Sensibilities

Discovery

2012-01-27T00:01:00.013+08:00

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

2012-01-20T00:01:00.009+08:00

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

2011-12-30T00:01:00.003+08:00

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

2011-12-23T00:01:00.022+08:00

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

2011-12-16T00:01:00.006+08:00

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

2011-12-09T00:01:00.003+08:00

And he loves me.

Great expectations

2011-12-02T00:01:00.007+08:00

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

2011-05-13T00:01:00.000+08:00

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

2011-04-22T00:01:00.020+08:00

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

2011-03-25T00:01:00.002+08:00

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)

2011-03-04T00:01:00.001+08:00

Crayola crayon in use: Bittersweet

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

Where the days are longest

2011-02-11T00:01:00.012+08:00

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

2011-01-14T00:01:00.004+08:00

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)

2011-01-07T00:01:00.004+08:00

[Previous colorcasts: 1, 2, 3]

Hello, new decade

2011-01-01T01:01:00.001+08:00

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]

And just like that

2010-12-31T00:01:00.001+08:00

the year -- and the decade -- is over.

And I’m spending year-end with the people I love and two little fat baby rabbits named Twitter and Facebook. There’s food and friends and time to sleep, and a new Moleskine planner for the year ahead.

I don’t know what the new year will bring, and I cannot say that it will be “fabulous,” like what so many people seem to be so confident in predicting, but I do know that whatever 2011 brings, I will deal with it with as much grace, restraint, and elegance as I can.

Sensibilities has turned five

2010-12-30T00:01:00.001+08:00

And I thank all my readers, followers, friends and relatives for your silent yet clear encouragement, and for your consistent support. It gives me great comfort that with each word I throw out there into the big wild infinity that is the Internet, from my very first post and onwards, someone else captures them and gains insight, strength, a few laughs, and the sense that one is not alone. In the invisible filaments that thread us all together, may we thrive on the faith that even if we cannot make sense of everything in this random universe, our humble attempts -- including my own, each Friday, in this blog -- can be just as important and fulfilling.

[Image credit]

Lights

2010-12-24T00:01:00.002+08:00

This year, Christmas Eve falls on a Friday, so I am taking this opportunity to wish everyone peace, love, joy, health, laughter, more friends, and a good night’s sleep each time.

May good cheer rain on us all!

[Image credit]

I'm on Pakinggan Pilipinas

2010-12-03T00:01:00.002+08:00

Or rather, my story is.

Listen to Dulce Amor Fortunato read "God is the space between" here.

The story is also coming out in the special crime issue of Philippine Genre Stories.

In Walter's office

2010-10-29T00:01:00.004+08:00

One Friday afternoon, while the officemates and I were in our work cubicles, cramming for the week’s deadlines and dealing with last-minute stuff that kept coming up as we went along, it rained. But it was no ordinary rain. It was cold, dark, dense, driving rain at half past four, after weeks upon weeks of fiercely hot weather. It was rain that seemed bent on some kind of revenge, making itself heard even through the sealed windows of our office, and the wind it came with howled with force that the glass panes rattled in their frames.

At the sound of the thunder and the sudden heavy rainfall, everybody got up and ran to the window.

“This is exactly the kind of weather that I like,” announced Louie.

“This makes me want to read a good book,” said Gretchen, giggling.

“Ayos ito, ah,” said Dennis, dancing around.

The rest of us just stood by the windows, and then Walter shut the lights in his office (the one that our Vice President was previously occupying before she was transferred to the executive wing in another floor) turned on an OPM classic, and we all trooped in and watched the rain from there, and each retreated into their own quietude.

I myself love the rain; I love it extravagantly, outrageously, unreasonably. But I didn’t always use to. Just a few years ago I went through some very sad and heavy months, and the rain that seemed incessant then seemed to mark the beginning of the realization that the man in my life was falling out of love with me. That was the era in which I had to drive to Baguio, in the cold and the mist, with rain sheeting on my windshield, to deal with some problem or other, to clarify some issue or other, and the misunderstandings never seemed to end, and phone calls never seemed to suffice, and then eventually, it all had to end.

But there is a reason for every season, as they say, and as I moved on (having no choice in the matter, anyway), I’ve grown to accept that some things will always be out of my reach. The concept of love is itself something that will always elude me, and I have the perpetual feeling that love is constantly slipping through my fingers, and I spend most of my emotional energies trying to grasp at the light, feather-like slivers that remain, like the vapors that stay for just a few seconds before they disappear completely and so smoothly that I never notice that they have already gone. Such was my life then, and such was I: always grasping with my cold, wet, half-numb fingers at ever-elusive things that didn’t quite belong to me.

But now, I jump with joy each time it begins to rain. I think that to some degree, it’s because I’m happier now, because I know I’m beloved, and I’m not alone. And with that love, rain has become my new sun, filling me with warmth and acceptance, and happy memories, making my heart feel hot, sweltering, summer-like. Because that’s what the heart keeps at the foreground after all the hurt has receded into the deepest abysses of our remembrances. At some point, it all starts to heal, become good again, become happy again, like a child again. No one who is loved can ever be sad in the rain, and as I looked at my officemates, I realized they must already have known what I am just realizing then.

And so we sat there in the semi-darkness, at 4:30 in the afternoon, listening to the sound of the crashing rain and songs about unrequited love -- Ricky the Photographer, Louie the Copywriter, Walter the Art Director, Dennis the Webmaster, Gretchen the Executive Staff Assistant, and I, Resident Misanthrope -- and quiet contentment wafted around the cold room, because we all knew in our hearts that none of us were loving unrequitedly.

[Image credits: 1, 2, 3]

Still the one color (a colorcast)

2010-10-22T00:01:00.002+08:00

[Previous colorcasts: 1, 2]

Stigmata

2010-10-15T00:01:00.005+08:00

There are stories that you could tell a thousand times. There are stories that you remember until the day you die because of their vividness or their richness or their profundity. There are stories that leave a taste in the mouth, or a sting on the cheek, or a memory of a sound or an odor. There are stories that bear an awful weight, and freeze that one moment in your life into a stigma that you just know will keep bleeding its way into your soul.

And then there are those stories that do not really feel like stories. Having no beginnings and endings, these stories settle over its characters ever so thinly that there is a danger of never seeing it at all until time, in its eternal jest, pulls someone’s eyes upwards to see it. These are the stories that hold no deep, numbing emotion, cause no smarts, create no stigmas, draw no blood. Spanning years and years and years of regularity and prosaic calm, these stories have the quality of air. Not even of wind or of breeze, just of air.

This is the kind of story that I have. And it is a story I can tell only once, and without words. So listen to the silence, and feel my story.

Image credit

Xanadu

2010-10-13T00:01:00.008+08:00

When I was seven or eight years old Da brought home a rented Betamax tape of Xanadu. I loved it! I loved the celebratory music and the joyous cinematography. I was especially enthralled to see that the Nine Muses knew how to jazz dance to the Electric Light Orchestra, wearing their ruffled dresses, with their hair Farah Fawcett-like and their slouchy leg warmers Jane Fonda-like. Gene Kelly was there, and so were roller skates. What more could a girl growing up in the eighties want? Of course I watched the movie over and over.

After about a week, Da had to return the Betamax tape to the Betamax rental store, and rented several more really good movies for me every week after that -- Chorus Line, Electric Dreams, Flashdance, Body Rock, The Goonies, Footlose, The Pirate Movie, St. Elmo’s Fire -- but I found that none of them were as feel-good as Xanadu.

Maybe it was the fantasy of it, and the allusion to Greek mythology (even as early as that, I already loved the age-old stories that form part of the literary tradition). Maybe it was the fresh-faced innocence of it. Maybe it was the character of Olivia Newton John, which made me feel like a happy young girl who would never have any problems in life, unlike the burdened, neurotic, damaged girls in the other eighties movies.

That it was a big flop then was irrelevant to me; I had no idea it was a big flop until I was nearing my thirties, when I Googled it, looking for a DVD copy to purchase. And when I finally found a DVD, I re-watched the movie, for the umpteenth time, and relished it as if it were the first time. And I watched it three times in a row. And then I realized that I when I was seven or eight, I did have my own Xanadu. I was a fresh-faced and innocent happy young girl who didn’t have any problems, I lived my summers the way I wanted to, and had everything I needed. And all because of Da, who has given me that Xanadu, both the movie and the paradise.

I still watch my own DVD copy of Xanadu from time to time. Now I am hardly the fresh-faced, innocent, leg warmers-wearing happy young girl who would never have any problems in life. Over time, I have gradually become a version of the burdened and the ever-so-slightly neurotic, as life only so often turn us into, but that’s okay. Because I’ve had my Daddy-sanctioned Xanadu, and the memory of it will see me through for the rest of my life.

Thanks for Xanadu, Da. Happy birthday!

And of course, Happy October Thirteen!

[Posts for previous birthdays: 2007, 2008, 2009

[Imade credits: 1, 2]

She is sugar and spice

2010-10-08T00:01:00.003+08:00

and everything nice, including freshly-baked brownies, ice cream with sprinkles, and chocolate eclairs.

Also little soft rabbits, flower petals, bracelets made of beads, and long, fruity showers. She knows how to bake cupcakes, and can run faster than I can. When it rains she wears little red rubber boots and stomps around in the puddles in the garden, happy and contented to be our song and sunshine.

Happy birthday to my niece, The Shrimpmouse!

[Post for a previous birthday]

[Image credit]

Mountain

2010-10-01T00:01:00.010+08:00

Ever since I was a little girl growing around books, I have always dreamed of having my own private library, in a large, dark, room that’s lined floor-to-ceiling with books. My daydreams often consisted of dark, gleaming wood, reading lamps, heavy curtains, and an overstuffed leather chair, and the company of the likes of Dickens, Atwood, Garcia-Marquez, Updike, Austen, and Shakespeare. Daydreams of pink fluffy bedrooms and huge closets full of dresses to wear when I go out with a Prince Charming were definitely not for me. When other girls my age would dream of birthday parties and pink bicycles and cupcakes and dolls, I would dream of leather-bound pages, the smell of wood and paper, and the light from a reading lamp falling on black type as I flipped page after page after page of a novel or a treatise or a monograph, time passing me by in hours, years, eons, while I sit entranced, immortal.

Now I already have my own library, although it is nowhere near my dream library yet. I have about five hundred titles on six medium-sized shelves made of laminated wood fiber (four of them a gift from my mother, and two I eventually purchased as my book collection grew.) These books I have been able to acquire over the years from a myriad of sources. Books do not come cheap, so after the books I have inherited, I continued the collecting by going to book sales and estate give-aways, often finding one-of-a-kind editions, such as the unmarked first edition of The Naked Ape and The Witches of Eastwick. I also “discovered” so many wonderful authors through a book I found in these rummages, such as Tom Robbins and Anita Shreve. When I was starting my library, Google was not up yet, and the internet was in its baby stage, so I had a dearth of sources for information. But whenever an author I admire does mention another author he admires, I’d try to find a book by that author, and that’s partly how my library grew.

When I moved to Manila, started studying in UP Diliman, landed a series of well-paying freelance jobs, got broadband in my apartment, got my own credit card, and discovered Amazon and Paypal (milestones that occurred one after the other with dizzying speed, much to my delight), I started buying books brand-new. I had more reason to: research for my freelance jobs, readings related to my graduate studies, and reading to ease my loneliness whilst living alone in the big city. And my library continued to grow. And now I need even more shelves.

I don’t place books in storage, because i find that I go back to the already-read ones from time to time, sometimes to re-read (as in the case of my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Funny Farm), sometimes to quote (as in the case of my copy of Negotiating with the Dead and How To Read A Novel), sometimes to check certain things against (as in the case of my copy of Generation 13 and The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism), sometimes to feel amazed at the wonders of the universe (as in the case of my copy of The Fabric of the Cosmos and The Biography of E=mc2) and sometimes to just skim through to get strength from during difficult times (as in the case of my copy of The Year of Magical Thinking and Emma). Books have become my security blanket and I need to see their spines all lined up in the shelves all the time.

When people see my now-overstuffed bookshelves they often ask me, with awed voices, if I have read them all. I am perplexed by the question. Of course I have read them all (except for the latest batch acquired which I am still in the process of reading). When I say yes, they look even more awed, as if they have just witnessed me accomplish a stupendous, almost inhuman feat, such as reaching the summit of Mt. Everest alive while wearing a flimsy dress. For what purpose would I buy books except to read them? How difficult is it to finish reading books? How extraordinary is it to love books, much like other people might love diamonds or cars or gadgets or handbags or watches or antiques?

But then again I suppose there are diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks. I do love reading books over every other activity in the world. And even if the books in the bookshelves would overflow onto other newer bookshelves that would eventually ease out other furniture, it’s okay. I’d be happily reading on, so comfortably, even if the books would overflow from all shelves, onto the floor, onto other remaining pieces of furniture, at times even occupying half of my bed, like some profound, verbose fungus gradually growing larger and wider to cover the entire forest floor, then creeping up towards the hills and the mountains, spewing adjectives and verbs and gerunds and metaphors and dialogue and arguments and streams of consciousness as it spreads along, enveloping my world with chapters upon chapters of plot and premise.

And there I nestle underneath the soft darkness, a growing mountain of literature over me. The people who ask me about my books are wrong. I have not reached the peak of the mountain. I lie ensconced underneath the dogmatic layers of the centuries of writing, life, and learning that have come before me.

[Image credits: 1, 2, 3]

Sun and wind

2010-09-24T00:04:00.006+08:00

When I was growing up in the farm we had a lavandera who would come in every few days. She would haul all our dirty clothes and linens out to the water pump in the back of the property, behind the bodega and beside the vegetable garden, and there should would stay all day, washing everything by hand in large aluminum pans with cold, clear water pumped from the Isarog Mountain.

She would always do the heavy fabrics first because they take longer to dry. Whenever she would finish a batch, she would wring them out with her fierce, strong hands made of steel -- she herself was large and stocky and looked as strong as a tree -- put them back into a large pan, and bring them out to where the clotheslines are, for hanging. One by one she would unfurl the fabric and pin them to the clothesline with long wooden laundry pins made of split bamboo that have been long dried out and become brown over years of use.

When I see her starting to hang out the clean, wet, laundry, I would run out in the warm sunshine, against the wind streaming down from the mountain, to stand in front of the flapping fabrics and enjoy the way they slap me with cold wetness.

The laundry would smell divine. I would be able to smell soap, bleach and the subtle but unmistakable smell of fresh spring water, mingled with the smell of the leaves and bamboo in the vegetable garden. I would be able to detect the aroma of the wind from the mountain, and smell the sun on my hair. I would run along the heavy clotheslines, laughing while the laundry flapped in the wind and hit me gently, prodding me to keep running. And when I would notice that my clothes were damp and also smelled of fresh laundry, that was my cue to skip on back home, tired and happy.

After hours of being hung out in the sun and wind, late in the afternoon, long after the lavandera had gone home herself, the laundry would be taken down by the other maids and folded into baskets. The laundry would then be brought into the house, and the whole house would smell like fresh laundry and bamboo. Even if it were already dusk, it would be like sunshine was still inside the house. That was when I learned to love fresh laundry.

Now hardly anyone ever does laundry that way, especially in the cities. Now sheets are fed into steel machines to be washed and dried, much like how we do laundry now in my parents’ house. But each time I get to hand-wash my own small batch of delicates in my sink and hang them out with plastic pins on a clothes rack on the balcony outside my apartment so they can dry in the gentle breeze, I stand there for a few minutes longer, invoking my own older memories of sun and wind and clotheslines, and of giant, clean, wet bedsheets happily dancing themselves dry in the orange afternoon.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

Spaces

2010-09-17T00:01:00.018+08:00

It has become my usual joke that my apartment has now grown up. But the truth is that my old apartment, which I call The College of Chaos, did not grow up. It is still stuck in time, cauterized into my memory, as that magical, fantastical place where mad and important things happened in my long-ago life. What really happened is that I have moved out of The College of Chaos and into my new apartment, The Fortress, and it’s The Fortress that is a grownup, has been a grownup even before I moved in, and which now envelops me with grownup things.

It’s nice. Here I can pretend that my life is in order, because there is a stockroom where I can throw all my disorderly, childish things, including things I cannot sort or deal with at the moment. In this new apartment there are actual compartments. I have an actual bedroom that has only one book in it (which, currently, is Midnight’s Children. All the other books are in the study. There is an actual architectural division between study and sleep.

I have an adorable new lamp, which is a birthday gift from The Dude, and an area in the wall for my favorite photos.

Also, all my shoes are inside a shoe cabinet, a piece of furniture that I’ve never had space for in the old apartment. In the old apartment I used to keep my shoes under the bed, which is okay for all intents and purposes, except that on mornings where I am in a hurry, it’s pain to have to reach under the bed each time for the right pair of shoes, and so I have developed the nasty habit of leaving all my shoes out in the open, where I can easily trip over them at any given time. But now, all my shoes are where they should be in an adult’s apartment.

I have three windows that actually function as windows, and which I have decorated with stylish grownup window treatments. I have cream roman shades with dark rose and matte gold stripes, with blackout linings. In the bedroom I have additional filmy cream-colored drapes.

On weekends I sit at my desk beside a window with the roman shades up, watch old movies while enjoying the soft breeze created by the cross-ventilation of all three open windows, and read while the afternoon sun sinks beyond the skyline of Makati.

