The Liars Club

Moving Day

2009-02-21T10:04:00.003+08:00

Sasha keeps a blog at:

www.sleepnotsheep.blogspot.com
(Account mostly for Happy Mondays posting.)

and

www.sleepnotsheep.wordpress.com
(Which looks prettier, and that's the main blog.)

Oh my, I think I'm growing up. Bye, blog.

Revisions, Revisists

2009-02-21T10:03:00.001+08:00

So. I’m not graduating. At least, not this March. And it’s that proverbial big load jumping off my too-bony shoulders.

I feel much better.

I’m not even dwelling on the fact that my father may pound at his chest in grief, or that I may ask my brother to scoot over and make room for me in the Out of School couch. There is hope.

And that amazes me. As much as my mother’s never-ending mantra to “Face up to it” (or the cocktail-induced variation, “Shit’s hitting the fan. You can duck, but you gotta stay and clean it all up”) actually rings true, if you just muster up enough courage to roll out of bed, to stop trying to convince other people that it’s okay, to stop lying to everyone–yeah, you never lied to yourself, because what would be the point?

There I was already imagining a future that involved me standing in my red suede boots along Quezon Ave. (But, really, after reading Confessions of a London Call-Girl, I realized that it’s high-class escortage for me. So, people and your rich widower daddies, line up.)

Why hide? Why didn’t I ever ‘fess up one drunken night and blurted, “I am such a faiiiluuure!”? I almost did, though, many times, and usually in the company of one charming grouch. But, you know how this is. Here comes Sasha, the Golden Girl, the fate of humanity.

(I remember in fifth grade, how I stayed in the classroom while my classmates cheered on the section’s contestant for the Chess tournament being held in the quad (yes, Chess under the basketball hoop). Eric, the town barber’s son, forever called to what was elementary school’s equivalent of the Dean of Academic Affairs, a 60 grade average, played a wicked chess game. I recognized that at 9 years old. And I thought then, If I’m so smart, why can’t I play chess? And I think now, It’s the detention boys playing chess in the quad you have to watch out for; the girl cocooned in the classroom with her paperback will prove anticlimactic.)

Here I am, about to blurt out that I am a bad investment. It’s been a rough year, a rougher couple of months. And I’m sure I only made my life harder because I didn’t want to go running to people, admitting that I’m not the horse to put your chips on, or however that saying goes. It’s the big D-word all over again, and there were times I wanted to throw my hands up and just end it all one way or another, but well, that’s a too-familiar story for my friends, for the people I love the most. Strangely, I ended up feeling like a copycat, never mind that I’m in as much a psychological mess as anyone out there who spends most days melting on the bed, unable to find a reason to get up. Oh, woe is me. I’m never the vindictive, slash-my-wrists-while-cackling bitch when the happy hormones submit their resignation letters; I’m the real sad dude, the one you talk about in hushed voices because her lack of obvious drama demands that you pass it off as an effect of the emo generation, the long, sad epics she likes to read. Coagulating in bed and creating constellations out of the cracks in the ceiling doesn’t make for good entertainment, or good gossip fodder.

But, well, life goes on, like all the Hallmark cards say. I’m still alive, partly because at the back of my head, I’d eventually want to get out of Sasha’s Bed and out into La-La Land, mostly there are too many people I love, and you don’t go drinking White Flower in shot glasses when you’ve got people to love, when there’re people who love you. Or at least people who’ll dig through six feet of earth just to wring your neck.

That said, I need to go. There are naked women to try drawing, and (if the writerly spurt this morning is any indication) fictions to weave.

‘Til next time.

Wait for the robot

2008-11-25T17:49:00.000+08:00

A few things you should know

2008-11-03T12:55:00.002+08:00

Last Night.
How To Get Mistaken For a Hooker Around Taft Avenue Station Of The MRT.
Armed with an itsy-bitsy purse, and a backpack stuffed with hair products, eight pairs of new frilly panties, a laptop, a book, two dresses, and a partridge in a pear tree, I headed over to the outer lobby of the Kabayan Hotel, just a couple of skips away from MetroPoint, and Taft Ave. Station. I gave a winning smile to the security guards, and motioned to the ashtray. They smiled back, albeit warily. I grabbed a cigarette I deprived myself of for about 48 hours, give or take a couple of nervous breakdowns, and puffed away, imagining the bonemeal most probably coursing through my bloodstream, my shoulders slowly pulverized by the disgustingly heavy pack on my back (cuz you know, it’s a backpack!).

Halfway through the stick, a greasy old man walks up to me and asks for a light. He had big eyes, and one was more yellow than the other. I noticed he took an obligatory puff on his cigarette to light it, but then never put it to his lips again.

I inched away, pretended to be entranced by the landscaping.

And then he, shyly, in a way that may have been sweet if it wasn’t so creepy, asked me if I’d like to go up with him to his room. “It’s my first time here,” he said, as though that would make me actually consider the proposition.

I blinked. There was no panic. Merely utter confusion as to why anyone would confuse a girl with tons of baggage, literally, on her back and hanging off the crook of one elbow, to be a working girl. Cumbersome, much? Like, Excuse me, honey, can I charge my laptop while we get it on? Everything was starting to look funny, and hazy. The world was swelling, the way it did when I had too many margaritas, and puffed on too many Lethal Mentoses.

I shook my head, snorted out the hair that snuck into one nostril. I considered saying, “Boss, I haven’t had my balls removed yet.” Or, “Would you like to see the stillborn fetus in my purse?” Or, “Oh, I hadn’t had any action since the day before I left prison for a parole from multiple homicide.” Or even, “Oh golly wow, the doctor said it’d be difficult with a tumor hanging out from inside me.”

I blinked, again. Inched closer to the security guards. Considered laughing. Prepared myself to scream Fire, because Morgan Freeman told Brad Pitt in Seven that in rape prevention seminars, women are taught that no one responds to cries for help.

I considered laughing.

In the end, I said, as politely as I could, “No, thank you. I’m good.”

And the man with one eye more yellow than the other gave me this littlest smile that told me he knew what my answer would be even before he phrased the question in his head.

(This is what’ll get me in trouble one of these days: assigning humanity to people who mistake you for a hooker.)

*

The Day Before.
How To Let It All Go: An Exercise on Vanity
I felt—there was no other word for it—younger. I was itching to walk into the middle of the room, giggle, stun the crowd with my irrepressible youth, then leave, making them long for more. I was for whom The Cure’s Love Song was made. A sexed-up Shirley Temple. Like I looked like I just tumbled out of bed with some early San Franciscan swashbuckler who liked to wear tight pants. Like I woke up every morning to a kiss on the spot where my neck meets my shoulders. Like I could wear PVC pantsuits--not that I'd want to, I just could, you know?

“You look like that girl walking in the desert with James Bond,” said the girl who shampooed my hair. It was the first civil thing she’d said to me. Our relationship, up to that point, consisted of her pressing her hand on my forehead to keep me still, and her grunting when I got her wet when I sneezed just as she had her face close to my wet hair. I had committed the inside of her left upper arm to memory; she had a small brown mole about three inches up her elbow. It was a relationship that wanted of her smiles. I would never know her name.

I leaned back on the leather seat, squinted. The lights were too white; I could see every pore that had been compelled to bare itself to the world. My face looked like it needed a sandblaster. Oh, but my hair, my hair.

“Oh, nice,” said my mother, walking towards me, holding my copy of Rick Moody’s collection of short stories (which I got for 15 bucks at BookSale, HAH, KAEL, HAH!). She beamed at me. She looked at the shampoo girl, then she hastily looked away. She tried to catch the attention of the hairdresser, Miss Jocelyn, but the other woman was too busy parting her hair according to the starkness of her highlights.

“I told you to keep your hair,” she told me. Her head was cocked, the tips of her straight hair, threaded with gray, touching her shoulders.

I lip-pointed to the counter, watching myself, however blurrily, as I did so. I imagined myself in black and white, grains of sand sprinkled on my moist cheeks. Hello, good-looking, where have you been all my life?

My mother picked up the Ziploc bag from the counter, held it in front of her. She shook the bag. “There’s so much hair.”

I shook my head, my curls grazing my neck. “I know.”

I avoided looking at that bag. I’d already seen too much of it. Miss Jocelyn made Shampoo Girl hold my hair while she cut it. It was quite unceremonious. I still feel a tiny spurt of outrage whenever I think of this indifference. Do you know how long that’s been part of my life? I wanted to ask her. I held the Ziploc bag. She filled it in three goes: one clump of hair, another, then another. I stared at it for the longest time. And then I tossed it on the counter. I amazed myself at this roaring vacuum, of the sheer nothingness in my mind, not too much violent reaction to what was going on, not even a whimper. I had discovered Stoicism. There was no Undo button. Someone should be documenting this.

My mother was stuffing my plastic bag of hair into her bag. I thought of that scene in a short story I’d written, about how “Leah cut her hair, put it in a box, and gave the box to [her grandfather].” I was quoting myself in my head. I was on top of my tiny little fishbowl of a world.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

She patted her bag. “I have a better use for it.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll turn it into a wig. Or just attach it to my hair.”

“You’re going to wear your daughter’s hair.”

She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I’ll gather it into a ponytail, and brush it every night.” She widened her eyes a fraction, and her voice came out breathy: “It’ll be like you never left.”

I laughed, then turned back to the mirror and run my fingers over my newly exposed nape. I saw the hairdresser was gawking at us. I tried to ease her with a smile.

I reached for my cellphone. No messages. I had texted P. about three times, telling him how earth-shatteringly short it would be. The last time I told him I wanted to get a haircut, like, seriously, he wailed Nooooo, and said, “If you do, I’ll bring it to bed with me every night, and whisper, It’s okay, it’s okay, no one's going to hurt you anymore.” That was a couple of months ago.

No messages. My swashbuckler was in denial.

“You look really nice,” said my mother. (I try not to recall when she asked me last night, “You want to get a nose job?” because my schnoz would prove detrimental to her plan to have me moonlight as model.) “Really nice.”

When we got home, I bullied all the boys into rating my new hairstyle. Joshua laughed, then ignored me the rest of the night. John looked like he’d rather be trapped in a cage with seven bloodthirsty gamecocks. The Father beamed and said, “You look happy.”

P. and I have messaged each other about Joyce Carol Oates, Ian McEwan, needing a bath, needing to sleep, travelling, Mucha Lucha. There is an elephant in the room. I have been painting it neon pink. Hello, good-looking, look where I’ve been all my life.

Proceed to dazzlement, dude

2008-10-22T23:11:00.001+08:00

Here are a few things I don’t understand. Some things, I know I could easily comprehend if I practiced some Google-fu, other things I’d rather not understand because I tend to have a naïve, misguided view of the world (snort) and I’d like to keep it that way, and other things I guess I admit to not understanding (grammar check, Nazis), because otherwise (I hate it when people say eitherwise), I’d be this pompous twit who’d rather understand everything in the world, than stop asking questions in fear she’d look stupid, and, gasp, normal.

1 – How those brown ribbons in cassette tapes record sound. And, for that matter, vinyl records. Mehn, grooves, literally, mehn. I mean, I understand it technically, I know how it works – but, well, I’m awed that it’s even possible. (I still think this way about instant messaging through the Intarwebz. See, how do people get to talk to each other by the moment, and they live so far away from each other, oceans have to be traversed, even. How do we talk in real time, when technically, people may exist in different, assigned time zones? So, essentially, I don’t understand technology.)

2 – What really happens to caterpillars inside cocoons? All the graphs and charts I’ve seen show a caterpillar on a twig, a pupa dangling from a twig, and a butterfly about to leap from a twig, one connected to the other by big arrows. But what happens inside cocoons? Again, I know what metamorphosis is. But, you know, is metamorphosis gooey?

3 – Why men get erections in the morning. What, are you aroused at the thought of beginning a brand new day? Stimulated at all the unknown opportunities and possibilities laid out before you? Titillated at the mere thought of, oh god, another fucking day, time to kick some ass? (Pancho says Yes.)

4 – How Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) created a whole cat-suit out of one leather jacket, that’s most probably brittle due to disuse, since I don’t see Selena ________ leap into it every once in a while to paint the town red.

5 – On the subject of movies, and natural disasters: If Jack and Rose hadn’t been necking on deck, would the Titanic not have crashed into an unsuspecting iceberg? Is PDA really bad after all?

6 – Why do we feel in dreams? Sometimes so intensely, that for a fraction of the day, after I wake up, I’m still incredibly pissed at someone for failing to reclaim the Golden Maggot attached to a red plastic hollow ball inside a McDonald’s playpen? Like, dude, the fate of humanity was in your goddamned hands, and you had the temerity to insist on eating that last Egg McMuffin? My McMuffin, at that?

7 – Why eating young, brown mango leaves at the tip of a twig of some old mango tree remind me of childhood. And Bagoong Balayan, rarr.

8 – Why anyone has an appendix. It’s like everybody’s been handed this useless lump of meat that’s pretty much a ticking time bomb if you, like me, have no patience spitting out itsy-bitsy tomato seeds.

9 – Why sunsets and dawns happen so quickly, compared to the rest of the day, when they’re arguably the most awe-inspiring, even the most beautiful. (I learned a new word a couple of days ago – or rather, found hidden, sparkly depths in the word – liminal, which has this red zigzag below it, because it’s not very English, but Latin-y. Liminal. At the threshold, in-between. Sunrises and twilights. Transitory times. Even places: airports, train stations. Even planes and trains. That moment when you’re not quite awake, but you’re not still asleep either. People between one decision and another. Or an issue. Or in a phase. Straddling a state line, the way Jamie Sullivan and Landon Carter did dun sa movie version ng A Walk to Remember. And so, I guess, this brings us to another thing I don’t understand: Objectively, it all seems so strange, supernatural, compelling, poignant. But when you are liminal… well, to quote Mackayla Lane: “Liminal sucks.”)

10 – That way back then, the world wasn’t really low-res, or black and white, or sepia, or even grainy. When I was a kid, looking at two-year-old me in my parents’ wedding album, I’d wondered at how I hadn’t been as colorful as I was then. Until now, I still sometimes think that the world slowly grew color, hues leeching into the smallest things first, a spectrum growing out of the first blot, then the first stain. That everything simply became clearer out of some unexplainable natural phenomenon. That certain things ceased being a soft kind of brown. That the universe, out of some unknown compulsion, over time, magnified, and then burst, highlighting the details, filling in the white dots that speckled its faces.

Addendum (I don’t necessarily not understand this, it just came to me, really): When I was twelve, back in Cavite, I had a chat with the man who sold taho, the one who’d been doing that for as long as I could remember. He said he put his kids through school with taho. Naturally, I asked him how long he’d been doing it. He said it had been sixteen years. And I remember being so struck by that: Sixteen years, four more years than my entire existence. It shook me at how that man was doing things, living his life, long before I was born, long before I had the possibility of being born. That he -- a lot of people – had lives before I came out squalling from my mother’s anaesthetized womb (TMI, I know.) That the world didn’t begin with me, that everything before me wasn’t like the prefaces to books that anyone could skip reading. Ah, the conceit of the youth. Haha. This is what amuses me when it’s story-sharing time with P. I was probably still swimming in primordial soup around the time he had this massive crush on Virginia from the bakery. Things like that, you know, things I don’t really think about much, but well, when I do, well, it boggles the mind, haha. It is so cool.

Big enough for ten plus me

2008-10-08T00:00:00.000+08:00

First Comes Love

When my father still had a job he would bring home key chains
left by diners in the restaurant where he would stand around
in his suit and tie and when he got home he’d give my mother
who’d be reading a book in bed a kiss and he would then hand
the key chain to me and I would all too eagerly toss away the key
to some door I would never think about at five and slip
the key ring over my thumb where the fit is most snug
and the next day my father having left for work my mother
having left her book on a table I would tap the windows
of neighbors and playmates then all of us would run to the empty
lot where we would build ourselves houses from discarded plywood
hang plastic bags for curtains and I would be making mud
cakes inside found bottle caps and I would smile at the grimy
boy who’d volunteered to be my husband and show him two
key rings free of dangling jagged shapes grooved free
of plastic icons and brand names and he would put the ring
on his ring finger and I would tell him to put the ring on my ring finger
the way it is in the movies that scene right before a man and a woman
kiss right before my mother slips her hand over my eyes right
before my father sends me out of the room saying Good night
as if he knew some secret he could never share no matter
how many consolations he brought home no matter how many times
my mother tilted her head up to his that she can accept his kiss.

