Just A Matter of Timing

In an attempt to prepare myself for Motion City Soundtrack's first Manila concert in March, I've been doing a little brushing up on their music and while I'm not too big a fan of their new stuff there is this one song, Timelines that I've really gotten into. I was listening to it on the way home from The Fort this afternoon, right after my bestfriend Marz got off the bus. Nothing like the sun setting over Metro Manila and a song like this to get you a'thinking about time.

It's 2013--five years since college started, three since I shifted into my course, give-or-take 10 since I met my bestfriends and almost two years since I met Keav. Today is the 26th of January: almost exactly a month since I turned 22, six months until I finally get my ass out of college. And how many more until I die? Until we all die? Who knows? 

Sir Howard, a teacher of mine used to say this to us at the beginning of every term: you're one term closer to graduating, to living the life you want and you are also one term closer to dying. I know mortality is something that we don't like to think about a lot because well, if we thought about it all the time we'd go crazy and just end up being afraid of everything all the time but I think it's healthy to acknowledge that we won't live forever.

I spent the day walking around The Fort (now called Bonifacio Global City) and Ayala with Marz (we had a meeting and were lazy to head home) and we stumbled upon this metal tree-canopy dome thing in one of the squares at BGC. I really, really liked that the people who made it were able to take the image of something that dies and something that is a symbol of life (and consequently, death I guess) and re-make it so well but still capture nothing of the actual tree. A lot of the time I think stories and writing in general are like that--we're trying to make things that are no longer the things they look like, in the same way that this photo is not that metal tree and these words are not that photo.