MussoLOLen is Always Right! |

Before leaving for the United States, I happened to be randomly reading an eBook of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra and it was amazing how his ideas (or my understanding of it, anyway) just kind of fell into place the moment I started exploring San Francisco. Let me try to explain what “simulation” and “simulacra” is so you can see what I mean.

One of the more apocalyptic consequences of the postmodern (world? condition? postmodernism? postmodernity? whatever) is the destruction of the real through the media of film and television. Traditionally, we think of art as mimesis – the image (art) as a reflection of the real (reality). Eventually, the image evolves (or devolves?) from a reflection of reality to its own pure simulacrum - the image no longer reflects reality; instead, it simulates a reality that isn’t there. And because we are constantly hounded by these simulacra through the media, we tend to mistake the real for the simulacrum. In other words, reality – or the way we think about reality – follows the image instead of the other way around.

I hope these theoretical concepts make sense as I go along. Or maybe it will be easier for me to get my point across if I begin by paraphrasing Baudrillard on America as a cinematic experience. He says that one of the charms of America is that even outside the movie theaters, the whole country is cinematic – the deserts appear like the set of a Western. There was definitely a movie-like quality to the way I experienced San Francisco. I had been there several times before, of course, but only during my last trip did I realize that the city looked like nothing I had experienced in the physical world, and everything I knew from movies. There was something about the way people moved and the way the buildings looked that made me feel like an actor walking across a movie set. I kept being haunted by a feeling that if I entered one of those pretty houses at Lombard Street, I would be greeted not by a living room but by lights and cords and a film crew moving things about behind the scenes, too busy scurrying about doing movie crew-like things to even notice that I was there. The city felt so unreal that at some point I began to wonder if there was a “real” America underneath the movie-set America I was moving in, and if that “real” America would ever be accessible to me at all.

There were also times when I waited for life to take a cinematic turn, and felt disappointment when it didn’t. At the motel Ale and I stayed in at Berkeley, the first thing I did was check under the bed to see if there were any dead bodies hidden there. The motel was far from the cheap, sleazy place I expected it to be – my first disappointment. It was clean, well-decorated, and had a flat-screen TV on the wall. And no dead bodies under the bed. (Later on, we discovered that the room cost us $130 for that one night we were there. I guess if there were any dead bodies to be found, housekeeping would have cleared it up before we even got there.) I know that the dead body under the motel bed is more of an urban legend than a scene from a movie, but the where else would my idea of the motel as a crime scene come from? That’s right, the media. Motels are often the site of movie murders, like in that John Cusack movie Identity, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a dead body in a motel in a CSI episode somewhere.

Another example. My friend Bobby has this apartment a couple of blocks away from the Transamerica Tower – you know, that famous pyramid-shaped building that you can easily spot on the San Francisco skyline. If you ever get the chance to hang out on his rooftop at night, you’ll be greeted with a spectacular view of the downtown area, glittering city lights and all. The first time I stepped out on his rooftop, I was left breathless by how pretty everything looked from up there. Then I said, “You know what would make this view perfect? If Godzilla or the creature from Cloverfield rose up from the Bay and started smashing everything.” I was already making an escape plan in my head and calculating my chances of survival, considering that I can’t go very far with my smoker’s lungs.

A couple of evenings later I was back on Bobby’s rooftop, this time with some of our friends from the hostel. It was their first time there and at some point, a lively discussion took place about how this would make the perfect hideout during the zombie apocalypse. Barricade the entrance to the roof then take turns guarding it, not to mention it’d be easy to snipe at any zombies who tried to enter the building. I could almost hear the moan and shuffle of the flesh-eating living dead.

There were many other instances when the events that happened to me there seemed a like something out of a quirky indie film or a badly-written Tagalog melodrama, but this narrative would become too unbelievable if I get into all of that now.

The first thing you’ll probably tell me after reading all of this is that I’ve been watching too many movies – and that is precisely the point of Baudrillard. Because of all these simulacra, “the real itself becomes organized along the lines of a disaster-movie script.” I’m not gonna lie and say that I wasn’t disappointed that a Cloverfield attack or a zombie outbreak didn’t happen while I was there. I will say though, that one of the highlights of my stay in San Francisco was my last night with Ale, which was spent in a room at San Remo. Again, the feeling that I was walking about in a movie set – our room was furnished with antiques, and to flush a toilet you had to pull a chain. Then everything happened according to the script: there was a love scene, and then the lights went off. This is where the credits roll, if credits rolled in real life.

