Discovery

I agree with the adage that a picture can paint a thousand words, so I have always held an understated fascination for photographs. They can capture that spectacular, magical split second that will never happen again, and render it immortal -- a baby’s first tentative smile, a look of pleased surprise on someone’s face, a scarf billowing in the wind, dandelions flying towards the horizon, a balloon escaping into the sky, colors of the sunset, the look shared between two people deeply in love, forever frozen in time, immortal.

I don’t have the penchant for capturing images that way, through a lens. The most I can do is write about them, in my own unique way, and give them my own brand of immortality. But thanks to the iPhone and its handy camera with the super-clear lens, I can indulge my inner photographer. And though I will never be as good a photographer as the best ones, I have Instagram to help make my photographs look much better than the ones I originally took.

So from now on, all my posts will use more of my photos, and less of the borrowed images. Here are a few of the first ones I filtered with Instagram.

These are two of my favorite things in life, my Mac and a pencil. Hi-tech and analog.





My checkbook holder, from Fino.



That's me at my parents' house for Christmas, wearing my Dad's bedroom slippers, while reading a book beside the Christmas tree.



My bed in Makati, which I absolutely love.



I have too many gadgets in the office that this plug hub is not even enough for me anymore.



These are just some of the details that make up my life, rendered as images. Somewhere among my journals and drafts and manuscripts, I have written about them, rendering them perpetual, eternal, in my usual writerly way. But I have discovered that there is more than one way to embed things more deeply into my memory. I shall always write, and I shall always write about things and feelings and life in an increasingly heartfelt way as I grow as a writer, but taking pictures with a good and handy camera isn't so bad, either.

[Please feel free to share my photos online, but be sure to link them back to my blog, as I am covered by the Creative Commons.]

I'm on Pakinggan Pilipinas again

But this time, I am reading someone else's story.


Last Saturday, Elyss Punsalan's monthly podcast site which features short fiction by Filipino authors showcased Marianne Villanueva's "Coconut," which I read. After the recording, Elyss and I chatted for a while, about Marianne's story, about writing, about UP, about a few fears and doubts I have been having lately about my career, how I'm coping with them, and a few other things.

We recorded the podcast last September 2011, and my life was different then. Some of the doubts and fears are the same, still soaking in the damp darkness of my past, but some of them have already begun dissipating into the light of the new morning.

You can listen to the whole thing here.

Last December 2010, too, Dulce Amor Fortunato read my short story, "God is the space between." The podcast is here. The story eventually made it to the special crime issue of Philippine Genre Stories.

I hope you enjoy our podcasts, and please do follow Pakinggan Pilipinas.

Life is beautiful

Not just because it’s the Yuletide season, but also because all year round there’s friends and family and love and good books and happy stories, and underneath it all, sustaining everything, is the faith that the future is going to be bright.


And also, this blog has just turned six. Everything is okay. Happy New Year!

[Image credit]

Rock-a-bye

Three weeks in, and we are doing fine. He brings solidity and consistency into this relationship, and his patience seems quite deep, perhaps borne out of being a father to three sons who are now well into their teenage years, and after having dealt with his own share of bad relationships. And now, there is me in his life, the little old girl-princess with a clinical case of bipolar disorder and OCD. Amazingly, despite that, we are doing fine, and I write this clause a second time with a sense of awe.


Who would have known we’d hit it off so well? Even our friends are amazed. Even our officemates are amazed. Even his family is amazed. And I’m sure my own family will be amazed. But I suppose that’s just one more proof that there is no formula for loving. No matter where he’s from, no matter where I’m from, if the constellation of events leads us to meeting, then that’s that. After all, men do come from another planet, and he is one bona-fide Martian to the core: guns, war games, actual wars, simulation exercises with various special forces, a smoker who doesn't drink alcohol and who almost never gets sick, a fan of rock music, steeped in tactics and logic, a pillar of sense, integrity, loyalty, and security.

