accident prone

I haven't written in such a long time. I was going to blog two Thursdays ago following my nasty accident, but I was so caught up in my homework and tending my wounds.

But, enough about the homework. To tell you the truth, I'm not really feeling this semester. Or should I say... I haven't really felt this semester. And by that I mean I haven't been enjoying myself too much. Don't get me wrong. I really love the courses and the subjects and the professors are great, but I'm not too fond of late classes and the idea of missing the bus ride (it comes every 40 minutes and the last bus is at 8.20 PM or something) haunts me whenever we get overboard with the time.

That was precisely what happened on the night I had my accident. I was fidgeting much in class because it was already time (7.30 PM) but we were still talking about our assignments. I really didn't want to miss my bus. I was tired and hungry and Thursday is the last day of school week so I was looking forward to a nice long weekend.

We got out of class at 7.40 PM and I hurriedly walked to the bus stop. It was freezing and my teeth were chattering and I cursed because it was 7.41 PM and that was when the bus was supposed to come and I didn't see any bus. So I thought I must've missed it. I braced myself to wait for forty minutes and decided not to wait in the library because I wouldn't be able to see it if it came. Instead, I walked to a nearby classroom (very warm and cozy and empty) with windows through which I could see the bus stop.

Just when I plopped my ass down on the chair in the class, ready to rub my freezing tropical palms together, I instinctively looked outside the window at the bus stop and lo! and behold, the bus was there. So I did my best Wonder Woman impression and ran. I ran and I ran and I ran and... I jumped over two stair cases. The first jump was quite a success. I wobbled a bit when I landed, but I thought, oh f*ck it, I'm going to jump over the other. So I did, and landed on the asphalt on my palms and knees like a little bitch.

My stuff was all over the place and I picked it up and ran to the bus. The nice driver apparently saw something on the ground and said that I had dropped something. I went out again and realized that I had forgotten my glasses and they were there on the ground.

Well, the bus was empty and I was the only passenger even when it arrived at the BART station, so I guess I was lucky. I suddenly felt stings on multiple parts of my body, namely my right palm, some fingers of my right hand, and my right knee. So I looked, and sure enough, I was bleeding. The right knee part of my jeans was torn and I peeked inside and saw that I was bleeding hard.

The bus ride was twenty minutes long to Lafayette BART station. Then I had to wait for about five minutes until the train arrived. The train ride took about ten minutes to Rockridge BART station. Then I had to wait for about fifteen minutes for the bus from Rockridge to the nearest stop from my apartment. The bus ride was about eleven minutes, and the walk was about seven minutes.

In the words of Plankton, let no one say I don't suffer for my art. Or something like that. And actually I don't suffer for my art technically speaking, but you get the idea.

After the jump, you'll be exposed to the gore fest that is my wounds. They're healing now. The one on my right palm is still raw but at least it's not bleeding anymore. My knee, on the other hand, suffered quite a deep gash, and since I can't stop walking (and dancing - although I've been restraining myself from doing floorwork), it's healing somewhat slowly.

But before that, here's some more Wonder Woman goodness. I personally prefer the theme song where the singers sing the whole song, but those other clips don't show Ms. Carter jumping around.

Perhaps that night before I jumped, I should've twirled so I could change into my Wonder Woman costume, huh?

To think I was interested in doing Parkour.

See my wound after the jump (pun intended)

nightmare

At 00:11 just now, I woke up from a nightmare.

Okay, here's a little disclaimer. I'm currently working on a horror story that takes place in Indonesia and I was watching Coraline before going to bed and feeling bloated after dinner. 

I am there with my friends and we're hanging out and I think we're in the studio during an open house and we have people coming in and trying a dance session. Then she comes in. There's something about her that's making me uneasy and right then and there I scream to my friends, telling them she's a specter, a ghost, a demon. No one believes me, but the woman seems to be offended and runs to where the elevators are (pretty impressive, huh? A dance studio in a fancy building with elevators! Yeah! But I digress), and stupidly enough, I run after her. 

Seriously, I don't know why I'm running after her, maybe it's to say I'm sorry? Maybe it's to shout and scream some more at her? I think it's the latter. Then she looks at me and I feel the strangest thing: I feel that I've seen her before and I feel that I've been in the situation before and in that previous situation, the spectress revealed her true face when her face was hovering just inches before mine and let's just say that it wasn't a very pretty face. Okay, I lied, it was a very evil and grotesque face with skewed yellow eyes and boy, I think I saw fangs too. 

And just like in the previous encounter, now she's looking at me and she seems to be flying (or probably taking a huge and graceful step towards me - that makes me wonder why I turned her away from the dance lesson. She would probably make a good dancer) and her face is hovering just inches from mine and, yes, sure enough, she reveals her true face to me.