My bed is a hypersomniac’s dream. In the old apartment I have lived on a narrow bed because it was all that could ever fit among the bookshelves and the boxes of my graduate student life. But now that I have a full-sized bed with a mattress that's fifteen inches thick (including the topper), a high, padded headboard, and backlights, I make a day out of shopping for bed linens to drape my very stylish grownup bed with.

And because of the roman shades with the blackout lining, I can have instant night any time of the day. Indeed, my sleeping life has gone from cotton rompers to silk dresses, from pigtails to fully-coiffed hairstyles, from sneakers to high-heeled leather shoes.

I loved the College of Chaos. It truly lived up to its name, and I lived there happily and chaotically for seven years. But the College of Chaos is no more, and so is the girl who used to live there. When I see old photos of a younger me in my old apartment, I feel both nostalgia and detachment, both homesickness and liberation. Now, in The Fortress, I feel more regulated, more scheduled, more aligned, and in this neat order I find my sanctuary and my protection.

And that is how our homes reflect our own desires much more accurately than we would care to admit. Because in truth, only The Fortress is a grown up. The person who lives within its walls is still just a little girl dreaming of growing up.

Escape

2010-09-10T00:01:00.005+08:00

Sometimes when the pressures of city life and the mounting deadlines get to be too much for me, I imagine myself in a place far, far way, where there are no highways, no parking lots, no traffic lights, and no phones. In that place I can read and write to my heart’s content, by candlelight, on paper, using an actual pen that takes ink from a bottle, wake up at dawn, eat fruit every day, and take long walks along creeks and byways and vast fields of flowers. I imagine taking naps under huge trees with canopies that cover acres and acres of grassland, gathering flowers in huge baskets to decorate my home with, drinking water straight from waterfalls, watching butterflies rise from bushes, running across green pastures, diving into lakes, living with the sunrise.

And then I wake up, look out my window, and realize that I am still in the city where I have been living for almost ten years, but that where I am at the moment is still the best place to be. Because it's real.

[Image credit]

Destiny, perhaps (a colorcast)

2010-09-03T00:01:00.004+08:00

[My first colorcast]

In the light of the afternoon

2010-08-27T00:57:00.001+08:00

One afternoon on a weekend The Dude decided to take me somewhere low-key so I’d get a change of scene. We drove around the semi-deserted streets of Metro Manila, settled on a mall, had fruit juice and flavored ibos, and talked. We didn’t talk about us, though. We talked about movies, current affairs, House, puzzles, Manny Pacquiao, and maybe a little bit about how to tell good leatherware from bad leatherware.

It was nice. After a while, he turned on his computer and surfed, and I opened my book (a gift from him) and read. And the afternoon sunlight streamed down through the windows in its soft, watery orange-y way, and I wondered when I have stopped thinking about the future.

I have always been an A-type person who had to have a plan before embarking on something, whether it’s starting a craft project or just dealing with the laundry for the weekend. I had to know what my year would be like before committing to any new projects of major engagements. I’d always plan out my outfits for any appointment that would not require my office uniform. And my Moleskine planner would be filled with details of how my days are supposed to come out as, and each October I’d always make it at point to purchase next year’s planner, so I could plan ahead. I always needed an endpoint; I always needed gauges, parameters, markers, and timelines.

But somewhere along the way, I became less hard with myself. After all, we can only plan so much, but life always unfolds the way it wants to, no matter whether we plan for it or not. Planning would indeed make me more prepared, but if something catches me unawares, I’d more or less be able to come up with something to deal with it, anyway.

Perhaps this was why I never even brought up the future with The Dude on that afternoon. Life was right there, or should I say, we were right there, in the middle of life, as it was happening. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, and the earth didn’t shake and there was no thunder and lightning. It was just an ordinary, low-key, modest, quiet afternoon. And perhaps that is what we are for now: small, simple, modest, low-key, but functioning. Getting along, surviving each day as it comes, without plans, but knowing that we will be okay.

In the light of the afternoon, things are softer, slower, kinder, more hopeful. On afternoons like this, I know things will go on as they have before.

Image credit

Opposites

2010-08-20T00:01:00.003+08:00

You to me are a battle of flavors,
like orange and chocolate,
like cucumber and tofu.
When you kiss me my tongue burns
with the quarrel of purple and yellow,
like the fried ice cream you gave me,
a reticent betrayal of depth by light.

[Similar posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]
[Image credit]

A rather long letter, on the occasion of a birthday

2010-08-16T00:01:00.012+08:00

Dear Fifteen Year-Old Maryanne,

Hi! I hope you’re doing fine. I hope you’re not afraid that you have received a letter from me. I know how scary that sounds, but I’ll try not to scare you, today being your birthday and all. Scaring you is the last thing I want to do.

Because I don’t want you to be scared. All I want is to let you know that I miss you. I miss your simple life, your simple joys, your simple dreams, and your simple needs. I miss the girly, small-town ambitions you used to hold, and the adorable little standards you felt you have to adhere to.

I miss the way you try to vary your handwriting, and I miss wearing a high school uniform with the white socks and the black leather shoes. I miss school. I miss the green grass of the paranymphus, and how the morning light hits the blades of grass at just the right moment to make the dew glisten as you walk on it towards the daily flag ceremony. I miss the notebooks, the Trapper Keepers, the neon felt markers, the pencil cases made of tin. I miss you taking down copious notes during Physics class with a dark pencil, and drawing arrows representing the directions of the momentum, and writing down concise definitions of physics terms in Bicol-English, like, “Pareho dapat pirmi ang force kaining duwa.”

I miss that class in which your PE was a double period, but the first PE period was at 1:30 and the second PE period was at 4:20, so you and your classmates had to change into and out of your PE uniforms twice in one afternoon. I miss watching a kick-baseball game from the second-floor balcony of the school building, and going home hoarse from all the cheering. I miss going bowling on Sunday mornings. I miss throwing tiny crumpled papers at classmates during tests.

I miss the outfits, the torn jeans and the sloppy shirts and the Reebok sneakers and the neon-colored socks and the cycling shorts. I miss obsessing about a pimple on the cheek, and I miss walking under a drizzly sky on Sunday evenings on the way to church. I miss oversleeping, and staying in bed all Saturday, completely engrossed with a thick, fat Sydney Sheldon book. (You might think this strange, but in only two years, you will stop reading Sydney Sheldon completely.)

I miss the fads, movies like Batteries Not Included and Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, and the music, and the New Kids On The Block. I miss not knowing what to study in college. I miss staying up late to read novels. I miss living with Squiddward and Nachie (although I know now what a pain I was then). I miss singing along to that old Coca Cola jingle with them. (“It’s a burger, pizza, fries kind of feeling. That only taste that goes is the real thing.”) I miss being sincerely and deeply excited for Christmas. I miss being sincerely and deeply excited about many simple things, like getting a new Walkman, or getting to eat cake, or getting the latest issue of Seventeen which had a feature on rollerblading. I miss being you.

And I miss you. I want to tell you things, many of them seemingly trivial, like why you have to take better care of your teeth, and why you don’t have to worry too much that you are skinny. (In twenty years, you will get forty-inch hips.) I want to tell you to start using Nivea Creme this early in your life and not be afraid that it looks too rich. I want to tell you not to get that perm when you turn sixteen. I want to tell you to start your Dickens reading with The Pickwick Papers and not A Christmas Carol.

I want to look you in the eye and hold your hands, and tell you not to be in too much of a hurry to see everything. I want to tell you that life will always run its course whether you hurry it or not, and all that remains for you to do is to be happy for every second that passes by, and be grateful for the chance to learn something new and do something good everyday. I want you to make friends and keep them. Spend time with them. Share your secrets with them. Talk to your siblings. Write to your parents. Reach out. Trust your instincts. Pray more.

I also want you to learn how to work hard and earn every glory you get, and know that you deserve it. I want you to see that you don’t have to be in a hurry to grow up, but when you do decide to grow up, in your own sweet time, you don’t have to revert back to being childish again. I want you to learn how to let go and move on, and be strong for the bad things -- which you call battles -- that life will throw at you from time to time. I want you to realize that you don’t have to think of them as battles. Life is not a battlefield, and you are not a soldier. You’re just a girl who wants the world to be happy and peaceful, and who loves books and wants to be a writer.

I want to tell you to write as much as you can, about anything that you want, without being too conscious that you want to be a writer. Don’t dream of becoming a writer; just write. Write a lot. Write anything, and do it in a way that you feel you will never forget.

But who am I to tell you these things? I am not living such a perfect life myself. If anything, I have been only plodding along, halfheartedly taking one step after another, making wishy-washy turns, slipping along the wayside, sometimes being evil, sometimes being timorous, but never ever truly resolute. And though I might try to sound wise, I have to admit that I have not really understood the lessons that I am supposed to learn in the past two decades that I have been trying to learn them. I have the sinking feeling that I am here largely because I have forgotten about you, and now, at this moment, twenty years later, I remember you.

Write me a letter. Talk to me. Teach me how to be simple again, to have simple dreams again, to be excited for Christmas again. Teach me how not to be afraid again.

Teach me how to read for enjoyment again and not to break down each sentence with a literary criticism. Teach me how to jump rope again, and play jackstone again, and sing along with commercial jingles again. Teach me how to ride a swing again, and walk in the rain again, and cheer wholeheartedly at games again. Teach me how to sleep soundly again. Teach me to celebrate life again. Teach me to believe again.

Love,
Thirty-five year-old Maryanne

Posts from birthdays past: [2006, 2007, 2008, 2009]

Image credits: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

The dude next door

2010-08-13T00:04:00.002+08:00

He didn’t always live next door. He’s someone I have known for a long time, before I lived next door to him, and our memories together go far back, perhaps even further back to a previous life. But in the heart’s attempt to make sense of the overwhelming ebbs and swells that make up a relationship so recondite, one needs to have an anchor that is portrayed in a more or less conventional light. Thus, he is The Dude. And he lives next door.

What can I say about him? Perhaps just a few simple things, like, he loves puzzles. He can solve the 3x3 Rubik’s cube in under a minute. About a year ago he purchased a 5x5 version and after just a few days of practice he was able to solve it in under five minutes. Also, he is a vegetarian, and prefers his food spicy. He drinks a lot of water, and is online a lot, to look up his Lakers, to browse the boxing websites and blogs, to read up on Manny Pacquiao, and to look up the latest news in technology and the latest Apple rumors. He is an Apple geek. His latest Mac is called Sans Rival; his previous Mac was called Cotton. He irons his own shirts but cannot do his own laundry. He likes the color black, because he says it’s elegant and sophisticated and goes with everything. His cars have always been black.

What else to say? Now he likes good leather. Before he met me, he didn’t even notice leather, but now he can tell whether or not a piece of leather-ware is of good quality. All his leather-ware are black, of course. Now his casual clothes have less color and prints, but more style. Now he also knows some Shakespearean lines, and I suspect that sometimes, he secretly Googles for papers on Shakespeare. He likes at least one chick flick that I know of, Letters to Juliet. He admitted this to me after we saw the movie in a cinema. He likes House, M.D., and he likes 24, and he thinks that the writers of those two TV shows are some of the best in the industry. His favorite movie is The American President. I watched Salt with him and he watched Sex and the City 2 with me.

I keep finding more and more things to say about him. Now he is more conscious about his grammar and word choice, which makes him feel insecure when he is composing a draft, but I think he really has nothing to worry about, because his English is very good. He can get a little pompous sometimes when he talks about his work, but it’s only because he is very passionate about what he does and he takes great pains to be exact in his conclusions. His Excel files are perfection. I am a beneficiary of this Excel perfection when he made me a template for balancing my checking account. I use it now not just to balance my checking account but to monitor all my bills and expenses, track all my post-dated checks, project my cash flow, and plan my purchases. Because of this Excel file, I have never had a check bounce, all my bills are paid on time, I don’t need to carry around much cash, and all my purchases are planned. His Excel perfection helped me live a mature financial life.

But not so much in other aspects. Because in other aspects I am still a little girl. I still need him each time I get feverish, or when my knee gets scraped and needs to be disinfected and bandaged, or when one of my software gets a glitch. I still need him to get dinner for me sometimes, and massage my legs when they get crampy. I still need to consult him each time I plan to buy a gadget or perform a software upgrade or install anything new into my system. I still need him to remind me to take my medication and to go to bed at 9:30 pm.

I also keep finding more and more reasons why I need him, and it could go on and on. But I suppose that in the dark and murky vapors that continue to surround our lives, and in the fears and uncertainties that plague us, what makes us endure are the prosaic, the simple, the everyday facts, such as the sun continuing to rise every morning, and AM Radio still churning out the news every day, and rush hour still awful but endurable, and Google still available each time you access it. It is small details like these that help me carry on, facts like, local checks still take about three days to clear, a thousand pesos plus five hundred is still a thousand and five hundred, that my ATM PIN still works, and that my taxes still get withheld from my salary. Lamps still light up when I turn them on, people still answer when I call them on the phone, and my analog wall clock still works. Books are still made of paper, hamburgers are still made of beef. The value of pi is still the same and Apple computers still don’t crash. And he is still the dude next door. For these, I am thankful.

[Image Credits: 1, 2, 3]

Radio

2010-08-06T00:01:00.005+08:00

In the late 1990’s I worked for about a year in a radio station in Naga, first as a newscaster, and then eventually becoming a newscaster-slash-disk jockey. Incidentally, it was also that particular FM radio station’s heyday, having placed number one in major surveys for two consecutive years, and one more time within the year that I worked there. I was part of the air team, and it was something unconventional for me at the time.

Our DJ’s booth was a regular-sized booth, with large picture windows on three sides. The DJ’s console sat in the center, the CD player desk was on the right, the guest microphone was further to the right, and the turntable was on the left. The library of CDs and vinyl records was right behind the DJ’s seat, and we have memorized the contents of the CDs so we could pick out a CD from the stack for a particular song without having to read through the CD’s contents.

The booth also had mood lighting. When the one on board was feeling a little jazzy, he’d close all the blinds, turn off all the lights and leave on the blue spotlights trained onto the console. It made it a little difficult to see, but we could navigate the controls even when blindfolded. Time slots with a rock playlist had the red and yellow lights turned on, and pop (which we didn’t like much) didn’t merit mood lighting and closed blinds. But even though we didn’t like pop so much, whenever pop stars and recording artists from Manila would visit the station we would give them a warm welcome, and we would let them joke around with us inside the booth, which we would air live, and listeners could phone in and join in the banter.

Our big boss was Brenda, herself a rather wild and raving Valkyrie, who was based in Legazpi City where the head office of the network (which she owns) was. She would show up suddenly at the station on random days with her peculiar ideas about how to sound sexy on the air, how to to market our airtime, and how to deal with that pesky advertiser who wanted the voice-overs on his advertising materials to sound like someone was choking on his food. And then she would ramble on about something else, walk out of the conference room in mid-sentence, and harp on the technicians about something completely unrelated, and then she would convene the TV people and talk to them about the coverage of the Penafrancia Festival that was, like, ten months away, and then, just as suddenly, leave, leaving behind bilaos of pancit canton and a case of Coke Litros. No wonder we felt cool; our big boss was insane and never felt it important to rein us in, so we were, happily, all over the place, just like she was.

We lived only in the present. We had cellphones and pagers, wore jeans and Tretorn sneakers, went to street parties, played billiards, drank flaming drinks, listened to Bjork, went swimming at 2 o’clock in the morning, and were always the first to play the newest songs in the city. We were young, immortal, inviolable, and defiant of the times and of playlists. We were a rather uproarious bunch, didn’t care much about what other people said, but we lived our lives in hi-fidelity.

That was almost two decades ago, and I never looked back to that time until now. I realize how different I have become now, and how far I have driven myself. Thus, in loving memory of who I used to be, I play the old songs, remember old friends, old stories, and my old life, things that I will never have again, but am grateful for still being able to remember.

[Image credits: 1, 2, 3]

Searching for Sheryl Festejo

2010-07-30T00:01:00.003+08:00

We called her Pot-Pot, although she looked nothing like a Pot-Pot. She was taller and older than me, very graceful and slender, and had straight black hair that flowed down to the middle of her back like smooth black liquid. Her name really suited her: Sheryl Festejo. But I never remember calling her that. She was always Pot-Pot to me.

She lived next door to us in Jacob Putol in Naga City. Her house was in the innermost lot of the neighborhood we were in, so her two-storey home was almost completely enclosed by a high perimeter wall and dark trees. The house I lived in was the very first house that Da built for Ma.

Suitably enough, Pot-Pot was my very first best friend, and she made me feel preferred. She would stay with me in our house most afternoons after school, and sometimes we would play in her living room, where her hundreds of dolls were displayed. She had all kinds of Barbie dolls, including one which had very long hair that we could cut half an inch from, and see it grow back right there and then. There was a larger doll who could change the color of her hair, a doll that sang to us, a doll that cried to us, and I think there was even a doll that danced the hula for us, in a grass skirt and all.

That young, and enamored with Pot-Pot, I was sincerely happy, in the prosaic way only children could be. Also, I never wanted her to leave at the end of the day. I would hide her slippers, or her toys, believing she will not leave me without them. What she would do, then, is put me to sleep for a late nap, and then she would leave, without her slippers, but when I would wake up in the evening at dinnertime, and Ma and Da would already be there. But then during most of the next day, I would go through the hours looking forward to when I would see Pot-Pot again.

