inferno

I recently went to National Book Store to buy some school supplies and left with not even a single pen but instead hauled out a big plastic bag containing books. One of the four books I bought, and also the one I’m reading at the moment, is The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. I’ve heard of the book a year ago but was unable to find a copy until the other day.

The Dante Club is set in Boston in the year 1865. A small group of elite literary men and Harvard professors are about to publish an English translation of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy but the members of the Harvard Corporation are bent on stopping this venture. This strengthens the resolve of the Dante Club to introduce Dante’s vision of hell to America. Their plans fall apart when a series of gruesome murders is reported and they realize that the killings embody the description of punishments from Dante’s Inferno. I have yet to get far in my reading but all these takes me back to the first time I read the works of Dante.

I was a senior in high school when we began reading excerpts from The Divine Comedy for an English class. As a project for our last quarter we were tasked to “rewrite” the Canto I of Dante’s Inferno and from there create a comic strip. One of my groupmates wrote quite an interesting script and we set to illustrate it in washes of watercolor. The finished product turned out quite well. Good enough at least to warrant praise from our teacher who insisted on keeping the comic strip and using it as an example for students the following year. Dante was forgotten afterwards amidst the flurry of exams and graduation.

I was already a sophomore in college when I decided it would be nice to actually read through the whole Divine Comedy. I bought a copy of Inferno and started reading it. I did pretty well reading the first few pages but as Dante descended into hell and introduced revolting punishments I found myself slowing down in my reading. I would read only about 5 pages a day trying hard to grasp the meaning of each verse. I’m not sure if I actually finished the book. What I’m sure of is that I never got to reading Purgatorio and Paradiso. Now, reading The Dante Club, I wish I had.


Another “episode” comes to mind when I think of Dante. There was this movie I saw as a junior in college. It was set in Death Valley in the desserts of North Mojave with Dante’s View serving as its glorious backdrop.

One afternoon as the two main characters sat watching the sun set over the valley the first one turned to the other and asked,

“Did you know that you lived this close to hell?”

The second just laughed and said, “I don’t know. But I kinda like it.”



Hell is everywhere.

cold turkey

It is two hours past my dismissal and everything feels wrong inside my head. The continuous ache that started last Saturday has suddenly changed character from a sharp, stabbing supraorbital pain to a dull ache that is deceiving. It almost feels that my week-long headache has finally subsided but I know it is still there, like a fading memory of an obscure dream. I'm not sure if I should be worried about it or not.

Earlier in the day I was going up and down the school's fire exit - to buy a drink, to get to my locker, to go down to a department. The fire exit was always the quicker route because it was on the side of all my above destinations. Going up and down the stairs all I could think about was having my camera fixed simply because I was itching to take pictures of the fire exit. This blog is not "Tales from the Fire Exit" for nothing. It is where I disappear to have my cup of coffee or to get some peace and quiet when the noise inside the classroom seems overwhelming. It's a good enough place to shout off frustrations or study without being disturbed. Of course there are other things that happen in the fire exit. But those stories are better left for another time.

Friday, thank God. I wonder why I always have friends who don't go out on a Friday. We seem like a goody-two-shoes band of quiet revelers. I am stuck between classmates who go straight home after school and friends who are too tired to go out after working overtime every day of the week. I am stuck in my apartment again although I am definitely not the homebody type.

Oh! By the way Happy Thanksgiving, well at least to those who celebrate the turkey day. My grandmother just called to say that my mom and two siblings are in Hawaii for a conclave right now. I'm not sure how long they will be staying there but I'm mightily pissed they didn't tell me about it.

My blog posts always seem to come on a Friday. I suppose being stuck in my apartment with nothing to do is the reason behind it. I am a cold turkey with my head in my hands trying to stop it from throbbing. Picture that.

lemon-sweeting

It is Friday once again. I am stuck inside my apartment, bored and hungry. The occupants of the first apartment downstairs are hanging out with friends. My ears are filled with their laughter and my nose wrinkle reflexively as the smell of cigarette smoke waft up to my second floor window. I refuse to call myself a loser for staying in on a Friday night. Besides, I already had my Friday night on a Thursday. I went out with friends last night, arrived late and went straight to bed too tired to do anything else but sleep. In any case Saturday has always been my lakwatsa day. I have a whole day to relax and gallivant around.

This is me sour-graping.

Sour-graping. Lemon-sweeting. Things people do on a daily basis. Behavior, I learned today, that patients often use as a defense mechanism to be able to cope with impairment or disability. Not that I never thought that patients utilize such behavior. It was just nice to hear a physiatrist confirm what seems to be a common enough reaction to a patient's current health status. And that, I'm afraid, is the only thing that comes to mind as I try to remember today's lessons.


My mind is blank. There seems to be nothing more to write.

For now.

sampung mga daliri

Noong isang araw nagkaroon ng pagpupulong ang mga estudyante kasama ang dekano ng medisina. Sabi ng dekano:

"Iba-iba ang tao. Ang mga daliri nga, iisa lang ang kamay, iba-iba pa ang taas . . . ang tao pa kaya."

Para sa akin, ito lamang ang nagpapaliwanag sa dami at pagkakaiba-iba ng mga naging hinaing ng mga estudyante hinggil sa bagong patakaran ng removals at promotion boards, pagbago ng pagkakasunod-sunod ng mga pagsusulit at iba pang mga isyu.

Totoo nga. "You can't please everyone."

life is waiting

Second day of classes. For today alone I spent more hours waiting for professors to arrive than actually listening to a lecture. It was such an awful feeling waiting for more than an hour for each class unable to go anywhere, unable to do anything else but wait. My schedule for today is from 7 am to 6 pm. Imagine how many hours of waiting I had to endure pretending it was not such a waste of time. And when I started to be quiet and my head started to throb the only excuse I could give to curious classmates was low batt na kasi ako e. I hate having a headache.

I am starting to read on topics for Obstetrics. Next door, the occupants and their friends squeal over the recent capers in Pinoy Big Brother. Such is life.

everything is illuminated

It was 6:30 in the morning when it hit me. I was in the middle of preparations for my first class and I had to sit down for a moment until the wave of illumination passed.

After a trying semester I felt good about having a break. I went home to the province for the first time in 5 months and slept soundly in my bed. I slept late and woke up late, attended family reunions and had conversations with my grandmother. I watched TV, something I did not have the luxury of doing in my TV-less, mirror-less apartment. In the midst of Numbers and CSI marathons, Discovery Channel features, endless coffee breaks and reading books I actually enjoyed reading, I found myself saying this is not so bad. And for a vacation virtually free of travel, malling and movie marathons I still couldn’t help but feel satisfied. It was like having my Buddha-on-the-mountain-top moment -- enlightenment that life wasn’t bad at all.

Anxiety over going back to school didn’t hit me until yesterday. I was unsure of how easily I could get back in the groove of things after having the longest sem break I’ve ever had in med school. I was still pretty much holding it all together though, psyched about attending classes, refreshed after my month-long hiatus.

And then this morning the veil was swept aside.

Who am I deceiving? That entire sem break is not who I am. Nor is it how my life will be. I am not long vacations, eight hours of sleep, TV and books to read.

I am a perpetual student, destined to have a life in the academe. I am waking up early, going to school, studying, doing homework and sleeping late at night. Lectures, patients, hospitals. THIS is my life. Who am I to pretend otherwise?

I have not chosen a life involving arts, culture and history. There is no reason why I should expect to have one.

This is my life. This is as good as it gets.