How to get fired, how to get fired up

Last Thursday night I lied. In a text message I told my team leader, sir, I'm not feeling well, I just logged out. I was at a restaurant when I told him that, drinking milk tea. My work had just started. Ten o'clock in the evening. I'd opened my PC and started editing one file then when I decided to get out. There at the restaurant, I checked the time. An hour past ten.  Did you visit the clinic, he asked. I told him I didn't. Later that night I convinced myself it wasn't entirely a lie, what I said about not feeling well. True, I wasn't feeling well, I said to myself, here, touching that part where my heart is, guffawing.

I bar-hopped alone. If per chance you've tried doing this already, you might have to agree with me when I say it's one of those rare moments when you could actually feel a strange pathetic sense of purpose and stupidity, meshed in a way that, when you're finally sitting at the bar's counter watching others on the dance floor having the time of their lives and you're gulping one bottle of beer, pretending (or not) to look amused, makes you want to leave that godforsaken chair and head out to the door of oblivion, or stay, hoping against hope that someone would come over and share that quiet space of desolation you call being alone. One moment I was at the office reading a boring file about a research study that talked about why Brazil was having a bad time getting their economy up. Next thing I know, I was going to three bars that night feeling, well, in a strange mission for experience, I'd later on say to myself.

But I ended up getting tipsy and smelling of smoke so I went home. It was almost three thirty in the morning. A few minutes after, I realized something. There's a boat leaving for Dapitan at four in the morning and I have to catch it.

At around 6am somewhere between Visayas and Mindanao.

Still feeling really tipsy, I packed my stuff in my bag -- toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, a bottle of blueberry-flavored vodka, deodorant, shirt, my Speedo trunks, a pack of green peas. I was hyped. Then I remembered McDonald's, ordered two burgers and Coke, and told the old pedicab driver to please hurry I'm catching a 4-am boat ride I need to get that ride please hurry. It was exhilarating. 

When I finally had my ticket and reached the boat, I stood at the open deck, breathed slowly, took one bite at my cheeseburger, almost screamed but didn't, and thought for a second what if this boat sinks, goodbye friends, goodbye work, goodbye mom, goodbye world.

The best thing about traveling alone, I found out, is, in an inexplicable way, you become braver. Something inside you demands that you talk to someone you don't know and that what you need to talk about is why you are there at that moment and what are you up to in the minutes and hours to come. I eventually ended up talking to this guy who, I gathered later on, was headed back to his hometown, Pagadian city, a ten-hour ride or so from my own hometown. Davao city. He was a nurse, was an instructor before -- said he did it for experience -- and so on. He's visiting his parents for two days.

"What are you doing in Dapitan?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. He laughed. I laughed too. I said I was doing it for experience. I had been planning to visit Dapitan for a long time.  Funny that I had to get drunk to do it, I said.

But I really didn't know. There at the boat, when both of us decided it was time go to sleep, I thought about what I was doing. The four-hour ride was taking too long, I couldn't sleep, and what seemed like enthusiasm slowly turned to sour boredom, and fear, and regret. That was one of the things I later figured out when traveling alone. There will be moments when traveling becomes pointless and for a second you just wanted to get out of there, go back home, and snuggle in bed. The good thing about it was that I was in that boat somewhere in the middle of the ocean on an early morning headed to a place I haven't visited for the first time. There was no way out and I was on my own.

Pulauan Port, Dapitan

At around nine, I finally had a glimpse of Dapitan's port, and I was immediately struck at how it looked. There were no buildings, to name one. From what I see, it looked too rural, the line of houses cluttered too close to each other, others even reaching all the way up the mountain side and the image of Rio de Janeiro's slum area flashed in my mind. When the boat started docking, men waiting below, porters, began to shout, "Dallas here, Dallas here!" "Miami! To Miami!"

Later I would find out from my motorbike driver that indeed, there's nothing much to see in Dapitan except for the famous place where the famous national hero, Jose Rizal whiled away his time when he was in exile, thanks to the Spanish, before he was finally shot, and of course, the dollar beach, Dakak. I wasn't interested to go there anyway. After a few minutes at Rizal's shrine, we proceeded to Dipolog city, a fifteen-minute ride from Dapitan. The drive reminded me of the movie "Motorcycle Diaries". It felt surreal.