Closer to where I started

2008-10-07T22:57:00.001+08:00

Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill

One slow October Sunday, I run my fingers over the books
on the shelves above my table, like a pianist poised over his keys,
instead, a leap of every hue imaginable, and, of course, a chime:
Roland, yet another discourse on love, is the deep, mellow rumble of moss
green, Haruki’s twisting in hallways the tinny zigzag of all the neons
laced with cream, and another ping. The crooning of Gabriel a slide
keening over the creases of supposed memory, and that one bed you
have not visited, the rose you did not bother to snap off a bush, and yes,

perhaps, a sigh. And I pluck a book I bought months ago
from a secondhand bookstore, where I knelt in front of boxes packed
with volumes long ago pushed to the backs of shelves, giving way
to Octavio, Kazuo, or even Danielle, Dr. Spock and Dr. Seuss – hiding,
huddled, their spines curving, the gold on their cloths steadily losing
their glimmer, later on lost in the moving from one house to another
from whose pastel walls still hung the faint scent of paint. And in my hand,
this book falls open, and I read the pages dotted with yellow,

gray veins, the deaths of silverfish scuttling between tales, and all
the words turn fluid before my eyes, all of us aware of the drawn out
whirs of time, while all the other colors caged in fake mahogany
beams clatter what remains of their gold leaf against each other,
thudding in their places, sending out purrs and whines, and once,
even the beginnings of an aria. I come upon the expanse between 144
and 145, and see there, lying within the speckled tale of a beige-clothed
secretary hell-bent on seducing her lawyer boss, there, here,

a lock of hair, just a pinch of brown curl, fine, translucent if held
up against the afternoon light. And I imagine a child, his steps weightless
one moment, then heavy the next: dimpled feet padding none too gently
on the carpets, the knees raised gingerly, then stepping, again and again,
until he stumbles – discovering the first bars of a giggle – into
the outstretched arms of a mother who has put down the book
she has been reading this one rare, selfish afternoon. Oh, my sweet,
I hear this mother, and see her fingers twirl against the crown

of curls on his head, a few locks tangling with his eyelashes, and now
her mind hops and skips across the room, sliding into drawers,
into covered boxes, searching for the smallest pair of scissors, and one,
one simple snip would do, before the day is over,
before Gaitskill completes her tale, before a girl on her knees eases it
from the dust of a bookstore, a girl who could be doing other things,
instead of imagining herself lovelorn, clasping a brittle book in front of a shelf,
humming an old song, holding up a then-child’s lock of hair against the light.

Fight the fire that's in your hand

2008-09-29T16:41:00.011+08:00

1
A few months ago, when it seemed like everyone around me was getting their congratulatory Palanca letters, I went back to my dark corner and banged away at my laptop, trying to shoo away the hurt and, yes, the outrage of missing out on all the excitement. (Call me childish, fuck you, haha.) Beside the sincere happiness for friends, and yes, pride (in Marie's case, oh god, you make me want to cry, I love you, I am unexplainably proud of you, sweetie!), there was resignation, yes, that I should yet again be content with living vicariously, and yes, damn it, the confirmation of the goddamned fact that the world doesn't owe me anything, none at all. And so I banged away, banged away at the laptop, came up with a story, then another, coming up for air to drink with friends, to get some hugs and awkwardly given pep talks.

But what nagged me, damn it, what was stuck in my goddamned craw was my mother. I wanted to give her something tangible, damn it, something that could make her incredibly proud of me, more proud of me than she'd ever been. I wanted to give her the honor of walking on Palanca-winner-dust-spattered carpets of some hotel, in shoes we'd bought specifically for the occasion. I wanted to go up on a stage (or whatever it is) and grin at her while I hold a medal, and the, hehe, the check. I wanted to give her a hug, what medal there was between our sternums (it's her fault I'm flat-chested), cool at first, then warming to the skin beneath our dresses. I wanted to tell her, "Mom, I won a Palanca. Apir!" But I didn't. And I couldn't do all that, not this year, no.

I sent her a message, a couple of days after all the winners of the category I'd joined in had surfaced: "Mom, I wish I could tell you that I won a Palanca, and that it was for you. But I didn't. Sorry."

And she replied with, "Oh love, that doesn't matter, and yes, this is cliched, but there's always next year. You will always make me proud, Palancas don't matter, not really. Know what? Just give me your diploma, and I'll be the happiest mother in the world."

And I cried, and I couldn't send her a reply, because I was too preoccupied, bawling with my face buried in the nearest welcoming chest, which smelled of wood chips, soap, High Endurance, a good night's sleep, a hell of a good morning, and that moment when you sit down with the clothes that have dried on the clothesline and you just need to smooth the creases with your chafed palms.

"What's wrong?" he asked, and I showed him my phone, and he kissed the top of my head, and he said, "Awww." And then I punched him on the stomach, and he laughed, and I knew exactly what he meant.

2
The first time a certain award-winning, highly esteemed poet (buwahaha) made me cry (yes, this wasn't a one-time thing), he made a shot at my mother. This was at the heels of him saying my mother was hot. (Men are weird that way.) And then a few seconds later, he said, in not so many words, and I do not quote (so italics na lang): Your mother, she is bad, yes.

See, I had launched into the inner workings of my family, of how my brother and I sneak out at the dead of the night to share some Lethal Mentoses, of how my mother always let us go our own ways, make our own choices, but never letting us forget that the family was always there for us. All that mushy stuff that I couldn't really verbalize, and so I just gave examples. Poor ones, apparently, because then Mr. Poet said something, implying my mother was a bad mother, and before I could reach for the nearest beer bottle and rid the world of a great literary man-dude, the glare I'd directed at him had turned wobbly, and before I knew it, I was trying to stoically stare at my shoes instead, and damn it, I was crying. Gah, guerilla-girl tactics, crying, yech. Conscience-ridden me, fuck it, decided I'd have more satisfaction fantasizing his death by molasses and fire ants, rather than me doing it myself with any blunt object, or my elbow (which is also considered a blunt object anyway).

Mr. Poet apologized, and I think he knew he should never tread on that plane again, because I may have cried that one time, but the next time it should ever happen, I will draw blood. Promise. Reminds me of the time when my principal kept hinting that I was the spawn of damned people, and my head was abuzz with, One word about my mother, you hag, and your face will blend in to that blackboard behind you not too nicely.

Mr. Poet said, "Oh, don't cry na, Sasha, sorry. I said your mom was hot naman, di ba?" Orayt.

3
My mother wrote me a letter a year ago, for an Ethical Will project for a Nonfiction seminar. And this is what I wrote for that project, or tried to write (yes, my nonfiction sucks ass):

The night before this paper was due, my mother sent me a text message: “I have emailed the values. Please insert where you see fit – Never lose your sense of humor and your belief in the wonders of one-liners. Approach life with passion not timidly and safely. Do not be afraid to get hurt but be afraid if it does not make you stronger.”

Reading the message aglow on my screen, I was struck with some sort of trepidation. My mother has never been the sort of person to give out Hallmark cards during birthdays. She’s never been the type of mother who baked cookies on weekends or demanded hugs and kisses as she came home from work. My mother is an abysmal cook. Maybe because it’s inevitable that she be compared to my father, who does all the cooking, and with good food, at that. Over the years, my mother’s repertoire has changed little: sushi, salsa, chili, tacos, penne with seafood sauce and molo. The one time she baked some brownies for us, they came out rock-hard and she was forever banned from approaching the oven by a two-meter radius – banned by me.

She’d not the type of mother who would ask you aside and talk to you about your life, begging for some tidbits about boys, school, boys and more boys. She doesn’t ask, “How are you feeling, dear?” as she tucks a wayward curl behind my ear. My mother asks, “How’s school?” And I would mumble the token, “Okay naman,” all the while, not-so-surreptitiously making a beeline for the exit. When given a more honest answer like, “I’m miserable. I hate school,” she asks, “Why? What’s wrong?” and we’d get to the bottom of it, but not without making some U-turns and detours here and there, talking about the latest The Simpsons episode, or some favorite wrestler, fencing all the while with one-liners from TV, mostly cartoons. An inquiry about my location would be a paraphrase from Dexter’s Laboratory, complete with mangled accents:

“Sasha, where are you?”

“Right here.”

“Where here?”

“Here here.”

“I don’t see you . . .”

With the last line being said together: “Uh-oh, I think Dee Dee’s become the caaar!”

Completely inane, as you can see.

The mushy words that linger between us like secret farts have all been uttered under duress, complete with squirming and really awkward laughter. Happy Birthday? Hug. Happy New Year? Hug. Merry Christmas? A hug, plus a kiss if she gave me something really pretty.

My mother shows her love in a markedly different way from all the “normal” mothers out there. (Yes, all of us, including her, admit that my mom is abnormal and weird.) She does it matter-of-factly and in this way, she manages to surprise me. Like before college, she asked me if I wanted to be a writer. When I said yes, she asked me to shift into this course. When I thought about applying for a writers’ workshop, she told me to go through with it, only if I wanted to. I did, and she let me. Of course, she listened, patiently, as I told her of my irrational fear of flying – mainly because I haven’t done it before. She listened and told me, “Come on,” with her signature smirk.

But I know that I can tell her anything because I know I will be heard as an adult. And she has a way of putting things into perspective for me. When I lost a phone, I fretted and cried and she said, “It’s only a phone. Sayang, sure, but we love you more than that.” And she was hugging me. When I sunk into episodes of depression, she’d call me everyday, saying as little as possible, and our small talk slowly pulled me out of my funks.

No, my mother is not the conventional mother of fragrant kitchens and spotless aprons. My mother is the mother who laughs at cartoons with us, the one who goes with me to spelunk for books in second-hand bookstores, the one who squirms at a hug, the one who occasionally slips and calls us “love” once in a while.

The following is a letter from her to me. Reading it at such an opportune time once again put things in perspective for me. These tidbits from my mother are things I am grateful to receive, and something that I hope I will carry with me, as Hallmark as that may sound.

Dear Daughter,

In terms of material wealth, there is not much, if none at all that your father and I can bequeath to you. It saddens me personally as I have made it my vow that my children will never experience how it feels not to have money in the pocket, to have to ask a parent and have her give you a litany of how hard life is, that money does not grow on trees, blah, blah and more blah. I have made my needs of the least priority if my children have urgent needs of their own. Perhaps this has made me a push-over. This is of no consequence, however, as long as they will know the feeling of belonging. My life is governed by past rejections that my perspective has been warped by what not to do. The values that I wanted to impart to my children are based on everything that is opposite to my personal experiences and my hurts yet with the attempt to intersperse it with the sense of right and wrong. My upbringing was one that is sheltered because of my mother who for selfish reasons did not allow me to go out anywhere not even for a Girl Scout jamboree. With you and your brothers, I took the other route and allowed you to mingle with your peers, to join activities and thus expose you to different environments, opportunities, scenarios, judgments which I am hoping will translate to future intelligent decisions based on actual knowledge and experience rather than vicarious learning.

Along the way, I try to guide by example hoping that my actions will be passed on and lived by my daughter and sons. I am aiming for financial stability and independence. To achieve this, it should be done through hard work and self-reliance. Each task is important on its own and there is no job too small or too big that it cannot be done the best possible way it can be done. Everyone should be treated with fairness and respect. Prejudice or bias does not have a place in this family. Always carry with you a sense of honor. Hold yourself liable to your commitments and meet them whenever possible and always try to make everything possible. Let no one belittle you not even yourself. Brand and luxury is not a priority. Comfort is. Make this your mantra – form and substance, substance and form. Do not approach anything armed with only one. Always take them together. Set your immediate objectives, however selfish they may be. However, this should only be at the start. Your objectives must always end with plans to pay forward, to give back what you have been blessed with through hard work. Stay practical. Never let your heart rule your mind. Focus on your objectives. Keep your eyes on the prize and do not deviate. There is always the right time and place. Analyze all actions with pros and cons. There is no fate. There is no destiny. Your future is set by the choices that you make. Do not over analyze either that you will never act. Your first instinct is usually always right. Be forthright. Do not hide behind lies and half-lies and as the UP people say, the truth will set you free. Face up to your decisions. Do not fret and try to anticipate other people’s reactions and, more importantly, do not dwell on their reactions. However, if you decide on something, you should be able to prove yourself right.

Your father cannot stress enough the importance of family. Between him and me, he is the one who has heart. He’s Homer. I am no Marge, sadly. What I am is a mother who wants to see all her children happy, content, leading useful and productive lives and who watches out for each other. The success of one is the success of the other. I am not talking of dole-outs. I am talking of time and effort and follow through to make each one’s life meaningful. All I can give right now is unconditional love, free of judgment but filled with action plans and guidance. And hugs. Yes, really.

I love you, Elisha. I say that with implicit fact rather than sweet sentimentality. Chill.

Always,
Mami (I am your)

4
I cry easily. A compliment, a spontaneous hug, an e-mail, that Globe commercial when there's a man in a wheelchair and there's a woman fussing over him and he sends her a text message and the woman looks up and smiles at him really soft-like. I cry easily, and even though I'll probably lynched by the gliterry literary world, I mean every tear when I mean every tear. Seeing my name in print, for example, or on a bulletin board along EDSA walk, those kinds of tears. And then my mother, who's caught me off-guard more times than I care to count.

I remember when my Pollyanna essay, Everybody Has a Story appeared in the Youngblood column and I called her while she was in the office, and when she came home, she had eight copies of the newspaper and a tub of strawberry ice cream, and she told me, laughing, how she'd knocked on the metal door of every closing sari-sari store just to get the copies. I remember, when I got accepted in Ateneo for AB European Studies, she told me to write a letter to the administration, asking to be shifted to BFA Creative Writing, because that's what I really want, wasn't it? And I remember, after a class with Sir Krip, when my short story The Return was discussed, and he'd told me during consultation, "I can't teach you anything else. You're a writer." And I called my mom, and we did some mutual giggling. I remember when that story got published in Free Press, and it was my mother I called first, and she kept saying Wow, and she kept saying, You're first short story published, in Free Press. Oh god, that's a big thing, right? and I remember how I stayed on the line as she Googled what Free Press was, and what it could mean. I remember that a year ago, in Calatagan, Martin sent me a text message, congratulating me on some good writerly news. And I ran to the nearest Internet shop (hard to do, in Calatagan, hello), and before I could think of the damage to my ridiculously unhealthy body, I ran to my mother, who was curled up in the bunk bed reading Byatt, and I said, "Mom. I got in. Dumaguete." I remember how she helped me pack, making a table of what I should be wearing for the day, and how we both forgot to pack some underwear, and so all my bras and panties were stuffed at what available nook and cranny there was. I remember her calling me up right after my first story was discussed, and I told her everything they said, and then I called her after my second story was discussed, I remember this phone call happened while everyone was in a Dance Tribute, and I was weaving my way in and out of the lawn, trying to keep my voice low. I remember when I came back, and my eyes were glazed, and we were in a cafe in Quezon, and she ordered some coffee, and she said, "You want to talk about it?" And I said, "I can't." And she said, "Ew, I don't think I want to know then." I remember when another story was published, and she laughed, and said, "Good job, love." I remember when Sarge Lacuesta sent me a (suspicious-looking, haha) email, informing me that The Return was a finalist in this year's Free Press Awards, and I'd stared, dumbfounded, at the computer screen, and then it was my mother I first thought of, and I sent her a message (short on load), and she replied with, and I quote, "WOOHOO." And then she called me and squealed, and said, "WOOHOO" again. I remember sending manic messages to her during the ceremony, telling her I had to go to the bathroom real bad, screw everything, and her telling me to Calm down. Apparently, B. loses her hair when she's stressed, and you lose your bowels. And I remember I texted her, "Didn't get anything, save for a box of matches. I'm off to get drunk." And I remember she replied with, "Okay. But not too drunk. You've got class tomorrow." I remember when I saw my name on the Heights bulletin board, telling me I was a fellow, and I remember I told her first. I remember the morning of the workshop, and she sent me a message, "Have fun. Chin up when criticism goes your way. Don't let your head grow big with whatever praise they give you." And I remember coming down from Antipolo, having lunch with her, and we both didn't have to say anything. I remember when Marra Lanot of Graphic told me This Fleet of Shadows would be published soon, and I remember my mother telling me, "You never cease to amaze me." I remember when I got the Heights issue came out, and I told her I had two stories there, and she said, "Yay, love. You never cease to amaze me, kid." And I remember her telling me, after reading Quick, the Tomatoes, "You never cease to amaze me. Can you really smoke aphids out?" And I remember I cried because of that, but I replied that yes, you really can smoke aphids out. I remember, just last night, telling her, "Mom, oh my god, the story in Graphic is out! Page 42! And Sir Krip's column, buwahahaha!" And she replied with, "Ah, wonderful. Congratulations! Where can I get a copy?" And I remember, how, just this morning, I told her how a professor had told me, "This girl can write," over that overly dramatic story of mine about the Japanese Occupation, and I remember that I quoted a barf-able line to her, "I truly have nothing to live for. And that makes me the perfect candidate to die for anything at all," and I remember how my mother wrote me, "Simply amazes me how you meld seemingly disparate words and turn them into a story." And I remember how I just sat back, and just stared at the computer, and tried to telepathically hug my mother, trying not to cry, because I was in Mag:net then, and Sir Rock was beside me, and it didn't seem polite to cry while he was staring at a picture of Sisig-stuffed Sili.

5
I wanted to make this as short as a paragraph, but you know how things are.

6
From Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson: "You said, 'I Love You.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I Love You' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body."

Wala lang. Bzzzt.

