!