Suddenly I have to leave the computer in twenty minutes. Oh, circumstance can lead to murder, can't it? I am actually forcing myself to write something now.

During the time when we were cramming our journalism class final paper, some were actually confident that I would breeze through it, not because I did my research properly (because I swear to the heavens I didn't) but because I write well. In my three years of blogging or so, I have learned that how you write will not matter in the end - it's in what you write about. Thus, there are those times when I write something and feel so good about it, and other times when I write something that's got perfect grammar but no sense.

Two days ago I was chatting with Piyar when I told her, in all honesty, that I can't think of anything to write about. Better yet, I spend my time doing errands - buying bread for breakfast, for example - thinking of what to write about and, eventually, what to write about it. The term ended with me having three ideas, and now I haven't written anything about those three. The one I've long wanted to write about - triggered by the fact that everybody lives in Merville - is lost in space.

Or, let's face it, I don't always feel like writing.

"Tinatamad kang magsulat?" Piyar answered back. "Si Henrik Batallones? Parang ngayon ko lang yata narinig yan."

I don't really live on the expectation that everything I write here is an extraordinary stroke of genius, but I guess it has finally been etched in their memory - I can write about anything, at any time. I did my final screenplay without any concrete idea for a plot, and eventually got twenty-four points out of it (because, as Sir Doy said, I didn't give my story a high point). That paper, eventually, was written in a span of four hours and a lot of papers strewn around me. The surprise came later, when I got my course card.

But I have always insisted that semantics don't mean much without substance. You can't write anything - a column, an essay, a comic strip - without having something to get it from. Blame me and my recent idleness for this stretch of nothingness in my thoughts, but really, I am forcing myself to finish this entry and make sure it makes sense. So now I am supposed to write about this very thing I'm doing right now, and I am slowly losing my thought process, and I'm still typing, hoping that somewhere my neuron connections would figure out a connection, from out of the blue, and salvage this excused paragraphs from obscurity...

...nope, it didn't work.

I suddenly remembered what I was supposed to write about. In line with everything else, it's going to be about communities - what brings people together, and what (ironically) brings people apart. Last night I was just thinking on my bed, playing with the idea that I have always written, loosely, about me being against the world, and me reaching out to a world that doesn't give a damn otherwise. Now I think it must be easy to whine about the same old things again. Maybe I could just give it a different spin and you've got an entry.

But, well, circuits don't work when you add hot water to it. It just breaks down and you lose all functionality. Now I have forced everything I can force, I can publish this entry without hesitation.

Or should I?