Electric girls with worn down toys

2008-09-26T03:11:00.004+08:00

The UAAP Basketball Finals, Game 2, brought to you by Sasha Martinez, told in the Third Person, because all the cool kids do it this way:

First Quarter: Sasha starts transferring files from old laptop to new one. Decides to turn borrowed, fuzzy TV on, for some noise. Ah, the game. Sends mandatory text to brother, who's studying in the La Salle, GO ATENEO, to which he replies, GO ATENEO. Watches as the Other Team scores four points. Picks up The Book Thief, has an attack of conscience, and picks up Nicomachean Ethics. Conscience decides to live up to its highly selective reputation, and allows Sasha to pick up Zusak again. One team has a higher score than the other, but fuzzy screen prevents interpretation. Chirpy TV voice informs her of the last two minutes of the quarter. And then, incredibly pain from insides starts. Lights a cigarette, checks her laptops, shuffles out of the room.

Second Quarter: Off to the bathroom with cigarette. Don't ask what she did there. After, suddenly remembers the laundry that's been hanging on the clothesline for about two days. Drenched wet, everything is. Goes back inside, drapes wet clothes over the back of a chair. Ateneo might be winning. Starts to fantasize of classes suspended. Thinks of st---- timeline game for a class tomorrow. 1973, my boyfriend was born. Someone is screaming on TV. Puts down Zusak, picks up Aristotle. Puts down Aristotle, diddles with laptop. Finds encoded journal entries from two years ago. Cringes. Cringes again. Another trip to the bathroom.

Third Quarter: Someone is mad on the television. Sasha sends P. a message, ordering him to be careful. Does a flashback. Does another flashback, this time while playing Bennett's As Time Goes By. Lights a cigarette. Someone's texted, needs to know what to do about the paper on Iliad, due for tomorrow. Thinks, Fuck it. Looks for her paper on Foucault, and Recto as a possible sexual landscape. Grins at the grade. Remembers mother's text when messaged, "I got an A!" -- "You never cease to impress me :-)." Remembers she didn't know what to send in reply, so she simply paused in the middle of the overpass she'd been crossing -- that is, until grimy little boy tells her to buy some bananas for him to eat. Sasha looks at the television; she knows she has to keep up: journalistic integrity and all that jazz. Back starts to hurt with all the bending over the laptops. Wonders about electricity bill.

Fourth Quarter: Someone is really mad on the television. One of them guys looks like the worst kind of asshole, the kind that gives you all those vomitocious looks while you're sprawled on the floor with an assortment of broken bones. (Yes, I typed in vomitocious. Try it. It’s fulfilling. Making up words makes you feel invincible.) Sasha starts to feel giddy -- whatever magical juju makes the TV work has allowed her to see more than fuzz and static: Ateneo is leading. Sasha thiks, Wow, we might actually win. Thinks of how it all fits together, 150 years, senior year, that guy Chris Tiu, whom she always sees around school but can never recognize until bewildered staring and five minutes later. Horrifies herself with the spurt of school spirit. Lights a cigarette, transfers Feist and The Killers and Yael Naim to her other laptop. Last two minutes. Someone's still pissed. Someone does a free throw. Last 45 seconds, Ateneo leads by ten points, give or take. Computes in her head: three three-point shots, plus a two-pointer for good measure. Admits she's fatalistic. Last 15 seconds: a blue smudge on the screen hugs the ball to his crotch. Thinks she might actually like this sport. Watches a swarm of blue and white on the court. Sees all the crying, and the hugging. Thinks of how it'd be if she were there, imagines the rancid stench of victory and Gatorade sweat. More people are hugging. Sasha texts brother, and mother, and P., none of whom reply. Insides start to ache again. Lights another cigarette. Turns the TV off. Stores away old laptop. Opens a Madison Hayes file on new laptop. Wriggles on the bed. Sneezes. Acknowledges the start of a headache. After five minutes, all the text messages flood in, telling her what she already sort of knows.

They taped over your mouth

2008-09-26T02:50:00.003+08:00

1 – My dad called me, said, “Magaling na raw magsulat ang anak ko a.” And I laughed, and joked, “Ay, kagaling raw nireng anak niyo, kagaling.” And I remembered how, in Calatagan, I’d be walking with my grandmother from our day in the market, and she’d stop by, it seemed to me then, every freaking house on the street, making idle chatter with the neighbors. And I’d listen to her talk to them, say, “Parang uulan ngayong hapon,” and then, she’d say, again, “Parang uulan ngayong hapon,” but slower now, almost as if the last thought was just for herself, something gentler than a mutter, something more iterative than a mumble. Ah, words.

2 – A week or so ago, P. got Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores and Of Love and Shadows. And so I sat down, ignored everything that I should've been doing, and read Memories, and hours later, I was done, and I had this gem: “Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.” Amen.

2.1 – I hereby resolve that before I turn twenty, I will have read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and this one, and that one), and not just have skimmed them, looking for the juicy parts. Pramis.

3 – Medyo late news 'to, ha, pero mahirap lang mawal sa utak ko. During the Heights book launch, AHWW co-fellow Brandz handed me a contributor’s copy. The pretty, hardbound one. The kind I never knew existed until about a year ago, when Martin brandished his, and I growled, “They give you that when you get published? I am so sending them my stuff.” Anyway. There I was, wearing pink (the pinkness of my shirt is relevant, it just is), with the book nestled in my spread palms, and I thought, Shit. The kind of Shit you say when you’re not exactly about to cry, more like so giddy and gaga over everything that you just want to go on a Hug Rampage. That kind of Shit. Yes, kinilig ako. (Translation: Yes, I so got kilig.) I opened the book to the table of contents, saw my name (saw my name again, buwahahaha). I ran to P., (and to Martin, to Marie, to Panch the Younger, and to Petra, haha), and I said, “Oh god, look.” Wasak lang.

Siguro dahil may history kaya wasak na wasak ako, haha. Siguro. I remember, freshman year, I submitted about five poems, and five short stories (sinagad e), and each and every one of them got rejected. Fine. Haha. It’s emo daw kasi (and this was before they all started using the word – iba talaga ‘pag pasimuno, hehe), pa-gothic. Astig lang na meron na na-publish na ‘ko sa wakas, haha. That’s the sentiment, haha: finally.

Wala sa isip kong magyabang. Kinikilig lang talaga ako. Malabo siguro, may mga iba diyan kung saan-saan na na-publish (parang pinaparinggan ko sarili ko, ang labo, haha), pero, eh, basta. Ayoko i-analyze masyado, pero eto masasabi ko: It’s almost the same feeling when you get yourself a new pair of skinny jeans, and you try them on for the first time, and you’re hopping around the damned room because they’re just so freaking tight on you, and then when you’ve calmed the zipper and the buttons down, ang sarap ng kapit ng tela sa hita mo, every centimeter of your legs can feel the rasp of that denim, the weave, even the stitching running along the side. So, yeah, beyond the observation that I wear really tight pants, that’s what this particular publication feels like. Apir!

(At sa wakas, na-publish din kami ni Martin sa (technically) isang anthology, or publication. Sabi naming dati, at least once, simulan namin sa Heights. Sure, you have to flip over the book to see each of our names, pero okay na’ko dun, for now. Cool lang, hehe.)

4 – I have been chanting, “Get thee to the nunnery!” since yesterday afternoon, and it is, quite frankly, driving me crazy.

And doesn't this sound familiar?

2008-09-22T00:52:00.004+08:00

Far Too Much, On Nights Like These

Here we sit in a café yellowed with the refrains of old songs, when everyone in this town must be asleep, when people we know have already turned twice in their beds, when people we wish we never knew hear the mutters of their bedmates. See there, even lamplights wink with the rare cars zooming by with roars far too much like an argument we refuse to forget. Don’t you think those explosions of steel and haste wish to quiet themselves, to huddle in the next-to-darkest cul-de-sac, rumbling only when the breeze proves too cold? Don’t you think those tired bulbs high above us want of a stronger wind, that their long, singular limbs could be allowed to creak, before they succumb to their necks badly in need of craning? Look away from walls, my dear, please, ask someone to turn the radio down. We are yet to look at the stars, barely visible, yes, that we could think they have sneaked off for a nap, think this, if only to feel better for ourselves. Look, could you, look—the waning of light reaching us far too late, pinpricks on the sky content (we think) to be without sound. Look, and later, we will have to go to our own beds, ready ourselves with things we have not dared to speak of on nights like this, later still. And I know, my friend, tomorrow, we will talk of how all of these, all of them with their blinking and their disguised whimpers filled our heads with far too much sheen and rhythm, that in the last few moments of our waking, we still touch our hands to our mouths, expecting the few bars of a dead mother’s lullaby, or the sudden, vast glare peeking from between our fingers.

For Kael.

And it was all yellow

2008-09-18T23:18:00.003+08:00

While tweaking the short story “Marga” (for FA workshop class), some thoughts, here are:

1 - It’s hard to give a convincing description of a very important tree when you don’t spend too much time thinking about them. What was it that Zoe said? Something about hating nature in general, but trees are pretty? Zoe? Anyhoo. This will not turn into a moralistic soliloquy (I love how that word’s spelled) about the environment, about trees dying, about other things the environment people are worried about. I am simply saying that when it comes to a pretty obvious objective correlative, I am epically failing. Like, okay, the tree. It’s big. And gnarly. Sort of brown, but more green. That’s about it.

2 - “Marga” is the story of Nora Ortiz, who, as some of you may know, is Michelle and Alice’s stepmother. This thing has been brewing in my head for quite some time now, and a couple of months ago, it simply refused to be written. (I remember that I’d despaired about this to [Sir] Larry Ypil, and he’d told me something like, “Sasha, I think you should move on.”) Anyway, I was banging away on my laptop, talking about the mangoes in various stages of rot on top of the hill (you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, do you?) and it just came to me, like, yeah, you know, whapaaak! – I’d described Nora, in “The Catherine Theory” as: She smelled like mangoes, picked at just the right time. And there I was, alone in a messy fall-out shelter of an apartment, whooping and screaming at the gahdamned synchronicity of it all. Bad writer ba kung hindi mo talaga sinadya yung mga bagay? Bahala na kayo sa opinyon niyo. Basta, I love it when it all comes together (*rubbing hands together*). Good job, subconscious. Or unconscious. Whatever. Wee.

3 - I was an idiot to volunteer to have this butchered for FA workshop class. And be butchered, it will. The story screams, Yes I know this particular tree is quite important, but I simply do not like trees right now.

4 - I do like trees, though. I do. (See "Pancho Birthday Renga 2008" below.)

5 - The computer tells me I can’t describe the leaves as aflurry. But it makes sense, I want to tell the computer. It makes perfect sense! Leaves! Aflurry! How about a-flurry, then? Oh, never mind. Tree's leaves are are green-ish.

6 - Uh, yeah. Midnight deadline.

PS - Fire trucks are whizzing along Katipunan, and they're, like, making wang-wang, you know. And me, stuck here in the internet shop, having uploaded the short story for the class, I have to wonder: Are they going to my dorm because they better not because oh god my books, my red boots, Donkeybert! Ahem. On my way now, keep yer fingers crossed.

C'mere, I'ma feed you a leaf

2008-09-17T15:48:00.004+08:00

Pancho Birthday Renga 2008
by Various Artists (harhar)

I am thinking of a tree,
or a leaf, the lone downward spiral
I will think of again in a colder hour
when the space between words allows
the murmuring of certain brown things
that used to gleam and glint upon flight,
and still do, sunlight catching perfect
geometries, the way old pictures seem
so precise – brown background, brown
clothes. Pigments turning into a shade
of sepia, setting a saffron brilliance upon faces,
upon the length of one’s arm resting.
But then comes the turning
of season, coming of green, and other vibrant,
innocent birthings. This is a leaf,
I say to the tree. Thank you for this.
I am held in awe.

*

Marami akong puwedeng sabihin. Pero sa amin na lang yun.
Happy birthday, love. You are now divisible by 5, and/or 7.
Good job. Apir.

Where the neon signs are pretty

2008-09-09T13:23:00.004+08:00

Some people over at CERN are conducting an experiment, which seeks to recreate the beginning/birth wah-hever of the Earth, some 300 feet below the French/Swiss border. The experiment, if successful, wah-hever it is/becomes, could create a teeny-tiny black hole, that, over time, could suck Earth and everything in it, into it. More scientific/idiotic juju here.

Wee.

If the world ends tomorrow at 3:24 PM, I'm going to have lots of bleep!, read as much books as I can, and sleep away the rest of the duration of the Earth's existence.

Oh, who am I kidding, I'll probably just bleep! and scream my head off, two things which are not completely unrelated.

Aherm.

Feel my bones on your bones

2008-09-09T12:43:00.003+08:00

Taking a break from work:

1 – Taking a break from the paper I have to finish by early tonight – an analysis of the Magsaysay and Garcia administrations – I picked up the book Karyl lent me (and I want it, not-so-subtle nudge nudge, wink wink, haha). In my new cave at the dorm (yeah, moved a couple of rooms down the hall), I read, and, some odd hours later, finished reading Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl. Yeah, I know. It’s quite entertaining, funny, shamelessly honest, and overall an intelligent read, and I say this last bit with my Serious Face on. Whoever this Anonymous is (ah, that long-running joke about Anonymous being a prolific bastard, harhar), some girly applause to you. Yes, this might all be fictional, written by some middle-aged balding man with too much of a gut, smoking fat cigars, while his pet poodle rests against his pennyloafers . . . and this last bit just went on too long.

If only prostitution were as lucrative here in our sunny-muddy little country, as it is in England, particularly in London. (See, there is an elephant [or hippo, or whale, or rhino, or whatever ample creature there is around] growing in the room: the matter of my degree. Rich-and-powerful awesomeness with a Creative Writing/Literature diploma seems like a rather dim possibility. And so I’m keeping my options open.)

Also, it’s making me consider, more seriously, writing a purely fictional sex blog. Think of it as a literotic exercise of some sort. And schizophrenic too: why not detail the nonexistent existence of theoretical sex blog author? Why not? I’ll tell you why not: There is this hurdle to leap over: I cannot write a decent sex scene without giggling. Just typing in nipple could send me into paroxysms of seven-year-old laughter. Where’d the sexy-time juju go? My blockmates say it’s because I’m no longer repressed. Foucault says there is no such thing as repression, that society deludes itself with and within a repressive hypothesis. I say, there’s just too much information. Besides, although my imagination is giddy at the thought of writing one squeee-and-squick entry every day, there is such a thing as the creative juices drying up – what the hell is it with these innuendos?

2 – Because I had to finish yet another paper in History (oof, did I just sound like I was complaining? Did I, oh my?), wasn’t able to prepare my application for the Ateneo Nationals [read: didn’t get to actually finish writing any decent story]. Yes, I am vaguely pissed – only vaguely because everything exhausts me these days, from choosing what brand of tissue won’t scrape the skin of my bleep off, to being pissed. I cannot believe I actually prioritized school over my writing (insert ironic little laugh here). Well, the bright side is, I’ve got two-and-half new stories [with my usual WTF titles of “Marga,” “Understanding Fish,” and “The Children of Mira Bella” – I’ve always sucked at titles; methinks every CW curriculum must offer an elective dedicated solely to titling the shit you do] wanting of a couple of sentences to tie them up. And so, there’s always my thesis.

[3 – If you’re interested, I submitted my almost-two-year-old story, the hastily (and ineffectively) revised “These Dark Hours,” for that History class project. It’s got everything: action, romance, betrayal, patriotic bull, Japanese soldiers, water torture, women slipping notes into their camisoles (and I remember asking about five people the question: “Did women wear bras in the forties?”). The assignment, then, for Sir Krip’s fiction class was: develop a love story (about twenty pages) in the time of a great crisis – have one character be conscious of the fact that he may breathe his last in a couple of pages’ time, or bomb the country into itty bits and pieces, or Global Warming. Tempted to go for that last one, but seventeen-year-old me couldn’t think of anything sufficiently romantic about the Earth melting – although a scene pops into the mind: woman lying on her stomach, on a floating piece of ice, in the middle of a freezing ocean, holding on to the near-stranger loverboy submerged in aforementioned freezing ocean. But that one felt rather familiar. Meh. So yeah. Made the lay-out of the story sparkly-er, if only for creative plus points (because in some circles, fiction ain’t creative enough, gah).]

4 – In connection with numbers 1 and 2 above, I have decided to submit something smutty for my thesis workshop class next week – that is, if I finish the damned thing before the Thursday midnight deadline. It’s called "Bones" (get it? get it? ugh). To say that this piece was, erm, inspired by P. and his collection of bulalo/lechon bones would most probably just make you think nasty thoughts – for the record, I speak of the literal kind bones (as opposed to, what, the figurative kind of bones, gah?). Bones. Italicized, bold, underlined, font 25. And yes, being that I find myself the illegal spokesperson for the man’s cute widdle idiosyncrasies – and I know I’ll get in trouble because of that, haha – allow me to say it more clearly: P. collects bones. It’s a rather impressive collection, if decidedly morbid. Downside: the stench is just awful when they rot, or when he marinades them in a concoction of bleach, brake fluid, and whatever liquid there is lying around the house; restaurants probably we think we keep mutated gargantuan puppies as pets when we ask for a doggie bag of every bone that happens to be in the kitchen. But whatever makes the man happy, though objectively disgusting, is, erm, tolerable. Haha!

PS – Googling some do-it-yourself decomposition strategies for P., trying to remember what it was in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" that's being triggered. Upon sight of some really icky sites of graphic walk-throughs of decomposition and skeletonization processes, I had it: It's not the arsenic, you idiot, it was the motherfucking lime! Lime, rarr.