She always seemed glad to see me, too. After school, even before going into my own house, I’d go running to her gate, and she would meet me with some kind of contrivance that she had innovated for my amusement: a new dress for one of my dolls, a pair of Barbie doll shoes that she painted with her mother’s glittery red nail polish, a fan made out of leaves, a headband with rabbit ears. I revered her, and she adored me.

We would sometimes fight, of course, and this was always because I couldn’t get what I wanted at once, but Pot-Pot had the knack for making my childish anger dissipate within minutes. Once, I remember I got mad at her because of something, and I went to sit and sulk on my bed, leaving her at my desk. As I sat there smoldering, she cut a square piece from a sheet of cartolina, and curled it into an S-shape, laid it on the desk and started typing on it, the concave surface jumping up and down the desk. I was immediately captivated.

“What’s that?” I asked, my eyes getting bigger and bigger.

“It’s a calculator,” she said, smiling at me.

I jumped out of bed, and we were friends again.

There, in that valley of dolls, dark trees, late naps, and murky orange afternoons, I found the seat of my girlhood. There I learned how to marvel at toys made of paper, hair that grew before my very eyes, magic wands that really do magic, and the resilience and clarity of someone who understood me to my core. Perhaps I never really left that place; perhaps after all of my three and a half decades of life, I have never really grown past five years old.

When my family moved to a different house, Pot-Pot and her family moved to the United States, and we lost each other. Not having the benefit of technology at the time, and all wrapped up with growing up, I let go of her, and moved on to jeans and brassieres, and new friends with short hair and who listened to pop music. I suppose she let go of me, too, in her own way. But now I wonder how my life would have been had we stayed together, in our street, living out our afternoons in the microcosm of our childhood.

My fondest memory of her is also my last. It was late afternoon, and we has just finished making new magic wands out of Bic “Haba-Haba” ballpens, ribbons, foil, and old tinsel stars from the previous Christmas. We decided to test the magic of our new magic wands while taking a walk around our neighborhood wearing matching dresses. So we skipped out the door, singing nursery rhymes and casting spells on birds and bushes and rocks and butterflies and fruits and parked cars, and cats that rejected our spells by hissing at us and then slinking away. And then we reached the end of our street, and before us, when there was supposed to be more houses, lay a vast field of cogon in full bloom, with nothing beyond but an orange and magenta sky where the sun was slowly sinking like the last forgotten candy in the wrapper.

And I was awed by the magic that our wands had created.

I am looking for her. I hope I still find her.

[Image credits: 1, 2, 3]

Yearbook

2010-07-23T00:02:00.006+08:00

I found out yesterday that a friend and classmate from high school and college, Annabelle Goce, had died. She was only 35. She was the subject of one of my earliest blog posts, and after I found out about her death, I read my old blog post again, and reading it gave me chills.

In the blog post I predicted how she would grow old. (Now I know I am definitely not a fortune-teller.) Neither do I really remember what happened the first time we met. All I could remember was that we were both thirteen. It must have been in the classroom, and it must have been quiet and polite, because that’s how she was. She was unassuming, proper, kind and considerate. Even though she was fighting her own battles, she never showed it. She had poise, and everybody could see that. In the elegance and quietude of our first meeting, more than twenty years ago, the details have been lost to memory.

But I do remember the last time I saw her. It was on the day of her wedding, in January 2006. As I watched her walk down the aisle in a pure white gown, to the song “On the Wings of Love,” I sat at the end of a pew and cried, because she was so beautiful. I wished her a long and happy life. Little did I know that that wish would not be granted. And as the choir sang to a crescendo, saying that the only way to fly is on the wings of love, I felt so much gladness that Annabelle was doing exactly that.

And now, on the wings of love, we send her off. On the wings of love we see her through from this life to the next, amid flowers and tears and the extraordinary memories that she leaves behind. She will be laid to rest on Wednesday, July 28, in Naga, the city that witnessed her life. And even though I cannot be there myself, she will have many people there who will bid her farewell, including our high school batch-mates from the Colegio de Santa Isabel Batch of 1992. I can almost see them there -- an army of 35 year-old women propelled by sisterhood and memories, walking along the streets of Naga alongside Annabelle’s casket.

And as we all walk in the memory of Annabelle Goce, we also remember other high school batch-mates who have already passed away: Georgina de Guzman, Sheila Cuarto, and Encar Parone, comrades from our unforgettable adolescence, sisters from the glory days of our youth. None of us will ever remember them sad, or ugly, or old, or in pain. They will live in our memories, always happy, constantly radiant, invariably golden, forever young.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

Beyond this

2010-07-16T00:08:00.004+08:00

Beyond the lights and sounds of this home
my heart sees an underlying pattern of fire and wind
that shape themselves into colors and aromas
which defy the notion that where I am
is where I should be.

[Similar posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]
[Image credit]

At the bottom of my bag

2010-07-09T00:01:00.005+08:00

One afternoon, while I was looking for a file inside my storage room, I came across an old canvas tote that I remember using from six or seven years ago. At the time I was still living in my old apartment and didn’t have a car yet. I was also still a full-time graduate student (as opposed to my current status of being a part-time, fallen-away, grappling-to-get-back-in-the-program graduate student), and living a vastly different life. I still lived along Evangelista St. in Makati, and my life revolved around the Camarines Sur and Makati offices of then Camarines Sur Governor Luis R. Villafuerte, for whom I was writing, and the subsequently his son, L-Ray, who became governor after him, Naga City, UP Diliman, and my old apartment, the College of Chaos.

This old canvas tote was huge! During its heyday it could fit my 12-inch Powerbook inside a padded sleeve, various chargers and cables and flash drives, two or three books, a stack of CDs, a thick sheaf of handouts and a handful of file folders brimming with even more files, a jacket, a folding umbrella, and a bottle of water. It’s a testament to its very good make that not a single stitch ever broke on me and my daily load within the months that I lugged it around the city, inside MRT trains, jeepneys and cabs and buses, elevators, classrooms, and offices. And for the past few years it has lain empty and quiet inside a large plastic storage box inside a storage room.

But not quite completely empty. As I fondled the material I felt some bumps from inside, and unzipped the bag. Inside I saw a wealth of small old things, the usual flotsam and jetsam from my life of six or seven years ago. There were old crumbling tickets from Baclaran-Novaliches buses, three Mongol # 2 pencils, a sachet of instant Nescafe, its contents as hard as stone. Inside I also found a handkerchief, two Yale keys I couldn’t identify, several paperclips, a small purple stapler, and three Globe prepaid load cards from when I was still using a tiny silver Samsung flip-phone with two green screens.

There were several crumpled Post-It notes as well, a few blank, but several containing names and numbers and email addresses of people, some of whom I can even remember, and short reminders of files to be sent, amounts to be billed, and places to be photographed. There were old tickets from Isarog Bus Lines for when I would travel from Naga to Manila and back, eight-hour trips I would take overnight, sleeping snugly under thick pants, two jackets, and a soft warm flannel blanket. And when the memories start, there’s no saying when they would end, because I don’t live that life anymore, and I am someone else now.

At the bottom of my bag there are fossils that contain a world inside them, a world that I no longer inhabit, but which I still recognize from a past era. If that world is not mine anymore, why then do I feel suddenly misplaced where I currently am? Why is my heart yearning to live in it once more? Has a piece of myself fallen off and embedded itself into one of these relics, and shall I always keep trying to find that lost part of me? Why am I dreaming of spending even just a day in that old world? And why am I imagining that, once I am back there, I shall overstay my welcome and not leave at all?

[Image credits: 1, 2]

Here’s something a little different

2010-07-02T00:05:00.003+08:00

In computer parlance, typecasting is the conversion of an expression of a given type into another type. In the world of typewriters, however, typecasting refers to the creation of the impressions of type from the type bars onto the paper, making an imprint through an inked ribbon. But there is another kind of typecasting, which involves a typewriter, scraps of paper, a digital scanner, a computer, internet connection, and a blog.

Typecasting, in the world of typewriter collectors who blog, is a different way of publishing blog posts. Instead of typing words directly onto the “compose” field, they type the words onto paper using a typewriter, scan the paper to turn it into a digital image, and upload it into their blog as a regular image. It’s fun and cute, in an analog kind of way. It can even be said to be some form of defiance of technology, where the defiance of technology is spread through technology. (It’s a little twisted that way.)

Something even more analog are papercasts, in which the blog post is written by hand on paper, and the paper scanned and uploaded into the blog page. I have my own papercast right here. These techniques using paper as primary media are supposed to be more spontaneous, fresh, natural, and open, because the whole thing is uploaded with all the handwriting slips, typographical errors, and corrections. I myself like it because it allows me to use paper, one of my favorite things in life.

A colorcast is mostly the same thing, except that instead of making the type imprints through the inked ribbon of a typewriter, a crayon is used. In colorcasts the crayon is rubbed onto a piece of paper, then that piece of paper is placed face down on a blank piece of paper, and together they are fed into the typewriter, and the words are typed on the underside of the surface that was colored, producing a colored impression instead of the usual inked type. Hence:

What do you think?

I have grown up with Crayola crayons, have always had them throughout high school and college, and relied on them as a mother to help me out in entertaining and teaching my small son. Throughout the years I have seen colors come and go. (I miss tumbleweed.) Furthermore, I have been living alone in Metro Manila for over seven years, and I have always had a box of Crayola crayons with me, so I thought I might as well do something novel with it -- not so original, sadly, but something new for me. New expression from an old type to a new type -- temporarily shifting from new technology to old analog -- all joined together in a blog that's approaching its fifth year. Old things in new things, and new things from old things.

[Crayola crayon in use: purple mountain's majesty]

The fortress has risen

2010-06-25T00:01:00.002+08:00

Tonight I am looking out of the window towards the lights of the high-rise buildings of the city, and wonder about the lives of the people who inhabit those spaces. Are they happy? Who are they living with? What color are their drapes? What did they have for dinner? Do they like their eggs scrambled or over easy? Do they watch old movies? Do they like the Electric Light Orchestra? How often do the laugh? Do they get headaches? What really goes on inside those spaces that I can only behold from afar, other lives that go through their days not knowing that I wonder about them from time to time?

I, on the other hand, am in a different place. Though I sometimes wonder about other lives in other places, as a writer is wont to do, in the quest to gather details that make up a believable story, the demarcations between them and I are clear. I am not them. And not only do I live elsewhere, the structure of my life now is also different, and the air around me has been transformed.

I live along a large, black river that functions as my moat, and even my door is the same color as the lamb’s blood that was daubed on the doorposts of the children of Israel so they will not be stricken with the plague. I am safe here within these tall, heavy walls, and my doors are guarded by a sentinel upon whom is vested the powers of love.

Because of love, this sentinel’s competence and constitution extends to the walls, becoming the structure itself, throbbing with life, reverberating with music, and ablaze with the light of a thousand mornings. Nevermore shall I be the damsel in distress; nevermore shall I want to be anywhere among the ruins of a world that goes to battle on a whim and a conjecture. I am here. This is now. Out of the ruins, the fortress has risen.

Image credit

Out of the ruins

2010-06-18T00:39:00.003+08:00

One morning, after a deep and dreamless sleep for what seemed like a hundred long and winding years, I woke up to the bright sunshine, the smell of roses, and a man’s familiar voice that reminded me of goodnight wishes and a particular song. I, in a torpid state, was at first confused, for I thought I would never see him again. But I blinked my eyes and looked harder, and indeed, there he was, looking exactly like the last time I saw him, a hundred years ago.

I looked around, seeing the ruins around me, ruins of a union that had toppled over due to an unnecessary declaration of war, and realized that the battle had been totally unfounded, and that the premise of the war was grossly untrue.

As the waves of guilt and remorse washed over me, I could not even look him straight in the eye, didn't know how to begin asking for forgiveness. My mind went back to everything that had happened, and then, little by little, like tiny slivers of light coming into view, clarity came. And I knew then that, like the archetypes of our psyche that have been true for as long as anyone can remember, he is someone I can never live without. And though we might live among the ruins for now, eventually, with forgiveness and sheer hope and sincere love, we can always build something new from the old foundations that will always, always be there.

And so it goes that fairy tales don’t always end the usual way, and they are not always over when we think they are. For even when we behold something that has already crumbled to the ground, there is always, always something -- maybe a token, or a magic spell, or stardust -- that carries the entire fairy tale with it in a grain of a promise, and keeps it there, ready to be unleashed in the future as something stronger, more magical, more magnificent. And out of the ruins, something even more beautiful can live again.

Image credit

The long and winding

2010-06-11T00:36:00.003+08:00

If life is one long journey, how do we know what paths to take in the myriad of streets that make up the history of living? We have all heard about the road less travelled, and the well-worn path, the trees paved with gold, and even the place where the streets have no name. Many a song has been written about the journey that life is all about, but is it really a road? Is it even a journey? What if it’s an open field, or an ocean, or even pure air, and we are not so much walking forward as being tossed around by the forces that surround us?

For comfort, though, I pick the metaphor of the road.

The image is familiar, the connotations are mundane, and it requires me to always put one foot in front of the other, on and on, day after day after day, which is much like how I am living my life at the moment. After loss and heartache and guilt, and while still dealing with the confusion and exhaustion that comes out of them, one can only aim to survive each day as it comes, and not think too far into the future, lest one realize that the road might not extend onwards too much for oneself.

I have been through many turns and bends in my three-and-a-half decades of walking -- sometimes running, something hopping, sometimes tiptoeing -- along this infinite road. Recently I have taken what can be called a literal turn for the worse, and though I want to turn back and take the correct turn, unfortunately, in the unwritten laws that govern the traversing of these roads, that is not allowed. So I trudge on, apprehensive, fearful, yet also hopeful that somewhere along the way I will come upon a side street that will bring me back to where I made a wrong turn, and enable me to correct my mistakes.

I have come upon that side street. It beckons to my feelings of contrition, and assures me that this is my chance to face my fear of the unknown. The longer I look upon the opening of that street, the more it tugs upon my longing to be loved once more, qualify myself for retribution, make myself ascendant to my calling to be part of a whole. And though I know the road will not end there, and though the subsequent roads be long and winding, I will flourish with the conviction that I took the step forward.

So tomorrow I walk into the unknown, armed only with faith and love.

Image credit

Downpour

2010-06-04T00:13:00.008+08:00

Towards May the stifling, overbearing heat wave of several weeks prior broke in torrential rains. The rain came so suddenly and so forcefully, and people were startled, umbrella-less. Some were walking to dinner, some were on their way home, and when the rain came, together with the deep puddles it created everywhere, people had to cancel their plans and run for shelter, bumping into each other, edging each other out under awnings or whatever slivers of roof they could find. It was as if the entire world had stopped in mid-sentence, in mid-bite, in mid-stride, stunned in the most prosaic of manners, like chickens jolted out of their roost at midnight.

I, however, felt it coming, like a rumble from deep in my bones.

For most of my life I have always felt some kind of intuition each time the rains were about to come suddenly. Even in the midst of stifling hot weather, I would feel a tug from somewhere deep inside me, something with a very old and brittle voice, and I know that it would rain very hard in about an hour or so -- and it would. Most of the time I would pretend I didn’t know, and I’d stay out to get caught in the sudden downpour, even letting myself get wet sometimes, just to keep up the pretension. I don’t know why I did it; it was just one of those things that young people did to blend in with the crowd, the crowd that had no premonition whatsoever of the coming rains.

But really, perhaps my premonition of rains come from my understanding of the logic of rain. Because after all, isn’t it supposed to be a cycle? When summer has ended, isn’t the rainy season supposed to begin? When the dry, cracked earth has given up its yield and bounty, the heavens open up to drench the plains with water and then turns the dry, gritty soil into warm, fragrant mud, dark as dead dreams but fertile again, absorbent again, as a woman regenerates after childbirth. Isn’t this an organic thing, an instinct of nature?

Now May has passed in its full unpredictable glory, and June has begun to settle in on us, and at this point, I have begun to enjoy the rain as a happy fact of life. After a while I hear the steady drone of the heavy rainfall die down to a mere whisper, and then hush itself up to the deep stillness that often follows a downpour. The stillness feels portentous, as if it was pregnant with some hidden life that could, at any time, spring forth from a mossy green womb. But though I know there will be more rains, I also know that they will never really catch me by surprise. Something ancient inside of me sees to it that I will always know beforehand.

Image credit

The red kangaroo pillow

2010-06-01T00:01:00.003+08:00

When I was in kindergarten I went to this little school in Naga City, called Kiddie Garden. I don’t remember much of the whole experience. Like most everything from childhood, we only tend to remember snippets and snatches of things when we're very young -- the colors of the walls, fragments of voices, the beats to certain songs but not quite the words, the feel of a classmate’s small hand on our equally small shoulders, someone’s mother’s floral dress, the taste of milk from a thermos, the scent of the teacher’s legs as she walked around.

I remember letting my crayon shavings fall to the floor and stick there, to the chagrin of the janitors, who would have to go down on their hands and knees to scrape them off the surface of the floor tiles. I also remember a fat, loud Santa Claus who gave us all brown paper bags with large red apples inside, and the feel of a dry clump of soil in my hand as we planted forget-me-nots under the windows of our classrooms. I remember the headbands I wore, which always matched my dress. I remember strawberry-scented shampoo and white lace socks. I remember Winnie-the-Pooh, Raggedy Ann and Andy, and Holly Hobbie.

