Self-Improvement Tip # 2: Big Dipper

When I was declared unfit to run a race and subsequently told to make a different kind of journey, I was caught unprepared. I had nothing, knew nothing – felt nothing. But I had no options, or had one — and this was it: To pick the destiny given to me, and charter the course of my own unknown voyage.

I was numb, feeling nothing when I went aboard the ship. I didn’t even know what kind of ship it was. Was it the kind that can go on war and sink all the enemies’ tankers? Were the materials used to build it strong enough to brave the winds, storms, and gigantic waves? But my mind was too clouded to seek answers for those petty questions. All I knew during that time was the wind was strong: I could hardly breathe; the waves were incessantly hitting the vessel, causing it to sway back and forth, enough to effect dizziness on me. When the ship began to sail and reached few meters away from the shore, that’s when I realized that I’ve brought nothing with me. Not even a compass to point the directions of my journey, of where I’d be going to.

I poured my heart out until it seemed to stop beating. My eyes got tired and dry, and my body paralyzed. But still, I cried silently. I was still alive and could see myself thinking, moving, speaking — just not feeling anything.

I went outside my cabin and went on the top floor, sat down on a huge round pipe, and looked at the sky. It was dark, moonless night, but the sky was clear. No clouds at all. I saw countless little tiny things, brightly sparking in heaven.

I was blankly staring at them, amazed at their wonders, when this thought came to me: that even during the darkest of the nights there are little tiny stars that could guide me to where I want to be or where I am destined to be. All I have to do is to identify them. Know them.

Since then, looking at the sky and enjoying the twinkles of its stars became my favorite habit. They serve as my reminders that during the toughest times of my life, they – numerous little stars – are my hopes, my remaining undying hopes. See how countless they are?

One day, I wanted to go see the Captain. Luckily, I met him on my way to his office. “Can I borrow a book about stars or constellations?” I asked him. He said yes without even asking who I was. “Captains could not be captains without knowing the stars,” he proudly said with unwavering conviction in his tone.

He lent me a book entitled “The Stars of The Night.” It was a very old hard bound with some coffee smudges on the edges of its pages. I can barely recognize its author’s name. I was nevertheless ecstatic when I read the first few entries of its leaves. What caught my attention first was the Great Bear – Big Dipper. Unlike what I’ve initially thought of, Big Dipper is just a ‘greatly identifiable portion of a constellation’ called asterism. It is just part of the Ursa Major, a larger group of stars.

I ran promptly on a nearby window to look at the sky, but have seen nothing. There was a great mass of dark clouds, a sign of an impending bad weather, of a storm, perhaps. I went back to my room. Gloomy. Which was even more surprising: “Could I still be gloomier than I already was?”

I remembered a bookstore named “NBS in a Boat” located on the same floor where my cabin was. I went there and looked for some star-shaped neon objects. I found two boxes of them, bought one full of 500 pieces of stars, glimmering in the absence of light. Their sizes vary from small, medium, to large. It cost me around 5oo bucks. There was one box more when I left the children’s toys section. Just in case you might want to buy, too.

Through a reusable clay paste, I began sticking the stars on my cabin’s ceiling. I started with an asterism that looks like a pot or pan with a very long handle. It is composed of 7 stars – 5 medium, 1 small, and 1 very small stars. After finishing the whole pattern, I felt an unexplainable sense of happiness. I turned off the light, and my neon stars mimicked the ones I could see in heaven. I lay flat on my bed with a smile plastered on my face. I was in that position for nearly an hour until I decided to regain my consciousness.

With my more than 400 pieces of stars left, I began building Hercules, Draco, Aquila, Perseus, and many others, until the ceiling was filled with tiny, little sparkling stars, each one pointing to a new sense of directional hope, each one essential in signifying my attempt to build my constellation of dreams.

Many of those who were visiting my room wonder how I’ve arranged them — my stars, and I would begin telling them the story.

That is Big Dipper, the warrior of the Polar Caps; that is Hercules, the constellation whose heroism was measured by the size of his heart, not of his strength. And that one, Perseus… He killed Medusa and rescued Andromeda from a sea monster…

Someday, there might be an asterism named after me. What do you think could be its story?

Self-Improvement Tip # 1: Magnanimous Loser

Photo Courtesy of sxc.hu

What a title… What do you think do I really know about self-improvement?

Never mind though.

Before I proceed, I want to make a disclaimer first — that when it comes to giving self-improvement advice, I’m neither a professional nor an expert. In short, follow this tip at your own risk. There is something I am certain though, that I’m a trying hard who is persistently adding usefulness to my blog entries because of their continuous sheer lack of it.

But wait! Have I not named my blog Kwaderno, the Filipino term for notebook? Well, that’s because I want to take down as much lessons and notes as I can while taking this journey I’m temporarily calling K-O TRAVEL.

So, this is more of a for-me-tip than for-you-tip.