PPS – If y’all would do me a favor, and not tell him that you know about his bones, and his blow torch, and god knows what else I’ve yakked about him, that would be really nice. Hehe. He.

5 – Reading Octavio Paz’ The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism. Blame it on the endless Foucault, and the recent re-call for submissions for the Coming Soon anthology. Long story: The last call for submissions, there I was, staring (giggling) in front of my laptop, hours before the deadline. Needless to say, I did not make it, because by the end of the night, I most probably just picked up a Theo reading to calm the hormones – among other, erm, handy things [I did not mean that to be suggestive, I swear].

Anyway, so there it was, the re-call for submissions (and mental hugs and congratulations to all the writers who got accepted on the first go, esp. almost – birthday girl Margie de Leon, and hunny-bunny Marie, whose poem "If I said I was drawn to the idea of the body," I just commented on a couple of nights ago, saying, Oh god, this is hot, I love it, I really like it) and there I was, thinking Yeah, why not? So I did a round at the library for research [research because the only erotica I’ve been exposed to is the online, typo-ridden smut, but yes, I admit you didn’t need to know that], booed it for not having any Anaïs Nin handy (although hello, Harold Robbins, subjective eww, haha), and found Paz. I don’t know how this will help me, because it’s booty-ful, and makes the probability of me giggling at my own work more, er, probable, but hey. Yeah, whatever.

6 – A quote of some sort is the usual closing for these entries, no? "All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh..." This one's from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which I need to re-read, not because it's been quite relevant for sometime (ha-haaa, people), but because, well, I want to... Along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, because it turned my then-pubescent brain into moosh.

Now. Back to work.

Somewhere down the road

2008-09-05T18:15:00.004+08:00

On School
1 - For Philosophy: Supplementary readings four inches thick? Bring it on. Sasha is (not) reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Plato's Cretan City (although she does giggle when she says, Cretan -- haha, Cretan). Sasha (did not) read The Use of Pleasure anyway, and (randomly highlighted parts of) the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality. Who's a good student, who?

2 - Compilation of works for thesis, deadline October four: How to complete a collection of stories for your fiction class when the crummy (Krame) laptop that contains everything you've ever written refuses to cooperate, to actually turn on when you poke the On button?

3 - History film: I wanted to do a John Torres, settled for Mangled Sasha Martinez and Homicidal Groupmates. The professor was pleased, perky-pleased. And I, to quote, "gave [her] goosebumps" with that paper I wrote on the American Occupation, and the English language (angas eh), and the analysis/slammage of Agoncillo. The groupmates who, less than two days ago, had me on top of their To-Strangle list, I hear, are, I hear, relieved that I actually did not fuck this one up. Meh.

4 -In Theo class, while discussing the book of Amos, on that passage that warns that if the people stop running around in gleeful sin, God will step on mountains, and the mountains will melt. And the teacher asked, "What does it imply, those mountains melting?" And I said, "Global Warming." And everybody laughed. Amen.

5 - Western Classical Lit: Sir Gawain's Green Knight is literally green. Because of some juju Morgan le Fay did, but what matters is that he's literally green. I forgot to ask if he glowed.

On Writing
1 - I need four stories by Monday, and then another by the eleventh. Yes? Yes.

2 - Sasha is happy. Tayo na sa Antipolo: Fellows for this year's Ateneo-Heights Writers Workshop announced, and I'm one of them. Wee, plus a bounce around the room.

3 - Writing? Yes. Uh. Right. "...I know that the words are collecting at the tips of my fingers and that if I don't shake them out over the keyboard they could go backwards and form word clots around my heart. Word clots are worse than blood clots -- because blood clots more or less kill you as soon as they reach a vital area in your body, but word clots just stay, occasionally giving you heartburn with all the things you could have said but didn't." From You Are Here by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan. So, yeah. Bring on them word clots.

As I was saying

2008-08-31T22:46:00.005+08:00

Pretend nothing bad's happening, pretend you learned new definitions for age-old monikers. Fuck the world. (Guess who bought Open Secrets by Alice Munro, The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, and Ignorance by Milan Kundera?) Shoot. (Today is the absolute last, I swear. I needed something to do during that mind-slooshing wait in that stark white room. I conveniently forgot to bring a book with me.)

*

The Quiet World
by Jeffrey McDaniel

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it
to my ear without saying hello.
In the restaurant I point
at chicken noodle soup. I am
adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long
distance lover and proudly say
I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond, I know
she's used up all her words
so I slowly whisper I love you,
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

*

P. gave me a classicized Eeyore the Emo Donkey, among other things. (In compensation: he got himself a blow torch, for Chrissakes.) Here's hoping Moosebert doesn't act up. But the newly christened Eeyorebert is so goddamned awesomely puking cuteness, it's disintegrating quite a lot of brain cells, and I fucking love everything.

Dance to this beat

2008-08-30T07:23:00.006+08:00

Drug, obsession, whatever. Toss in all those clichés this way, because, damn it, I cannot stay away from books. I've already taken over a bookshelf of my roommate. Some books are still in boxes, from my move some months ago. And some books found their way to Pancho's already overpopulated shelves, competing with shiny copies of Toot and Puddle, Winnie the Pooh, art books and art magazines galore, the occasional girlie magazine for space. I've gone hungry more times than I care to count, if only for something like that sparkly copy of Auster (which I unintentionally stole from Martin, hehe). Reviews for exams have been pointedly ignored, just so I could find out what happens to people like Astrid Magnussen (White Oleander, by Janet Fitch). And yeah, I've ditched many an inuman, and, erm, some poetry readings here and there (haha) because I cannot put Ann Bleeping Beattie down.

(Yeah, I'm a loser. A broke one, at that.)

After listing down a ridiculous tonnage of books a couple of days ago, National Bookstore decides to hold a SuperMegaUber Sale. The bastards. What's a girl to do?

It was a Thursday afternoon, and I was dragging my ass from the yearbook shoot (more on that, later). Was supposed to meet Pancho, so we could head on over to Trinoma to engage in a whole lotta "Awwww" for Wall-E. There I was, on (in?) the overpass, keying in a message to Pancho, and hello, red banner that is salvation/damnation. Whose wonderful idea was it to do this, now? Goddamned fucking sale, come 'ere, lemme hug you, then stab you as you leave for the door. Hay. And perhaps this is another indication that the universe is conspiring against me, because, well, coding si Herbert (as Sarj and I have christened Pancho's car), and my body hurt from what I did to myself sa yearbook shoot. The message I finally sent to Pancho was, "Crap. National Bookstore sale of cosmic proportions. Patayan na 'to." To which he replied, "Meet you in National in thirty minutes." Groan.

Guess what I did? Oh god, I couldn't help it. Apparently, Pancho couldn't either. (Wall-E, dearest, you're cute and all, but you know, things happen. It's not you, it's us. And... well, I've known books long before I knew about you. I'm sorry things didn't work out between the three of us. We could have been great together. But. You know. I'll try to catch you on DVD, okay?)

Pancho over there took some books of poetry, a uterus-cramping book of Romanesque art and architecture, lots more art books, and a book about turtles. And me? Well. Huwag na nating ilista. Basta marami. Marami talaga.

And that wasn't enough. Of course not. Because Friday afternoon, though running a fever, I stopped by the LS Bookstore. And squeals of squeals: I found a fantastically orange copy of Wilfrido Nolledo’s collection of short fiction, Cadena de Amor and Other Short Stories in the LS Bookstore. And then I squealed some more, because Nolledo, bless his soul, is absolute love. And then I realized that if I bought it, I’d starve the rest of the week. And then I bought the book anyway. (Plus two stretchy black hair bands for Pancho, who, if not wearing chopsticks filched from unsuspecting restaurants and wedding receptions, likes to steal my own hair thingamabobs. And an ID protector, whose purpose is to allow my ID, which has been sat on and slept on into three perfectly triangular pieces, to have some semblance of wholeness to last until March, after which it retires into a packet of my father’s wallet, joining all the other IDs that preceded it, along with my brothers’.)

Where was I?

Well. I can never have too much books. (That's what I keep telling myself.) I can't wait to be rich and powerful so I finally get to buy every goddamned book I ever wanted! Buwahahahahaha. And that yellow dress.

(If you're interested, I've been reading Sir Sawi, Sir Butch, Nolledo, Munro, Sebold, and some Snoopy, all at the same time, and I am going fucking crazy. What a wonderful way to go.)

*

Yearbook shoot last Thursday too. Karla, the hairdresser/make-up artist oh-so-magically transformed my snail-butt of a face to something rather Photoshopped, and I wasn't complaining. "Do you want me to straighten your hair?" he/she asked. I shook my head no, rather nervously. (Sasha is a pushover of the ages. Service crew at fast food chains know that they can get me to say Uh, yes, what, yes to anything they offer, provided they say it fast, plus cheery smile.) "You going as Dyesebel?" I shook my head no, thought why I didn't think of going as a mermaid. It would've been less painful.

See, for my creative shot, I "dressed up" as a bookwhore. Snort. (How literal, how contrived, how obvious.) Well. The original plan was that I look like a ton of books dropped out of the sky and landed smack dab in the middle of my torso, and I'd be lying on the floor with my glasses askew, and my tongue lolling out. But since Sasha is The Legendary Excitable Pushover, when the photographer said, "No, just stare into the camera, just like that. And put that tongue back in your mouth," I followed to the letter, resulting in a rather dazed expression on my face, which could be interpreted by my future grandchildren as either seduction or catatonia. Yeah. I have no idea how this happened. Idiot.

There I was, on the floor, books strewn all around me. Books I'd lugged from home, to the studio-of-sorts, hardcovers all of them (because Sasha is an occasional idiot as well). By the time I was finished, most of the people in the room had gathered around the moron on the floor, pointing and shit. I made a lot of friends that day.

The formal toga pose, plus the casual shot, went well enough. I was glowy. Mermaid-ic. I texted my mother, "Oh my god, I look damn good!" to which she replied, "Huh." First couple of shots, I had this crazed grin on my face, which led the terrorized photographer to say, "Uh, don't smile too big, okay?" Okay.

I like the pictures. Now I just have to figure out 50 people who'll want wallet-sized copies of them all. Any takers?

Just because we use cheats

2008-08-26T00:57:00.004+08:00

1 - Martin sent me a superfantabulous write-up for the yearbook, and it is love. Like I wrote to Martin, although the first part made me squirm (I do not like to imagine myself as a, erm, monument), those last bits made me smile, really smile, and then, yeah, cry a little (and, as I've said to Martin, yet again, making me cry is not exactly that difficult thing to do, but this one's just a whammy). You know that feeling when you're faced with such a seemingly insurmountable delight (weird word choices, but I'll keep them), and you don't know whether to hide under the nearest blanket, or launch yourself to the world and hug the life out of it? That feeling? Yeah. This write-up pretty much rocks that. :) Salamat, Martin. Maraming-maraming salamat. Fluffy pink bunnies are cavorting as we speak.

2 - Some good writerly news: There is Wednesday to look forward to, yes? Yes. If I don't get to bring anything home to my mother (and no self-deprecation here, just a really strong hunch), there's always the free booze I can filch for my proud, darling father. And yes, I said darling father. Cool it. And there's more, yes, there's more. After three years of rejection/snubbery, two stories of mine are set to be published in Heights. There's "Quick, the Tomatoes," and that piece with the long-ass title of, "Because Tomorrow They Come And It Will Be Raining When They Do," which I'm thinking of giving a title-makeover, to something like, "Oh Fuck It." And then another story is getting published in Graphic, "This Fleet of Shadows." I don't know why I'm letting you know all this. Like my legendary write-up says, this is not my thing. But I don't know. Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts, and then I'm going to float. Float. Float. A pat on the back to me. (And now I better go back to writing that paper for Philo, the one about Recto as a possible sexual landscape. Gah.)

3 - This here is a shameless birthday plug. I'm turning nineteen on the second of September. I would like to get a cookie. Preferably Mrs. Fields, because they've gone bankrupt, and I don't think I can live with myself if I've never eaten a goddamned cookie of theirs (hers). Stop sniggering. Mrs. Fields' Cookie. Stop sniggering, damn it. Anyway, a book would be nice too. A couple of days ago, I finally relented, and watched Love in the Time of Cholera with Pancho, though I haven't read the book. So, yeah. Books would be nice too. And a laptop. Maybe some new shoes. And I've always wanted a yellow dress. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

4 - "It's strange how your mind plans ahead for such an eventuality while simultaneously hoping against hope that it will not happen." - from A Friend Like Henry, by Nuala Gardner. Yeah. That's sort of what my mind's running on these past few weeks.

5 - My mom suggested I go as Daphne. You know, the ditzy redhead in Scooby-Doo. But I've always liked Velma. So I don't know. On the 28th, it's either purple leggings, or orange ones. Yeahba. Hay. I planned on going as Sharon Stone's character in Basic Instinct, before she uncrosses her legs. That would be cool. Rawr.

6 - Yeah, I'm just procrastinating. See you, everyone. It's Shpartah time.

Parked car, night sky

2008-08-20T01:43:00.005+08:00

Because I'm procrastinating, and I think it's raining outside, and I'm sure I don't have an umbrella:

1 - By all means, I should be safely tucked in bed, or at least writing for shit's sake, instead of Googling Michael Phelps (kalaglag-panty, pramis), Mrs. Fields' bankruptcy (remind me to buy some cookies), and sexy-places in Recto. Hello.

2 - Aside from all that, that scene from Far and Away keeps playing on loop in my head, the one where Tom Cruise dies, and the camera follows his soul around the fields and the clouds, and Nicole Kidman is wailing all over him, and then his soul does a somersault and lands back into his body with a great, big gasp from him. Yes, that scene. I love that movie. It appeals to my Fabio-Covered-Books obssession. Gahdamn, I can never spell obsession right. Single S, double S! Anyway. Far and Away, rich girl, poor boy, pretending to be siblings, lives in a whorehouse, boy does a bit of Fight Club, girl shows her knickers dancing, they get separated because she's oh-so-sick and he realizes he can't take care of her, and then a long time later, they meet again, in some land-grabbing thing, and they hook up again, and I remember she's wearing blue, and wow, do I love that movie. Atrocious accents and all.

3 - I have this grand plan. Someday, when I'm rich and powerful, I'm going to write a historical romance novel set in the Philippines. Jill Barnett, romance novelist, did that with Just A Kiss Away, which is set in the Philippines, about 1896. I love this book (it's all about luuuurve), and I find it funny that Antonio Luna has a minor role. Now, I've been thinking, why can't I write a romance novel? None of those 35-peso books sold in 7-11s, but full-length novels with lots of hot men and swooning and sexy time? Why not? Yes. I'll do that. Get back to me in about ten years, give or take.

4 - Yes, I read romance novels. Get over it.

5 - On being rich and powerful. I told my mother my laptop refuses to work. It's shuddered its last shudder. And she said, "Oh, and we can't get a new one until --" And I butted in with, "Yeah, I know, when I'm rich and powerful," and she laughs, and says, "Actually, I was going to say, in December, but that works too."

6 - Good writerly news in my e-mail, and I'm tickled pink. I wanted to reply with, "You're fucking kidding me right?" Or even, "Okay. Who put you up to this?" Hay. Good tidings, and fluffy pink bunnies, and rainbows coming out of my ass. See? Happy. A part of me still thinks that it might be a mis-send (haha), though I'm keeping my fingers crossed, but only loosely, hehe. Little ol' 18-year-old me from the toad-splattered streets of Imus, and all that jazz. (Goddamned self-deprecation.) But I'm happy, ridiculously happy. Order of information dissemination: my mother (immediately called her up, and she squealed, and said, WOOHOO), Zoe (almost hysterically buzzed her on YM, and she replied with, "Oh, I'm happy for you -- what's this again?"), and then I ran out of the shop to Pancho (who gave me a high-five, haha, oh love), Martin (mental apir too, hehe), and then Marie (to whom I gave a rather pretentious write-up, for Heights, haha, and who kicks ass with her Palanca win!), and then there's this blog, although I realize I'm not making a lot of sense. (Besides, if I put this in a long paragraph, and plunk it in the middle of a long-ass entry, your eyes would've probably glazed over by now.) Okay. I'm talking about this too much. But, but, but. You know when you get really good news, and you turn the television on, and there's all this mess about rapes and pillages and burninatings of countrysides, and you keep wondering, "Jeebus, why the hell aren't they talking about how happy I am?" Yeah. Sometimes, I think the world revolves around me. It often does, you know.

7 - Happy birthday to Official Two-Year-Fixation Miyo Sta. Maria (got you!), sexy testudinine poetess Nikita Paredes, and my mother, who said this afternoon, "Yeah, I've been lying in bed all weekend, reading books. What's wrong with lying in bed all weekend, reading books? Can't I lie in bed all weekend and read books when I'm turning forty-one?!" That's my mother. I luuurve you. :)

8 - Okay. That's it. Awat na. Relax.

9 - Last brainfart. Ernest Hemingway, y'all (though with some contentions) -- "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

I'm of consenting age

2008-08-19T23:22:00.005+08:00

And so this bloated weekend is coming to a close, and I hate it. I've done nothing but sleep all weekend, give or take a bottle of Mudslide or a couple of glasses of RhumCoke, some books I've been meaning to get to, and mad scribbling on my journal. I just want this weekend to go on, and on, and on. But it can't. Damn it, it can't. And then, there are other things.