I remember afternoons in Kiddie Garden, when our teacher and her helpers would lay down colorful mats on the floor, make us get our pillows from our lockers and lie down on the mats to take our siesta. The pillows in Kiddie Garden were never the usual pillows. They were always in some shape or other -- a large candy, short and very fat pencil, a pink cat, a blue car, a large yellow flower, a green dog with plastic eyes that rolled around. I had a pillow in the shape of a kangaroo. My kangaroo pillow was made of red felt, and its ears and pouch were made of red and white checked fabric. It was big and fluffy and smelled of crayons.

I loved that red kangaroo pillow. I was the only one in my kindergarten class that had a kangaroo to hug every afternoon at siesta. My mother designed this pillow and had it made by the family seamstress. She was twenty-six. I was four.

Now she is fifty-six, I am thirty-five, and my son Chandler is ten. I am not the kind of mother, though, that would have my son’s siesta pillows custom-made. The kind of mother I am is generally forgetful, disorganized, un-coordinated, highly strung, paranoid, melodramatic, histrionic, a little frazzled, and just a wee bit neurotic. But when I am with Chandler, somehow he compensates for my mercurial ways, and we get along perfectly fine. No fancy pillows, but there are peanut butter sandwiches, stories, movies, long telephone conversations about anything under the sun, being together in the rain with rubber boots and a very large umbrella, or just waiting to see how far up into the sky a balloon would go.

It’s Chandler’s birthday today. And as he enters the two-digit age, I wish only that he grows up to be an adult who would have happy memories of his own childhood, and remember the sounds and the colors and the aromas of book pages and chocolate and freshly-fallen rain and --

Well, I will stop now. It’s Chandler’s turn.

Older posts for Chandler’s birthday: [1, 2, 3]
Image credits: [1, 2, 3]

Elsewhere

2010-05-28T00:05:00.002+08:00

For the past seven years I lived in a wonderful little place in Makati, a tiny space that housed my books, my files, my thoughts, my solitude, my memories. I made that small space my own little world where I could be happy. What made it more endearing to me was that I was its first tenant, and it was my very first apartment.

I called that place the College of Chaos.

It was literally chaotic and almost a college because of the amount of time I spent studying and writing there. Books and files were all over the floor, the shelves, the tables and chairs, and the countertops, and for a time, books and files and manuscripts stayed on half of my bed, and I slept curled up beside them, waking up often, and then falling back to sleep with an open book on top of my chest. There I re-discovered my first love -- Physics -- and went giddy over Chaos Theory and the concept of superstrings. There I grappled with my sensibilities just to be able to put on paper what my professors felt was best for me, and also what was bad for me. There I began this blog in December 2005. There I drowned in Shakespeare, reveled in Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and fell in love with Margaret Atwood over and over again. There my Bible was the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

That was the space in which I discovered the merits of doing housework while listening to Sex and the City, where Carlos Santana’s “Winning” has become my favorite feel-good song, where I have begun collecting fountain pens and vintage cat’s eyes eyeglass frames. That was where I lived when I taught at the PNPA and wrote for the PNP-SAF. That was where I moderated the Philippine Macintosh Users Group.That was where I learned how to buy my own bedsheets and hang up my own towels and sort my own trash. That was where I found out that my annulment has been finalized. That was where I wrote my Palanca-winning story. That was where I fell into depression and then got hauled back up into the land of the living. That was where I found love and lost love three times in a row.

That space was the microcosm in which my heart beat wetly against the desires and longings that marked my solitude. Through everything that happened in my life for the past seven years, there has always been the College of Chaos, and little me, sometimes resolute, sometimes bewildered, but always, always finding comfort in the four walls that enveloped me.

Sadly, I had to give up that space and the life that went with it. I have said my goodbyes to the College of Chaos, amid tears and a quiet ten minutes of sitting on the now-empty floors one night, moonlight streaming through the now-open windows, much like the very first night of my life in it. The College of Chaos is no more. And now, I am elsewhere, living differently, around different furniture placed at unfamiliar points in a space that I have yet to grow accustomed to.

It takes time, this business of getting to know a new apartment and making it your friend. But so far, my new apartment has been kind to me, and I do my best to be kind to it in return. I sweep the floors regularly and clean the bathroom everyday, and make it a point to make things look pretty. At night, it lets me sleep soundly, without nightmares, and always wakes me up at the right time every morning, and as a gesture of thanks, I always make up my bed and keep my dresser neat and orderly. I always greet my apartment when I come home at the end of the day, and I have promised it new lamps and curtains. Little by little, my new home is taking on a new singularity. And as each day goes by, it will blend more and more with the new kind of solitude I have chosen.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

Six months and one day

2010-05-21T09:12:00.004+08:00

to the day since my last blog entry. Six months and one day of doubts, fear, nerves, hopelessness, deception, violence, risk, hurt, fury, passion, resentment, vacillation, and raw love.

It was crazy. It was a tempest. It almost destroyed me, but it didn’t. Thanks to friends and family and other unlikely people who kept me hanging by a thread, and miraculously, by that same thread, pulled me back to where I could feel safe again.

And now I can write anew. Maybe someday I will write about what happened; maybe I won’t. But what I know for sure is that I will write, write about other things and other lives and other days, and in the words that form on the page, from memories and darkness and airy nothing, I will find my direction once more.

[Image credit]

Lost

2009-11-20T00:01:00.002+08:00

Far Tibet calls you with a voice of ether and you turn your head to listen. In that eternal second you become a myth. With your eyes of saffron and your breath of incense you degrade art and turn it into religion, and I from woman into human.

[Similar posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]
[Image credit]

For my mother, as she turns fifty-five

2009-11-15T00:01:00.007+08:00

She is clean rooms and fresh laundry and open windows and beautiful gardens and warm, healthy food, and afternoon naps and anti-wrinkle creams and reading glasses and Clinique Happy and blue sign pens and yellow “smileys” and checks that never bounce and terracotta tiles and solid walls and etched light fixtures and well-maintained roofs and a home that always welcomes me no matter where I have been.

Feliz cumpleaño, Mamita. Te quiero mucho.

[A related post]
[Image credit]

Time capsule

2009-11-13T00:01:00.004+08:00

My family recently decided to move the remains of our faithful departed from one of our old family plots to a new location. The old family plot in Naga City is over thirty years old, and the cemetery it is in had been a parochial cemetery for about sixty years. This old Naga plot is different from the Moll mausoleum (see the old photo below) in the town of Tigaon, which was built almost eighty years ago by our ancestors.

My father’s father -- Heriberto Moll -- and my younger brother who died as a baby in 1978 were the ones buried in the old Naga plot until recently. They were not buried in the Moll mausoleum in Tigaon because, at the time, Tigaon was more than an hour’s drive away from Naga, and the roads were very bad. Bita -- my father’s mother -- was living in Naga then and wanted her husband to be near her. My parents were also living in Naga at the time, and decided to have my baby brother buried in the same Naga plot, beside my grandfather.

Perhaps they were uncomfortable to bury the little baby in a mausoleum, which, to a grieving young mother, must have seemed like an edifice honoring Death itself. There it stood, stoic and cold and brooding across the decades, unquestioningly admitting into its dark innards whoever Moll was most recently departed. And although there were a few Moll niños buried in the mausoleum in Tigaon, they died way before the seventies, so somehow they did not seem like babies to my mother.

And so the Naga plot has been there for over three decades, and every year for one night, the sons and daughters and grandchildren of Heriberto Moll -- me included -- would gather round the marbled space and talk about everyday things. When midnight would strike, we would all pack up, drive to our own homes, and go to bed, because on the next day there would be school and work and errands and housework and gardening and friends and life. The buried would stay buried. And for the rest of the year the family plot would be overgrown with weeds, flooded with mud and frequented by scavengers.

These cemeteries where our plots had been were built with no particular plan in mind, so over time people would bury their dead in whatever much space they could find: they would place graves on top of existing graves until there were five or eight stories of graves over one plot, and they would even place graves in the middle of lanes and passageways, so people had to step over them each time. As old cemeteries go, they looked medieval, they felt medieval. The only thing that would date them as modern is the changing fashion -- and music -- of the people who would visit these cemeteries once a year.

And so the family purchased a plot in a newer, cleaner, more modern cemetery in Naga, one that was privately owned and was created for the business of housing the dead. The plots were larger, the ground layout was more orderly, and there would be ample parking space. Everybody nodded, yes, it was a good decision. Yes, we have to change with needs of the times. Yes, we will move on now.

But then there was the business of the exhumation. The two graves in the old Naga plot were opened and the decaying coffins torn apart and the remains gathered. The gravedigger first found two tiny white socks, and then he found a tiny knitted cap, the kind that all mothers make their babies wear. He could not find any unbroken bones. Because the baby was too young when he died -- only a few months old -- the bones were still too fragile that they either broke or disintegrated. He carefully opened up the cap and showed the pieces of baby skull inside, broken into small pieces, but still perfectly in place inside the little knitted cap. He scraped up the rest of the soil he found inside the cement grave and put them all in the new container. He did not even want to wash the remains anymore, fearing that he would lose more tiny bones. Had he lived, my brother would have been over thirty now.

At the burial of the remains in the new family plot, Bita was in front, and she cried and had to sit down. My mother did not cry, and stayed standing at the back. But they were both in the same place. They were back in the old family plot, looking down at the freshly dug earth that would envelop their loved ones for over three decades.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

The things we hide from ourselves

2009-11-06T00:01:00.002+08:00

(An excerpt from a story soon to be published)

I sifted through the jewels that I had with me – earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and pendants, and remembered the moments when my mother handed them to me. I particularly remember her giving me an antique cross of St. Benedict as a gift when I was thirty-five. I remember because she pulled me closer to her and whispered: “All that you need to say is, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’” That was the very first time I heard her utter the name “Satan” in all the years I have known her.

Then memories stopped because the pain had begun to grow on my back and run down to my hips. My belly had also begun to hurt, and the hunger began. I felt cold sweat on my forehead and my hands felt clammy and my feet felt moist, even when they were placed on the area rug where my chair stood. My head had now started to hurt. At first it felt like a drill was going through my right eye, and then the right part of my head started to hurt. It hurt so much that it felt like it was actually shrinking, and then I could not see clearly out of my right eye.

I staggered up and noticed that my nightgown was damp with sweat and I took it off and wiped myself with a towel. My breathing had become shallow because of the deepening and spreading pain. I gripped the edge of the dresser and gritted my teeth. I managed to get to the bathroom sink and uncap a bottle of mineral water and take great gulps from it, and from where I stood, clutching my stomach, I suddenly noticed something – the corner of a dark-colored, very ornate tapestry behind the door, under an hollow alcove, hidden behind a chest of drawers topped by a rather tall potted plant. I found it odd.

I put the plant on the floor and moved the chest aside. It was quite hard to do because of the pain in my back, hips, and stomach, but slowly, the tapestry emerged. The tapestry was so rich with color and marvelous patterns, and yet it was hidden from view in such a way that people would miss it, even with the alcove light on. Well, my husband and I were the only ones using the bathroom, so why would I cover that tapestry? It was too beautiful to hide. And then something dawned on me.

[Image credit]

Never

2009-10-30T00:01:00.010+08:00

Try looking up straight into the sun. Then close your eyes. Do you not see white owls swimming in the dark red of your cloistered vision? That is what you are to me: a floating promise of a forbidden sight.

[Similar posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
[Image credit]

And the wedding entourage wore Chuck Taylors

2009-10-25T23:59:00.010+08:00

And the guests wore black. And the grandmother of the groom wore a dress embroidered with black flowers. And the father of the bride wore jeans and a blazer. And the flower girls had lollipops. And the wedding cake was shaped like a black electric guitar standing beside a silver microphone.

And the principal sponsors danced in a circle. And the band played progressive rock. And the groom played the base guitar. And the bride sang rock songs. And the priest who presided over the ceremonies was the very same one who wedded the groom’s parents 35 years ago. And the bride and groom have been together for 12 years. And everyone was happy.

And it’s called The Wedstock: the wedding of Ivy and my brother Kid.

And this is their logo, their crest, their shield:

Congratulations on a wedding like no other, and on a love like no other.

[Some photos here.]

Stormy weathers

2009-10-23T00:01:00.003+08:00

A couple of weekends ago I got stuck inside my own apartment building because Typhoon Ondoy, which ravaged Metro Manila and other provinces in the mainland, brought unexpected floods that horrified people as the water level rose fast in areas that had never been flooded before. By noon of that Saturday it was flooded everywhere. Evangelista, where I live, and which had not been flooded in the five years that I lived there, was knee-deep in dirty floodwater, and news reports say that Edsa was a twenty-kilometer river at the height of the rainfall last Saturday. It was the worst flooding in Metro Manila in over forty years.

Luckily, I lived on the third floor of an apartment building, and although electricity, internet connection, and mobile phone service were intermittent, I was safe and comfortable. I noticed a leak in the ceiling that was starting to create a puddle on top of my wooden desk so I placed a plastic dipper under it to catch the drops. From time to time I would look out the window to see the floodwater on A. Bonifacio and Evangelista Street rising consistently, and more and more vehicles getting stuck. I could not walk out in that deluge, not even to buy food or check on my car parked downstairs, so I just muttered, “C’est la vie,” and snuggled into bed with Proust.

I used to like summer so much. Growing up in a farm, summers have always been the highest point of my year. School would be out, I didn’t have to wake up at 6 o’clock in the morning, and neither did I have t go to sleep early, and I could read books that were not required for school. I’d stay up in a mango tree all afternoon, reading, with cushions stolen from the sala for my back and tushy. The maid would bring me merienda up at the branches. I’d only go inside the house once the mosquitoes started coming out.

Even when I was a freelancer, I’d spend summer like I was partly on vacation. I’d go out and have meetings only in the early mornings or in the late afternoons or evenings, and work at home just in the morning, and stay in bed reading all afternoon. There’s something about summer that makes me feel lackadaisical, carefree, like I’m a child again. And once, there was this magical summer when I joined the Hell Week of the Urban Counter-Revolutionary Warfare Course of the PNP Special Action Force. It was for work, but it didn’t feel like work. It felt like I was just hopping around the dust and the grass in combat boots smelling the gunpowder, with sweat streaming down my back and hot wind blowing through my hair – a child in a vast playground. And whenever summer ends, each June, I always feel like it's the end of an era.

I suppose when one gets older things do change. Now I find summer quite tiresome. It melts the makeup off my face, it makes my sun block feel sticky on my arms, it makes my glasses slide down my nose, it makes me sweat through my pantyhose, and it makes cars feel like ovens inside after you park them, even in the shade. The things that I have always liked about summer – the heat, the dust, the fact that school was out – seem annoying now.

But when it’s cold and raining, somehow I feel more cheery. I can run errands without (literally) breaking a sweat, there are less people on the sidewalk, and there’s no smog and no dust. The air smells fresher, too, and the gray atmosphere is easier on the eyes than the bright, vivid light of hot days. Though rainy days bring their own set of health hazards, these are nil with sensible rain gear. Plus, of course, no one should swim out in six-feet-deep floods.

Why have I changed this way? Perhaps, after all these years of summery living I’m due for a wash-down. Perhaps, too, summer fashion has gone and left me for younger skins and more active bodies. Perhaps the discomforts of summer has always really been there, but I was too young to notice, and now I am old enough to see them, and can now appreciate the cool, the wet, the gray, and the subdued. These days I look up at the sky, see dark clouds, and start feeling comfortable. Perhaps it really does come with age. Now approaching my mid-thirties with forty-inch hips, the rain has grown on me. Rain is now my new sun.

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

To bed, to bed

2009-10-16T00:01:00.004+08:00

The thought of tackling Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past has always been intimidating. Just seeing the entire work in six volumes lined up in my bookshelf, in its own matching case, is enough to make me think of it as the reading project of a lifetime. But once I picked up the first volume, “Swann’s Way,” I immediately took to it, and from then onwards, Proust has become my bosom buddy.

That’s because he opened the entire work with memories of falling asleep.

Falling asleep is my favorite activity of the day. Not the sleeping itself, which I do not have much memories of, but the delicious moment of surrendering conscious thought into something dreamy and strange. Not, too, just the usual falling asleep after a long, hard day, but the luxurious falling asleep of one who has the privilege of time, like a princess who can linger in her pillows and let her mind swim to and fro in a thick, dark, warm liquid, not having to care about the state of her kingdom, because she is a princess and not a king.

Of course, Proust had it differently. He was sickly and delicate, and he probably spent long stretches of time in bed out of necessity rather than luxury, but the experience of falling asleep, that moment where the mind is suspended and sort of just goes about slowly in gloopy semi-darkness, is divine, regardless of whether one is a princess, a sickly aristocrat, or me.

I would often spend hours in the office, doing things that I have to do, all in anticipation of going home, getting into bed, and falling asleep. I would spend hours on a short story or a paper, telling myself that my reward for finishing the work would be to let myself fall asleep. Over a year ago, when I was suffering from a mood disorder that had depression-like symptoms, I would let myself fall asleep over and over again, all day. I would wake up after an hour just to make myself fall asleep again. Now that I have largely recovered from that condition, though, and have a nine-to-five job, I don’t sleep so much anymore, but I always look forward to the moment of falling asleep everyday at the end of the day.

