Viva La Graduacion

I apologize for the last posting, I'm not usually so resentful. But the sad thing is, the girl is kind of...me. I feel like I've swallowed a whole load of crap and yearned for this life here, and I've been given talents that I'm not using properly, not for the right reasons, reasons only to forward myself, to have a sweet little home and a blue passport or a green card or someone to hold hands with. I feel anxious as time moves ahead, and I'm sitting, doing nothing. Tons of ideas...and now, now I am responsible for them, and realizing them.

I saw a eurotrash chick in skinny heels, a Boho skirt, a halfshirt, obnoxious earrings, carrying a Guess shopping bag, paying for her latte while on her nokia bluetooth, wearing a MArc Jacobs ripoff cut jean jacket with a silkscreen of Che. In Goa, there was this stall with all shirts- all different, wifebeaters, v-neck tees, crossback tanks, ribbed collars, blue, white, black, red. But on them there were only two different designs, a silkscreen of Che or Ghandi. Now you could write pages on pages of going into that, about how we've turned their icons into the commodity they fought against, blah blah, but I realised how strong design can be. How it can create meaning, and destroy meaning, how it knows our language and can tell us lies while using it. At the same time, it could teach us all something, no? Half the people who sport those Che shirts, readily available at Newbury Comics, Cafe Press, Tower, and the like, they have no idea what it means. I'm not saying I do, nor do they have to. People can do what they want. But what's amazing is everyone has a right to their aesthetic opinion, and if it's a cool looking silkscreen monotone silhouette brown on red flag of some dude that I wanna hang in my window, I have every right. But what if you used that same language for something..real?

I read that the Free State Project is looking for an ad agency to give their image an uplift. So they don't look so crunchy, wierd, and Star Trek conventiony. Heck, Brad Pitt? Sure, I'll wear that rubber wristband for a dollar-it's cool.

And me? Retouching Charlize Theron's thighs for a one of sixty poster comp for an H1B visa to keep me here. And by night, putting together my magazine of interviews of migrants and displaced people...

So i've started reading Che Guevara. I'd love to make it sound that I'm some kind of intellectual, but I am not. I was feeling lonely and thought I'd have a Gael-Garcia Bernal film festival and watch Y Tu Mama and Motorcycle Diaries back to back (using my essay on potcolonial cinema as an excuse). I was struck by how frighteningly similar Mexico is to the Philippines, right down to having called my nanny "mother" and my sister's wedding might as well have been at a mexican bullring. And how I will one day motorcycle across South America. Anyway, struggling with my visa status, economic hardship, search for the medium, all that I want to do, all that I have to do (to eat), and all that I know I can do, I came across this passage:

..it is easy to distinguish the division between material and spiritual necessity. For a long time, man has been trying to free himself from alienation through culture and art. While he dies everyday during the eight or more hours that he sells his labor, he comes to life afterwards in his spiritual activities.
(Che Guevara,from Man and Socialism in Cuba)

Then I read my horoscope:

Saturn can bring feelings of anxiety initially, but if you work with this planet it will also bring you great security and accomplishment. In fact, your biggest and proudest achievements in life will happen while Saturn is speaking to your Sun or ascendant (or rising sign). As you get older and look back at certain years, you will find this to be true.
(Susan Miller, Astrologyzone.com, Taurus)

I'm not saying I know anything, or what I am going to do for that matter. All I know, is that something is happenning...something that's been brewing since 1977. Yikes- when did I get so damn dramatic? Don't answer that question.

On a lighter note, congratulations to me, and my Bachelors in Mass Communications, Film. (Queue graduation march song, me with black cap and gown, with Magna Cum Laude sash) Thank you. As Valedictorian, I would like to conclude with quote from the cinematic genius, Tommy Boy:

Did you hear I graduated?
Yeah and just a shade under a decade too, all right.
You know a lot of people go to college for seven years.
I know, they're called doctors
(Tommy Boy, 1995)