On Pseudo-Writing
The subtitle is an attempt at self-deprecation. Just enough that you'll feel a little sympathetic while I recount how blah writing's been for me lately. It's all part of my grand plan. Anyway. I've tried to look over and revise some pieces I'm thinking of applying with, to the Heights workshop, and even though I just want to grab a convenient stapler and whack my laptop, I've got to grin and bear this, because meh, if I don't get in, or don't make the deadline, at least I've got two new stories for Acorn Purposes, that is, acorns, term borrowed from Stephen King's Bag of Bones, these refer to those stories you exhume when a deadline's coming up, or you need to show somebody you're actually writing. If you're wondering, I've run out of acorns. Everything's been trashed in workshops and I'm not feeling up to touching them yet, or published/about to be (yey), or written while I was about thirteen (with titles like, “Deliverance” and “Twisted Angel” and “In Moveless Woe” and the borrowed, “Crash Course in Polite Conversations”). I need to stock up. I get this indescribable panic when I look at my file folder labeled “!Completed Stories” and realize there's nothing there that I can use.

And so I'm writing. Or trying to, given the ridiculousness of senior year, the myriad demands of life and love as we know it. As we know it. I started a story a couple of days ago, and the main character's a teenager with the proverbial chip on her shoulder, and I love her so much, but then Sparkly Literary Moodliness gets in the way, and so that story – with the working title of “Stay” – has been put on hold, indefinitely. And then there's this other story, about two pages of which I started writing this afternoon, and it's in the first person, and said first person is a jaded old coot, and so schizophrenic little me has been bitchy since then. And both are about love. Because I'm eighteen, and apparently a girl, and that's all I can write about, you know? Like, because love is like the only thing that's like, yeah, worth writing about, talking about at 3 AM in a McDonald's, crying over while The Cure plays in the background. All you need is love. And who said, “If love is the answer, what is the question?” Not in the mood to Google it. Just know it's not mine, and I don't know who said it. Yeah.

There's a blinky deadline on all the walls I look at. Plus I've been spending the past few weeks narrating my life as I lived it. This is madness. This is Shpartah.

UPDATE: My laptop officially refuses to turn on. I've whacked the adapter a couple of times, which usually works, but now. Yeah. Dead screen. Literally. God damn it.

On My TBR-Mountain
And perhaps I'm compensating for something, but I've been amassing quite a lot of books, half of which I haven't even touched. God. I do admit that I am gloating. Because most of you friends and frenemies like books, and even though some of the titles here do not appeal to you because either they're not just your type, or you're a snob, haha, I kid, anyway, I know you'll understand the un/fortunate condition of Book Whore-age.

My name is Sasha Martinez, and I am a Book Whore. Book whore, you know. You've got to buy that book, because even though you stink at math, you know that the odds of finding the same book at that idiotly priced price is nil. Jesus. And damn it, never mind if you won't have any money left to feed yourself for a week, you have to buy that Hoffman, because Christ, how many pristine hardcover editions of Skylight Confessions will practically throw itself at you?It's a hopeless condition, I've long ago accepted that.

Many thanks to my mother and Pancho, who are crucial in encouraging this disease. That is, I will send my mother a message, something like, “I'm broke, but I've got A.S. Byatt on my bookshelf.” And she'll pretend to give me a sermon on me being too thin, but then we've always been those strange girls whose top three material priorities consist of food at third place, with shoes/clothes and books vying for first, with books bitch-slapping shoes/clothes most of the time. And then there is Pancho. I don't know a lot of people who'll gleefully spend five hours in a bookstore, digging through the discount bin, or going through the overload-age of the shelves on the fourth floor of NBS Superbranch at Cubao. He understands when I screech, “OMGWTFBBQ, it's Toot and Puddle! For 150!” or mutter, “God, I am so hungry – is that Janet Fucking Fitch?”or whisper all-too-reverentially, “It's so cheap. Thank God for stupid people,” never mind the meanness, the inanity, the addiction. One kick-ass memory: the two of us wheeling our pushcart of purchases out of the bookstore, stopping for a cigarette break, and realizing our palms are covered in nerd-dirt. Ah, sweet.

Basa pa. You can never have too much books. And on that note: malapit na akong mag-birthday. I can never have too much books. You hear me? I will be nineteen soon, and I can never have too much books!

Ahem. And a happy week to all of you.

Chiaroscuro

2008-08-02T19:17:00.007+08:00

You cannot believe how many times I tried spelling Chiaroscuro for that title, gah.

The upcoming 33rd installment of the Happy Mondays Poetry Nights on August 4, 2008 @ mag:net cafe Katipunan will kick off earlier than usual, with cocktails at 6:30 pm for the launch of Chiaroscuro, a book of poems by Joel M. Toledo. Followed by readings at 8pm by the featured poets and fictionists: Marjorie Evasco, Jimmy Abad, Butch Dalisay, J. Neil Garcia, Marne Kilates, Krip Yuson, Rebecca Añonuevo, Mookie Katigbak, Sarge Lacuesta, Ramil Gulle, Larry Ypil, Mikael Co, Angelo Suarez, Arkaye Kierulf, Conchitina Cruz, Daryll Delgado, Pancho Villanueva, Waps San Diego, Marie La Viña, Joseph Saguid, Sasha Martinez, Kash Avena, Kris Lacaba, and Khavn De la Cruz. Poetry reading shall be hosted by Lourd De Veyra, readings up to 10pm, followed by music from Los Chupacabras and Dead Pop Stars.

FREE ADMISSION the whole evening. Punta na, people. Cocktails! Poetry! A book! Sir Jimmy! Cocktails!!!

PS - My clumsiness pays off. Go, book cover, by Pancho Villanueva.

Well when you go

2008-07-31T16:27:00.003+08:00

Something to cheer everyone up:

Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of these terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

- Virginia Woolf's suicide note to her husband Leonard.

(If I ever write a suicide note, I would like to use the word shan't because it is so fucking quaint. No, keep your pants on, I won't kill myself. At eighteen, and with the way I've led my life, a suicide would be quite anti-climactic. And no, it's not that I won't kill myself, simply because I think suicide is for sissies. Actually, I think there's a peculiar kind of braveness to [insert preferred way of going here], and waiting for things to happen. I'm a girl who won't ever get a tattoo because 1, the buzzing needle will have me peeing my pants, and 2, I will most probably say, in the middle of the process, Ah, joke lang, joke lang, promise! I don't think I can do that with [insert preferred way of going here]. That's just me.

If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. If I had something to drunk, or were more of a zombie than I am now, I would say: Oh, it happened, and it was you. You know that, don't you? But since I've got most of the parts I need to function as someone posing as sane, my reaction to this particular line, is to quote Joan Silber, from her short story, "Ashes of Love," a quote give or take a few gender reference replacements: "In bed I would feel a terrible mellowness in my heart. Whenever her head was resting on my chest or we were lying flat under the covers, holding hands, I would drift off to sleep and hear myself think, thank you for this." Gets? Gets? Thank you.)

Love Me Sexy

2008-07-30T16:11:00.004+08:00

1 - Love Me Sexy.
Come on, people, haven't you seen Semi-Pro? "That’s right girl, let me whisper in your ear / Baby wake up, we’re naked and we’re humpin’ sexy / For the last fifteen minutes baby, that’s what’s been happenin’ / Yeah, too late now, it’s on." Watch the movie, if only for the song. Although that Jive Turkey part was priceless. Hm. I think only two people know what I'm talking about.

2 - I'm benta when you're drunk
Apparently, I'm a fantastic comedienne when about 2.4 people in the vicinity are drunk. I'll take that. Oh, love. Waps says I have a blorvely manly-man voice. Blorvely. What a wonderful name for your theoretical child. Hello, these are my kids: That one's Anja, this is Lucas, and that one there, we don't talk about it much, it's name is Blorvely. Blorvely, c'mere boy, c'mere, that's a good kid, who's a good kid? Who's a good kid? Yes, you are, yes, you are! Yes. You. Are! Ah, shit, Blorve, not again! Oh, sorry, we've been trying to potty-train him for about six years now, but I think he takes comfort in bare walls. Hay, that was an awfully belabored point-proving right there. Quite mean, too. Eh.

Give me a bit of space to tell you people that I wasn't drunk. No, I wasn't. That I was swaying only because I was identifying with the motion of the Earth in the most infinitesimal level. That I quoted Neruda because it really felt like the heavens unfastened. That when I asked about seven people if they liked sex, I really meant to say, "A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved," from Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut. That when I told everyone, "Dude, I love you. No, no, I don't think you get me -- I. Love. You. Cool, no?" That when I laughed, and laughed, and laughed some more, it was because I was trying to hide the pain (okay, that had me snorting, hahaha, tangina). That I sat on the McDo counter, and crossed my legs because the cashier asked me to. No, I wasn't drunk. Of course I wasn't. Three Vodka Mudshakes, 2 1/2 glasses of RumCoke more Rhum than Coke don't do that to you. Nope, wasn't drunk. No. Apir!

Hahaha, thanks everyone. Mass hug!

3 - In your head
Philo class, Foucault, approach the professor and say, "Father, I might collapse in your class. Can I sit at the back?" Listening to Rey Valera in the study hall, admitting you feel giddy when he sings Maging Sino Ka Man. Unable to explain why you're pissed as hell at girls who wear hair bands (head bands?) in the middle of their skulls, so half their faces are still hidden by their hair. Ooh, stylish.

Thesis class. A workshop piece three weeks - pending. Salamat sa mga nagbasa.

The whole day, dragging your ass around school, feverish though you may be, hugging mango shake and a pack of cigarettes to your chest because those are a few of the fewer things that make you go on, sleepless little missy. Those, and knowing that your frequent disappearances could make a saint give you the finger. (People tell you, You're sick all the time, and you manage to restrain yourself from retorting, Well it's not as all fluffy bunnies and butterflies as I make it look like. People care, me thinks.) Those, and knowing that after this day is done, you're free to crumple in any relatively horizontal space. Those, and knowing that at sundown, you can run and you run, while you grumble, Get out of my way, fuckers, I'm sleepy! Those, and, amazingly, a long-awaited hug and a kiss at the spot where your neck meets your shoulder (which is called trapezius, if I remember my high school bio lectures correctly).

4 - Hating rain together
Writing at the crack of dawn because you can't sleep. Going back to the three poems you wrote with friends, writing a new one, called, "And Lastly," because you're reminding yourself that you need to sleep, your eyeballs are melting in your head, and that's your only clean shirt, eyeball moosh is hard to wash off.

5 - Crush
I'm turning 19 on the second of September. I realize that's a long way off, but I've decided to be generous and give you enough time to hunt down a book for me, Crush, by Richard Siken. This one's from "You Are Jeff" -- "...and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for." And then this one's from "Straw House, Straw Dog" -- "I don't really blame you for being dead but you can't have your sweater back." Wala lang. I need me some man-man love poetry.

And since we're on that note, (the note about the second of September, not the man-man love), ihanap niyo na rin ako ng -- teka. Naaliw. Haha.

6 - ELE
To close, a quote from Semi-Pro: "Everyone Love Everyone!"

You can always go downtown

2008-07-23T17:23:00.002+08:00

I've been sitting in front of this computer for more than an hour now, thinking of something to rant and ramble about. Nada. And the Korean love ballad (castrated man - voice) in the background ain't helping me a bit.

Today, thirty minutes after I woke up, someone called to say good morning.

Today, thirty minutes after I woke up, I found that I'd lost my voice sometime during the night, while I lay sleeping, curled up on my side, open journal by my cheek.

An ass in the crack of humanity

2008-07-21T01:22:00.008+08:00

Blog title from the song "Ride Bikes with You" by The Moldy Peaches. Yeahba. Hello there. Hello. Intro, Mike, Tess, Mike, Tess? (As far as jokes go, that was high school freshman-lame.)

Hell of an introduction for a ramble of epic proportions. Not really epic, since it's about two in the morning, and I've got History class tomorrow (later), so no time for epics, no energy, no liquor in my bloodstream to keep me chugging along.

What am I here for? What is the meaning of life -- 41 or 42? I forget. Someone please remind me. I am not trying to be witty -- I simply do not remember that line from that movie.

Anyhoo. I spent the weekend reading the first fifty pages of Alice Hoffman's The River King -- which I picked up (200 pesos sa fourth floor ng NBS Cubao!) with the suspicion that I'd read it before -- only to realize that I actually have read it before. I looked at the fresh dump of my To Be Read pile, ignored them, and asked Pancho for his copy of Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies. I've never been known to give intellectual feedback about anything in particular (ugh, self-deprecation this early, damn it, haha), so I can't say anything beyond: Yeah, okay, so far only the second novel of Auster's I've read. Characters feel a little stiff sometimes, but that's just me. Nathan Glass is a pretty solid character, though, not so much stiff, as, well, solid. Human redemption and all that jazz. Touching at some points, but not gushy touching. Like, tangina-galing touching. Blah blah blah.

Do not take me seriously; I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't even know if I used that semi-colon correctly. What did Kurt Vonnegut, bless his soul, say? "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." Wasak.

Blargh. This is one of the several quotes I copied to my journal: "Did I love her? Yes, I probably loved her. To the extent that I was capable of loving anyone, Joyce was the woman for me, the only candidate on my list. And even if it wasn't the full-blown, one hundred percent passion that supposedly defines the word love, it was something that fell just short of it -- but so close to the mark as to render the distinction meaningless." Look it up if you don't believe me: page 278.

(If this blog entry gets any more I, I, I, then the next sentence would probably read: This comes close to hitting the mark about what I feel for someone.) This comes close to hitting the mark about what I feel for someone. Someone. Funny little euphemism, this word. Someone. Anyway, I say that aforementioned quote comes close to hitting aforementioned mark, if only in yet another self-deprecating dimension of the whole What is Love, Really? claptrap discourses (did I just say claptrap?) -- like, Section II.A, subheading C: How you love -- this love you supposedly carry with you for this Someone, this love you [expletive deleted] feel for that Someone -- and the definition of love (if there is a definition, at all) is, in many ways, asymptotic (woo, math!). The whole closer-and-closer thing but never-meeting thing. But does that nullify this love, whatever it is? Of course not. See Auster quote. So, no, of course not. Whatever love may be, whatever this love may be -- who the fuck cares about defining even this? Do we hold nothing sacred anymore? Oh, Love. Love. Love. Ah, Love. Fucking love. -- fuck it, love na nga eh. So close to the mark as to render the distinction meaningless -- there, it's been said, why do I even have to lose myself in the system and goddamn explain it?

I just lost myself.

Someone got a dose of happy pills this morning. Ain't it sweet?

Just caught in the undertow

2008-07-09T17:33:00.000+08:00

I had a weird dream. You were in it, and then someone else was, and yes, the world too.

Weird dream, it begins: I am on my toes, looking out a window to the apocalyptic world -- there it is, gray skies, gray buildings, gray mountains in the distance. And then there's a rumble in the air, something a writer has aptly described as thunder without sound, and you stand behind me, and I think, This is an important man, he will save the world. And then you brush my (alarmingly short) hair from my nape, and I think, You need me to save the world. And then there's a heavy thudding within my chest, and I cast my gaze to the gray clouds, and there they are -- I say, Igloos, the goddamned Igloos: gigantic, gleaming white balls of segmented metal, sort of like Marvin's (from the movie Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) bubble head, without the cuteness, and the Igloos are hurtling from the skies, and everything is turning grayer. I tell you, Fuck, the Igloos are here, and you stand closer to me that my body has no choice but to feel your warmth, and suddenly, beyond us, out that window, one of the Igloos has hit a skyscraper and everything shatters, and I am scared, yes, but I only feel this overwhelming sense of inevitability that tells me all those prophecies are really real, why didn't they believe you and I? We were out to save the world, and no one listened, and now the Igloos are here, and that only means one thing. Only one goddamned thing, and before I start to do something that could ruin the fate of what remains of mankind, you keep me still by saying, I would like for you to be still.

The dream goes on: That other person? As we stare out at the end of mankind, she slinks towards us, and I can feel her -- see her, fuck dreams are weird -- as she presses against you, that you press against me, and I think: Tangina, lousy timing for a goddamned threesome, puwede ba?! Outside, the Igloos are razing our city.

The dream goes on: You say, Don't worry, we still have you and the Corps. And I lean towards you, and then I realize that other person is still attached to your back like a leech, and so I make my voice gruff say, We don't have much time.

The dream goes on and I think: Who the fuck is that woman?