What do I get out of it? It could be a million things. Aside from feeling good at knowing that I do have the luxury of time to linger in this moment of falling asleep, it also helps me to remember things, important things that I have already forgotten for a long time. It gives me images and aromas that eventually end up as details in some of my stories. But perhaps, most importantly, it teaches me the importance of surrendering to things that are beyond my control -- the night, the biological need to shut down for the day – and realize that there are other things I can wield my power over. Perhaps this is why Proust was still able to write his six-volume novel despite his physical weaknesses. I'm no Proust, but I can also fight battles of my own choosing.

A case of very fine steering

2009-10-13T00:01:00.005+08:00

My Da taught me how to drive when I was sixteen and we were in California. When I went back to the Philippines, I still lacked practice, and thus practiced on the car of whatever boyfriend I had, at night, after dates, on the private roads of subdivisions whose residents have long gone to bed. I could make mistakes and not kill anybody, I didn’t have to stay on my own lane, and I didn’t have to obey any traffic rules. I thought I did pretty good.

But when Da came home, I still wasn’t a good enough driver. It was only after a while that I realized that it’s not the practice on deserted roads with the freedom and ignorance of a four-year-old that makes a driver. It’s the daily nitty-gritty of driving through many different roads amid constricting situations and still arrive unscathed that makes a driver.

They say we get the habits of our teachers. I never got the driving habits of my boyfriends who taught me how to drive, in their own teenaged way, but I did get some of my Dad’s habits. Perhaps he was really the only one who taught me how to drive.

Once, years ago, as a new driver with a student’s permit, I was plowing through traffic and barely missed another car that was backing up. Da, on the passenger side, just said, “Oops,” and didn’t say anything for five minutes. I knew he was disappointed, and I felt bad. And then he said, “No matter how much you know the road you’re on, no matter how perfect your driver’s instincts have become, you still need to be unfamiliar with that road in certain ways, because sometimes that’s the only way you can keep a sense of defense when driving.”

I nodded, but couldn’t say a word. And then after a while, he added, “You can only steer finely when you can really see what’s there and what isn’t there.”

Little did he know that on that day, he has given me a mantra for going through the relationships of the rest of my life. People are roads that I must travel.

Thank you, Da. Happy birthday. And Happy October 13.

[Previous posts about Da: 1, 2]

[Image credits: 1, 2]

Bloody

2009-10-09T00:02:00.002+08:00

(An excerpt from a story in progress)

Evelyn coughed once, feeling a thick, warm liquid gather in her throat, and then realized that her legs were pinned under the dashboard with a searing pain that was traveling up her back, and she had the disconnected thought that she had somehow prophesied this: tired, brittle bones snapping.

The steering wheel, dented and dislocated by the impact, was digging into her chest. Blood was trickling from her nose and she breathed through her mouth, feeling more and more dust granules catching on her tongue. She could not feel her left cheek anymore. She felt dizzy, and in her swimming, swirling vision, saw that the red car was a Honda, and over its license plates was a black bumper sticker with “GUILTY!” spelled out in bold letters. Like a faraway phonograph from another time zone, the red car’s radio was still running, though stuck, playing what sounded like “No breathing... No breathing...” over and over and over again, and Evelyn, in the heady, muffled state of quasi-rational thought, wondered if she was really meant to die like this, violently, mannishly, entwined in twisted metal and covered with broken glass, with some unknown dead character of an indeterminate origin that flew towards her in an overturned and bashed-in Chariot of Fire, making her look like a blatant coagulation of blood like the incubus that would never be a part of her, telling her that she was guilty, and rubbing in the fact that she was suffocating painfully, blocked by an unforgiving fate at the fork of a junction: some obscure, has-been, barren writer who didn’t even think of gassing up before taking a drive to nowhere.

[Image credit]

Little girl

2009-10-08T00:01:00.003+08:00

She was born tiny and out of wedlock, but she is as pure as can be, and larger than life in her solitude and her books. She knows more Tagalog songs than I do, and can speak Bicol like she has lived for a hundred years.

But she still has her dollhouses and her bead bracelets that have her name spelled out in glittery curlicue letters, and for all her gravity, she is just seven years old. This is her magic.

Happy birthday to my niece, The Shrimpmouse!

[Image credit]

Scarlet chair

2009-10-02T00:01:00.003+08:00

A scarlet chair stands alone on a darkened porch, casting vague shadows on the floorboards like a forgotten thought. The half-light embraces me as I look at the crisscrossing lines, in the hope that in their junctions something would come alive, not like me, who stare at furniture with dust in my eyes.

[Similar posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

[Image credit]

Horror movies

2009-09-25T00:01:00.005+08:00

The very first horror movie that I saw in my entire life was “The Thing.” I was probably seven or eight years old at that time. I found the Betamax tape for it from a stack near the TV one evening, amid tapes of Disney and Looney Tunes and Voltes V and NBA games, and watched it when everyone else was out for the evening. The maid left the room after the first scary scene, so I ended up watching the rest of the movie alone.

The movie never scared me. For one, I particularly remember not seeing at all the actual Thing that horrified and killed many of the characters in the movie. Also, the movie was set in some snow-bound encampment where it always seemed to be night, so the scenes were a little difficult to see. I suppose I was either too young to understand that it was something that was supposed to scare me, or too jaded at such a young age to believe that any of it was real.

I grew up in a small farming barrio in Camarines Sur, a community that has been around for hundreds of years. Naturally, old wives’ tales and rumors of all kinds of aswang were everyday things. Our maids would often tell my brother, sister and me ghost stories before putting us to bed. My sister would be scared, but I would fall asleep so easily and stay asleep so soundly as if I had just read a feel-good bedtime story.

It was obvious that even early on in my life, horror movies and horror stories would not hold the usual spell over me.

What do I get out of horror movies if not the scare that other people watch them for? Surprisingly, comfort. Although come to think of it, this is not really so surprising. Because aren’t horror movies, on some level, meant to comfort us with the knowledge that they are just movies and those things will never really happen to us? I have never believed in ghosts or spirits or aswangs or mananaggals or vampires, not even when they were ordinary fare when I was growing up. Maybe it was this early inundation with folklore that gave me a more objective eye when confronted by the horrific tale. Maybe it’s because I have never seen or heard or felt anything that can be remotely identified as paranormal, even when I’m seated right beside someone experiencing that exact thing at the very same moment, gripping my arm with icy hands while I brush off her hoarse squawks and continue chewing my chocolate wafer and reading my Nancy Drew. Maybe it’s because during my childhood every dark shadow that seemed to hover in the corner of the room always turned out to be either a chair heaped with jackets or a dress on a hanger waiting to be worn for a party the next evening.

Maybe it’s because I have always believed that every single dark and looming thing I don’t comprehend at first can always be broken down into its basic commonplace, non-horrific components -- such as a chair, or a heap of jackets, or a dress on a hanger, or a guilty conscience, or a nagging memory, or a sudden remembrance, or a déjà vu moment, or a big secret, or a love in progress, or a dream about to be born. And there it is, something that we should never, ever be scared of.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

Go, story

2009-09-18T00:01:00.004+08:00

True love is like ghosts. You can feel it coming, and then when it finally goes, you are left there with a slightly trembling heart. But it never really goes. You remember the moment for as long as you live because you imbued it with the power to save you, but it never does. It leaves you just on the brink of salvation, exhausted, dispirited, unable to pull yourself over to the other side.

It rained, I remember, the night she came.

Thus begins a story that I have started writing years ago and haven't yet finalized now, even after over twenty drafts. But after a little more time, it appears to have finalized itself without any need for me. It has come to the point where the story has taken a life of its own and has shaken itself free of me. Now I can only stand by and watch the story shape itself into a world where I can see myself walking silently among the characters, the grass, the words, the fears, the memories -- a different me walking, a different me looking out of the page to look at myself reading that very same page.

Always, at this point, I know I can let go of the story and let it fly to the form of publication that it is destined to join.

And then I go back to the more mundane things that seem to occupy my life in between stories: clean up my apartment, call a few friends, sleep, get some work done for the presentation due on Tuesday, pay my bills, order a new checkbook, listen to the The Royal Tenenbaums for the millionth time. It feels a little empty, but only for a moment. Because there is always yet another draft to finish, another story to write, another plot to thicken, another idea to dwell on. And then when the whole strange, inexplicable, fascinating, magical cycle starts over again, it will feel like a ghost has touched me once more, just a moment before the rains come.

[Image credit]

Talk

2009-09-11T00:01:00.001+08:00

You smile at me from across the table and around us people don’t see. Fathers sip their coffee, mothers take a forkful of lasagna. Yet across that table we weave a tapestry of loving glances which, as the night wore on, took the liberty to adjust itself into colors so voluptuous they home into my stomach, curbing my need for food.

[Image credit]

Year Two with Jim

2009-09-07T00:01:00.004+08:00

In your travels over hills and mountains I hope you won’t ignore those ponds tucked deep in forests like words held under your tongue. And when you get there I hope you will dive in, for there in the cool, dark waters you might find me, almost drowning in a verb that has melted into oblivion.

Happy second anniversary, my love.

[Some related posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

[Image credit]

Onion skin love

2009-09-04T00:01:00.013+08:00

At times I wonder if I chose to be a writer because I am enamored with words, or because I am enamored with paper. For one, as a writer I have always felt the need to hold paper in my hands. Not for me, those things like word processing or eBooks or working in The Cloud; give me paper and any writing instrument, and I’m all set. I have used computers – the old Macintosh Powerbook 165c from my Dad, my sister’s Intel desktop she had through college, my own iBook G3, a 12-inch PowerBook G4, my sister’s next Intel desktop she had as a fresh graduate, and my current 15-inch MacBook Pro – only for preparing drafts for publication, and for games and email and browsing the web. For writing needs, I always went to back to good old paper manufactured from good old trees.

And my favorite paper is onion skin. Ever since I was little, I have always held a fascination for the delicate, cream-colored paper that rustled noisily each time I held it in my hands. I love that it is so thin but has its own integrity that it can’t easily be torn. I love that its watermark looks more “watery” that regular paper watermarks. I love that you can see through it to the writing on the next page, like a promise of something more to come. I love that the delicate thinness of its structure gives its creamy surface a gently mottled look, like the skin of a lady that has elegantly and beautifully graced. I love that it is not white. I love that it does not give me paper cuts. I love that when it is held in a thick sheaf the sheaf acquires an unforeseen heft, as if each extra-thin onion skin sheet held secret powers of weight that were drawn out only by the presence of hundreds of other onion skin papers, a discreet and very stylish army of pressed and distressed paper pulp that can broadcast volumes worth of words to the whole world.

I would write on these onion skin sheets and type on them using at least twenty sheets a day on the average. They made up the pages of my journal for several years. I would carry around sheets of onion skin paper in my bag and write entries for my journal during the day while at school or in the library or at work. I would roll them into my typewriter and type my journal entries very early in the morning, before my day began. My journals for the period between 1998 and 2006 are composed of ten volumes of two inch-thick books filled entirely with onion skin paper, mostly in cream, sometimes in pink and green and blue. I would send friends and relatives long letters typewritten on onion skin paper, and I kept carbon copies to keep in my diaries. I loved how I could mail up to fifteen onion skin pages in a letter envelope and still be charged only the standard postage. And that made me send even more letters to more friends and relatives more often.

For a while I even tried to feed onionskin paper into inkjet printers and laser printers in the hope that I can send a polished word-processed draft to an editor in onion skin. The bright idea didn’t work; the printers either jammed or won’t take in the sheet. (In retrospect, I’m glad it didn’t work, for the industry standard is really at least mid-weight regular white letter-sized paper. I’d have been the laughing stock of editors all over Metro Manila.) But for personal use, onion skin paper was my staple. There's always an envelope of them in my bags, in my drawers, on my desks. I’d bind them into notebooks, I’d cut them into smaller pieces for writing down notes to myself and other people, and I’d never be without a constant supply of at least two reams. Sometimes I would even dream of onion skin paper butterflies while I slept.

I first discovered onionskin paper one afternoon when I was quite young. I was rummaging for a pen in my father’s desk, and I came upon a sheaf of very thin paper. I asked my father about it when he came home that night, and he told me that it was called onion skin paper because it was as thin as the skin of an onion. And then he showed me on the typewriter how onion skin paper is used to make carbon copies. I decided at that moment that onionskin paper was one of the most beautiful things in the world, and that I would never be without it.

Now I'm still an onion skin user and I'm even more fascinated by it than I was on the first day. For after a while, I realized how ironic it was that it is called onion skin – a euphimism for being highly sensitive and easily hurt, in humans – when onion skin paper is a rather tough weave, tougher than most other papers because it’s made of more cotton fibers than most other papers. The onion is also one very tough bulb. Slice it and it you cry. Add it to food and the food suddenly acquires a tang. Munch on it and you will repel all kinds of people. String several of them on a piece of twine and you will repel all kinds of aswang. It’s been around for decades, witness to the movement of civilizations and their food and the evolution of the occult.

And yet when we speak of onion skin paper what comes to mind is fine, creamy, delicate paper that needs to be handled with care. The writer in me swoons at the irony. Yes, I did become a writer because I am enamored with paper – onion skin paper. But I am also enamored with connections, with history, with irony. I’m enjoying the best of these worlds. I am lucky.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

And the search begins

2009-09-02T00:01:00.004+08:00

The search for a manual typewriter for my son Chandler and my niece Cheska, that is. They saw mine when they visited me in Manila recently, and they wanted their own. And they want them badly! Chandler, for instance -- who has typed up the first sentence of a story about a swan who lost its voice on my typewriter -- has taken to calling me up everyday to ask if I have acquired a typewriter for him from any one of my 2,000 officemates. I have already begun, but since the typewriter is fast going the way of the dodo, I need a little bit more help.

Thus, I am on a mission.

I have decided not to purchase brand new typewriters for them. The new ones are made of plastic and they skitter across the table when being typed on, and they are so flimsy that I am certain they won't even last. I prefer the older manual typewriters because they are sturdy and more reliable. I can't have Chandler feeling bad once a flimsy plastic typewriter breaks down. (And I can't have Chandler asking me once again to look for a typewriter from all of my 2,000 officemates.)

So, help!

And just to pique your interest, here are vintage typewriter ads for the Royal Portable, which came in different color choices.

Do drop me a comment if you know leads on any typewriters within Metro Manila that still work, no matter how dirty. Since my comments page is moderated, you can be sure your contact details will stay private. Many, many thanks!

[Image credit]

What I like

2009-08-28T00:01:00.014+08:00

Weekends on the beach.
Cold, rainy nights.
Taking long siestas.
Watching old movies.
A room in which I can make time stop.
Updike, Atwood, Garcia-Marquez.
Reading Proust all day.
Reading Agatha Christie all day.
Finishing writing a short story.
Finishing writing for a project.

Chandler.
My mother's garden.
Remembering the boys.
Being with other writers.
Apple computers.
Fresh laundry.
The letterpress.

Crossword puzzles.
Peanut butter sandwiches.
Bopis and steamed rice.
Chocolates.

5 x 8 index cards.
Moleskines and fountain pens.
Onion skin paper.
Silver-colored paper clips.
Manual typewriters.
Ballads from the forties and fifties.
Skirts, pantyhose, and four-inch high heels.
Eyeshadow.
Walking in stormy weathers wearing rain boots.
Summer afternoons.

Old sepia photographs.
Old, dusty villages.
Abandoned houses.
Intramuros and Quiapo.
Living in Metro Manila
Lying on the grass in UP Diliman.
Physics.
Eyeglasses.
Ghost stories and old wives' tales.
An old, comfortable chair.
Warm sweaters.
Crayola crayons.

The quiet, empty office on weekends.
Constancy.
Predictability.
A man strong enough to let me be myself.
Flowers for no reason.
Diamonds for no reason.
Love for all reasons.

[A similar post]

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

Okay, so I have given in

2009-08-26T14:42:00.000+08:00

To this:

In time, when I have gotten used to the Twitter concept, I will learn how to stop referring to myself in the third person. In the meantime, you may follow Maryanne Moll on Twitter.

And as you might already know, I am on Facebook as well, although my profile view is temporarily limited to friends only. You can also make this blog one of your favorites on Technorati.

And that's it. Scroll down -- or up -- to return to regular programming.

To that which makes me write

2009-08-21T00:01:00.007+08:00

To me you are a wisp of sulfur – ephemeral, evanescent – that takes over my soul and renders it liquid. You make me simmer and leave me to evaporate, to be pure again.

There lies your power. If I fall with you a thousand times into magma, I rise a thousand times glacial water.

[Image credit]

Growing

2009-08-19T00:07:00.011+08:00

My blog has had the same repeating background pattern for over a year now, and I just thought I'd give it a new look. I wanted to go for dark vintage this time, for contrast.

Previously, it was this:

And this is the original repeating pattern, which I started out with in December 2005:

And because I am now posting more often, sometimes having one more post for the week on top of my regular Friday post, I have made the home page longer. The home page now shows the fifteen most recent posts, instead of the usual ten. The posts from 2009 onwards shall also have footnotes at the end that lead to similar and related posts and outside links. For some reason I prefer doing this over using tags. I also prefer the older template's linear archive format over the newer drop-down archives. I think the latter has way too many moving arrows.

Also, I have made the sidebar a little bit more relevant, and -- this must be my proudest blogging moment -- placed custom headers that I created from zero all by my little old self!

This is the old sidebar:

Here's the new one:

It took me hours how to figure everything out, since I have no formal training in either Photoshop or savings files for the web or working via html, and I had to deal with the sizing via trial and error, plus the choice of font was crucial, but it turned out okay. Hurray for me!