He has made me more stable, too. Now I am off some of my psychiatric meds, which have been replaced with laughter -- thanks to his hilarious stories about his cuckoo friends and their war games bloopers -- and my mood swings are not so bad anymore. I am hardly ever angry these days, and if something at work annoys me, I just call him or meet him for break time coffee and rant for a while, and then he says something to make me laugh, and then I can go back to my office and pick up where I left off, cool as wind, smiling through the initial drudgery/setback/nuisance, and come up with better solutions. I can also write again, and it is a credit to my clients, bosses, professors, and editors that they have acknowledged my dark phase as only a phase, and they have patiently waited it out, and now I can finally give them some of the best work that I have ever done.


I sincerely hope that I also give him something good, too. I hope I inspire him to become more creative and productive. I sincerely wish to make him happy, to make him feel free to do the things that he loves, to make him see that the right relationship with the right person can be a very liberating thing. I hope he feels that his world is now larger because of me, and that he now has an abundance of wide open spaces in which he can be himself, without any judgement from me, and that it is possible to be completely honest and transparent in a relationship without the partnership crumbling into pieces. We have taken all the lessons that we have learned from relationships past, and together, we have changed the game of our lives.


So there. Almost immediately after my "single again" post, in which I said that I still believe I deserve love and I still expect to get it someday, I did get it, faster than I expected -- and believe me, this dude is fast. But I suppose it's the right way to deal with this, because once you've found the person that you want to spend the rest of your life with, then you'd want the rest of your life to begin right away. Three weeks in, he has made so many changes in his life in order to accommodate me, has walked the extra mile to make me feel wanted and accepted and loved, and his family and friends are simply darlings to accept me that quickly. Our journey together won't be completely smooth and perfect; there are bound to be some stumbles along the way, but I sincerely hope we can make it. He is my lullaby, my security blanket, my safe haven. Because he's here now, I know that everything is okay.

[Image credits: 1, 2, 3]

Blank page

Because I am a writer, the image of a blank page always incites so many mixed emotions in me. Most of the time I feel such awe that I am being given the privilege of filling up with my own words something so profound. Sometimes I feel guilt for not writing more often, an indication that I’m not appreciating that writer’s privilege the way I should. At times it’s frustration I feel, because that blank page remains blank for days on end, and I feel quite useless, not very much like a writer. The rest of the time it’s a strange combination of wonderment, annoyance, fondness, craving, and slight panic.


I’ve always felt that a blank page is like a mountain to mountaineers (who climb a mountain just because it’s there), but some days I’m like a mountaineer on steroids. I write words on a blank page not only because the blank page is there. Sometimes, even where there is no more blank page, I create new ones to write in, pulling out sheet after sheet of paper from my stash, typewriting prose in duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate, just to end up with something thick, and which I can edit in two, three, four different versions. Sometimes I spend hours -- and use up a lot of pencils, one after the other in quick succession -- writing about anything that comes to mind: memories of old conversations, old rooms, old voices, colors that have no name but which I can envision in my mind, a line to a song that leads to a line in a story that leads to a line in a movie that leads to a line I heard when I was a child that leads to a line from someone’s blog.


Once I remember staying up all night just trying to describe the voice of someone I heard talking in a dream I had years before. Recently, I woke up in the middle of the night and remembered vividly the dream I just had, and wrote it down, in full detail, until the sun came up and my alarm went off.

I found writing this way helpful, cathartic, therapeutic. At times it’s difficult to start writing, but once the first few words are laid down on the page, the rest flows easily afterwards. And so most of my life is filled with the frenzy of taking things down, making notes, journaling, grasping at the last remaining details of a dream and writing them down, and even debating with myself on certain difficult life decisions that I had to make, seeing my possible future in the lines of fountain pen ink that are absorbed slowly by the paper, like an acceptance, a form of consent, an assurance that what I write down is most likely what will be.


All these notes have since been collected and bound, and are now at 36 volumes (with the first 12 composed of 12 inch thick stacks of onion skin paper, the more recent ones in large Moleskines), dating back from when I was 15 years old. I used to go back to them from time to time, to read through some entries from a time in my life when I was feeling particularly happy, or particularly sad, or particularly confused. But just last year, I sealed them all up in boxes, and had them stored in a fireproof and waterproof safe. I have decided not to go through them again within the next twenty years or so, and just keep on writing and writing my life down as I go, without looking back.

