Deep Affections

My eyes are still swollen as I type this. I've just come (literally, I am about two blocks away from Greenbelt) from watching The Hobbit and I simultaneously feel like a child and an old woman. Part of me feels like going home and crying until I fall asleep and a bigger part of me knows that I can't do that because I am no longer a child--I'm not even an adolescent anymore, come to think of it.

Of all the characters in The Hobbit or generally, in Tolkien's world Bilbo is probably the character for which I have the deepest affections. He isn't my favorite character--I think that would have to be Aragorn or Thorin or Beren--and he isn't the person I want to be like--that would have to be Tinuviel, Arwen or Eowyn--but he is the character with whom I identify the most. Like Bilbo (at the beginning of The Hobbit anyway), I think I am the kind of person who is always reading about the world and studying maps and trying to figure out how things work but who is never getting out there and seeing anything because I am very, very anxious and clumsy and scared that the decisions I make will lead to my ultimate and untimely demise. 

Also, I grew up in Alabang--and a very comfortable, Shire-esque part of Alabang too. In my childhood world there was only the village and not the village. In fact, until college I didn't know that people lived in the North. (Weird, I know.) I always thought that people worked in the north of Metro Manila and came home to the south every evening.

 This is probably why I find myself always saying yes to things that are up north--events, booklaunches, poetry readings, get togethers--and why I always find myself dating people from the north; heading up there is always interesting to me because it is so alien. My life is a constant push-and-pull between the two things I fear the most: that what I do will kill me and that because of that anxiety I will die having done nothing, having gone nowhere and having made no impact on anyone.

Furthermore, I'm the kind of person who is easily underestimated and easily set aside because I am so small and so soft and dainty. More often than not, I find I am put into a box together with the words pretty, cute, adorable, amicable, friendly. Harmless. I am the kind of person who earns respect through anonymity, usually--I never would've guessed that was your story or Wow, it sounds so un-girly are things that I have heard countless times at deliberations and workshops for my work. And that's fine, I suppose. To some extent, there is strength in the unexpected.

But there is always the desire to prove yourself and the want to be seen for what you are, instead of what you appear to be. And so when I watch movies like The Hobbit and LOTR and I meet characters like Bilbo--the things that happen to them always both hurt me and comfort me. His reluctant and seemingly accidental heroism is relieving because you know he's trying his best and you know he'll help out in the end but also it reminds me of being underestimated and being patronized and being treated like you couldn't possibly be brave and girly and vicious and nurturing at the same time. 

And that's how I felt this afternoon. I don't want to spoil the movie for people who haven't seen it yet, but I will say that this is a movie worth watching. I heard from a friend that some of the reviews said that the movie was so-so but I'd have to say otherwise. I think that this movie was full of the personal tragedies that Tolkien's non-LOTR Middle Earth work (Children of Hurin, The Silmarillion) so often contains and it's definitely different but just as great.