Note that I still pretty much have the 2005 format of this brown template, save for the repeating background and the sidebar layout and typography. The newer templates -- which will allow me to have the "Follow" link and the now-standard "Older Posts" and "Newer Posts" links, among other things -- still look a little to busy for me, so I'm sticking with this. Blogger bloggers who want to follow my blog can do so from their own dashboard. (Thanks to my four followers, so far.)

Just another moment in the life of a blog. Soon I might finally get to redo my entire template, not only to provide an easier way for my readers to browse through my archives but also to reflect the woman I have grown into: older, simpler, quieter, more robust, more refined, and hopefully, a better writer.

[A related post]

Harvest

2009-08-16T00:10:00.009+08:00

After rains and summers and full moons and Christmases and tears and laughter and family and friends and work and words and books and worlds, my boughs hang heavy with bounty.

Today in my orchards there falls a wonderful deluge of love. Happy birthday to me!

[Similar posts: 1, 2, 3]

Fridays!

2009-08-14T02:30:00.005+08:00

Thank God it's Friday is a movie from 1978 that celebrates the disco scene. As can be expected of anything disco, it's glittery, colorful, crazy, and retro.

The movie also featured a very young Jeff Goldblum, an equally young Debra Winger, a vivacious Donna Summer, and her song "Last Dance," which won the Best Song award in the 1979 Academy Awards.

And in a totally abrupt and profoundly off-tangent switch of topic, let me say that because of the new auto-publish feature of Blogger, I can now have a new blog post at least every Friday, regardless of whether I or my MacBook Pro are online at that very moment, regardless of whether I or my MacBook Pro are asleep or reading or driving through traffic or indulging ourselves on a peanut butter sandwich eating binge, or up late watching old movies like, well, Thank God It's Friday.

So, thank god it's Friday! No, we are not going to disco, but we are going to celebrate the fact that this blog has been resuscitated, and that I am coughing up the water from out of my lungs after a rather strange drowning and I can stand up again, a little bit wobbly in the knees, but able to walk step by step by slow, little step. Hopefully, you will like it. Hopefully, you will think it's worth your time. Hopefully, I can bring something nice to your Fridays. And hopefully, this will continue for a long time to come, so that I can learn to swim in the ocean again without ever drowning.

A very belated blog post about a book launch

2009-08-14T01:28:00.011+08:00

(Thankfully, I know my friends will understand.)

So I realized just an hour ago that I have never really blogged about my first-ever book launch. I can think up a few excuses – I have been very busy with other things, I felt insecure amid all the other good writers with me in that book launch, I have forgotten that I have a blog, I was offline for the longest time, I was sick, my Mac was out of space to even open a browser window, government work did not allow for blogging, my internet service provider is too inefficient, I ran out of fountain pen ink, I was trying to learn how to walk in high heels, I got a crew cut, I cracked a fingernail, I moved to Timbuktu where there was no internet service, my dog had a quarrel with the neighbor’s parakeet and the parakeet flew into my room through an open window and ate my homework …

Now that the (fake) excuses are over with, let me tell you that six months ago, in February of this year, Speculative Fiction Volume IV was launched at the Fully Booked flagship store in Bonifacio High Street. SpecFic4, as we lovingly call it, is the fourth volume of an annual anthology consistently being published by the husband-and-wife team of Dean and Nikki Alfar, both award-winning writers, and also top coordinators for the LitCritters, a reading group that meets every alternate Saturdays. (The LitCritters also has a Dumaguete chapter, headed by award-winning writer Ian Rosales Casocot.)

The anthology focuses on short stories under the speculative fiction genre, which is a loose – and, as Dean admitted, temporary – category that takes under its silvery wing science fiction stories, horror, fantasy, futuristic fiction, and other smaller sub-genre that cannot be technically classified under conventional realist fiction.

But the LitCritters never did let categories cramp their style. They just read and read and wrote and wrote, and they shared their thoughts during regular LitCritters get-togethers, to where everyone who has signed up in the Google group and read the story scheduled to be discussed for the week is welcome. The Speculative Fiction anthology is the fruit of these countless reading discussion get-togethers, where we get to meet writers we have read but have not met, read writers we have met but have not read, meet writers who are just starting out and writers who are well along their way, writers who are also editors and publishers, writers who love to read and write about dragons, writers who love Aimee Bender, and everyone else who the LitCritters just seem to attract into these afternoon get-togethers, to talk about stories of all kinds. It's no University of the Philippines, Diliman, but that, perhaps, is where the efficiency of the LitCritters gets its strength from. It's fun, it's funny, it's happy, it's uplifting, it's meaningful, it's natural. Isn't that how reading should be?

The LitCritters is a small group of really awesome people. My first experience at joining them was one particularly lonely Saturday afternoon in 2006 – which was really no different from all the other lonely afternoons I kept having that year – and at once I knew that this group can and will help me. With what particularly, I did not know yet. I was not even sure yet if I would still write, not sure if I still could, but I knew that there was still something in me that this group can (re-)ignite.

Right in the middle of a discussion about a story –- I think it was the one where the main character, an old potter, died and his body was cremated and his ashes were mixed into clay that were in turn made into pots and bought by people who lived in other countries and brought the pots with them to their homes, and placed them on porches, on windowsills, and the main character, Don Ysidro, was alive in those pots, exhilarated by all the sights and sounds of the civilization passing before him.

When I was asked to comment on the story, part of what I said was, “I am very much amused by this part that says that when an enemy of Don Ysidro asked Don Ysidro’s wife for the dying man’s red boots, the wife bent down to listen to what Don Ysidro would say, and Don Ysidro, who could speak with a very soft voice and only with great effort, said no, because the visitor was a thieving rascal, and the wife straightened up and said that Don Ysidro said the visitor could take the boots.” And then I paused, because I had a sudden flash of insight. “I’m amused because that is exactly how married people are.”

Of course everybody laughed at that. And that made me realize that maybe all was not lost. And when I laughed with them a split-second later, I knew I’d be okay.

And I got up from my depression -- aided by Dr. Zita Soriano and Zoloft -- dusted myself off, and went to work. The result was not exactly stellar, but good enough for a recovering writer. I was able to rework some older pieces in which I used to be stuck, and I was able to write a few new pieces as well. For SpecFic4, I gave my short story Breathing Space, which Nikki said has some elements of horror.

Here are all the stories in this volume:

A League of Champions by Ronald Cruz
A Retrospective on Diseases for Sale by Charles Tan
All We Need is Five Meals a Day by Jose Elvin Bueno
Beats by Kenneth Yu
Breaking the Spell by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
Breathing Space by Maryanne Moll
Dino's Awesome Adventure by Carljoe Javier
Dreams of the Iron Giant by Joseph Nacino
First of the Gang to Die by Paolo Jose Cruz
From Abecediarya by Adam David
Haya Makes A HUG by Erica Gonzales
Hopscotch by Anne Lagamayo
Mang Marcing and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vincent Simbulan
Parallel by Eliza Victoria
Press Release by Leo Magno
Revenge of the Tiktaks by Noel Tio
Sky Blue by Celestine Trinidad
The Dance of the Storm by Isabel Yap
The Day That Frances, The Copywriter, Became God by Monique Francisco
The Maiden's Song by Kathleen Aton-Osias
The Paranoid Style by Sharmaine Galve
The Rooftops of Manila by Crystal Gail Shangkuan Koo
The Secret Origin of Spin-Man by Andrew Drilon
The Sewing Project by Apol Lejano-Massebieau

And the launch was crowded and a little noisy, but as can be expected from Dean and Nikki and the rest of the LitCritters, always fun, friendly, and relaxed.

No stiff speeches and stuffy readings of excerpts of one’s story, just an evening of catching up on each other and meeting new friends and writers. It was my very first time to attend a launch of a book that included me -- this, a decade after the release of my very first book, in 1999, which I never launched, and the subsequent release of my second book in 2003, which I also never launched -- but maybe it's just as well, because the LitCritters are wonderful people to share a milestone with.

To Dean and Nikki and the LitCritters, you will always have a soft spot in my heart. Thank you for letting me into your gatherings. Thank you for being my allies in reading and writing. Thank you for being my friends. Thank you for making me laugh, and for making me see that what can save me has been right under my nose all along. Thank you for for those magical Saturday afternoons where talked about stories we have read, about stories we are working on, and how, in the beauty and the madness of storytelling, the trick is to keep going, keep reading, keep writing, and keep believing that in the childlike sense of wonder created by reading and writing all sorts of stories, we find our truest selves.

[Related links: 1, 2]

My typewriter

2009-08-07T13:05:00.005+08:00

I’m trying not to get intimidated by the recent discovery that I use the same typewriter as William Faulkner used to have, which is an Olympia SM-1 dating back to the late forties. It looks like this. Mine is in a sexy cranberry color, while Faulkner’s, I assume, is black. (Although with writers, one never really knows, and there are no photos of his Olympia SM-1.)

Of course he was also known to use other typewriters, such as the Remington 12 – presumably as his desktop typewriter – and the Underwood Standard Portable – presumably as his portable. I, on the other hand, have noticed that I have twice in my life ended up with Olympias.

I began with my father’s Olympia Traveller Deluxe, which he had since he was in college, and which he used to type his papers, letters, and speeches, most notably his speech when he graduated with a business degree and high honors from the Ateneo de Naga in 1976. I found a photo of it online.

When I found that typewriter, I was seven years old, and just a few days I learned to use it like a pro. At first I used it in secret, only while my parents were away, and used to hide from our maids while I typed, turning up the volume of the cartoons I used to watch on the Betamax player to drown out the clackety-clackety sound of the gray-and-white Olympia portable. I wrote stories, I believe. Long, narrative stories with no dialogue and which had mostly descriptions of places and people, because I fell in love with how a single block of text looked like, in type, flowing out from the typebars operated by my small, frantic fingers.

Eventually my parents found me out, and they just shrugged their shoulders. I ended up being my mother’s official typist. During summer vacations when school would be out for over two months I would spend the mornings reading in bed, and the afternoons in the comprada with my mother, where she would make me type data into forms and envelopes for two to three hours a day.

I don’t know where that typewriter is now. Maybe it is still in the bodega behind my childhood home, which is now inhabited by a second cousin and his family. My Dad visited me recently, and I asked him about it. He still remembers it. He smiled and said, “It has a matching case.” But what I do like best about it is that its keys are not exactly square. I found that very stylish.

In 2000, when I was pregnant with Chandler, I walked into Save on Surplus in Naga City, looking for something which I have now forgotten, and I came across several typewriters displayed on a shelf along the furthest wall of the store. The Olympia SM-1 was displayed in the middle of the middle shelf. Even from about four feet away, I knew that typewriter was mine. After I typed, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” in the spare paper already inserted in its feed, I purchased it for 3,000 pesos.

The salesman took about ten minutes looking for its case in the storage room, and handed the black, battered thing to me. And then as if I had been doing it for a hundred years, I positioned the back of the typewriter to engage with the hook in the case, slowly lowered the typewriter to align with the four metal pits for the typewriter feet, and gently pushed the typewriter down. The locks snapped into place approvingly, like a salute. When I straightened up, I saw the salesman looking over my shoulder with an incredulous expression on his face.

The Olympia has been with me ever since. With it, I wrote on my long-running file of index cards, the first draft of my first (and only) screenplay for a class under Rene O. Villanueva, my novel-in-progress (which, alas, I am still working on), the first draft of “At Merienda,” many letters (which I mailed), countless lists and notes-to-self, and an estimated three reams of letter-sized onion skin paper’s worth of diary entries. I'm no William Faulker, but I sure know how to work a good typewriter.

I am still typing. (Turns out I am not intimidated by the William Faulkner factoid.) And although my Olympia SM-1 shall probably outlive me, as it has outlived its previous owner, in my hands it shall continue to see the most care and the most typewritten pages ever.

[Other related links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

A small pause

2009-08-05T21:42:00.000+08:00

Because today I suspend my personal blog policy never to comment about politics or current affairs in order to pay my last respects to a historic lady.

Security blanket

2009-07-31T00:13:00.003+08:00

It has always been my habit to carry a book wherever I go. This is largely because I always seem to get stuck either in long lines, traffic, solitary meals, or large crowds that I tend to prefer to ignore. Even when my parents used to drag me to the Roman Catholic Sunday Mass, all throughout my life until my late twenties, I’d always carry a book with me, half-hoping I could get to read it instead of pretending to listen to the Mass.

Of course I never did get to read a novel while hearing Mass. But there were plenty enough opportunities in my life for reading books -- growing up among them as a sickly girl, for one. I was literally surrounded by books, as our bookshelves were placed along three of the four walls of the bedroom I shared with my brother and sister. I have always found comfort, escape, and wonderful little germs for thought in whatever book I could snatch from those shelves. I’d bring a book to the porch, to the living room, to the bathroom, to parties, when receiving friends at home, even when watching a movie on the Betamax, and sometimes, even when eating.

Summers during my grade school years were magical times. When school was out, I would stay up late in bed to read, and then linger in bed till way past nine o’clock in the morning, reading. Afternoons would find me up in the stout, old, fruitless mango tree in our yard, comfortably nestled in between two branches, with two throw pillows, reading a book. Our maid would bring me merienda there. When the cousins would visit, they would inhabit the other branches of that mango tree.

I also had my reading phases. Of course there was Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but I found the Hardy Boys rather tiresome. I preferred Nancy Drew because she had girlfriends and they wore dresses. Together with this phase was my Reader’s Digest phase, in which I read everything that came in every issue of the magazine. We had a collection that ran along one entire level of a bookshelf, and I would peruse their crumbling pages hungrily while slurping down three huge glasses of cold Milo. I also enjoyed reading long epic works, and anthologies of obscure but very long stories. I still remember the very first time I read the legend of Lam-Ang. (Incidentally, I also remember the very first time I read the rhyme that goes: "There was on old lady who swallowed a fly.")

Strangely enough, my childhood favorite has always been a huge illustrated book that discussed the principles of physics. I would pore through the pages, constantly referring to the Glossary as I read, and then promptly forgetting the definition of the word that I just looked up, running my hands over the drawings of pails filled with water spinning suspended on a rope and some such everyday object rendered strange and fantastic by its use to illustrate a particular law of physics. I remember suddenly looking up once from the page and uttering, “A chair is never just a chair,” and then writing it down on the page with a pencil. (Another thing about my childhood: when it came to books, my parents always let me run free with them.) And there began my lifelong giddy wonder for physics.

Agatha Christie, too, was staple reading. "The Witness for the Prosecution" left me breathless. It was Agatha Christie who said that people are often worse than we suspect them to be. Because of that, she is unforgettable to me. (I often wonder if I would be a less skeptical person today if I hadn’t encountered Agatha Christie early on in my life.)

And then came high school and the requisite Mills & Boon and Sweet Valley High. SVH was available for borrowing in the school library, while there was a rather large supply of Mills & Boon in a closet of the house we were renting at that time. But of course they were books I hardly remember now.

Thankfully, in college I started on Stephen King with the novel The Eyes of the Dragon. And from then on it was a wild ride across horror, fantasy, realist novels, comedies, plays, Ron Perelman, James Thurber, Woody Allen, back to the dark and serious, Henry James, a smattering of Shakespeare, and then to non-fiction, to self-help (ugh) to monographs about the concept of time, and then to literary theory and criticism, to Samuel Johnson to Edward Said to the horrible, horrible Derrida – who nobody likes, as Gemino H. Abad once blurted out in class – back to Shakespeare, and then to Proust, to Wally Lamb, to Betty Friedan, and on to works of writers that I actually know and talk to and exchange emails and text messages and drafts with. I myself have become a writer, with my own writer friends.

But I did not stop being a reader. If anything, I became more of a reader, I suppose. Reading certain novels more than once, journaling about them, looking up the biographies of their writers, taking down copious notes, tabbing certain passages, copying them into index cards and filing them away. It’s exhausting sometimes. But when I look back on my younger reading life, I realize I have most probably progressed along the most logical lines. What else is there for a wide reader to become other than be instrumental in producing reading matter for even more wide reading? And in the process of producing this reading matter, there is even wider and wider reading to be done. Here lies my world; in the ever-widening circularity of it I find fulfillment and comfort and saving grace.

Now, in my Makati apartment, I am still surrounded by books. The wall of books is the first thing I see upon opening entering, and I always feel that home is where all of my books are. Many happy moments were spent here, just reading. And I still never go anywhere without a book. I somehow feel safer with a book in my bag at all times.

Recently I stayed for four days in the hospital because of flu, asthma, and a rather painful attack of colic. My mother had to travel all the way from Bicol to take care of me and fuss about my pillows and blankets -- especially the blankets, as it was rather cold in my room at Makati Med. But I didn’t really mind about the blankets. I had my copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude with me. It was the most appropriate security blanket.

[Some related posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Fever, soup and sunlight

2009-07-22T00:00:00.006+08:00

I have taken to my little bed since Saturday because I am down with the flu.

But it's a nice bed. Jim made it up for me with fresh sheets and a comforter the other day. Now I'm looking forward to some soup with him tonight, and to walking out into the sunlight tomorrow.

[Image credit]

My Chandler, 9

2009-06-02T01:53:00.002+08:00

This is my son, Chandler, when he was just a baby.

