The Sunday Sad Club

Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006) takes place in some kind of afterlife where everyone who's ever committed suicide was put in, but it's really not that different from our own world, or at least how most sad people see our world anyway. To quote, Mikal says: Do you guys like it here? Who the hell likes being stuck in a place where you can't even smile? It's hot as balls, everybody's an asshole. I just want to go home. The charm of surreal movies like Wristcutters is how it's so different from ours yet so similar. The movie "made no sense" a lot at a rational point of view (there was a literal abyss at the bottom of a man's car, they have jobs in the afterlife, and cottage cheese, and there are miracles, and the political environment is really rather unsustainable), and yet it's familiar. The setting is of a gloomy, dead-end afterlife. There are no stars to be seen. People can't smile. It's uncomfortable. Sad to say, a bunch...

I went to Dumaguete for a four-day writing training and, not to be dramatic or anything, but it had arguably been the best four days of my life. I had basically just been working nonstop months prior that it was borderline epiphanic to have four days of just doing what I want to do for once in my life. So you'll find me walking across the Boulevard, a long stretch of concrete by the sea which directly branches out from the Dumaguete port. Bags in hand - I brought two: my Lotor bag (aka a Hawk bag with a Lotor color scheme), and a duffel. And neither had space for anything more. Both had been completely full and ready to go home, and I carried them across the concrete to the gates of the port - around 10PM; we were to catch the 11PM ferry. We had been drinking minutes prior, sort of as a last hurrah, so I guess my brain cells were pretty slow to process what had been going on. It was a flash of panic, and I slowed in my tracks. The breeze hit me sharp across the face, and I look...

  Admittedly, I compartmentalize things in my life so I can carry on with my self-depreciating humor and nihilist memes, business as usual, "life's like that", "let it flow", and whatever motivational quote that gets passed around in chain messages these days. I'm opening a compartment tonight as I'm writing this, because things have been happening around me lately that I think if I ignore any longer will eventually give me more issues in the future. So, suicide. I can talk about death, the fragility and absurdity of our existence for hours on end, but I can never quite be as articulate for suicide. Because the degree of hopelessness and loneliness and insecurity and pain that precedes a suicide is really one of those things words can never describe. It's only ever things that you feel inside your skin and all throughout the edges of your bones and as a constant throbbing headache and a monotone humming in your ear; it's only ever in the way...

The whole idea of the future is poisonous. Years seem to come with the expectation of growth but never really with much assurance of it. I mean, at least, for me. I seem to think of growing up as akin to going to sleep. That I'd close my eyes at 16 - angsty and hateful and insecure - and then wake up at 19 - magically cured. I've come home for the midyear break recently. My house is full of reflective surfaces. Windows took almost half of the walls in at least one side of every room, the cupboards in the kitchen for all the utensils were made of glass, there was a big mirror in the living room, a half-body mirror in my sister's room, a smaller one in the bathroom in the hallway, another one in the master's bathroom, and finally in my room the size of a palm. You know that part in Mulan after she goes to the matchmaker and realizes that practically no one is ever gonna want to be her husband? I had that Mulan moment, but upside down. I wasn't conflicted that ...