It’s such an odd condition, to want your reality to become like an image that reflects nothing real to begin with. I wonder if this sort of thinking happens to a lot of visitors to America, if there are times when Americans view their reality in the same manner as I did, or if they expect to experience the rest of the world according to a simulacrum of their own creation.

A couple of days ago I had it all figured out. I realized that the secret to staying sane to grad school is to simply not care.

By “not care” I don’t mean “start being irresponsible.” I will still put my best efforts in whatever I do, but I will not care about the results – results being what other people might think of my work. I will not care about being the best in class. I will not care that I’m probably far from being the best in class because my classmates have more knowledge and experience than I do. I will not care that for me, it’s the academe or die. (The world won’t end if I don’t make it, but I really don’t see any sort of future for myself if I have to work in an office day in day out.) I will read what I can and study as much as I can and not care that in spite of the hours I put in reading all these things, there will still be a lot that I won’t understand.

I had that all figured out. The fire was back, and for once I sat in front of my computer looking forward to doing my paper instead of dreading it.

That all came crumbling down two nights ago when I spoke to a friend about my ideas for a paper and he reacted to it a little too critically. I suppose it wouldn’t be entirely fair to blame him for what happened to me after. He was just trying to help the only way he knows how, but I keep getting this sense of “What? I can’t believe you don’t know this yet” every time I speak to him about what I want to do. I realize that this sort of reaction affects me so much because those are the exact same things I tell myself; to have it echoed implicitly or explicitly by another person just confirms all the negative ways in which I see myself and my abilities. I ended up crying myself to sleep that night, and I woke up with an awful sense of frustration and hopelessness that stayed with me the entire day. Getting out of bed that afternoon (I slept through the morning) was an epic feat.

I don’t think it’s wrong that I put a lot of pressure on myself, but I have a feeling that the pressure is a little misdirected. Okay fine, a lot misdirected. Ale and Kristel both told me (on seperate occassions) that I focus too much on my shortcomings instead of what needs to get done. Kristel says I was very rigid on her and myself when it came to schoolwork – a funny observation, considering that I don’t remember a whole lot of studying going on when I was in college. It wasn’t uncommon for study sessions

to degenerate into drinking sessions within the hour

with a lot of gratuitous boob-grabbing in between.

(I kid you not when I say I didn’t learn jack shit about academic things in college. So now you probably understand why I’m constantly asking myself what the hell I’m doing in grad school.)

Anyway, so Kristel was telling me there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to get things done perfectly. My problem is that instead of just getting things done, my mind goes overdrive on the “perfectly” part and the insecurities that come along with it. Whenever I do anything academic, I work work work for a while and out of nowhere I freeze, panic, and think:

“Gah, I can’t do this.”
“Oh god, why am I not as smart as my classmates?”
“Maybe I’m better off being an office monkey.”
And the penultimate, “What am I doing with my life?”

So, now. The Rules To Staying Sane In Grad School:

1.) I will not care (see first paragraph).
2.) I will take things as slowly as time will allow me and do things one step at a time.
3.) I will lighten up on myself, ease up on the loft expectations, and focus on what I DID do for the day instead of freaking out over what I wasn’t able to do.

(Rules two and three sound like appendages to rule one but meh, who cares.)

To be perfectly honest, I still feel mightily discouraged – and at this point, I don’t think anything anyone can say to me will help. Putting all this down into writing is my attempt at pulling myself together, as if by seeing this on paper the rules will automatically apply and I will handle this all like a healthy human being. But I’m just as lost as I was two nights ago (minus the crying, at least). That overwhelming sense of dread is still sitting on my chest. The question “What am I REALLY doing?” still matters and still has no real answer.

Perhaps I’ll give myself another day off and catch up on my pop culture. Which is really just a better way of saying, “I will avoid serious thinking and anything academic by seeing my friends, zoning out to movies, reading fun books, and getting my ass seriously kicked in Scrabulous.”

The last time I saw the insides of an emergency room was when I limped into Medical City wearing my tae kwon do uniform four years ago. Since I still had my yellow belt tied around my waist, the doctors assumed that my sprained right ankle was the unfortunate result of a sparring match gone wrong. I decided not to mention that I didn’t even make it to my tae kwon do class because my foot landed the wrong way while I was walking to the martial arts room.

Four years later I found myself inside the same emergency room, but for a far less pathetic reason than my inability to cross the street without injuring myself.

It began as sharp, searing back pains thirty minutes before my last class ended. Thinking that it was just my scoliosis acting up, I made nothing out of it, but the pain intensified and spread to my ribcage and stomach fifteen minutes later. I managed to hold out until class ended – heaven forbid anyone should see me in pain or in distress – and collapsed on a bench outside the building. Everything hurt, and every little movement made it worse. Staying still didn’t help. I was shivering and sweating and crying all at once. With the last of my strength, I fumbled for my phone and called my dad to please pick me up, called Ale to say that I’d be home late because I might potentially end up in the hospital tonight, and called my mom to let her know what was going on.

An hour later there I was in the emergency room, trying to think beyond the pain so I could spell my unwieldy middle name. The nurse, for some reason, felt that it was important for her to make sure that Lardizabal was spelled with a Z and not an S. Then I was made to lie on a hospital bed, poked and prodded by fingertips and needles to identify where the pain was coming from, to rule out swollen pancreas, and to get a shot of whatever for the pain. “What happens if I have swollen pancreas?” I asked. I’m not even entirely sure what pancreas are. “You’ll have to be admitted to the hospital,” the doctor said.

As I laid still in my hospital bed, waiting for the painkillers to kick in, I was struck by a Profound Insight. You know, those corny, post-near death experience, moral-lesson-of-the-story epiphanies that make you swear that everything is going to change and you are going to become A Better Person after all this has passed. What I realized was this: our actions are never innocent. A seemingly harmless habit, such as starting your day with a cup of coffee, has far-reaching consequences that you won’t see coming until it makes you collapse when you least expect it. It seems like it’s okay to do whatever you want to yourself because it won’t affect other people – but it does, if there are people who care about you.

My parents are definitely be at the top of the People Who Give a Crap About Me list, and they’d take the hardest hit if anything happened to me. I have no idea what it’s like for a parent to worry about their kid, but I can imagine that it’s definitely no picnic. I’m the sickliest kid among my siblings, and when my childhood asthma finally gave way to acne during my teenage years I bet my parents were happy about never having to worry about medication and hospital bills. I’m pretty sure they didn’t expect their grown, 22-year old daughter to randomly wind up in the emergency room last night. Children are such a pain in the ass.

Girlfriends are a pain in the ass too. Especially when they get all sick in a hospital emergency room some seven time zones away. After I had given Ale an update on my medical condition, he told me that he found a 17-hour flight to the Philippines and that he was ready to fly out that evening if I have to stay in the hospital. I interrupted him and said that I’m fine, you’re fucking crazy for wanting to spend three thousand Euros on a plane ticket to here, and wouldn’t it better if you save your money and fly to the Philippines under better circumstances because really, where’s the fun in seeing me when I’m stuck to a bunch of tubes? Secretly, however, I was kind of hoping that my pancreas or some other major organ were indeed swollen. Especially when he started explaining that he didn’t want me to feel alone and abandoned and how he wanted to be there with me even if I’m sick and not much fun.

I couldn’t decide if I should feel relieved or disappointed when the doctor came out with the results and said that I could go home. I was already looking forward to spooning with him on a narrow hospital bed every night until I got better. :( I have to admit, I’m still half-wishing I did end up with swollen pancreas.

As for what went wrong with me, it turns out that I may or may not have an ulcer. I need to see a gastroenterologist to find out for sure but for now, the doctor forbade me from drinking coffee, softdrinks, and eating spicy food for the next two weeks. Spicy food and Coke I can stay away from, but coffee? You might as well ask me to stop drinking water! I’m horribly cranky without my morning cup of coffee and god, I don’t even want to think about how I’ll be able to do academic things without my caffeine kick. I forgot to ask the doctor if beer is among the Stuff Lauren Can’t Drink Anymore but since beer is carbonated and all, it probably is. Shit.

I could go ahead and ignore the doctor’s warnings, but I can’t ignore the fact that there are people who care about my health even if I don’t. When it was all over, Ale told me that he was so distressed about my being in the hospital that he ended up painting his skateboard black just to get his mind off things. That made me feel sad, somehow. People I care about shouldn’t have to paint their skateboards black so they don’t go insane from worrying about me. *sigh* I don’t want to think about how I’m going to go through life without coffee or beer just yet, but I think the least anyone can do for the people they love is to make them not worry. So I’m going to grit my teeth and try to handle the caffeine withdrawals as best as I can until I find out what’s wrong with me for sure.