#oops there are 15 minutes left. fuck. i don't care about anything else

[asterdeer]

THE WORLD TREE !!! YEEESSSSSSSS THE FUCKING WORLD TREE AAAAAAAAA [AIR HORNS] YGGDRASIL I MISSED YOU BABY AAAAAAAAAAAAAA WE'RE SO FUCKING BACK [AIR HORNS]

[spongki]

unavoidable afternoon torpor, camels, and the color yellow.

What was only meant to be my regular late afternoon siesta turned into a 15-hour back-aching slumber. It's by far the longest I've been asleep, if my memory serves me right. I'm a known sleepy guy, alright. It's just never like this. I didn't even get to tell my dog good night.

I took a "nap" at around 4 PM and momentarily jerked out of sleep to turn on the air conditioner about an hour or two later, maybe around 5 or 6, because that's the time I usually turn it on to consume less electricity and stuff. I wonder if anyone else does that. It's not that strange of a thing to do, is it? To let yourself suffer in the suffocating heat for the greater chunk of the day because it's the only way to keep the bills down? I don’t even know (and don’t care) whether it’s effective or not. Anyway, it's funny how my brain knew well enough what my body so badly needed even half-asleep, like it's muscle memory. The following hours after that I had bouts of panic-induced lucid dreams while my back was soaked in cold sweat—completely normal, it happens—but I managed to make a mental note telling myself that I need to gather as much sleepy as I can otherwise I'd have to put up with being awake during the remainder of the night until the butt crack of dawn where I have nothing to do besides light a cigarette and listen to Strokes' Room On Fire and if I'm really going through it, maybe run through their entire discography as well. You really shouldn't do so much of a thing if you don't want to end up hating it, but I'm left with no choice. It's not that better in the morning. I really did not want to wake up. Not even until 7 AM, which is an hour that indicates I'm already sleeping in and ugh my head is going to regret this.

Being awake when the sun is up also means tedium. It means trying to check off tasks that I've shelved to do for later when later was two Fridays ago and the tasks in question could be accomplished within fifteen minutes. What I do is sit and think about how grueling that is instead of actually doing it, then I move onto other important things which I have no success in at all, like doing that one Buzzfeed recipe I've been meaning to try for a long time but lack the right ingredients so now I'm left with a strange concoction full of substituted stuff that no one wants to eat. Then, the unavoidable afternoon torpor, as Call Me By Your Name's main character Elio once mentioned it:

"My father, who was reserved and shy in private, loved nothing better than to have some precocious rising expert in a field keep the conversation going in a few languages while the hot summer sun, after a few glasses of rosatello, ushered in the unavoidable afternoon torpor."

He described siestas so beautifully. Too bad I'm not in a Mediterranean villa, sun-basked and mildly toasted in the right parts, surrounded by glasses of lush Italian wines and trees that give just the right amount of breeze to sweetly lull me to sleep. Oops. Did I get too into it?

Because if we're talking about sultry, we can talk about the less peachy reality that's closer to the literal meaning of the word, which is lying down in front of an electric fan trying its best as it blows hot, hot heat into your face while your body slowly melts into a sludge that seeps into the sofa. You anxiously chew over with yourself - "do I even deserve this siesta?" Hey, José Rizal himself said siestas were the Filipinos' remedy for our country's hot climate. So maybe you do deserve it. But maybe you don't, because he meant to say that to people who did hard labor under the burning sun, and you haven't exactly done anything productive to give yourself that reward. Other than swatting pesky mosquitoes buzzing in your ear, maybe, and you don't know whether that eases the monotony or it just plainly irritates the fuck out of you. Oh, and that one annoying show that your parents like is on TV again. Only this time, and I'm being for real, it gets cut off midway and you're fucking delighted but not really, because it's apparently to make way for the "president's" state of the nation address (The Marcoses have pissed off my parents in more ways than one, but interrupting their favorite telenovela, really? There's no redeeming yourself from that.)

It all just feels so yellow. I love yellow when it’s not overbearing - when you're not constantly enclosed with the warmth it emits. Yellow feels sticky. Humid. I sluggishly walk around my house with pellets of sweat in places I didn't even know were possible. Yellow is also kind of blinding. My curtains don’t do enough to shield my eyes from the sunlight, but it’s partially my fault for not making it a habit to wake up early. After smoking Marlboro menthols for a while, I bought a pack of yellow Camels just to try something new and I hated it. Why do I hear so many good things about this brand? Yellow is parching. Unpleasantly warm, the kind that gives you goosebumps. Yellow reminds me of how much I try to force sleep and how it’s the only sober form of escapism I can consume. I’m always deliberately getting myself struck with lethargy, putting the blame on the unapologetic heat of the blazing sun - on the color yellow - just so I can postpone for the dreaded tomorrow to come.

The next thing you know I'm in my bedroom, A/C on blast, writing this post. Lather, rinse, repeat. Mundanity is far from a foreign concept to me but the heat just so greatly exacerbates the agony of it. The least I can do is write about it.