Core memories
My attention to detail has become both bane and boon to my existence. On one hand, it precludes me from finishing my tasks early because I kept checking, rethinking, and over-analyzing even the simplest and mundanest tasks — such as the more efficient way of laying washed utensils on the dish towel: spoon’s concave side down; on the other hand, this also makes me intentional and mindful about the many things I do — in the case of the spoon: doing so prevents water from pooling and leaving marks as it dries.
Over the years, I tried to be a bit more forgiving of little flaws, if not nonchalant. This took me a lot of effort. In elementary school, I would rewrite pages of my notes if I had any singular mistake in my writing. My teachers often borrowed my notebooks then, which they would use as a reference for their lectures in their succeeding classes. One day, though, one of my teachers asked for my notebook while I was in the middle of rewriting my notes. I can still remember how he obliquely remarked I didn’t have to do that.
Of course, I didn’t have to. Still, I felt compelled.
In another time in high school, we were assigned to make a presentation following our field trip. Most other groups submitted a PowerPoint slideshow; our group filed a video of photo montages, complete with a customized CD album cover. (This made me realize I enjoy making videos, which eventually led me to my line of work.) Imagine my surprise when, in college, for a similar homework, I was the only person who took the effort to even properly label my disc.
This compulsion for near-perfection was a primary motivator for my workaholism. I guess it also reflected in the works I produced, most of which received awards here and abroad, though, for a time, this also made me a pain to work with. I would demand the same quality of output from my peers, regardless of any personal issue that may have been affecting their work. I accepted no excuse, no alibi, because I also denied myself the same. (I was particularly hard on one of my former researchers at some point that it made her resign from the team.)
Like every pursuit, my lesson in loosening up is riddled with small, somewhat negligible, steps. Turning my phone on silent, especially after work-hours. Now, almost all the time. Using a correction tape for my writing mishaps. Now, erasable friction pens, color-coded for my task categories. Leaving my dishes for the night. Now, letting my partner do the work for me. (Then, later, arguing about the spoon situation mentioned above, LOL.) Learning I tweeted a grammatical error — cringe — and leaving it be.
I learned two things from this mindset shift: First, most things can wait; second, no one cares. The moment of epiphany was also my point of liberation.
What came after was an exploration of why and how I became so conscious and critical. It’s a delicate subject that I continue to address with my therapist. My tendencies still slip every once in a while in my everyday life, but I am quite content that I am more able and capable to notice these and correct them.
In the midst of this productive self-work, I was with the DocuCentral team. When I started, I was very particular even about the placement of pens and markers in the steel holder — tips up or down? Scripts should be formatted in Times New Roman, 12, single-spaced. Filenames follow a template.
Five years later, by the time our engagement was coming to an end, my desk had become a patchwork of keychains and souvenirs, pins varying in colors, shapes, and sizes; to-do lists for my and the staff’s reference marked with some pen erasures; and document folders not labeled. Still organized, yet also messy.
Perhaps because of the nature of our work, our team bonded quite strongly. After all, we are the people who witnessed one another’s pangs of hunger (during lagari shoots and petsa de peligro), sleeplessness, and stress in exchange for literal plaques and figurative badges of honor, fleeting “fit to air” moments, and elevation in Apple products. We know one another’s tricks and tics.
One would think that the network’s shutdown and our eventual separation two years ago would sever the ties we built. Wrong.
Over the weekend, we reunited as a team in a cozy nook overlooking the mountains of Tanay, Rizal.
Like before, we rolled our eyes at the antics of our game master but played his card games nevertheless, either berating ourselves for our gambling inclination or blaming feng shui for our losses; we reminisced our job interview questions and answers, the “labada” or laundry list as we called them, laughing about how all but one among us lost our religion; we dined together, drank beer and ube cream liqueur together, sang a bit out of tune together, lolling the rainy night away and lulling in the bittersweet breeze of our shared past.
We’ve now gone back to our individual new normal lives. But, like that piece of paradise hidden in the ranges of Sierra Madre, tucked at the heart of our experiences will always be our fond memories of DocuCentral.
And, somehow, all that happened in those years became both boon and bane of our existence. Core memories, as the film Inside Out and the TikTok trend would describe. •
Recs:
🎥 🎧 At the core, I am a romantic. So, when my partner Nigel introduced me to Joe Wright’s film adaptation Cyrano (2021), it was effortless bliss. I thoroughly enjoyed the videography and direction of scenes, and how they mesh fluidly with the musical elements: a delicate balance; neither too much to the point of saturation nor too little to the point of want. As a fan of orchestration, I found The National’s score tasteful, and the harmonizing baritone and mezzo melodies of Cyrano and Roxanne, played respectively by Peter Dinklage (a.k.a. Tyrion Lannister of HBO’s Game of Thrones) and Haley Bennett, though raw and quite unpolished, grew on me. My favorites in the soundtrack were Madly and Overcome.
The adaptation elevated its source material, century-old French play Cyrano de Bergerac, which I read after watching the film. Naturally, many elements in the five-act play had to be excluded in the two-hour film, but the variations introduced — particularly Cyrano’s greatest insecurity that used to be his nose — worked nicely to make the tale more relatable and less unimaginable. (Because, really, when one’s a master at swordplay and wordplay, who cares about the size of one’s nose?)
🔖 On the smallness of our being and the depth of our feelings, a poignant poem on grief and kindness:
Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons.
The equivalent weight of how much railway
it would take to get a third of the way to the sun.
It’s the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief —
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer