As much as I should write about my experience in iBlog 4, I’ll have to postpone that for tomorrow.  I’m too depressed.

I don’t have a reason to feel depressed at all, but then again, I feel extremely depressed.  Any other person in my shoes would have absolutely no reason to feel depressed.  Compared to a lot of people, I have it made: a nice job, a roof above my head, money in the bank.  I don’t make much, but it’s enough for me to go beyond the rigors of survival.  There’s just that empty feeling inside… that empty feeling that I’m filling up with the absurd irrationalities of rage.

I find myself treading the tightrope between slash-wrist-emo and sex-drugs-and-violence.  Part of me feels sorry for imagined failures, and yet another part of me is filling in those inadequacies with rages long since forgotten.  I grieve over a love lost two years ago.  At the same time, I find myself back in the millstone grinding my ax against people who don’t even deserve to be nicked by my disposable razor.  On the one hand, I cry myself to sleep over real - and imagined - inadequacies and insecurities.  On the other hand, I pollute my mind with morbid delusions of helpless enemies - real and imagined - and me doing whatever the hell I want to do to them with pinking shears and an embroidery needle (like, say, literally knitting their eyebrows).

Ah, what do I care for this bipolar kind of depression, anyway?  I can walk around the Metro right now and find people who have worse problems than I do.  There’s bound to be a jobless, homeless, broke person out here who would think of my own problems as nothing more than figments of my imagination.  This person would have been left by his or her spouse, and couldn’t even dream of revenge against enemies because of helplessness and powerlessness.  This person would feel insecure for better reasons than I do, like not having enough to eat.  You give this person pinking shears and embroidery needles, and he or she will sell it for a meal: not grotesque, Jason Voorhees-esque violence.

All it takes is the recollection of a man like Brian Gorrell to put a smile on my face.  Things aren’t so bad after all.

Then again, they seem to be.

This is for FilipinoVoices.com’s blog carnival.  I’d like to dwell in the more human aspect a bit… I find myself really, really depressed.  Sorry, Nick, this is unusually half-assed.  - Marck

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I literally eat my words.

My job as a writer for a company in Ortigas Center means that the phrase “eat my words” takes a whole different meaning for me. Writing pays for my rent, for my food, for my transportation needs, for my weekly laundry, for my cigarettes, and for just about everything else. I am not a writer by virtue of a pretentious self-ascription on the “Occupation” field in a Friendster account: I write for a living.

Do I consider myself part of the “working class?” Hell no. I have been writing for as long as I can remember that I don’t even look at what I do as “work.” Work - in a physical sense - is all about locomotion. If my bosses are physicists, they would pay me only for bathroom breaks, cigarette breaks, and lunch breaks where I actually move out of my cubicle to go somewhere.

This Labor Day, I would not even dare take my place among workers who were once exhorted by Karl Marx to unite and lose their chains. I am not a laborer. If there’s anything I learned, “employment” and “labor” are two very different things. “Employee” is not synonymous with “laborer.” If you work from a cubicle in an air conditioned office for eight hours a day breaking a creative sweat, you are nowhere in the same league as a street sweeper who works for eight hours a day breaking real sweat.

I could bore you with unemployment statistics, the rates of wages, the injustices of the capitalist system, and so on. Pardon the archaic Latin: you don’t shit in your own yard. Capitalism - the juggernaut in the funeral procession of global economics that it is - puts food on tables. It would border on hypocrisy if I spoke out against “imperialist capitalism” if I am employed because of capitalism. Conversely, it would be defeated principle if I spoke for capitalism just like Ayn Rand referred to it as “the virtue of selfishness.”

I guess that I’m defeated on this one. You don’t shit in your own yard.