Because I don’t need to. I have the most important memories stored in my heart, and now, in some ways, I am a blank page. I am starting life again. I can be anyone I want to be.

There's a smoker in the house

And he loves me.

Great expectations

When I was seventeen, I received my very first marriage proposal from a guy who was about three years older than I was, and who, I believe, worshipped the ground I walked on. We were sitting together at the bleachers of the Ateneo de Naga gymnasium, watching an inter-department basketball game, so the marriage proposal felt a bit jarring.

Of course I didn’t know how to handle it, being seventeen and sitting right in the middle of a roaring crowd of college students. I think I asked him, “Do you know how old I am?” He said, “Seventeen.” And then the rest has become just a very faint memory.


But I do remember that even after that moment, we stayed friends, and he must have stayed in love with me for a little bit more until his eventual maturity allowed that love to naturally peter out. I, too, went and moved on, to focus on my own academic duties, scrambling to finish my Bachelor’s Degree in three years, and making new friends along the way. At some point he handed me a cassette tape of Dan Siegel, and asked me to listen to one of the songs there, which I loved, and listened to several times, until I returned the tape to him.


We both moved on to other people after that, of course. That’s what one does when one is a teenager. I don’t know who he turned to after me, but I myself turned to someone who I ended up marrying and then subsequently annulling from, and then came a series of serious and semi-serious relationships with other men. I thought I was progressing with each relationship; I thought I was choosing better and better men each time. And maybe I was. But even though some of them lasted years, and even though most of them were happy relationships that were quite easy to deal with -- and some weren’t -- they all ended up being terminated at some point or another, and there were many times in which I doubted myself and the choices I made with them. How come none of them ever truly worked out? How come the search never seemed to end? How come none of them felt I was worth marrying? Where is that man who would walk to the ends of the earth for me? Where is that man who would be willing to disrupt his entire world in the blink of an eye just to accommodate me, instead of just fitting me into some small spaces he could find here and there? Does he even exist? Should I stop looking? Should I lower my standards? I never really found the answers for those.


Now, finding myself free once more (after a four-year relationship to which I really gave all that I had, with someone who I believe also gave me more than what he bargained for), I remember this guy, from almost two decades before, the very first one who ever wanted me enough to propose marriage to me, the very first one who wanted to accommodate me into his life, the very first one who actually believed I was worth sacrificing his youth for. I remember the cassette tape, but not the title of the song, although I could still hear it in my mind. The sound was happy, celebratory, expectant. Recently -- since we are friends on Facebook -- I asked him what the name of the song was, and he remembered the sound of it, just like that. And then after a few hours, he found the title of the song, and I listened to it once more, and then I am seventeen again, and the world is once more big and bright and full of color.


At the end of yet another failed relationship, what else is left except to believe that something more beautiful lies waiting for me in the horizon? And that’s a question to which I know the answer, at least. If someone who didn’t know much about me could believe that I was worth taking the plunge with when I was seventeen, then there would still be someone would still believe I am worth it at 36, because even after everything that had happened in between, I am still the same person at my very core. And if that guy who proposed to me when I was seventeen could eventually find love and happiness with someone else, then so can I. The man for me may still be out there, or he may not. But no matter what the outcome might be, I’ll be fine. I still believe I deserve love, and I still expect to get it someday.

Image credits: [1, 2, 3]

Bicycle

When I was about eleven and twelve, I would spend most of my summers in in house of Papa Herbie and Tita Norma, and my cousins Trina, IC, and Manoy Bim, in Legazpi City. During one of those summers, Trina taught me how to ride a bicycle.

We looked like a rather funny couple of kids. I was tall and lanky and quiet, and Trina was small and loud and she was all over the place. At first we stayed inside her subdivision, De La Paz, and I fell into so many bushes and flower pots, it was a wonder none of their neighbors ever complained. Some evenings we would visit some of her classmates who lived nearby, and we would lie down side by side on the driveway identifying the constellations. We would wake up late in the morning, have a lazy breakfast and watch something on TV or go back to bed to read, and then later on in the afternoon, when it wasn’t so hot anymore, we would go out again in her orange bicycle and make another round of mess along the streets of De La Paz, with Trina hanging on to the seat, running a little behind me, shouting, “Keep going! Keep going! I’m right behind you!”