Now he is all grown up. Now it is he who takes care of me. When I fall asleep with a book, he’s the one who takes off my glasses and turns off the lamp. When I forget I’m eating and drift off to my laptop or to the television or to my books, he’s the one who reminds me to finish my food. When I oversleep in the morning, he gently prods me awake, and asks if I’m okay. When I’m panicky looking for a piece of paper or a book or my phone or the remote control, he calmly helps me find it. He asks about my day, and suggests when I may travel to Manila. He has his own opinions on books and movies. He reminds me to be careful when driving. Once, I sprained my ankle, and he massaged it, while telling me that I work too hard.

He just turned nine, and he's perfect.

[Similar posts: 1, 2, 3]

Forever

2009-05-19T14:59:00.000+08:00

Recently I bought myself an eternity ring, a ring with round cut diamonds set in prongs all around a white gold band. An eternity ring is supposed to be an anniversary ring, given by a significant other, but I decided to break the rules and purchase one for myself, without having to wait for an anniversary. A girl should be able to buy diamonds any day she wants.

Here it is, my eternity ring, in a photo taken by my friend and officemate Ricky Pineda.

It has a total of about 1.20 carats, spread across twenty plus diamonds, encircling the middle finger of my left hand.

Diamonds, as the De Beers ad has been saying for ages, are forever. They are formed deep beneath the earth's surface, out of pure carbon that has been placed under pressure and intense heat for millions of years, creating gems that can cut just about anything. However, a diamond gains beauty only when it is cut by an expert, so that a round cut diamond's facets will show glimmering hearts in a circle when viewed from underneath, and arrows when viewed from above. It looks fragile, but it isn't. And deep in its depths, one can see one's fate. Hearts and arrows. Cutting and cleaving. Such are the surprising coincidences that mark this chaotic universe.

And such are the symbols that help us cope.

Now here’s my own pledge to myself, as I give myself this ring. I pledge to forever surround myself with beautiful things, and to find beauty in as many things as I can. I pledge to keep myself from hurt, and to not cause hurt in others. I pledge to treat myself well and to always be faithful to the things I hold true. And I promise to keep believing in love, and that it never destroys, only saves, beyond sickness and health, beyond life and death.

Bloom

2009-02-14T22:59:00.002+08:00

You have kissed me a thousand times, yet every single kiss attains the potency of myth, even when its meaning should have dissipated into the thousand.

Happy Valentine's Day, my love.

After the insanity comes more

2008-12-01T22:34:00.000+08:00

After the insanity of this year's NaNoWriMo, my mind has now quieted a little, and the dust has started to settle, and I can look out of my window to the world outside. Before doing the revisions, I will live a little, go out a little, call friends a little, send letters a little, watch movies a little. But I know that I shall always go back to the word processor, because that is what my heart always tells me to do.

Such is my life as a writer. It is measured not so much in terms of weeks, days, and months as in number of pages written, number of people met, found, and lost, letters mailed, number of movies watched and books read. Some things take center stage in my memory, some get relegated to the dusty cellars of heart and mind, some waver in the distance like a mirage, while some are entirely forgotten for some reason or other. This way, time not so much tick-tocks with such numbing regularity as trickles down and gushes forth in a highly irregular, plodding manner, now fast and now slow, now with such intense force and now with remarkable insipidity, depending upon the richness of the days and the kind of catharsis or neurosis that delving into the deepest darkest depths of humanity brings, as time, inevitably, moves on.

Deeper and deeper shall I go into my writing, finding things good and bad, subtle and blatant, awful and profound. I grow more and more confused, yet more and more enlightened. In my mind, thoughts and ideas and memories fly about like gnats over horse dung, careening towards each other and ricocheting off, canceling each other out and multiplying. I dig my heels in, hold my hands out for a handhold, and find nothing and everything.

November is my new favorite month

2008-11-02T12:28:00.000+08:00

Seven hundred and twenty hours. Fifty thousand words. Chaos. Determination. Self-immolation. All for love.

The two October thirteens

2008-10-13T20:02:00.000+08:00

Two men born on the same day but years apart. Two men who had both undergone heart bypass surgery by the same doctor. Two men from the same biological source, but had gone different ways. One became a lawyer, one became a farmer. One married late, one married early. One is boisterous and loud, one is silent and keeps to himself. One is dark-skinned, one is fair-skinned. One had a mustache, one had none. One is severely myopic, one is not. One has a full head of hair, one began to grow bald when he approached middle age. One is skinny, one is chubby. One is my own father, my "Da," and one is the symbolic father of our family, Papa Herbie.

One died and is now ashes in an urn, the other has continued living and now has hair that had turned completely white. The tragic news of the death travelled via cellphone and landline from the hospital in Albay to the aunts and the uncles and the cousins. And after the words, "Papa Herbie is gone," none ever followed except the sound of crying from both ends of the line. I myself got the news from my own father via cellphone as I was entering my apartment after having breakfast, and after that statement, we both cried and said nothing else. I held on to the edge of the table by the door and somehow was able to reach the bed, and there I stayed until mid-afternoon. The nine other children of my grandparents called each other not to say any words but just to hear each other cry, and that was how they coped on the first day.

I prepared a eulogy for Papa Herbie during his memorial before his cremation, and in his memory, I post it here.

Four years ago, I almost lost my own father. I was in Dumaguete at that time, and I didn't quite know how to handle it. My father is okay, but now a father figure has died, and although I am four years older, I still don't know how to handle it.

For how do we really move on after a pillar in the family has died? We will never be the same again.

Papa Herbie, to me, and I'm sure to all my 46 cousins, loomed so large in our lives that it is impossible to imagine this family without a Papa Herbie. He was our Santa Claus, our big fat teller of funny stories, the one who had fathered four of my best-loved cousins, the irascible uncle who got drunk one night and drove an owner-type jeep off a pier in Tigaon. The jeep lived a long and useful life after that incident, and fortunately, so had Papa Herbie.

I knew so little about him, just like the little that I know of my own father, these two men who share the same birthday. But I also know so little of Lolo Berting, but he has always lived in the family long after he passed away. It is a credit to our elders how we have all formed the habit of keeping him in our hearts.

My father called me just half an hour ago while I was outside and the choir was singing. He asked me who was singing, I told him it was thechoir. He asked me the name of the choir, I said I didn't know. Normal chitchat for us. He was crying when he called me Friday morning, just after Papa Herbie died, but now, he sounded okay.

We will be okay. How could we not be, after having lived most of our lives basking under Papa Herbie's reliability? And Papa Herbie, like Lolo Berting, will live on in our hearts with the power of legend, with the potency of myth, looming still ever-large in our hearts, just like always, never changing, never gone.

Ever since Papa Herbie died, whenever I or anyone from my family greets Da a Happy Birthday on October 13, there is always a short, very subtle pause afterwards, where we all feel our hearts stopping very briefly, and we all remember where we were and what we were doing when the call came to tell us that Papa Herbie had died. I don't think anyone will ever forget. Now, years after, every October 13, after greeting Da, we whisper another greeting into the air. And in this way, there will always be two October thirteens.

Lost loves

2008-10-02T02:22:00.001+08:00

One afternoon, as I was browsing through the digital archives of the Moll family's photographs, spanning the 1920's and onwards, I came upon these two photographs of a pretty young lady. The photos are inscribed at the back. I have a hunch who "Dearest" is, but that will remain a family secret.

I was much moved by my find. I don't know who she is, really. I have never heard anyone talk about her while I was growing up, and I don't know her real name. I saw her in some other photos of groups, at soirees, wearing tea-length party dresses made of taffeta or lace, the women sitting together in a row, their knees and feet close together and poised at a practiced slant, as if choreographed. I never asked anyone who she was the first time I saw the albums as a young child. But as I looked at the photos in 2004, when I had gotten older, instantly, I knew the importance of this woman's presence in the group photographs. Instantly I knew how she felt, writing at the back of these two photos, perhaps kissing the envelopes before sending them off. Instantly, too, I knew how she felt, being away from her Dearest. And instantly, I knew how she felt when she realized that it was over.

I've had my own share of heartbreaks. I began to see images of myself in various ages in the later photos, and I look quite strange to myself. It was as if I was looking at an entirely different person. Even now, when I try to remember myself as I was a few years ago, I feel detached from that person, that woman tying up her waist-length hair into a bun, packing up the laundry to drop off to the laundromat, driving herself to Bicol while listening to the Electric Light Orchestra on her iPod, and suddenly bursting into tears for no reason. It was as if I were someone standing at a corner, watching myself, myself as "that" woman living through her years. That woman could very well have inscribed photographs of herself to her beloved, and then lost him, lost him to time, to distance, to differing interests, to growing older, to destiny.

I scanned all of these family photographs one summer in 2004 after finding out that Bita's albums, the ones that were made with black pages and required photo corners to attach the photos, were falling apart, and the photos themselves have started to fade. A few have been partly eaten up by silverfish. Several had begun to turn silver at the edges, the silver nitrate used for developing photos decades ago rising up to the surface now, as if from death to life.

The actual photographs are now permanently stored in a large box, meticulously arranged with sheets and sheets of acid-free paper, in a sealed wooden box lined with a UV protectant material. In a while, they will go into a fire-proof safe. After almost one hundred years of being looked at, of providing remembrances, of showing now-deceased people as they were when they were happy and alive, of showing now-widowed people as they were when they were still in their beloved's arms, of showing weddings and funerals and christenings and graduations and birthday parties, they have ended up in my hands because I had the time and the yearning to scan them in hi-res on the summer of 2004.

My fingerprints would be the very last imprint these photographs will carry, and these photographs will nevermore see the light of day. Lost loves have been beheld once more, if only in photographs, and shall be lost once more, sealed from the present, but never from our memories. Lost, but not lost -- simply rising to the surface once every hundred years or so, always alive, always aflame in sepia, the color of secrets and regret.

Nonsense!

2008-09-25T00:58:00.001+08:00

As I was retrieving some of my old UP files (recorded into cds from 2002 onwards) and copying them back into my larger hard drive, I browsed through the folders and found a poem I wrote for a Poetry Workshop Course I've enrolled in during the second semester of Academic Year 2004, under Professor Paolo Manalo of Jolography fame.

Our assignment was to write a nonsense poem, and I thought of creating one made up entirely of single-syllable words. Here's what I came up with:

THE PIG AND THE LEAF
By Maryanne Moll

In the gut of a pig lived a leaf,
Which,
when it turned eight,
Called its own ear and told it to make lunch.

'Tis this leaf that turned to a pen when it was twelve,
And then to stone.

The pig,
Poor thing,
Kept its own gut right on track by the words of its king.
“All hail the green thing that can turn itself into one thing and then some,
For it knows the life of gnats.”

The sty stank of pears,
And of airs,
And of hay,
And of clay.
The mind of the gut of the pig roiled
In mad ayes
To the words of its king.

And then,
One day,
This pig,
Just like the leaf that lived in its gut,
Turned eight,
With a mind to call its own ear to make lunch.
And then it was twelve,
And then it was a pen.

And then,
It was stone.

As I was reading the poem aloud in class, I noticed that, line by line, the poem began to make some kind of sense to me, and at the very end, it seemed to be telling me something of grave importance. Everyone else in the class felt the same way. I also felt the same way about the poems of my classmates. It was rather surreal, but I suppose you had to be there to understand the feeling. And now I wonder, are we just making our lives too difficult by always trying to make sense? Does every single detail in life always have to work together neatly and precisely, like a clock that never needs winding? Can we, even for just a few days a year, just let go of our standards and our labels and our Derridas and our Althussers and our Nietzches and our Kants and our de Saussures and our Spivaks and our Foucaults? Or are we, being humans and thus cursed, forever doomed to be constantly mired in the search for order?

Sometimes it tires me, I admit, to always have to know why and how things work. These days, I'm just not in that mood. I watch vampire movies and find them funny. I watch ghost movies and find them comforting. I watch documentaries about conspiracy theories and then close my eyes and try to merge them all together inside my mind to create a large, icky mass, somewhat like a hairball, and find relief that I still know what time to get up in the morning. I eat ice cream for breakfast, five peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, and finish off an entire 1.5 liter bottle of C2 iced tea after siesta. And then I write new stories. And I notice that my new stories are getting quite better. I don't write like I used to anymore, but now I also have the gumption to own up to the things that I didn't have the gumption to even face before. Chaos is good. Nonsense is good. Zoloft is good.

Year One with Jim, in photos

2008-09-08T12:58:00.008+08:00

It all began with a teeny tiny pink 4 gigabyte flash drive with a silver chain that made the flash drive look like a charm, and a cup of hot chocolate at four o'clock in the afternoon. Seven hours later, we were still together and talking, and I could sense that both of us were trying to find a way for the night not to end.

Of course the night had to end and it did end. But what followed is something that went on and on. Here are some photos from what we have been through for the past twelve months, all taken with the iPhone he gave me as a gift.

We did a major redecoration of our apartment, the College of Chaos. From a very cluttered, highly disorganized apartment for one person and thousands of books and files, we turned it into a nice and cozy and orderly living space for two. However, witness the chaos of redecorating the College of Chaos.

From this: The four feet worth of unfiled files, the furniture that have been turned into things for holding books and files, the audio and video cds, the cd archives, the dead files that have to go to storage, the old bookcase I've had since 1998 that was already breaking apart from the weight of all the junk I had it carry over the years, and the basic mass of materials that always seem to gather in a writer's home. And if you're a writer like me, who never throws anything away, then you'll understand how big a logistical problem I've been having for years.

Jim and I went from that chaos to this:

I love this new area rug that's beside our bed. And I simply adore that green lamp that I have been wanting to own since I was a teenager, because the green glass shade and the tall brass stand and pull-down chain switch evokes in me the feeling of being in an old library. As for the bookshelves, I have so many books that I can't arrange them in the shelves any other way. Some books had to be laid on top of the upright books. There are even books behind the ones that are stored upright. And each time I remember how Jim had assembled that computer table in the first photo, I always laugh a little at the memory of the sight of him on the floor, trying to figure out which were the #14 screws, which were the #8 screws, which was platform 3, which nut goes with which screw and onto what hole in which metal post, and on and on. He kept saying, "This is so bad."

And just as we were about to collapse out of sheer exhaustion after turning the College of (Literal) Chaos into the College of Chaos (Theory) -- which I have been studying secretly for over a decade now -- a good friend from PhilMUG turned up with two tickets to the March 15 Harry Connick, Jr. Big Band Concert, and he gave us these premier tickets for free. Imagine that!

I found the concert wonderful. I love big bands, and for a bit of time, a few years ago, Glen Miller was set up to play continuously for days on my iTunes while I was working on a particularly annoying small project. Jim himself isn't really a big fan of big bands and the blues, but about fifteen minutes into the show, I could see he was starting to get mesmerized. It was a fun night of music, good-natured and self-deprecating humor from the star of the show, talk about halo-halo, and balut-throwing exercises by some of the band members.

And then there were the travels to several different provinces. A sunset flight:

A hotel room:

Another hotel room:

Yet another hotel room:

And yet another hotel room:

Me in a mirror inside yet another hotel room, whiling away my time while Jim was doing his fieldwork:

Puerto Princesa:

Somewhere in Clark:

Palm Beach Resort, Laguna:

Eagle Point Resort, Laguna:

Rockpoint Hot Springs Resort, Laguna

Saud Beach Resort, Pagudpud:

This was the bus we rode to Saud, which I thought wasn't running and was due for the junkyard:

This was the "bus terminal:"

Of course neither of us dared to sit on this chair:

We always travel with these two bags, my small brown trolley and Jim's blue overnight carry-all. The black one is Jim's laptop bag. I almost never bring my MacBook Pro during our trips because I take advantage of the trip to catch up on my reading and journaling and the writing of first drafts of stories by hand on pads of legal paper.

I carry the larger luggage because I'm the one who's always tasked to carry the flat iron and the toiletries, and of course my usual stash of Moleskines and books and legal pads and fountain pen ink.

And then there were the lunches, the dates, the movie-watching in cinemas and at home, the window-shopping for the things we like, the drives we took just for the heck of it, the walks in malls and the attending of launches related to the Macintosh, the online chats, the email exchanges, the surfing through YouTube for old music videos of the Electric Light Orchestra, the tequila nights, the vodka nights, the champagne nights. It was a wonderful Year One. We've been through so much, and the first year seemed like ten years and it felt as if we have been to the moon and back, and from the beginning of time and back. We have been through the Crusades, we have witnessed the Spanish Inquisition, live through the Great Depression, and survived the bubonic plague and most everything in between. But through all these, we are still together, and we have found the best place to be. Home. My apartment. The College of Chaos.

From Pasay with love

2008-08-16T07:56:00.000+08:00

I woke up late in the morning of my birthday and saw a huge box waiting for me on top of the dining room table in my mother's house in Naga. When I opened it, voila!

Nothing like two dozen bright red American roses and a wonderful card from the man in my life to add to my birthday cheer. He wasn't there that day, though, but he came over for a visit the very next week and met my family.

I admit I am horribly late in updating this blog, but my hands have been full with changes and people and ideas and words, and my plate has never been even part empty. But I am coping. I am writing stories again, and I have filled in my blog with one post for every missing month, and have found a way to shorten the sidebar, which many people have already complained about before. See? I'm dealing with things now, little by little, one day at a time, and I'm grateful for every chance that I get to write and finish a piece.