Her eyes become askew and her irises turn yellow. Not yellow like fire, but like the mold, growing off of a dead thing and invading its surface. She opens her mouth and I can see perfectly lined fangs. Yes, the fangs are so perfectly lined that when I'm thinking about it now, they may look a lot prettier than my own teeth. In fact, the fangs are the same size. They're not huge like a T-rex's or a shark's, but they're there, menacingly perfect. Two rows of perfectly lined fangs. Then she arched her lips and grinned at me, baring those sharp fangs. There's something demeaning in that grin. Something that says she knows me and she has my soul. 

I don't know what's coming over me, but my left hand flies on her face and I attack her, clawing her face. But then I wake up as my nails hit the wall  and the Venetian blinds of my real bedroom. 

I open my eyes for five seconds but they feel so heavy, the kind of heaviness that one feels after an abrupt and involuntary awakening from a deep slumber (no matter how ghastly it is). So I close them back and I am  sucked into the nightmare again.

I wake up in my room and although it doesn't look like my room in Jakarta, I know that I'm at home. I quickly get out of bed and bang on the other doors next to my room. My mom and dad are there and also my sister, but my brother's room is empty. I remember feeling relieved that my brother isn't there. And there I am, screaming and shouting of my encounter with a ghost. My sister believes in what I say but my parents remain skeptical, but then something happens and I'm not sure what. I think I come back to my room and find a box, then there's a box of pictures, and every time I look at it, the spectress comes and it challenges me with her eyes and her fangs, but I want to defeat her because I've seen her once and she got away. I want her to stop bullying me. 

I run through the box of pictures. There's a picture with only a silhouette of a woman, there's another picture that I forgot. And every time I do that, the spectress comes back and haunts me and I scream (because I'm a chickenshit) and my mom comes into the room and I'm determined to show my mom that the demon does exist and that the demon follows me. 

And I don't know why, but somehow, mom and I are in the bathroom and I grab the shower hose and begin to spray water all over the room and there's a spot that no matter how strong the spray is, the water won't reach it, as if there's an invisible wall there, and then I know, and my mom also realizes, that it's the demon and that she exists. 

 Then suddenly I'm back inside the room but my mom isn't there anymore. I rummage through the box of pictures again and found a paper box. Inside it is a hair comb, the one that sticks on the hair as an accessory and as I reach to grab it, the whole room turns black. Pitch black. I can't turn the lights on and I can't find a single light spot to fix my eyes on. But I feel her, I feel that the demon is there, and yes she's there, I feel her as a giant, standing right there in front of me as a dark red fog but with sharp edges. She just stands there, glaring a ray of darkness (this may sound weird, but her glare, the dark redness that emanates from her presence doesn't reflect light, as opposed to what colors do. As far as I know, colors reflect light, that's why we can see them and differentiate which color is which, but that dark redness is there and it seems to stand starkly in the pitch blackness).

She's a giant now, and she just stands there and I'm sitting upright in bed, still trying to flick the bedside light on but it won't turn on. I feel she's feeling satisfied that I'm now so terrified that if I shat right then and there my poo would be pale and white with fright. I feel like I've done something bad, like I've wronged her and that she deserves to do that to me, but at the same time, I also know that I deserve to be free of this mortal fear. So I begin to confront her. I don't know what's coming over me but I begin screaming and shouting to her, "You are nothing to me. I am stronger than you are. I am bigger than you are. You are nothing and you don't scare me. You hear me? You are nothing!" Strangely enough, it works. I can feel her energy diminishing as she becomes smaller. Then she seems to disappear. 

As soon as I can't see her anymore (although I can still feel her presence), I try to turn the light on again by flicking it like a madman, but it still won't turn on and I panic again. Then in a split second, I realize that I'm dreaming and the only way to get out of this is to wake up, and so as the last resort, I jerk my head strongly to the right and there I am inside my room. My real room. The lights are turned off but the street lights seep through the blinds into the room and for a moment after the pitch blackness of my nightmare, my darkened room looks like it's filled with flood lights. 

Now I'm here, writing about it, ignoring the grammar and the structure and the cohesiveness (because it is a dream and I'm narrating it using present tense) and I'm just hoping that it's just a dream. 

I'm really hoping that it's just a dream. 

cali

I can't believe I'm back here in California. I can't believe I'm back here in my apartment, listening to my neighbor upstairs playing guitar in the middle of the night (something that I quickly avenged by Skype-ing loudly with a friend). I can't believe school is starting tomorrow.

To be perfectly honest, I'm here for the dance. But don't tell my mom.

If I'm not too lazy (I still have the jet lag to blame), I'll be posting the pros and cons of being here, of pursuing a chunk of my dreams far away from home, far away from the comfort, safety, and certainty of a city I call home.

However, I have to admit that when I boarded the BART train from SFO to Rockridge a few nights ago, I didn't feel like a stranger.

Perhaps it was the ultimate surrender. Or, the jet lag.

Yeah, I think it was the jet lag.