I kept falling, of course. My legs would be bruised and scratched at the end of the day, even when I wore pants; my arms, too, got those same bruises and scratches. There were many a fall, from many angles and in many spots, and that happened each and every day, and I felt so frustrated that I wanted to quit already. But all the while, Trina just kept hanging on to the seat and running alongside me, would keep saying in her very loud voice, “Just keep going! I’m right behind you!” At some point, she decided I was good enough to practice at the Legazpi airport, which didn’t host any flights after lunch. (Such were the eighties in Bicol), and so I didn’t get as much scratches from shrubs and flower pots at the end of the day then. But still I kept falling, and I wanted to quit so many times, but Trina just kept encouraging me, saying I could do it. She was a pillar of patience and consistency in her running a little behind me, holding on to the seat and shouting, “Keep going! I’m right behind you!”


I don’t remember anymore at what point I got the hang of it, but one afternoon, I felt myself going smoother and faster on the bicycle, and my arms were steady, and it felt like I was going too fast for her, so I looked back, and I saw that I was alone, and that I have been riding the bicycle all by myself for about twenty meters already without knowing it. I could see Trina far behind me, looking small in the distance, but still jumping up and down, and because she really has this very loud voice, I could still hear her shouting, “Keep going! I’m right behind you!”

Of course at that very moment, I fell. But it was the last time I ever fell off a bicycle.

That small, loud girl, who will always loom large in my life as the girl who taught me how to ride a bicycle, got married last May 7, to a man who loves her to bits and who I suspect could not last a day without her, and Trina and I hugged each other and laughed and cried, and I couldn’t even say anything more than, “Please be happy, prima.”


But she’s not just the girl who taught me how to ride a bicycle. In my life, she has been many other things to me as well. Landlady, sugar mommy, shopping buddy, lavandera, fellow wallpaper expert, fellow notebook maker, fellow laitera of local celebrities, Sunday morning breakfast maker, late dinner cook, saver of my ass, maker of beds and fluffer of the pillows that I used during the times when I spent the night on her couch. And more, much more than I could name, much more than I could express. That’s why I was speechless at her wedding. At the reception I wanted to take the microphone and tell this story, but I couldn’t summon the gumption to do it without crying.

So here it is, a little late, but I’m sure she will understand. Be happy, prima, and just keep going. I am right behind you.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

Overgrown

I love the look of an overgrown garden. I love it when the shrubs and the bushes are allowed to grow into each other, when the newer flora are allowed to mix with the older, woodsier greenery, and ever younger shoots thrive under the dense shadows cast by the aged arbors.

Happily, this is the kind of garden we have now in my parents’ house. Mature and overgrown, with aged-looking plants looking a tad ornery in their disarray.






Also, there is a rather large and dense plant called Five Fingers, in a huge terra cotta pot, that was first planted when I was about five years old and we were still living beside Pot-Pot. According to legend -- and as confirmed by our gardener -- it is still alive. It must be around here somewhere.



Once, a long time ago, my mother asked me what kind of garden I liked. I remember saying, “No flowers. Just leaves, and the whole garden should look like an unkempt mini-forest. I would take my typewriter out there in the middle of it and tap out a story from scratch.”

My sister said, “A garden like that would have snakes.”

So I had to add, “Perhaps a gardener that would do nothing but catch snakes would be appropriate.” My mother looked at me wryly.



We do not have snakes in this overgrown garden, although I suppose we have an anthill or two, several lizards, and an assortment of bugs somewhere underneath and among the foliage and the fallen blooms.





Manicured landscapes are not really my style. They try too hard, and they call too much attention to themselves, distracting one from other things. Give me a garden that has overrun itself with abandon, and I will give you a girl who can type out an entire twenty-page first draft of a story in a single afternoon. And as I love overgrown gardens, so, too, might I have become overgrown for certain aspects of my life, but never my mother, never my sister, and never that garden.