The dream goes on: We are sort-of underground. A classroom -- I can see the cut-out alphabet framing the blackboard -- filled with about forty people, the only survivors from the Igloo Attack. And everyone knows we're all here, because we're all simply waiting for the next batch of Igloos from the sky. There is a man in dress greens at the front of the class, talking to all the survivors. I am at back of the room, near the door, pacing. You and that woman (who the fuck are you, woman?) are off to the side, talking in hushed tones. I go to the door, and the moment I touch the knob, everything blurs, and it's like I am having a daydream within a nightmare: a vision -- floating above the city, disk-like segmented white thingies, like flattened Igloos, and then hatches are being opened from below them, and I should be scared, but I am only thankful. I blink my way out of the vision, and then you are beside me, holding my hand. You say, Did you have another one? I ignore you and open the door an inch, and everybody in the room goes silent, and I look up at the clouded, gray sky, empty of Igloos, flattened or no. I close the door, and look at you. I tell you, everyone: Ten minutes. The Corps is here. And presumably, ten minutes later, on the dot, the man in dress greens marches out of the room, and goes out to hold his hands high towards the flattened Igloos -- the Corps. The Corps is here, and everyone knows war is at hand, and I look at you, and you look at me, and we both know we have a job to do, preferably together, but alone if we must.

The dream goes on: I am in the passenger seat of your car. The Igloos have come again. Everything around us is being blown up, but you and I both believe that if we stay in this car, we will be safe. When I run my hand through my (abominably short) hair, I see how you have turned in your seat to tease the woman sitting at the backseat, and I think, You are not just doing that, and I open the door, and run out the street, ignoring your shouts of my name, ignoring you and everything else when you say, You fucking idiot, get back in this car, now! And I am running now, the Igloos are everywhere, and I can hardly believe I ran off in an almost paranormal fit of jealousy. I run, weaving through the broken road, like a child skipping across a lawn to avoid raindrops, and I tell myself, Damn idiot woman stalking off in the middle of a fucking Igloo attack!

The dream goes on: I reach a workshop of sorts, and the walls are painted white, and I cannot believe there is so much sunlight in this room, that I am immediately scared. I think, I am crucial to this cause, nothing will happen to me. And I see a man in a white shirt hunched over a wooden table, with a knife in his hand. He is stocky, his face looking like someone banged an iron pan to his face, and rubbed hard for good measure. Damn, he's ugly. On the table is a severed arm, deathly pale. (Duh. It's severed. The arm must be dead, then.) The man looks at me me with yellowing eyes that bug out, before he raises his knife, and starts to slice through the flesh and the muscle of the forearm. He spreads the meat as one would a book, and I can see how the meat is all-white, until, suddenly, it grows red, as though stained, and everything is bloody now. The door, he tells me, and he proceeds to make thin slices out of the flesh. I have to stay, I need that meat. But everything is starting to make me sick, and I run out of that room, into an underground sewage system, and everything is damp and dank, and I lose a couple of fingernails when I scrape them along the algae-d walls, and I think, Damn the cause, I can't do this, we're all going to fucking die anyway.

And the dream goes on: I reach a hotel lobby. You are standing by the door, and you are alone. Thank What Is Left of God that you are alone. Your face is stern, but the way your body has started to move towards me, upon seeing me, tells me that damn it, you fucking missed me, just admit it. But you tell me, Go back there, you know we need them, and I know you are right, and I also know that, like all apocalyptic worlds, the heroes and heroines, all the chosen ones, they all need that one scorching kiss, so they'd have something to remember when the people hurtling the Igloos to raze our city finally show themselves, when everyone has died, and the cause has almost failed -- everyone needs that kiss, because damn it, the world is ending, pucker up, you Messianic asshole, give me this kiss, then let's go save the fucking world.

And the dream ended there. I woke up with the right side of my head throbbing, and Bed of Roses stuck in my head, and I thought, I need to write all this down, because no one is with me, and I don't have anyone to tell my dream to, as I usually do.

Yes, I dreamed that, I shit you not.

*

The Painting
John Balaban

The stream runs clear to its stones;
the fish swim in sharp outline.
Girl, turn your face for me to draw.
Tomorrow, if we should drift apart,
I shall find you by this picture.

A city wall and a trampoline

2008-07-06T20:38:00.004+08:00

Sasha is...

... writing a story that begins, The average person spends about 20, 160 minutes kissing in his lifetime, or something like that. Everything is difficult, and she couldn't be happier. Ngitian lang natin 'yan, oks na. And did you know that there are neurons in the brain that allows people to locate another's lips in the dark? Di niya alam kung totoo yan, kaya nagtatanong ngayon.

... drooling over the red suede ankle boots she bought with her mother, among other things.

... wondering if she's strong enough to make tuna sandwiches for what she feels will be a happy night.

... inviting everyone to the Happy Mondays Poetry Night in Mag:Net, tomorrow, at 7:31-ish. Gawin nating field trip. Buddy system, don't forget your IDs.

... referring to herself in the third person, yet again, which means she will be wearing black tomorrow. Gah, the pabaon.

Look inside your head

2008-06-24T12:43:00.001+08:00

After Waps' torn-off piece of yellow pad paper:

*

I would like to be the moon. I already see which mothers are tending to their sleeping first-borns, when I close my eyes. Only when I close my eyes. Because otherwise, it is my father I hear intoning from the next room: Do you not love me anymore? and then: the obligatory rustle of bed sheets. I have understood that the world makes the noises that matter most when it thinks no one is listening -- the butterfly-wing beat of the fingers of widows too sad; the sudden thunder of a car down the street, about to drive away; an abrupt lullaby; the inexplicable sadness of that widow, who may be too young, and her sleeping son. My father would chant, Love-Love-Love, and I know everything confounds him, especially those noises that matter most. Especially those.

I am the third son. My mother is sleeping. I can wake her up if I say, Mother, I would like to be the moon.

*

I would like to be the moon. Then, I no longer have to write about grown men leaning to kiss new blooms by leaves, about how I can never spell obsession right the first time, about how that girl I fell in step with on the street happens to write too -- that just last night, she sat with the man whose name she was been writing on the margins of her books, and he asked her to Please, tell me a story, and she began, A year ago there was a girl who'd only been kissed twice, and the man held up his hand and said, Stop, and the girl looked at him, and she became quiet. I would like to be the moon because I only need to concern myself with pulling oceans and holding gazes, with men and with word -- none of which I know anything about, not really.

The trees forgive me

2008-06-15T21:10:00.005+08:00

I wrote about missing this one here, about sleeping there, and losing that one, no the other one. I read about the love of a good woman, the spectacle of the scaffold, and how this sissy boy got whisked away by the goddess of love. I wrote about this woman whose sister kept the hair they cut off years ago, I wrote about that man waking up from a dream of the way his mother's lips sounded like when she talked. I read about how the children must stay, about this bacchanalia on the hill of some guy named Samuel. I said, Get me something pretty, when I should have said, Spartan, come back with your shield or on it, sabay hi-five. I said, 'Pag malamig, pasok ka na lang sa tent, alam mo na gagawin dun. Tribute to Heath Ledger. He's dead. The Joker killed him. The earthquake in China killed off some pandas. Pandas are cute. You are too. You are currently in an earthquake zone. At dahil cute ang pandas at namatay sila sa earthquake, ingat ka kasi cute ka at nasa earthquake zone ka. Sabi ng nanay ko, marami raw umiyak nung linibing yung mga panda. Cute kasi sila. Tsaka onti na lang sila. Hindi hassle na libu-libo namatay dahil sa lindol na pumatay sa mga panda. Marami namang tao sa mundo. Population control 'yan ng Mother Nature, sabi ng Philo teacher ko. Onti lang ang panda, marami namang tao, kaya iniyakan yung panda. Cute rin sila. Cute ka, pero naks, anong gagawin ko sa maraming tao? Kaya mag-ingat ka, puwede? Uy. Tsaka hindi 'to masyadong related, pero sabi rin ng nanay ko, "I wish I had someone to talk to about intellectual things, but then I realized: I have nothing intellectual to say. All I have are novels and Newsweek." Sabi ko, "Ah."

Segue.

I grew tired of the bed growing while I slept, so I finally moved in to that place in Escaler. Bisitahin niyo naman ako. Cool place. I bounce on the bed, though I doubt I'll find the time to do some (literal) bed-bouncing. I can smoke, as long as I blow the smoke toward the mango tree at my window. Do mango trees have kapre (ang conyo-plural ba ng kapre ay kapres?) Yeah, I think so. That's cool, though, he and I will have a lot in common. I sleep tonight in an empty room. Beside my bed is another bed with floral sheets. It's empty too, in an almost lurid kind of way. There are drawings of the male anatomy on the walls. The last tenant must have been very lonely. Or repressed.

Segue.

Yesterday, in Recto, I was on my hands and knees, unearthing Doctor Faustus and John Milton. I went home with dirt under my fingernails, my mom calls it nerd-dirt. Nerd-dirt. That's like having slashes of ink on your palms because you dropped your pen into the black hole that is your bag; like having orange highlighter marks on the sides of your fingers because your hand can't keep still when you read something intellectual. Like, dude, na-a-agit ako. Bakit? Dude, Philo 104, dude. Brother na lang, parang si Desmond. Ah, Desmond. Sawyer has a daughter in Albuquerque. I should look up how to spell Albuquerque. What's in Albuquerque? Miss, I think you dropped your Albuquerques.

*

Happy Father's Day to my daddy who likes to send me text messages from Imus that go like, "Ineng, pataba ka. Tsaka tayo ng maayos, ipalipat mo na 'yang likod mo sa boobs mo."

The pebbles forgive me

2008-06-13T18:01:00.003+08:00

It's not everyday I walk around Katipunan with copies of Homer's The Iliad, Burton Raffel's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and, er, The Sad Clown and Other Five-Minute Tales for Bedtime inside my bag.

Buti na lang. (That's thank goodness, for the konyo.)

(I text my mother: "Foucault is cool." And she replies, "You should check out my pendulum." I'm sure I'm not the only one with a compulsion to giggle at that statement, no?)

All this pretending-to-be-smart-and-well-read thing is a strain on my budget. And oh yeah, on my mind. And my eyes, as some idiot lost her glasses. Gahdammit, what kind of idiot loses her glasses while she's wearing them? Never mind the sudden rains last Wednesday, never mind the flash-lake around the overpass. Those glasses were on your head -- how could you have lost them?

Ahem.

Everything about me is either about to melt, or go poof! so I leave you with an excerpt of the latest short story I managed to squeeze out of wherever these things come from. It's called Park 9 Alley, and I have a feeling this will be one of those bitcheries of a story that would forever be in-progress, guh. Anyway:

Somewhere in this street, someone is kissing someone he is not supposed to kiss. I suspect it is Francisco Revelar, the architect [note to self: scratch that -- change it to "accountant."] who has not seen his wife in two years. It is understandable that he kiss someone else – I think he is kissing the girl Marta from the sari-sari store in front of his house for she often has that sad, faraway look on her pale, prematurely lined face and I’ve learned that it is those sad looks that make the men rise from their beds in the middle of the night and cup a young girl’s aging face. It is understandable that Francisco Revelar kiss Marta. After all, two years is a long time, a very long time. Dishes get stacked in the sink, the sinks are cleared, then get filled again. Drains record the remains of breakfasts, lunches and dinners, until they revolt by clogging up, and someone has to push his sleeves to his elbows sooner or later so water can make its proper descent into the sewage that spreads like misplaced roots underneath the gray concretes of this city. Windows turn muddy, then are wiped down one procrastinating afternoon months later. Doors squeak, complaining of the capricious comings and goings of men, these doors swell in their hinges after a thunderstorm, they crack in the heat of a summer, until they are oiled into silence, or replaced by something sturdier, not necessarily prettier. Oh, don’t let me get started on floors.

All this and more, over and over for seven hundred and thirty days, more or less – am I the only one who wonders what I should do with the quarter-day that helps define a year? What exactly is “365 ¼ days a year”?

Anyway. A lot happens, two years is a long time. Imagine all that waiting, all those mornings with no one to listen to you say, “Five minutes more.” All those noontime show summaries not recorded. All those six o’clock bell tolls without some floury, sun-kissed arms thrown around your neck. All those nights lying in a bed that grows larger and wider with every passing night.

Two years is a long time. Francisco Revelar knows – he has waited that long.

The classic story: Ida Revelar goes out one night after making dinner, she tells her husband of twenty-two years she needs more vinegar. Her husband, the architect, looks up from his newspaper for the barest of moments just to nod – trifle acknowledgment in a marriage that has lasted that long. It used to be enough, that little nod, a swift kiss on the shoulder before he went off to work, a distracted squeeze of the bridge between thumb and forefinger in social gatherings.

Francisco Revelar gives his wife a nod, returns to his newspaper.

He has read through the Obituaries, notes that someone with his first name died yesterday, and he looks at the front door, expecting Ida to come bustling in, her hair escaping the loose bun arranged at her nape, apologizing for taking so long, the neighbors wanted to chat about the president’s daughter, dinner will be ready in a bit, god she hopes she didn’t burn anything while she was away gossiping.
But she does not come in, she won’t. Although Francisco stays in his chair, at first puzzled, then worried, then a dismal bewilderment – Ida does not come in.

And he thinks then: What will I eat for dinner?

She’s dead, she’s surely dead, he thinks three months later.

What is wrong with that sink? he thinks two months after that.

I can’t change the locks, he thinks five months after that.

Where did the brown of the linoleum go? he thinks four months after that.

Another Francisco Something is dead, he thinks a month after that.

What now? he thinks, finally, eighteen months into that nightly ritual in his chair.

Every night, in that chair, he wonders. He cannot help it. There is so little one can do when one is waiting. He has tried, many times. He has busied himself with a company that used to bear his surname, he has started a garden (he has discovered a fondness for ferns), he has even decided (with the help of a self-help book) that it is his calling to be a poet. The distractions worked, to a point, although the last one did not work very well. But Francisco Revelar has learned that no matter how many ways he busies himself, he ends up, every night, on his chair, with the day’s newspaper in his hand, reading it from cover to cover, saving the Obituaries for last.

Until tonight, apparently. Because he is kissing Marta from the sari-sari store in front of his house. He is still waiting, of course, he must, he always is – any minute now Ida will shuffle into the living room with a bottle of vinegar and an unplanned basket of vegetables. He should be in the house now, he should be waiting. What if she comes home? What if she can’t see through the grime of the windows? What if another Francisco has died, and he can’t pour some Scotch in honor of the unfortunate soul?
But there he is now, kissing a sad young girl in the middle of the night. He has cupped her face in his hands. Her cheeks are so pale beneath his callused fingertips. Two years ago, his wife went to get some vinegar. He does not even remember Ida’s face when she told him so. He remembers that someone named Francisco died, and that he shall be remembered through life by a wife and two daughters. Not Ida’s face, though.

He is kissing Marta. He is kissing her with his eyes open, so he can watch how her eyelashes flutter to rest on her cheeks. Marta is young. Two years is a long time.

All right? All right. Off I go now.

Pahabol, a wave to Pancho, who's probably running in a field of strawberries with A.G. right now. Brokeback Plateau. Okay, fine, corny.

Toodles.

Portraits hung on empty halls

2008-06-09T03:43:00.000+08:00

I've got a buzzing headache from those Lights I kept chugging down, just because I had something to prove to myself -- mainly that I can drink something as vile as beer. Yes, beer is vile. It is yellow, bubbly, and clings to the tip of your tongue and the back of your throat. I'm writing this as I wait for work to load, because work is technological that way. My mind is whirring with things I have to write down. God, my head, it hurts. There was too much poetry written down tonight, all those epic rengas, especially for someone who's in a Fiction diet. Gahdammit, my head. I hate beer. I am not drunk, just piss-ass mad at the world. Insert momentary Zen moment here --

Say something interesting: Good morning. Today I woke up to the neighbor singing Don McLean. I cannot go on with how his voice sounds like, if it sounds like anything at all, whether the timbre shivers the bones by my heart, because he is in another house, and the walls are thick. But I hear him. He sings and when no hope is left inside and it is easy toi magine him sitting up in his bed, a glass of water suspended in the air, forgetting its own path to his lips. Would I know if, right now, he thinks of Van Gogh, the one who took your life as lovers often do? Does he wonder who this Vincent is, does he know the man cut his ear off to stop the voices in his head? No, I don;t think I would know, because the walls are thick. But then, I could always leave this house and go knock on his door. But then, what would I say? Something interesting like, Good morning. I hear you through the walls. And by the way, I'm just your neighbor, trying to get some song out of her head.

-- okay, that was done. And this bleeping headache won't go away and I've got somewhere to go early tomorrow, early later, god, head, shut up shut up shut up.

I came to this strange world

2008-06-07T10:56:00.000+08:00

Nothing to see here, folks.

1 - Just a girl who's not sleeping very well, aggravated by the fact that I was conned into watching The Matrix Trilogy plus Animatrix for the entire bleeping night last night. (But hey, all is good -- at least I get what it all means now. Sort of. Watch out, nerds.) School starts this Tuesday and I'm still only just starting to sleep around 11 in the morning. This is not good, no? No, no, I don't think so, especially with eight more episodes of the fourth season of Lost. Gah, I'll just wing it.

2 - I've officially enrolled, and learned I'm taking a slew of teachers who either terrify me to bits and pieces, or those of whom I know nothing about. And I've got class everyday -- yeah, I'm mortal now -- which means this kind of fucks up work, not to mention hangover-indulging. Anyhoo, I guess this is as good a time as any to get into Serious Student mode. Watch out, Arneow, I'm going to work my effin' ass off.

