early december delight

Beneath the surprisingly arid blanket of an early December evening, amidst the jolly frolicking of Christmas party-goers, I sat exhausted upon the uncomfortable edge of a low-profile poly-vinyl wicker-backed chair in one of the comparatively less-frequented cafes at Makati. Books in tow, sprawled across a wood-veneered composite table laminated in deep cherry lacquer, I piled my readings face-up to assess that evening’s objectives.

Sore from the incessant impingement of the cruciated left shoulder probably impacted by the continuous lugging around of kilos of readings, and the tinitis symptomatic of an elevated blood pressure, being pre-hypertensive and all, I had to struggle with the less than adequate mood-lighting of warm-whites and yellow-tinted luminaires embedded and indirectly dissolved against the lush graphics of rough gypsum and paint.

Like maraschino cherries and succulent taffy-pulls, the interiors swirl with the Kubrick-esque staccato of clandestine palette branding enmeshed in a rather consistent rawness of distressed imagery. They play tricks upon my eyes, distracting and seducing in a merry-go-round of heightened caffeinated dyslexia.

Undeterred by this visual debauchery, the thought had the clarity of a mid-summer noon’s vertiginous intensity. That, after months of frantic, erratic epistaxial force-fed data synthesis redolent of informational seizures, as induced by the uncompromising frenetic schedule of a successive step-ladder program of education, in the closure of our final fundamental course pre-board's, I am starting to enjoy studying again.