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Justin Erik Halldor Smith asks, Is depression a medical condition?

I was 10 or 11 when I first learned the word “depressed” from a Woody Allen movie, and I quickly grasped its usefulness. “I don’t want to go out, I’m depressed” just sounded more dramatic than “I don’t feel like it” or “Tinatamad ako”.  Am I a true depressive? To say so would be disrespectful to the people with the real problem. I have these black moods, but I know that they will pass eventually, I just have to ride them out. But I see how it can get very bad, and pass beyond your control, and then you’re in the abyss. My friends tell me depression is chemical, and often you have no choice but to medicate. But what if depression is an inextricable part of your character, one of the things that make you you? Medication makes it easier for other people to deal with you, but is it still you?

I have these two friends who love the movies, have worked in the movies, want to make movies, have been talking about making movies for years. They have all these brilliant concepts for the movies they plan to make, which for a host of reasons (economic, but mostly psychiatric) they haven’t gotten round to making. But they committed a crucial error. They told me, and I am implacable. Never tell me your fondest dreams, your secret ambitions, even the name of your crush, because I will hound you to go after them. I am relentless. Basically I won’t shut up, and you may feel like hiding from me, but who else will you talk to about your fondest dreams, your secret ambitions, your crush?

I have asked myself why I am this way, and come up with too many answers. My life is boring, so I live vicariously through my friends (sad/pakelamera). I was seriously pushed to achieve as a child, so now I push others (from the safety of my lifetime underachievement award). I regard life as a real-time writing laboratory, and I want to see how the story turns out. Maybe I just want my friends to be happy, even if it kills them. Maybe I just like eating paper.

So I bet my two friends that if they met the deadline for Cinemalaya applications last month, I would eat their synopses and post the video on YouTube. Well one of them actually submitted his application! True, we had to drag him kicking and screaming through heavy traffic on a rainy Friday evening to turn it in, but it was done. And I will make good on my threat and eat that synopsis on YouTube. I ate newspaper as a child (weird family ritual on the first day of school), so there’s your foreshadowing. Since I am not kidding, I have coerced (blackmailed) Jade Castro who wrote and directed Endo, best movie of Cinemalaya 2007 as far as we’re concerned, into directing the video. We shoot in October.

In which I drag you kicking and screaming to a French movie about a gangster who wants to be a pianist. Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.

Still no sign of the original version with Harvey Keitel. As for The Beat That My Heart Skipped, ask your usual source, wink wink nudge nudge.

In the course of my friend’s quest we sought out a psychic who’d been recommended by a columnist. This manghuhula used regular playing cards to read the future. We sat at a table—I was the designated note-taker—and he shuffled the cards. He asked my friend to cut the deck, then he lay the cards on the table. “You used to live in Makati,” he told my friend, looking her straight in the eye. In a sort of trance, he described the house she’d grown up in, including its color, the color of the gate, and the stones leading up to the front door. Then, in similar detail, he described my friend’s mother.

“Wow,” my friend said, “You can see all that in the cards?”

“No,” the manghuhula replied, “Don’t you remember me? I was your houseboy in 1973!”

Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.

If you’re not in the mood for revelation, look away. I hated high school. It’s no secret; I’ve written about it a few times. Most of those years I remember as an abyss of rage, misery, and loathing. You don’t know how angry I was, I was about two minutes from going Columbine. I don’t blame the school; I probably would’ve been as miserable elsewhere, and my family life didn’t help. I don’t blame my classmates because I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me. I was an angry, alienated teenager—not a unique situation, and not one I relish remembering.

That should be the end of the story, but for the ironies that follow. Anger gave me material. I actually became mildly famous for being angry. (It was the grunge era; rage was in.) This is not how I thought my life would turn out, but on the whole it works. And now because of the fame shit my old school wants to have something to do with me.

Do you know how warped and bizarre that is? I have no school spirit. I can’t get nostalgic for the time I spent seething. When I watched Auraeus’s movie Pisay I wished I had been like those kids, well-adjusted and happy. I can’t feign retroactive bonhomie. Then I realized that no one is asking me to do these things. It’s just a gig for which I’m qualified. I talked it over with my friends, I talked it over with the alumni, and I thought, what the fuck, I’ll do it. It’ll be an exorcism.

Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.
Saturday, 2 am, somewhere in Makati. Raymond insists that we go to this 24-hour carinderia, a favorite among filmmakers.

“What’s it called?”

“It doesn’t have a name,” Raymond says. “You have to try the tokwa and lechong kawali.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know the name of the street.”

“Then how will we get there?”

“I know the way. Sort of.”

“Di kaya tayo ma-Tribu nyan?” Ricky asks.

“No.”

“What do they serve?”

“Pares. Lechong kawali and tokwa.”

So at 2 am, after only three minutes of confusion that Raymond blames on a tikbalang, we find the carinderia on a crowded street. I can’t be more specific because the place has gotten popular enough as it is. It’s so popular that by the time we get there the only food left is lugaw and tokwa. True, the fact that it’s past 2 am may have something to do with the lack.

The carinderia is clean and bright, with that cruel fluorescent lighting that picks out and reveals your zits from twenty years ago. We sit on the bench by the long metal table and order lugaw and tokwa. The neighborhood is pretty lively despite the hour—people keep popping up for midnight snacks. At the next table, the owner is having a serious conversation with a transvestite in a halter dress. Across the street is an electric sign offering “24-hour organic massage”, whatever that is. (”They massage your organ?” is Raymond’s guess.) Down the street someone is doing karaoke: it sounds like he’s being garrotted with his own vocal cords.

Two picturesque teenagers sit at our table and inhale bowls of lugaw. Raymond wants to put them in a movie, but they leave before he can deliver his spiel. However, the woman at the counter tells us their names, addresses, and hobbies without our even asking. Then it starts raining again. I feel like a character in the Edward Hopper painting, or more accurately, the Tom Waits album. “There’s a rendezvous of strangers around the coffee urn tonight, all the gypsy hacks, all the insomniacs, now the paper’s been read.” In that instant I even wish for a piano, until I remember that I don’t play.

rue Cazotte, originally uploaded by 160507.

Paris, je t’aime; the movie not so much. It consists of short episodes set in the different arrondissements and directed by a bunch of well-known directors including Alfonso Cuaron, Gus Van Sant, and Tom Tykwer. The idea is to make Paris seem romantic and worth visiting; the fact that it’s become necessary to make a movie to deliver that point says a lot about Paris’s image these days. You mean Paris isn’t the default setting for romance anymore?

The producers reportedly got the idea from Love, Actually, which made London seem romantic and exciting; the memory of Love, Actually still makes me want to run screaming out of the theatre (and I usually enjoy Richard Curtis flicks). The episode I like most is the last one, by Alexander Payne, in which a middle-aged American postal worker speaking French with a midwestern accent sums up the weird combination of joy and sadness that seizes visitors to Paris. It makes up for the cuteness that afflicts the rest of the movie. Paris is many things, some of them infuriating, but it is not cute.

The most unbelievable episode is the one in which an estranged couple have a drink at a bistro and Gerard Depardieu as the maitre d’ tells them it’s on the house. Ha! A freebie in a Paris restaurant? Has the apocalypse arrived?

Five minutes into the movie, at the end of the Montmartre episode, there’s a shot of my friend’s apartment building. It’s the only building on rue Cazotte, which is the shortest street in Paris, in case you’re in a trivia contest.

By the way there’s a new Woody Allen impressionist on the screen: Julie Delpy. 2 Days In Paris, which she wrote, directed, sang the theme of, and stars in with her ex-boyfriend Adam Goldberg, her parents, and probably her cat, is like Annie Hall with Delpy playing both Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. It’s lovely and hilarious, though it ends rather abruptly. Noel and I both found Adam Goldberg hot all of a sudden. One thing I know about relationships among the hyperverbal: talking never resolves anything, it’s just more ammunition.

In the dream I am in a large, newly-painted, sparsely-furnished apartment, talking to Roger Federer. We are having a very serious discussion about why he still hasn’t won the French Open. Rather, I am angry and frustrated, and he is detached and cheerful. There is no reason you can’t win on clay, I tell him, so what’s the damn problem? Throughout our talk, people keep walking in and out of the room—sports journalists, tournament officials, Federer’s girlfriend Mirka—but no one interrupts us.

In the middle of our discussion, I remember that Federer’s Wimbledon singles final against Rafael Nadal is about to start. I turn on the television so we can watch it. Before the match begins, there is a celebrity scavenger hunt featuring the two finalists.

The game show ends—I don’t remember who won—and the singles final is about to begin. The audience at Wimbledon is waiting for the players to step onto center court. Suddenly it occurs to me that if Federer is sitting next to me on the couch, how can he play in the final? That’s when I realize that I’m dreaming, and seconds later I wake up.

What does the dream mean?

P.S. When you post a comment, please don’t call me “Ate”. I feel like you’re asking for the day off.

The horror!, originally uploaded by 160507.

Alright! I believe you! You had a horrible day! Everyone who posted their tale of misery and woe before Saturday, August 4, 10pm Manila time gets a book. To claim your free (um, not exactly—you bought it with your aggravation) book, email zeus.books@gmail.com. Give your real name if you want to have the book signed. By the way I don’t know what book you’re going to get—could be a novel, a treatise on Phoenician textile dyes, or an old calculus textbook, it’ll be a surprise! Because life is chaotic and full of seemingly random events, and if you hit rock bottom hard enough, you bounce.

P.S. Triangle 30, since you’ve brought cheer to so many, I’m going to throw in a DVD of The Departed in the hope that someday you will be able to watch it without reliving your trauma.

In Crimes and Misdemeanors there’s a character who keeps saying, “Comedy is tragedy over time.” Someday you will look on the worst days you’ve ever had, and laugh. For now you can just describe it in comments under Perspective (the previous post) and try to cheer yourself up with the thought that there are people out there who make your life look like a wine and cheese picnic on George Clooney’s Lake Como estate. Which incidentally has been cited as one of the most polluted spots in Italy. Rewind to previous thought—is this one reason why people take up humanitarian causes (I’m not saying it’s the only reason)?

Quite often these days I feel like a hamster that’s been running and running and is about to fall off the wheel from sheer exhaustion, but knows that if it stops some schmuck will pick it up and stick it in a place that’s fun for the schmuck but not for the hamster, you know what I’m saying?