Tip 1. Improve Your Vocabulary

Through the course of my initial voyage, I met two excellent writers. The first one was my Editor-In-Chief in a publication and the other one was a former colleague in a not so humane company. They had something in common, an attitude that I think was directly proportional to their verbal skills and rhetoric. They were calling their USP, laptop, and mugs with names — as if these were pets with birth certificates. Weird, don’t you think so? Perhaps yes, unusually bizarre. Admirable, nonetheless.

I told myself, “That is just so cool. Why should I not do the same for my things, too?”

I began with my pen. “From now on, I’m calling you magnanimous loser,” I once said while raising my new Pilot pen, recently bought from a supermarket near my boarding house.

Magnanimous was a term I encountered while reading an article. I couldn’t easily remember and use it inspite of my great efforts to repeatedly commit it to my long-term memory. Hence, to awaken my hippocampus and temporal lobes, I had attached magnanimous to my ball pen. In the absence, however, of another noun for magnanimous to correctly describe, I remained uncomfortable, if not totally incapable of, using it in my writings. I therefore added to it the word loser, the term magnanimous objectively illustrated in the same article it was written. That was how magnanimous loser pen came to existence.

I felt an overwhelming sense of happiness: little smile, forceful shout — which were already awesomely intense for a sick writer like me.

“Whoo! Whee! I could now be great, be an emperor like Julius Caesar, be a founding father like Abraham Lincoln, or be a national hero like Jose Rizal. I named a pen of my own, a weapon sharper and mightier than a double-edged sword.”

Not long after, magnanimous loser ran out of ink. That was even before I could conquer the whole of Europe, establish a super power country in the West, or receive a heroic recognition from my peers. I didn’t get so sad though, but still, I delivered a eulogy.

During the burial, I was the only one present. No one could hear my melodramatic speech, because everything was just in my head: “Ei, magnanimous, you might have lasted only for a month, but you left me important lessons in life. First, that losers can still be noble. Second, that I could be one word richer than before by attaching new vocabulary to my personal belongings. I shall never forget these values. Goodbye.”

Then, I threw it into the trash can.

The following day, I bought a pair of shoes. “Hello guys! You, left footwear, I’m calling you ‘ennui’, and you, right footwear, I’m calling you ‘boredom’. You’re twins – synonymous — always remember that. Don’t fight, be together at all times. Bring me to nice places where words are happiness and vocabularies are temporary refuge from sadness.”

Would you like to take a guess of where they’ve brought me so far?#

Differential Diagnosis

I am terribly ill. Metaphorically.

The signs and symptoms are visible but the diagnosis remains inconclusive. I know I’m dying. No one has to tell me — I can feel it.

The symptoms are psychological in nature and they are slowly creeping into the fibers of my soul, little by little eating what’s left of me. If the cause of this illness will not be identified now, I’d soon be dead in a few days — or hours.

I can’t sleep. No matter how much “House MD” series I take and push myself to be addicted to it for a short period of boob tube time, withdrawal syndrome will just be so fast that I’d be out of it right after turning the television and DVD player off. This symptom is usually followed by another one: I’d get back to my pillows to bury my head and cover my ears. I couldn’t cry, despite my longing for it. No tears would want to well up from my eyes and provide a hot comfort against my cheeks. Maybe my tear gland is too drained and my body is struck by numbness, drowning myself into a paroxysm of sadness.

I can’t even have happy memories. They make me sad. How ironic.

The symptoms of my disease also include hallucinations and blurring of memories. It’s like Lupus, an auto-immune syndrome. My body is releasing a kind of psychological white cells to fight off the disease, which could be an infection brought by a rare kind of virus. Is it really rare or something common? Tests have to be done — maybe an MRI would completely explain why the said basic units seem to be attacking not the virus but the healthy part of me.

I’m also experiencing an intense body ache, so painful I want to shout and say, “I want to die! Now!” I don’t want to take a glimpse of tomorrow. Or of the day after tomorrow. I want to die with my whole body intact. I can’t afford to see it disintegrating until nothing is left of me. I want to die, death would certainly be sweeter and life is bitter in a state of unidentified illness like this.

I’m scared. It’s a kind of dreadful fear that couldn’t be solved by subtle bravery.

Maybe the key to a right and certain medical finding lies in my previous actions or experiences. But when it comes to such history, everybody lies. I lie. Or I don’t talk about them so that I won’t need to lie. Or I’ll just say half-truths, which would also end up a lie. Well, at least the latter offers a consolation of not really lying. It simply allows me not to tell the whole truth.

The last symptom is this blog. I hate writing. I don’t write. I won’t write. I don’t want anybody else to read my entries. Or just what I’ve thought so. But still, why am I writing this piece of nonsense?

So, if you’re my doctor, what would your findings be, metaphorically?

By the way, my illness is contagious; it’s “read-borne.” You read this post, you’ll get the virus. Sorry, if I told you this only now.#