Chemistry is the neurosynaptic ability to adapt to expectations and move in a direction that is no longer clear. I have found myself following hypnotic pathways, sleepwalking, more instinct than alive. In this way I am human. Intuition wins in the long run because... well, it was all explained in the Matrix, in the heavy-handed blockbuster way.
Today, for example. I did a close reading of Arisugawa Park, with Nils. I identified those minute places where shifts could be made, to make the story more real in my own head. To convince myself it was worth telling, retelling. To convince others. To.... [insert cheesy Eric Clapton song title here]. At the end of the session Nils says... this is really a lot like brain surgery.
Then I came head to head with a major corporation's conception of what my reality should look like. No simple park, Ayala Triangle Park (which, as ubiquitous signs point out, has the express legal right to develop Makati's only relaxing public green space that I know of for perpetuity) is now to look a little something like:
I found myself walking through high rise development after high rise development and walled off future developments, no parks set aside that I could see, smelling the already acrid stench of shit that festers in clogged sewers (literally). An even stronger whiff of CORRUPTION. Reading Mark Twain's anti-imperialist writings at the turn of the century, at the time when it came to educated Americans' attention that the US aim was not Filipino independence from Span.
Realizing that we are doubling, tripling the population capacity here in the space of a couple short years. We truly are fucked.
* At which point I regaled Nils with the only joke I remember, the one about the writer and the brain surgeon. Interweb sleuths can suss it out it in an EW post from some months ago.