You… the one who got away.

   I seem to have forgotten all about you.  I forgot how much I loved you then, how much of my precious time I have spent in either content bliss or blinding jealousy.  I forgot how many times I wanted to talk to you in person, postponing it every day until, all of a sudden, I blew all my chances.  I postponed that one chance to talk to you until I realized that somehow, you’re no longer mine even in dreams.

   Damn, and really, I’ll be damned.  Really, it could have been you and me, maybe you and me until we walk that aisle and say “I do.”  But no, it never happened.  It never will.  I always thought that I’ll move on a couple of years and a half later, but I never really did.  I’m still stuck with memories of you.  They might as well tattoo your name on the deepest recesses of my brain, and name that tree after you.

   Oh wait… you are.  It’s so easy to spell your name, especially that I have to live with it every moment.  Damn you.

   Yeah, they say that there are many other fish in the sea.  But the moment you got away, I wanted to get you back.  Not just by casting my line into the very depths of the ocean hoping that you’ll bite into those promises I made, but I was all-the-more willing to dive in and risk drowning, looking for you whether the tide is low or not.  So I just quit making promises.  I just quit.  But still, I cannot forget.  I remember what you wore six and a half years ago when we first met.  Dammit.

   I don’t know if I’ll take another couple of years and a half to erase memories of you: after all, that’s the last time we talked.  Since then, I avoided every opportunity to talk to you or to even see you.  The bad thing is that I have to like it.  Like everything else in the world, I can’t have everything I like, much less have anyone I love.

   It could have been you and me, but that can never be.  No matter what you say about me hurting you, deep in your heart, you know how much it really hurt me when you got away.

   Because I wrote a thesis on this topic, I should know how to explain phenomena that take place in virtual environments.  Allow me to indulge…

   While Friendster remains to be the number one social networking site (SNS) in the Philippines, I’ve observed that more and more people “jump ship” to other SNS’s like Multiply, MySpace, and lately, Facebook.  Which begs the question: why?

   In my thesis, I wrote:

   Because the “self” created in the virtual environment – in this case Friendster – is completely devoid of cognition and of feeling and of other things that make an individual an individual, it has no recourse but to be articulated in terms of what is available to the thinking, practicing individual.  It is solely defined by the structures surrounding it: the limitations provided for by the layout of the Friendster profile, the limitations of one’s connection speed, the limitations of one’s knowledge of coding and programming, and so on.  But the most important limitation that should be noted is the limitation of the self in attempting to articulate itself: to concretize its abstractness, to make itself known.  (2007: 326)

   While I myself am a bit disillusioned by Friendster, you have to give credit where credit is due: Friendster “revolutionized” (using that term loosely) social networking.  But as a rejoinder to the “limits” I talked about, a service like Multiply offers an all-in-one solution for presumed “needs” like blogging and multimedia: you can’t share your favorite music in Friendster (yet) without using Imeem, for example.  Besides, more and more Friends are added to Friend Lists: a sort of “Friend overload.”

   The difference is that there really isn’t any added responsibility for people to maintain close contacts, much less establish them.  In my correspondence with Andrew Feenberg of Simon Fraser University, one of his biggest disagreements with my thesis was that I seemed to take the term “friend” seriously.  “Friend,” as it seems, is a linguistic limitation.  But the way I saw it, I had to take it seriously: because Friend Lists in Friendster start with adding real friends and end up in the mere acceptance of invitations, the very definition of friendship is challenged.

   But every social networking site - be it Friendster or Facebook - comes with waiving responsibilities in establishing close contacts.  There really is no responsibility to maintain close associations in an SNS: the absence of this responsibility means that certain “responsibilities” come to the fore, like tricking out Profiles by adding widgets and embedded video.  The real, actual responsibility still lies outside the realm of the SNS.

   Regardless of jumping ship, however, the limit still exists.  You still don’t know who you are.

   I’d give my left arm, my right leg, and both of my testicles to drive the 2008 Lamborghini Reventon.  My pet car for 2007 was the Lamborghini Murciélago, which I used to whoop ass in Need For Speed: Most Wanted and Need For Speed: Carbon (although I would never use a Murciélago for a Canyon Duel: I use my trusty Nissan Skyline for that).  Lamborghini has a special place in my heart.  I won’t say that exact same line to a girl or to my own mother, but I would say it about Lamborghini.

   Like any man, I have a particular fascination for cars: I literally wept seeing the new Subaru Impreza looking like a damned station wagon for a soccer mom.  Back when I was in Subic Bay, the highlight of my trip was not the sight of dolphins at Ocean Adventure, but a Lotus Elisé and a Ferrari Testarossa parked next to each other.  When customs officials wrecked a smuggled Porsche 911 Carrera under a mechanical shovel, I literally wanted to throw feces at the Bureau of Customs and hijack the beautiful car, spiriting it away to the highway that is freedom.

   Not to sound racist or anything, but I have the urge to be a black rapper and fill the garages of my diamond-studded gold-plated mansion with Bugatti Veyron’s, Lincoln Continental’s, and BMW’s from every era.  But those are pipe dreams: driving experiences left on cursor keys on keyboards.

   Damn…

   Roland Barthes, when he discussed semiotics (or “semiology,” to be faithful to his use of the term), expanded the traditional notion of Ferdinand de Saussure’s sign into two levels: denotation and connotation.  At the level of denotation, there is just the arbitrary and conventional relationship between the signifier and the signified.  At the level of connotation, there is the concretized and contrived relationship between the signifier and the signified: Barthes calls this “myth.”

   Advertisements are classic examples of “myth,” in that “subliminal messages” become part of the package, the marketing machine.  Think “Josie and the Pussycats.”  But to me, all this talk about “hidden messages” and “semiotics” surrounding certain aspects of a commercial is misguided analysis.  A class I took in my sophomore year comes to mind: a student said that there was a “sexist message” in advertisements for wristwatches, where the minute- and hour-hands of the watch’s face “represented the legs of a woman,” and the second-hand “represented the penetration of the penis.”

   But is it?  If my watch reads 10:10.01, should I then assume that the watch company has intended to do this to sell sex to me?  Obviously not.

   Marshall McLuhan comes to mind: the effect of media is not the content, but the medium itself.  McLuhan is often quoted and invoked for the phrase, “The medium is the message.”  There is no “pro-gay” message in rainbow-colored lights: the light bulb’s message is the expansion and the extension of waking, working, and leisure hours.  The medium that is the advertisement has served the purpose of extending “social realities,” but in truth, it doesn’t.

   In selling papaya-based skin whiteners, do I disregard a preference for the morena?  In advertising milk, am I in effect a racist because there’s no such thing as “black” milk?  Do I discriminate against curly-haired people by selling shampoo?

   If there is a “subliminal message” to any advertisement, it is that there is a different reading of truth, or a different truth altogether.  Advertisements “mythologize” truth: shampoo alone will not give you extremely smooth, straight and shiny hair.  Ice cream will not result in perfect scoops that won’t melt.  Washing clothes with a particular brand of soap will not result in a really old shirt looking brand-spanking new.  Herbal remedies are not substitutes to clean living and exercise, and there is no substitute to exercise.

   As such, all advertisements function at the level of connotation: not just soap, but this brand of soap.  Not just shampoo, but this brand of shampoo.  Not just a TV show, but this particular TV show.  There are no implicit messages about anything, but just an explicit message of the denial of choice, of signifying the signifier.