Rest assured that I'm okay, and that with the love I'm receiving from all of you, from Pasay to Makati to Camp Crame to Quezon City to Naga to California to Canada to New York to London, through all the channels open to us, I'll be back again with happy updates. Please feel free to visit my archives, reminisce with some of the posts, and remember who I was then. Because somehow, at some point in time, that person has become no longer. Here I am. This is me now.

Light

2008-07-13T13:43:00.001+08:00

Night descends on blades of grass. The skin slumbers under the heady wish of another day. As an entire cycle of darkness passes me by, the moon begs the question, and asks why I even keep my window open for you who do not even know how to fly.

[Image Credit]

My warrior

2008-06-02T12:34:00.000+08:00

My son Chandler turned eight today. And what a male person he has become!

One evening, during the Holy Week, we were all in the van on the way to church, and we had to go very slow beside a candlelit procession, the people chanting prayers as they slowly walked on alongside the van. As we looked outside the windows, Chandler said, in a low, gruff voice, and with great exaggeration on the plosives, "We're going to battle the devil."

That he knows which side he's on does not make me such a bad mother.

The fictions we tell ourselves

2008-05-07T13:26:00.000+08:00

It is done. I am free, eleven years too late. But I feel nothing, nothing at all. I know that my story will not end there. There is enough of God and space to write a million epics of hurt and bestiality, just as there is enough of time to redeem oneself and forget. Yet some things will stay on. Like the air. Like God. Like hunger.

Deeper waters

2008-04-19T10:41:00.004+08:00

Over the summer -- my favorite season of the year -- the man in my life and I have been to four different resorts: Eagle Point Resort in Batangas, Rockpoint Hot Springs Hotel in Calamba, Palm Beach Resort in Batangas, and Saud Beach Resort in Pagudpud. In Eagle Point I was a tag-along for an office activity of his with his subordinates, but the rest of the beach trips were just for the two of us. I got a mild tan and tried to finish reading a Margaret Atwood novel. We swam laps together in the pool, and in the ocean we tried to challenge how far we could swim from the shore, and I got stung by a jellyfish twice. It was funny, actually. We had a great deal of laughing done. He played PSP games in bed while beside him I read some trashy celebrity magazines. I remember looking up from my reading, looking so serious, and saying, "I will blog about this," and him bursting out laughing again. We had the chance to be together and talk, undisturbed by office and client concerns and online distractions, and we got to sleep soundly together with our sliding doors open to the beach and the sound of the waves all night.

I have always trusted my very first feelings about anything. I am one of those people who believe that things can happen in the blink of an eye, and that all around me are teeny tiny signs to tell me what's going on in my world. Sometimes I do misread the signs, especially when I over-analyze them, enlarging them -- a habit which I have acquired since college and which I now believe to be a temporary curse -- but once I go back to that initial feeling, that unadulterated first look, first breath, first heartbeat, and try to render things smaller and denser and purer, I always know what is to become of me. In my life, the first feeling is always the most compelling one, driving me to either glory or madness. All else is segue, all else is transition, to something I can neither ignore nor change.

In September, the first time we met, the man in my life looked at me and asked if we could take a leisurely walk along the shore, barefoot, with our pant legs rolled up. It sounded like a nice, fleeting thing, something like a pretty leaf that could just fly away in the wind. But in the deepest heart of me, where all my life begins, I could already see myself in the future, underwater with him, and I held my breath and said "Yes."

It wasn't all perfect, of course. There were inconveniences, there were problems. Sometimes the sand got rocky, and several times we got cuts from pieces of broken shells. Sometimes the sand was not sand but mud, and then it became sand again. Yet all through that, somehow, in the deep of night when I would stay awake, plagued by anxiety bred by over-analysis, I would go back to that very first feeling, remember that first look we gave each other, the first hello we uttered, and the first breath we shared in the same small space of a finite universe, and I would know that in the pure, instinctive, crystalline knowledge of what was to become of me, he would be part of it, irredeemably, and that would drive me deeper and deeper into that peculiar existence of one who knows but does not know.

And because of that, we are now treading deeper and deeper waters. A few months ago we could still feel the sand -- or something solid -- beneath our feet, but just recently, I found I had to hold my breath and submerge myself fully before I can touch the something solid again with my toes. And onwards we go, swimming, treading, to that part of the water where the earth holds its most ancient secrets, and when we get there, we will cling to each other and allow ourselves to be swallowed up by the irrevocable, unchangeable waters, where no human being can tear us apart ever again. There is nowhere else to go but further into the sea.

[Image credits]

Shore

2008-04-05T02:54:00.000+08:00

When you touch me, I am a pearl glinting on the sands of desire, being covered with kisses by a sun that burns through to the tiny grain that is my core, rendering me miniscule yet vast, like a vacuum of waves.

[Image credit]

Shading

2008-03-29T09:31:00.000+08:00

Last year I purchased a fountain pen ink called Mata Hari's Cordial, manufactured by Noodler's. I have seen this ink on Pendemonium a few times and I have always wondered about it, and have been rather curious about the "bulletproof" inks of Noodler's. So one evening I gave in to my curiosity and ordered a bottle.

Mata Hari's Cordial happened to be my first pink fountain pen ink. I loaded it into my Pelikan Grand Place with the 18k medium nib, which I have already soaked and flushed and dried the day before, in anticipation of this moment.

I was quite pleased with the color of this ink. On paper it’s shade of rose, what I know to be "Old Rose," and is not at all washed out. The lines it laid down were thick, rich and clear, and it was definitely not the ordinary everyday work ink. It’s actually a nice and proper Old Rose, the Old Rose that is predictable and familiar, the Old Rose of my hair ribbons from childhood, the Old Rose of my grandmother’s silk jewelry pouches. It was absolutely wonderful to use for letters and journals. Here it is on ecruwhite kid finish 32 lb resume paper from Crane, a paper that I absolutely love

I have already edited the scans with Photoshop in an effort to capture the Old Rose of the ink. It should be a medium dark dusty rose, not magenta, not fuchshia, not hot pink, not gray pink, and not faded pink. Not too dark, either, and definitely not washed out. Just the regular rose, darkened a few degrees, and rendered “old.” Old Rose. Very 1930’s.

I also liked the other qualities of this ink. It dried quickly on the three different papers I’ve tried it on, it did not smear or smudge, did not bleed, and was smooth to write with. And of course, it was fully waterproof, retaining its color and clarity even after an hour of soaking in tap water. Truly hardy for something that looks very feminine. (But then again, isn't that the essence of being a woman?)

Needless to say, I loved this ink. Loved. Because at some point, it started to look ordinary to me. No matter what pen I used, and no matter on what paper I wrote, the ink looked like I was using a felt-tip pen instead of a fountain pen. Over the months the bottle got relegated to the back of my ink drawer. I have purchased several more inks since the Mata Hari's Cordial, and a few more fountain pens, too. Looking through some of my writings from the past year written with Mata Hari's Cordial, I realize why it lost its beauty in my eyes. The ink has absolutely no shading.

Shading in writing is what is achieved when ink pools at the end of a writing stroke, which renders the ink darker at that point, and lighter at the point where the writing is faster and continuous. Shading also appears in strokes that are made slower. Notice the shading on the "s" of the word "this" in the writing below made with a different ink, and on the "t" in the word "resulting."

It's really quite subtle, but I can see those, and it's what makes writing beautiful for me -- that the lines are not the same all the way through, that the colors are not the same all the way through. I like that it looks imperfect, flawed, in a way, inconsistent, because of the combination of the pen and the ink and my strokes. I like how the shading reflects the speed of my thoughts; I like how the shading expresses on paper the things occupying my heart at the moment. I like how unique each handwritten page can look, because I know I feel secure in the constancy of the sensibility that lies underneath all the shading. I laugh, I cry, I don't know what to write, I get angry, I toss things into the wastebasket, I abandon my desk and mope in the rug beside my bed, but I know I'll write again. Much like in love. No day is the same as the one before. We laugh, we cry, we don't know what to to say, we get angry, we toss things away, we abandon our conversation and mope apart. Shading. Line strokes. But it's okay, because love is always there, like the ink, the exact same ink but just in different shades, and we both end up going back to the desk, to continue the writing of the same story.

Now the man in my life has begun to use fountain pens, too. He's on his second fountain pen, but at the moment he uses only one ink, Midnight Blues from Private Reserve, and he has not yet gotten the hang of loading a converter properly. I change inks more often because I have more inks, and I am perhaps more volatile and reactive than he is. But that's just my shading. I am not a felt-tipped pen.

But then what about the Mata Hari's Cordial that's still at the back of my ink drawer? I doubt if I'll ever use it again. Honestly, I did expect something more striking-looking for an ink named after perhaps one of the most enigmatic women in the history of 20th century warfare. I certainly did not expect a prim and proper Old Rose, never mind that a Cordial can be either a candy or a drink made from squash. (I would imagine her Cordial to be black and emit smoke). And why call it a Cordial? Why not just Mata Hari, and then color it the darkest red ever?

But I suppose this is just as well. For after all, for all we know, Mata Hari really just might have been the prim and proper Old Rose that history had never made her out to be, and there, in those spaces between mainstream history and the history that will never see the light, lies her magic over us.

I will never be the spy Mata Hari, of course. I don't have her spunk and her expertise at betrayal. And I don't think she ever truly loved any man. I will never be the prim and proper Mata Hari, either. If I were an ink, I'd be scarlet. But one thing I have that she doesn't is love. I love the man in my life, because of his shading, because of his presence, because he sees me as scarlet and also sees me as bubble-gum pink, because he sleeps beside me, because because. There is no enigma there. Shading is shading. Love is love is love.

By choice

2008-03-22T23:21:00.006+08:00

Sometimes when he's not looking, I take photos of him, like this:

Maybe it's because a part of me doesn't want to disturb him when he's engrossed in any of his Apple gadgets. I can see magic in the connection he has with technology. Also, part of me just wants to stay in the background, undetected, unnoticed, and just wait until he looks around to search for me or reach out his arm to touch me or hold my hand. There's magic there, too, one independent of data chips and battery power.

Guess which magic I prefer.

Shaken up in Davao

2008-03-15T12:09:00.008+08:00

So the man in my life flies to Mindanao to do field work with his district manager and a counterpart for three days and two nights and I tag along, as usual. We were to fly to Davao from Manila on Wednesday morning, spend the night there, drive to General Santos the next morning, and then take the flight to Manila from there on Friday morning. He picks me up from the apartment, as usual, and we park his car in the parking lot of the Centennial Terminal 2, as usual. And then we get our boarding passes from the check-in area, we get the window seats next to each other, and have breakfast while checking our e-mails online with our iPhones, as usual. I was prepared to have one of our usual out-of-town trips: short, sweet, relaxed, and fun.

It turned out to be quite the opposite. He had to rush to be with his district manager, who was already waiting in a car outside the arrivals area, so he armed me with leaflets for hotels and inns that we picked up from the airport concierge, and put me in a decent-looking cab, with an assignment: to find a nice hotel where we can stay till Friday morning. I was excited! I've never checked myself into a hotel before; it has always been him who checks us in. Trouble is, most of the hotels I called were fully booked, so I was relegated to the smaller ones.

The first hotel I checked into, The Manor Hotel, had dark, narrow hallways and dark, narrow rooms, and was along a street lined with hardware stores and junk shops so that should have made me suspicious. However, I felt it was a nice change from the large major hotels we usually stay in, and after all, I get to choose the hotel, and this was my choice.

This what when the horror really started. They put me in a room at the fifth floor, and the building did not have an elevator. Furthermore, the room had two twin beds and not the double bed I requested. I had to wait ten minutes before I could get transferred to another room with the right bed, but then the phone wasn't working so I couldn't order room service. Hungry as I was, I called the hotel front desk from my mobile phone to tell them about this, and was told to go downstairs instead.

When I got downstairs, an old man was standing by the counter in a shirt that has been slept in, his hair uncombed, and he was wearing slippers. He looked like he had just woken up! So I said, in Filipino: "Can I order here?"

"Yes," he answered in Filipino. He did not budge, though, not even to get a pen and paper to list down my order.

I looked through the menu and said, "I'll have the Bistek Tagalog."

"We don't have that."

"What do you have?"

"We have what's in the menu."

"But your menu has Bistek Tagalog."

"We don't have Bistek Tagalog."

"Okay, I'll have the Pork Adobo on the menu."

"We don't have the Pork Adobo."

"What do you have?"

"We have what's in the menu."

At that point I was starting to suspect that he was some sort of robot assembled in one of the nearby junk stores, so I thought I might shake him up a little. Maybe he was still half asleep.

Really annoyed, I asked him, "Can you cook an eggplant?"

He turned around, went to the small refrigerator nearby, and started rummaging through the contents. I tried to take a peek and all I could see were a bunch of plastic bags and some string beans. Unbelievable.

Of course I ran straight out of there, into the street, and almost tripped on a cog that was lying around near a small ditch. I felt like a character out of The Twilight Zone. I called my man, and he told me to get out of there quick!

So I half-ran back, told the front desk I simply had to find another hotel. I did not even dare to climb back up the narrow stairway to get my things (luckily, I had not yet unpacked), for fear that an axe murderer was waiting up there for me. I had them bring down our luggage, I took a cab and went to the next hotel on the list. Humberto's Hotel, advertised on the leaflet as "the charming little hotel," was even smaller than The Manor Hotel. It was too small that two people could not pass alongside each other between the two double-sized beds in their "Executive Suite." The carpets and drapes were also marked with too much cigarette burns that at first I thought it was a pattern in the fabric. Davao is a non-smoking city by law, so I suppose this room was where the entire population regularly converge to break that law, and in further rebellion, they refuse to use and ashtrays and use the drapes and rugs to put out their stinking, smoking cigarettes.

Finally, after a few calls to friends -- one of who informed me that The Manor Hotel was the site of a huge fire a few years back, and that a lot of people died in the fire -- I was able to reach the Royal Mandaya Hotel, which was a huge relief They had a sudden cancellation and could accommodate us for one night and one night only. I said that was fine because we were going to General Santos the next day anyway. Turns out the Royal Mandaya stay was the most pleasant one of the entire trip. The food was good, service was good, and the room was large and pretty and comfortable and quiet. The next day, however, we were back to some sort of quasi-nightmare.

My man and his district manager decided they will not be doing any work in General Santos anymore and will continue work in Davao instead, so we had to change our flight details. Again, I was the one tasked with that. I was to call the Philippine Airlines reservations hotline and get us seats on the 5 am Friday flight from Davao to Manila. I was put on hold for over twenty minutes. I was able to watch an entire episode of MythBusters while on hold! And then the Royal Mandaya could not accommodate us anymore for another night because they were already fully-booked, so I had to transfer to the Apo View Hotel nearby, which could now accommodate us for just one night.

The room was clean and quiet, the staff was helpful and quick, and I went to bed, turned on the TV and ordered food from room service. But then after a few minutes the strong smell of turpentine came seeping in. I turned down the airconditioning and opened the windows but the smell just got worse, and by them I already had a headache, so I called the front desk. Three managers came in (and behind them was the waiter bringing my food) and explained that the room next to mine was being repainted, and that they could transfer me to another room on the same floor but which did not have any fumes.

After everything was arranged, I was finally able to sit down and enjoy my lunch at 1pm. It was Bistek Tagalog.

But just like all other stories of disaster, this one did not seem keen to end that quickly. My man and I went to SM Davao in the evening to get dinner. We were planning to buy some stuff at the mall and have an early night because our flight was very early the next morning. But pople from his office started calling him, and he had to go online to send and receive several files, and there was a short unnatural period of us rummaging through our luggage looking for something he needed right away, and then my copy of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises ended up destroyed, and then finally when we went to bed it was already 2am.

And then we had to change our flight details again because there was no way we could make it to the airport in time for the first flight out because of what we have just been through together, and I was put on hold again for twenty minutes while I flipped through the remains of The Sun Also Rises, feeling sad at the carnage but also happy that the nightmare was almost over, and then finally we got confirmation for the 1pm flight, with the assurance that we can have our tickets rerouted directly at the check-in counters.

But oh no, it was not over yet. When we got to the check-in counters an hour before our scheduled flight, we were told that we could not get our tickets rerouted at the check-in counters. We had to go to the Philippine Airlines ticket office outside of the Departures area for this. So my man had to run out, stand in line at the ticket office, make the payment and get the new tickets, run back to Departures, stand in line again -- and take off his shoes again -- and then run to the check-in counters with me. Needless to say, we did not get the window seats, but we were still seated together. Thank goodness for small mercies.

By the time our plane touched down on the tarmac in the hot and sooty air of Metro Manila, we were hungry and exhausted, and we were never happier to be home. We took our luggage, he rushed to the parking lot to take the car and fetch me and the luggage at the main exit at Departures, but then he had to walk back to me because we have both forgotten that the parking stub was inside my bag (another "inconvenience" that already felt natural to us by then), and then finally, finally, we were home.

And it felt so good to be home. We turned on the lamps, had a heavy late lunch, turned off the lamps and went to sleep at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Sometimes we just have to be shaken up in order to have the right kind of order in our lives. This is our home. This is what we will always come back to, and there are no horrors here.

[Photo credits 1, 2, 3.]

French press

2008-03-08T02:24:00.002+08:00

Coffee grounds swirl in the water as I plunge in the press. The swill looks good: dark and holds much promise, like you who still lie in my bed, swimming in the limpid pond of love that has been brought to a boil the night before.

[Photo credit]