On Moleskines and fountain pens

Which are, as you know, pretty much my favorite things, second only to books and reading. I have written about them many times here -- and elsewhere -- before, and although I know I will write about them again in the future, for now I will let Avalon publish my words on the matter.


Many thanks for the appreciation and for the furthering of the reading and writing cause, Avalon!

The universe in a box (a colorcast)

Crayola crayon in use: Bittersweet

[Previous colorcasts: 1, 2, 3, 4]

Where the days are longest

When I was growing up in the farm, one of my main means of learning and entertainment was -- aside from shelves upon shelves of books -- my father’s stereo deck. One evening, when I was eight or nine, I my father brought home for me a 45 rpm vinyl record of America.


I have never heard of the band America before, and I was amused by the smaller size of the record, since I have never before seen anything other than the larger 33 1/2 rpms that we had around the house. I grew up listening to these 12 inch records. My favorites were those of classical music, Barry Manilow, Burt Bacharach, the Carpenters, Claire dela Fuente, Peter, Paul and Mary, and the soundtrack of Ice Castles.




I did not like nursery rhymes so much; I preferred music that spoke of hurt and pain and long, sad journeys, in voices that resonated with either despair, hope, or indignation. I naturally gravitated to grownup songs, which Da probably knew, and which was probably why he brought me that record of America.

My favorite song in that America record was Ventura Highway, and it still remains as my favorite America song. What made me fall in love with it, though, is not the sad sense of nostalgia and memory and the subtle desire to escape something dark and murky in the past, but the very first line: “Chewing on a piece of grass, walking down the road.”

Because that was me, growing up in a farm, wearing shorts and rubber boots, chewing on a piece of grass, walking down the road that was either dusty or muddy, depending on the weather. Mostly I would be alone, with no yaya running after me, and I could spend the day as I pleased. Weekends and summer vacations for me were spent either up in a tree branch reading a book, exploring my mother’s vegetable garden and squishing bugs, or rummaging around the dark bodega for old things that I would make up stories of. There would be balmy afternoons spent picking forget-me-not petals from the bush, crushing various leaves in the palm of my hand and smelling the aroma while sitting on one of the large rocks that formed part of my mother’s garden landscape. Sometimes I would pick the tiny red spheres that the aratiles tree bore, and eat extremely sour iba off the branches while skipping around with my face all scrunched up. Sometimes, after the gardener was done cutting the grass on the front lawn I’d lie there, feeling the sharp blades of the carpet grass poking my skin until I started to itch.


Most days I would walk from our house to the comprada where my parents held office. I’d bring a sandwich, and eat while walking. Or sometimes I would bring a long stick and pretend I was an old, old man from biblical times walking on a long, interminable journey. I would wave sagely to the cows that belonged to the next-door neighbor, and contemplate the greenish-brown cake-like droppings of carabaos with a rather marked effort at profundity. Each time I would take that walk I would always find something to wonder about.

Indeed, those were the days of my content. Although I was well-read enough to know that the world out there was huge and wonderful, I was pretty content to experience that huge and wonderful outside world from the comfort of my own room or reading nook or tree-branch. And dusty, humid afternoons that go on forever would always hold a mythical place in my memory.

[Image credits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Afternoon at The Fortress

One afternoon, at my apartment, The Fortress, I took a break from some housework to take photos of the light slanting in through the window of my study area.










And in the bedroom, the light generously spilled in, too.




This kind of light is my favorite. It always reminds me of the long, lazy summers I spent while I was growing up, and it brings back memories of comforting meriendas, visiting cousins, staying up in a tree to read, running around the front lawn, and the lighthearted days of languor, freedom, and simple joys that mark a happy childhood. This kind of light reminds me that I can be that simple, happy, free girl again. It’s nice.

In the kitchen (a colorcast)

[Previous colorcasts: 1, 2, 3]

Hello, new decade

Welcome to my life.


I hope that in the 120 months that I will be with you I’ll get to accomplish much, learn a lot, laugh readily, make new friends, laugh more readily, love generously, give sincerely, and live with integrity.

[Image credit]