Nothing much happened when I arrived in Dipolog. My driver and I ate lunch. I hadn't taken a bath yet and I was feeling hot, too stressed out, terribly edgy, almost nauseous really. I ended up looking for a massage spa. Okay, I'm going to stop here.

A few things I found out after the trip. For one, before embarking on a sudden crazy journey somewhere, take a bath. It really helps that you get out of the house feeling fresh and in good, comfortable clothes. Number two, at least have a general plan about what you might want to do there, especially when it's the first time you're visiting the place. Random ideas may help too, and I'm a firm believer of random plans, I tell you. I'm a fan of it big time. But it pays to have at least one clear plan just the same. Third. Never ever go to a new place and have yourself a massage. It kills all of your wild adventurous hormones, slays them that you eventually end up getting slothful that you don't want to do anything but lie down in bed and sleep instead of walking around the place and getting familiar with it.  Fourth, for heavensake stay at the place for one night! You've just arrived at nine in the morning and you're already leaving at four in the afternoon? Are you out of your mind? Last thing, if by chance you might want to visit Dapitan or Dipolog, do not ever ask anyone if they have coffee shops in town.

Literally or literarily

It still comes as a mild surprise to me whenever lost in thought somewhere, I stumble upon the fact that I'm nowhere near home. For that split-of-a-second there, something just taps inside me, and it lets loose what I gather as scales from that day-to-day casualness of my having to be alone in this city, its name I only heard for the first time the day my childhood friend decided to study here for college. As it happens, I look around, find my feet still walking the familiar streets of what I now consider my home. And once again, I am giddy and raving and ecstatic at the decision I made.

A year ago, around May or June as I recall it, I promised myself a dare. I dared that by the time I reached twenty one, I should be away from home. Far from it. Miles and miles away from it. That time I thought the prospect was just too ambitious. Picture a fresh grad who just drained his mother's pockets and everyone else's around him setting off somewhere to start an epic journey of his life at twenty one, all these crazy carpe diem! ideas running frantically in his head thanks to those movies and stories in college, a borrowed bag in tow, and no cash. It's ridiculous. No. No. It's a self-centered, egotistic, selfish impulse, like a sexual orgasm actually, unable to contain itself now that I think about it.

Unmistakably, there's always the usual heart-wrenching question nowadays: When are you going back home? Always, I tell them, "No plans, yet. It's too early to go back." And mind you, I say this with a light heart plus a quick offhand gesture. Poof. (No, I don't really do the hand thing. I like it there for the sake of effect.) Then: Don't you miss your parents? your friends? It must be hard living by yourself. Which reminds me about the phrase I heard one of my writer friends say about living literally or literarily. It's quite a distinction, actually, one that kept me pondering even as I am writing this. In Susan Orlean's words, she has this to say about traveling:

Is it that when you travel you can invent yourself anew, and the new person you become is freer and more engaged and more engaging than the persona you left at home? And even if you're not in love, is this still what makes travel so seductive - the creation of a new buoyant version of yourself, unpunctured by the familiarity of people who know you and know that you have another self?

What I consider living by myself is, in a way, what I consider too as traveling. I experience what it feels like to go home from work, to switch on the lights and find at ten o'clock in the evening my unmade bed, the sheets still tousled from last night; the dumped used shirts on one corner, the clean ones on another; the eerie quietness of the place when most of the nextdoor boarders have gone home, the racousness when they're back; the barking of dogs; the gurgling sound made by my cheap water heater as I try to cook instant noodles; the loud groaning sound of passing motorcycles outside the gate.

Or the site of men stationing themselves along Meciano street, drinking; boys my age gathering, strumming guitars, the beat box following the rhythm, the chorus of glee boys and girls singing Huling El Bimbo; the tired looks of old men and women watching them, oftentimes swaying their heads, perhaps in dismay at the noise; the twenty-four hour bakery station, the lady with the long hair inside, her round face and the bulge of her cheeks protruding in this irritating, sometimes frightening way whenever somebody wakes her up at three o'clock in the morning to buy bread.

So yes, I may possibly be living both. I want to think I am.