3 - I'm writing again, after a month of nothing but revisions and Hellgate and sad, sorry attempts at poetry. It's Fiction, folks. There's this girl. And then there's this other girl. And in another one, there's that girl, with that mom and that dad. And in another one, there's this mother, and that hot mathematician's daughter. And then looking out at them all, there's Sasha, who remembers that the first short story she ever wrote (er, completed) was written in a ten-peso notebook whose cover may or may not have been Judy Ann Santos.

4 - I wish I have something to say that's actually worth those few, endless moments of inanity I put you through, but there's nothing. Nothing, really.

5 - From Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera:

"Contrary to what the Captain and Zenaida supposed, they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion : beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid, the closer it came to death."

6 - Yeahba. I am made of love.

Paper paper obsolete

2008-05-29T21:17:00.003+08:00

1
Am I here to gripe about AISIS? About how I left a reading/inuman at Green Papaya to hole myself up in an internet shop until 2 in the freakin' morning just to fix my schedule? And how I couldn't sleep last night, so I finally collapsed on the bed (after many futile attempts to nudge my makeshift stuffed toy to awaken?) at 630 in the morning? And how, at 930, I had to wait for so long, grit my teeth at the incredibly slow-ass pace of the pages to load? And that I have no available Theo and Philo classes? And that I have to loadrev eventually because puro itlog sa free-for-all (the available slots, not the remaining teachers) and the ones that are available are in conflict with the classes I've already enlisted in, or are held Tuesdays and Thursdays -- no-go because I have, er, work to do? And how much I spent in total -- all the cigarettes, the iced teas, the internetting, the gahdamned coffee?! Am I here to gripe about AISIS, ladies and gentlemen? No, of course not. Wouldn't dream of it.

2
To quote the piggy from Sinfest, "I am made of looooove!"

3
Downloaded Caesar III during enlistment woes. Haha, wala nang tulugan 'to. Yeah, hello, Freshman Nights Geekdom, remember me?

4
Sasha needs to write (see Number 7). Which means she has to stop reading Virginia Henley and Jaid Black, titles like The Glass Stripper.

5
Pol Doble -- you made me smile a coupla entries back. You are special, you charming old goat. Here's a smiley stamp for your hand. :')

6
Currently taking a survey on whether or not I should cut my mermaid hair. (Yeah, same sentiment as last year, and the year before that.) I could get Audrey Hepburn's Roman Holiday hair, but kulot, buwahaha. [He said: if you cut your hair, I'll tie the curls together with a ribbon, and go to sleep stroking it, whispering, It's okay, it's okay.] So. Goodbye, mermaid hair, hello, Bob Dylan hair? Or stick with it until I look like Lady Godiva, sans nekkid horse-riding?

7
From "feeling a little good tonight," a poem by Charles Bukowski:

Thou shalt not fail as a writer
because the very act of writing is the best protection
from the madness of the
world.

Watching an in-flight movie

2008-05-27T19:17:00.001+08:00

I am so exhausted, any minute now I'll be keeling over with foam bubbling out of my mouth. My big toes hurt -- it wasn't a good idea to wear 3-inch wedges for a 3-hour commute, no matter how many times you tell yourself that this would be more convenient than bringing another bag for your shoes. People look at you when you tower over everyone else in the train cars, and too bad for you, you look like hell. You smell like a public payphone. You need a bath, you need to go soak those toes. What are you wearing tonight? How many times do I have to tell you that not everything in embarrass is doubled? I need teachers for this semester. Do I just pick afternoon classes, or do I conscientiously research the profs? Exie Abola's my thesis class teacher, and I just missed Martin. Hala, Martin, WTF? Hahaha. Haa. I'm going to have to call you Professor now, am I? Hassle. By the way, my toes hurt so goddamned much. What am I going to wear? My eyebrows look like happy squirrels cavorting on my face. I need teachers for this semester -- why are there eight freaking subjects listed to my name? There is so much to do, and I have to be somewhere else in thirty minutes -- happy birthday, ZoeDee. But I need another bath. I need to put a flamethrower to these eyebrows, and have I shaved my legs yet? Oh. Fine, I'll wear pants. They go well with my hobo-in-wedges look. Add an expensive stick of cancer. Rommel Adducul has nasopharyngeal cancer -- and I managed to spell that correctly on the first go. Smoking while trying not to be seen/smelled only aggravates the wonky heart conditions. You're pathetically quiet, and you sharpen your cha-cha moves with the wind and the smoke. This morning, my youngest brother and I giggled over the nilagang baka, his hairstyle, and having to turn the TV off for a snoring father. And a big congratulations to newly-sixteen Gabriel Joshua who's officially in college. Scared, I asked. No, he said. Ah, I replied, I was fucking terrified. Scheds, I have to fix my scheds. God, my fucking toes. God damn it, licorice-flavored toothpaste does not taste good.

Things happened while I was gone.

*

From Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin:

"Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, likes dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?

At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices silent finally, like a radio running down."

When the Spanish babies cry

2008-05-10T12:31:00.000+08:00

I woke up at 8:30 this morning, and the house was quiet, and I played five games of Solitaire. I looked for my journal, scribbled down a dream I was, at that very moment, forgetting, and marked a date a week from the end of the month with sparkly hearts and jumping stars and what seems to be the disembodied head of a baby panda. I read a poem by John Brehm, titled “The Poems I Have Not Written,” and thought about the stories that were waiting for me in that land of unclaimed stories, where a lizard scuttling on the wall across your bedroom door might mean that in three fast blinks of your left eye, the wind will part, rivulets of air and dust conspiring with you to hasten the steps of the person – other side of the world? a city away? down the road? – you are meant to be with. I thought about a friend in Paris, in a room brimming with Van Goghs, Vermeers, and Klimts, thought about the men that must have slept with her name on their lips, after an hour of conversation and baguettes and cheese. I thought about the young boys two blocks over who ride their bikes at midnight to meet the yayas of the children. I thought about how it would be hot soon. I thought about tonight, about how I’d spend the evening drinking with my mother and an aunt, in some not-so-polite pre-Mother’s Day celebrations. I thought about tomorrow morning, about whether I’ll be awake when the cake that greets the four mothers in this house would arrive. I thought about a day I would not have to wait for for too long, and thought about the dress I may or may not wear with shoes, or maybe slippers? I thought about the ceiling I’ve missed waking up to, the sunlight that streamed through the gray glass of picture windows. I thought about the song that would play in the background as I’d ride trains and field the screams of grinning children I do not know, about the silence of the dead tomatoes when a door finally opens and I finally get a hug from someone who’s not half the length of my body.

At 8:32, the babies from the room above mine cried their way into the morning, and I turned on the bed, and went back to sleep.

To hating tension, no pension

2008-05-07T17:06:00.001+08:00

Okay, just got home from a cross-metropolis trip (with "Total Eclipse of the Heart" on the radio as I rode on a bus, the wind sending my hair every which way, mostly sa mukha ng katabi kong mama), so bear with me. Anyhoo, here's today's edition of brainfart, from yours truly:

1 - Here's to Pancho, who celebrated his fourth year of painting full-time last Monday, to the tune of Frank Sinatra sa Que Rico. Yeahboi, here's to you, here's to art, to Dreamcatcher #42, to killing Venus, to paper-taping, to painting by numbers, to the artist's manual, to bling-bling, to earth tones, '"to days of inspiration, playing hooky, making something out of nothing, the need to express, to communicate, to going against the grain, going insane, going maaad!" Ahem. (Sorry, Rent soundtrack on loop.) Anyhoo, La Vie Boheme and all that jazz. Good job, bub. Beep, beep. :')

2 - Here's to Robert Downey Jr. and his tight butt. Wee, what a doozy. Yep, finally got to watch Iron Man, and that Tony Stark over there made away with my panties when they fell to the floor two minutes into the movie -- an inevitable reaction to Bobby Downey, who completely changed the course of my life when I was ten or so, when he sang Sting's "Every Breath You Take" sa Ally McBeal, as in, gahdamnit, rarrr.) So, while I fan myself: here's to older men, buwahahaha.

3 - It's nice to be back in the city. I am deliriously happy.

4 - "When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possible can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words, 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children."
- from Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle.

Enjoy the rest of your summer, kids. :')

If you meet me halfway

2008-05-02T20:26:00.001+08:00

I'm home -- the flattened-toad-splattered streets of Imus and all that. Home, depends on how you look at it. Definitions are vague if you're the prodigal daughter squatting in your family's living room. Good thing I had enough sense not to pack my mattress and a pillow or two in a big-enough box, that I let Moosebert hop into my purse-thing, that I've got clean linens in easy-access laundry bags, that I'm not at all iffy about being stepped on in my sleep. Yes, life is good. I sneak in a cigarette or two, smoking in front of my dad's chicken poop (I meant coop, but I'm keeping that). How's this for entertainment: watching widdle chicks poop and twitter, that's Telemachus, that's Darcy, that's Efren. I'm a feast for them damn mosquitoes -- new blood and all that. I feel caramel-coated most of the time. Whenever I move, I feel like dust particles and little bugs slapping into me, most of them on the way their Purpose in life (trademark owned by that un-balls-ified Rick Warren). Yeah, they're trapped, we're all trapped. Four showers a day don't do anything. Not even a stint in sudden rainfall -- ever notice how the torrents just stops, just like that, the moment you get the beginnings of a drenched shirt?

Two nights ago, I'd gotten lost with dear friends and darling children, and the windows of Pancho's car were rolled down, because the night felt nice, soothing in fact, and a little girl in the backseat kept looking at the lightning that trembled every moment or so, and she was asking, "Why, Tatay, Why?" A couple of hours after that, I ventured over to Que Ricos, which should've burned down in a freak accident some months ago, but I, ahem, er, uh, well, it never came around to happening. Fuck. Anyway, a drink or two, or four, and a Coke, a pack of cigarettes, some literary tempers. Delightful night. And then it was back home, and I was tired, coming down from a two-day adrenaline high, and I plopped onto bed, hitting my head on the corner of one cabinet door in the process, but it was worth it. Man, oh yeah, was it worth it. Panalo.

Hours after that, brother Gabriel Joshua (on a break from his DLSU basketball training whatever) and my mother helped me cart boxes and boxes galore from my fourth floor room, to the rented L300. Get evicted with dignity, check. Have one hell of a booze-fest before leaving for toady Cavite? Not exactly, especially hours following zombie-mode that automatically kicks in come the Palanca deadline (which got moved, yeahba). But it's cool. When something sweet wakes you up in the middle the night (well, at the crack of dawn) and simply takes your breath away (cliche, cliche!) that can sustain me. I didn't get my grand farewell -- I really can't help but think I'm permanently stuck here in Cavite, as all my worldly possessions have been dumped here -- but I really do think I got something, well nicer. Something quiet, words said simply, no thoughts of lyricism (no doubt due to the brain-leeching that accompanies deadlines like that), honest, so goddamned matter-of-fact that it gets me speechless whenever I think about it, as speechless as I'd been at the time (fucking schmaltzy cliche.)

Speaking of cliches (haha), Sir Sawi tells me the first of this year's Dumaguete fellows arrive tomorrow. Hello, hello. Learn, have fun, and all that jazz. Saya diyan, madrama. Beer. That's not a poem.

Toodles, kids. My dad just came in with some grilled tilapia (*insert Homer drool here*), and I've got to coat these legs with Off! lotion. Have fun, whatever part of the world (first, or third) you're in.

*

It's May, yes, and the rain this afternoon was probably a fluke or something -- weather gods playing poker or yosi break daw muna -- but this here is a whiff of that strange little wonder that is poetry: From "April Rain Song" by Langston Hughes -- "Let the rain kiss you. / Let the rain beat upon your head / with silver liquid drops. / Let the rain sing you a lullaby."

Clubs are weapons of war

2008-04-29T21:22:00.004+08:00

Spread the love, people. These here are brainfarts of the day.

1
I've finished with packing. Now I can get evicted with dignity. Never mind the gigantic box of condoms I bought sans condoms from Rustan's. It contains a shitload of shit, and is labelled, "Will do the Earth a lot of good if this was incinerated in the atmosphere of another star in another galaxy." It contains my Theo book from sophomore year. 'Nuff said, yo.

2
More on packing, and blind items: Guess who gleefully stepped back from crazy-taping Box #05? Said person was grinning like an idiot at the time, feeling incredibly proud of her gangly self. And then she realized her roll of packaging had run out. And so said idiot reached towards her de-cluttered desk to get the other roll of tape (which she bought because her foresight is simply astounding)? And guess who freaking packed said other roll of tape into galvanized - with - packaging - tape Box #05? Who, huh, who?

Another idiot: when all was said and done and packed, who was itching to light a stick and found out that the lighter had probably magically teleported into one of the boxes? Who, damn it, who?!

3
Watched Malena during lunch, and I kept thinking, "Man, I'd be more screwed up than I am now if my mother was Monica Bellucci." And then my lunch said, "Tangina, feeling ha." And so I ate it. And then I listened to the Mulan soundtrack, and realized that my childhood crush of Captain Shang has never faded. Hearing him sing I'll Make a Man Out of You just makes my heart twitter a little madder.

4
What? April 29 na? Sure ka? Uy, are those burritos? What? Anong walang tulog? Natural 'tong nasa ilalim ng mata ko. Pinaglihi daw ako sa puyat sabi ng nanay ko. Tulog nga siya nung pinanganak ako eh, tapos -- what chu saying deadline? To rip off Captain Jack, I like to wave at them as they pass by. Ano kamo? Ha? Ako? I shall play the Am Lazy, Get Out of Pressing Literary Opportunities card. And -- ooh, is that a dry seal? Puwede pahipo? Cool. So, gusto mo ng kasama bukas? I can guard the car and listen to Mulan and Rent on loop while you go and rule the universe. Sure. What? Yeah, yeah, I can always change my mind. No day but today, sabi nga ng Rent cast. Are you going to eat that?

5
One of these days you're going to have a visitation. You're going to be walking down the street and across the street you're going to look and see God standing over there on the street corner motioning to you, saying, 'Come to me, come to me.' And you will know it's God, there will be no doubt in your mind — he has slitty little eyes like Buddha, and he's got a long nice beard and blood on his hands. He's got a big Charlton Heston jaw like Moses, he's stacked like Venus, and he has a great jeweled scimitar like Mohammed. And God will tell you to come to him and sing his praises. And he will promise that if you do, all of the muses that ever visited Shakespeare will fly in your ear and out of your mouth like golden pennies. It's the job of the writer in America* to say, "Fuck you God, fuck you and the Old Testament that you rode in on, fuck you." The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful.

- Ken Kesey "The Art of Fiction," interview by Robert Faggen, The Paris Review No. 130 (Spring 1994)

*Kahit saan naman siguro, no? Haha, sige, I'ma split. My laptop's waiting for me. I have Battle Realms! And damn it, shut up, Tomatoes, I'll get to you in due time!

Good luck, errybooty. Uh, well, not everybody. Hehe. :)

The blur of fast-forward

2008-04-28T14:11:00.001+08:00

I should really be working. One, because I'm getting evicted on the 30th and I am yet to buy goddamned packaging tape. Two, because a certain deadline is looming, along with all the other deadlines that enjoy making a sport of me. Three, because I need to get my flaneur mojo on because I've got yet another paper on T.S. Eliot and his madafakeen "The Wasteland." Four, because I dreamt of the girl next door and man, was that a doozy, and then a couple of REMs down the night, a dream about a poet/kainuman, and that was simply horrific. Five, because I am running out of money, hence blissful state of inebriation is currently out of reach, which means I can't not think of not working. Yeahba.

So what have I been doing? Paper-taping for one, because that's what good sleepless friends of good sleepless artists do. And then I'm knee-deep in vampire / giants with tails / blue aliens and buttsecksing and all that jazz, not because I've grown mad with boredom, but because I have to -- yes ladies and gents, I have to read about anatomically impossible men and women bursting like ripe melons within each other, and I have to write a semblance of a sane review for them. And so, if anyone is up for a discussion for the hidden tribes of New Norway and Trek M'Qian, give me a call. Bring booze, as we shall need it. The girl next door, optional. What else? Oh yeah, new detachable showerhead. Which reminds me of a conversation I had with someone a few months ago:

"So, what made you happiest sa Dumaguete?"

"Fuck it, hands down -- yung detachable showerhead sa Bethel's!"

Get yer minds out of the gutter, there was hot water. (Ooh, that rhymes.)

Let's go to the beach, kids, and burn our noses off. Will entertain you with the sight of the expanse of my sternum underneath the stringiest piece of neon green bikinis. Oh, the horror, the horror.

And boo, I missed the dolphins to Subic (because doing so required me to get up at 4 AM).

*

And now, some quotes. About Luuurve. From the books Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres, which has been gathering dust underneath a gigantic bed at our house at Calatagan, because after reading the part about the doctor and his goat, I found I couldn't read anymore. Maybe because I'd been at the apex of my Cute Guy at the Billiard Hall phase, which, thankfully, has long since passed.

"Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because that is what love is."

"Love is not breathless; it is not excitement; it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being ‘in love ‘which any of us can convince ourselves we are."

"Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches were found that we were one tree and not two."

What up, people?

You want thingamabobs?

2008-04-24T09:54:00.000+08:00

Oh, the perils of public transportation.

I limped over to MetroPoint at Taft, increasingly aware by the minute that my foot felt like it just lost a baby toe and was just valiantly trying to regrow the spare it keeps during these dire moments. After meeting my beloved mother who was late and wearing my knit jacket, and nibbling on Pesto Plato Wraps, I watched as she banged her head on the corner of shelf in National Bookstore as we both looked for packaging tape. My mother saw stars. We left the store without tape (this is the fourth store I've been to in the past ten days or so that didn't have packaging tape -- what? some packing crisis I don't know about?). My mother rubbed her head and asked if I wanted to go back for some duct tape. I told her I wasn't that kinky. Yarn usually does the trick. And it's cheaper.

I spent thirty minutes in the MRT Station, eyeing women in veils with large tote bags that could literally knock me off my feet if the need ever arose (and it probably would have), girls with tight buns (hair buns, mind you) and nurse's caps of the industrialized variety, and this chick with fish nets and incredibly thick turtleneck. Mukhang talo ako pag sapakan na. So I stepped back. Some people would credit me for being instupid, ya know.

The trains were slow to arrive, they lingered and didn't set off for quite some time, and there wasn't any air-conditioning anywhere. The cars where so overpopulated, I kept grabbing someone's ass as some three hands grabbed mine back. The sheer density was mutating people. We defied the laws of physics for a good one hour. It was, sob, beautiful.

On my way out, I just barely managed to avoid trampling on a little boy, and in the process, kicked the shins of a man in a wheelchair, before almost falling on his lap. I offered to push him to the elevators. He smiled, the kind of smile that tells you tall, skinny women have made it an unspoken habit to give him a harried lap dance every other train ride or so. (I only hope I made him a happier man.) And then he said no. Poor man was probably afraid all this gangliness would hurl him to the train tracks. I'm really sorry, sir, my extremities are so very far from central command that messages tend to get delayed. You should see me dance, bub.

Anyway, I saw Kael and Sigh sa LRT, looking like normal non-ass-grabbing people. Oh, hello sweet Jesus. I mentioned the wheelchair incident, though I don't think I looked a bit repentant, given that my shirt was plastered to wear my chest should have been if only God up there was paying attention eighteen years ago, random handprints were on the ass of my jeans, and my hair looked like it had just been turned into a permanent residence by those creepy little fuckers that turn evil when they get wet. Those troll-like thingies with beaks and LSD eyes. Yun. And then at Katipunan, I saw Joel, who, damn it, looked like he just had a bath. He offered some mutual work-bashing. I politely declined, thinking both of the blood pooling between my sweet new flats, and the fact that my back was ready to give out.

And I have two Penoys (yeah, like, yeah) in my bag. (It's always a trial to stop giggling whenever I say, Manong, dalawa pong penoy, yung basa.) I got my poison. When I recuperate, I'll let you know.

I'm heading home in a couple of minutes, so if any stalkers out there are reading this in real time, you can probably kidnap me in ten to fifteen minutes by KFC. I'll lend you some yarn, duct tape is expensive. Share tayo sa penoy. Sarap nun pag basa.

Will keep you updated on the state of my foot. Central command most probably fucked up again and I now have six stubby widdle toes. Damn.

Drop the phone

2008-04-23T09:18:00.002+08:00

I don't know why I bother, but I guess I'm bored. So, here's the brainfart of the day, all of which point to me, because I'm an A-level narcissist that way. Woohoo. You won't be hearing anything about the goddamned ridiculous high-freakin'-prices of rice from me, nossirree, goddamned 40 bucks per goddamned kilo.

Brainfart:
I am still lazy, which scares me because I feel as if the summer's going to end before I know it, and I won't have time to be lazy anymore. And quite a bit disorientated -- I just love all the pretentious extra syllables in that word, don't you? I don't know what day it is really, and I have to look at the timestamp on this page repeatedly. I've got things to do, and yet I've gleefully chosen to lock myself in the nearest fall-out shelter to binge on trashy novels and McDonald's McNuggets McYeah. I've got stories to write, papers to submit, stuff to pack for my inevitable eviction but I've spent the past few weeks stewing with the heat, on my effin' ass. My dad's wondering what cliff his eldest daughter jumped off from, and my mother simply wants to make sure I'm not rotting away out of sheer unproductivity. My brothers are with that billiard table in Calatagan, and my dad's chickens are probably limping, because the weather's wonky. I've got more than my fair share of Jaid Black and I'm starting to ache with the surfeit of blue aliens making love on stone tablets. Stories of Divorce is just depressing me, so I often put it down and hunt for a hug. Sometimes, I think I need to read Nabokov again, because the last time I did, I couldn't finish it because the guy I was dating then was a self-confessed asshole. Haha, you know who you are. I'm wasting my time in front of this computer, and I haven't had breakfast. Been awake since three in the morning. I need to get a life. I have a lot of keys in my bag and they're making a lot of noise. John Torres is the shit. I can't seem to find my USB. I'm meeting my mother by the Plato Wraps at Taft. Miriam girls, I am picking my nose as I write this. I need to get a dress and some bronze sandals. I've got two hundred bucks in my pocket. Where the fuck are those McNuggets?

*

"Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. "
- from Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Hello man sitting in the park

2008-04-10T15:15:00.006+08:00

So, Sasha got this Life On Happy Hold thing going on quite nicely. She's settling in, but not for want of some distractions. Last night was a flurry of mosquitoes and Jennifer Crusie and Kelly Link and back issues of Heavy Metal. It was fun. Oh, yes, she rediscovered The Fifth Element and squealed like mad at Bruce Willis in his bright orange muscle shirt.

This morning she tried to get away though her eyes were clouding over with sleep and she had on a thin lavender shirt that didn't quite reach her midsection. But she stayed, partly because of exhaustion, partly because moving away would be a mere affectation and she'd only be miserable eventually. And so she spent an hour holding up dragons and horses and tigers to the light, and watched as a pencil marked their silhouettes.

Today, she got new books -- The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks and Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce, an anthology which includes writers like Ann Beattie, Lorrie Moore, and Raymond Carver. She thinks the books will make her seem smart. She read Welcome to Temptation last night, before switching to Magic for Beginners. No one was looking anyway. Well, someone was but he never objected. Damn well wouldn't, shouldn't, if he knows what's good for him, haha. Ha. (No one gets this joke, ever.)

She's got this craving for ice cream. Or scoops of ice cream resting regally on a tall glass of halo-halo. She's not picky at this point. Just bring in the ice to bring in the summer.

And damn, but she likes to refer to herself in the third person because it's all the rage and all the Gwen Stefani girls like to do it like this.

*

Because writers remember everything, Paul. Especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones, you get novels, not amnesia. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is that ability to remember the story of every scar.

- From Misery by Stephen King

April 9th is and will continue to be one of the busiest, most tragic days of my life

2008-04-09T02:30:00.000+08:00

Oh yes it is, yes it will be, you heard it here folks.
Now excuse me, I'll just climb into someone's car and cry.

You're the best deal in town

2008-04-06T19:13:00.000+08:00

When I woke up today (at 4:30 PM!) after a rather disconcerting dream of canyons and weird sculptures hewn from mountains and a lost pagan / Quaker tribe in the probably-not-there mountain ranges of Batangas-Bicol (dreams are like that, ya know), I realized that a.) I've got to pee really badly, and b.) I have not seen another member of the human race since Thursday night. Yes, my interactions with The Others have been restricted to instant messaging and random comments on my LJ communities, plus the guy from Happy Homes whom I ask every twelve hours or so, Kuya, menu please. And yes, that fall-on-my-face love-letter I told you about. And a phone call and a half from my mother in which we talked about The Shawshank Redemption and the tribespeople of Hmong (which are, I joked, from Hmongolia). Ooh, throw an egg on the hermit when she gets out.

So, I guess this is the part where I offer an intellectual discourse on solitude and the intrinsic value of being in the physical presence of your fellow man but I need my Happy Homes now. Later.

If you ain't got no money

2008-04-05T22:52:00.004+08:00

Oh goodness, I've grown bored with procrastinating. It's gotten so bad, I'm writing three-page love letters disguised as your run-of-the-mill Howyadoin? e-mails to people I'll likely see the next day. I've nothing left to do, really [note to self:] but do laundry by the bucketload (because I'm tired of washing the same two shirts over and over again), get boxes in which to dump my Clothes, Clothes Not Worn In Six Months, Shoes, Things Not Used So Much (like, three years worth of college shiznit), Books Read Once And Will Never Reread Again (hello, Virginia Henley), and Books Me Likey (like my six-year-old Eight Stories by Sir Krip and lovely lovely Barthes and, hehe, Susan Elizabeth Philips-es). Oh yeah, and go back to revising "The Twenty-first Month" like mad, because my ever-dependable no-bullshit critic was foaming at the mouth when he read it. And Holy Pickled Tuna, Batman! I have to start writing new stories, if I have any self-respect left in me! [/note to self].

So. Ahem. In other news: Early this morning (around midnight, oh dear), thanks to the shame-a-turtle slowness of Aisis, I learned I did not go into epic failure, thus retaining my Atenean status. Yeahba. Good thing to know, because I've already signed up for a summer of writing so I'm less hassled with thesis next year (gasp, I know, the foresight is astounding). So expect me to roam the hallways of our dear old university with my mermaid hair flung behind me and hitting some choice people. That's one worry over and done with.

I'd like say more things that will prove I'm a sane person who spews sense (I dare you to say that three times fast!), but my ass is numb from sitting in front of the computer all day doing absolutely nothing, and I have to go take a bath and I have to think about saving them orphans in Malawi and the black-footed ferrets in South Dakota. (Gasp, will no one think of the ferrets?)

Okay, that's it. Toodles.

What do you take me for?

2008-04-04T16:34:00.000+08:00

I’m thinking of getting a Lomo just to piss Pancho off. Haha, I kid. (Not so much, actually, no.)

It’s actually to get all artsy-fartsy emo on all you people, taking pictures of girls leaning against brick walls with their hair floating in all sorts of directions. I could take a picture of a little boy pulling weeds from the ground, or a mother laughing to herself while washing dishes in the kitchen. And I’m sure I’ll be taking pictures of myself. Oh you just wait. Bony shoulders, and arches of feet, the point where my shorts get cut off, the plumpest part of my mouth. Oh just you wait.

A part of me thinks this is simply borne out of my natural inclination to detest high-res, especially if lenses are turned towards me. I don’t do no photoshop, you’ll all see the other side of the world through my pores.

I look better when it’s dark. When I’m standing underneath a lamppost at 2:30 in the morning. When I’m riding shotgun at the break of dawn, illuminated only by the smattering of light from open girlie bars. When I stumble into the bathroom with my eyes closed. When it’s time for bed and looking up at the ceiling already feels like you’ve fallen asleep.

Or I look better when it’s hazy. I think people are beautiful when they’re hazy. I have not worn my glasses for six weeks.

I think I’ll be prettier if everyone was myopic and I wore summer dresses all the damn time.

The monkey on your back

2008-04-03T22:57:00.005+08:00

Hello, welcome to Brainfartlandia.

1
Should I be interning now or something? Ah, reality rears its ugly head. I wonder, I wonder. This is my last summer in college, as next year shall be senior days galore. Should I be knocking on certain corporate doors, begging to photocopy their files and make them coffee? Should I have done this months ago? Does it even matter anyway, when I've already planned to erect a fall-out shelter in a creekside bakanteng lote somewhere in Loyola Heights after I (eep!) graduate?

I don't even know why I'm thinking about this now. Most probably because this is an example of the kind of things you think about when you've spent the last few days blissfully melting your eyes with e-book radiation / Allende-overload. But then, certain peoplez have rockin' internships, whereas my plans for this summer, hazy at best, include semi-nudity and Off! lotion, hammocks and green mangoes, a moody laptop and certain publications, oh yeah -- happy time and sweetness.

2
Out of sheer boredom, and in trying to distract myself from sheer boredom, in the midst of my frantic packing (oh, who am I kidding?), I unearthed the journals I kept last summer, while in Dumaguete, and those written the weeks after. All I can say is -- damn. Haha. :) Spent an hour or so giggling in post-humiliation / kilig / bangs - head - on - nearest - wall. As in pota, the drama.

(Oo nga pala, deadline for submission of manuscripts for this summer's workshop is April 5. Come on, kids. It shall be holy batman, what just happened?! experience. :p)

And a big wave to Sir Sawi. :)

3
I'll be leaving this bleep-bleep of a place before the month ends. Yes, I realize, I still have no place to live in. Teka. (Oi, Kash Martinez Avena, long-lost-sister / faux girlie lover, where are you? You shall be shelter, hehe.)

4
Oh and acourse: HAPPY BIRTHDAY SARJ! To (your) future world domination, my dear anal ex-editress and partner in smocket-crime. :)

5
And a late birthday greeting to Kael Co. :) Happy birthday po, sir. Inom pa.

6
Any minute now, Ima start working on my fiction fosho. For sure. Whatever.

If I had eyes

2008-04-02T22:30:00.008+08:00

1
Things have been ho-hum lately. Basking in the nothingness that is the beginning of summer. (Crap, may hold orders pa pala ako.) Spent a weekend with the family back in Cavite for Gabriel Joshua's graduation -- where I a.) met the ghosts of boyfriends past, b.) was made to promise to graduate with honors by well-meaning former teachers, c.) was told by my former principal that I was "always worthy in the eyes of God." Right.

2
More on nothingness: sleeping the entire day, only getting up for the bathroom, frantic messages from family and friends, and Isabel Allende.

3
Speaking of Isabel Allende:

"I no longer had the strength to grab a sturdy peasant girl by the waist and swing her up onto my saddle, much less rip her clothes off and enter her against her will. I was of an age when you need help and tenderness if you're going to make love. I was old, damn it."
- from The House of the Spirits

Happy summer everybooty.

Like I never needed love before

2008-03-27T13:09:00.004+08:00

Yawning, stretching, grasping my nth mug of coffee. Pressing Ctrl + S, then Alt + F4, grinning hugely. “Damn, I sound so smart,” I say out loud, to no one in particular. “It must be inherent.”

The man off to my side grunts.

“What? Aren’t you glad? I can talk about Francis Ponge and the duality of poetry, about literatures of the Non-Western World, about Estrella Alfon, about Nolledo and his Maria Alma. Quiz me on Dobyns and the crisis of language and the poetry of the city, and I can prattle on, sleep-deprived, wanting of a bath and a proper meal, surviving on sheer stubbornness, caffeine and nicotine. Aren’t you glad?”

Another grunt.

“Well, I’m a magnificent conversationalist.” My voice has taken on an English accent, culled from years of reading Victorian romances out loud. “I happen to know a lot about mandrakes, sweetness. Yes, mandrakes, and not the Hogwarts version. Mandrakes, mandrakes. What eighteen-year-old in a five-mile radius can claim to know about that?”

“You need sleep.”

My laugh sounds shrill, even to my delusional ears.

Weeks ago, I watched as she stood on her tiptoes to kiss the boy who had ignored her for three years. Wow, I thought, we’re in for it now.

“That’s for ignoring me freshman year,” she told him, sure to keep her voice more impassioned, certainly louder, than a whisper.

I walked beside her then as she sashayed away, an unmistakable new sway to her hips, a smile of pure, gloating satisfaction playing on her face.

“I can see everything through your skirt,” I told her.

“I bet he could too,” she said.

One more time, he told her, impatient for the slap of her moans against his neck, of the near-desperate clasp of her hands against his back. You can have me one more time, he told his Maria, this new mythos found on yet another port – who, in time he was sure, would succumb to the gray that wrought all his memories of whores in places far-flung, humid and too-bright with sunlight. But for now she was still real, the color apricots from home, the scent of the moon when he was traveling – pale, timid, keeping an unrealized power that ensnared many a sailor to walk to the edge of the ship and simply walk farther, hands held high in hopes for a touch of the cool surface. But, oh, his Maria: the heat, the openness, the unabashed wanting making them both moist with a glance, near-erupting with an accidental grazing of sun-kissed skin. One more, he repeated, already hardening where he still nestled inside her, willing her eyes to open, her grip on him to tighten. One more time, Maria my darling, he implored. I leave on the rooster’s first crow.

Last night, I dreamt I shared a hopia with F. Sionil Jose.

Strawberry dreams

2008-03-26T18:47:00.005+08:00

1
I'm practically done with junior year. Imagine that. (I reiterate practically because, well, technically, I haven't exactly finished with requirements. There is still the matter of submitting the essays on Stephen Dobyns and Federico Licsi Espina. And then that blasted paper on Francis Ponge. And then another essay about oppression, freedom, and the notion of beauty in the literatures of the Non-Western World. [No, no name-dropping here. No, oh look at me, I'm so smart, reading up on such smart-sounding people, and all those relevant subjects! Pfft. I'm swamped, damn it, in over my head and I know it.])

2
I finished that story I told you was brewing in my head the other day. It's called "Quick, the Tomatoes" and I'm quite pleased with myself, thank you very much. :) Maybe it's the influx of domesticity in the literature I encounter lately -- in academe, in leisure --but "Tomatoes" could very well be a variation on the theme tackled by "Digressions" and "The Twenty-first Month." But then, almost none of you have any idea what I'm talking about now, do you? Oh well.

3
For the life of me, I can't find the page in But for the Lovers that says, "Garlanded thus, the world was tolerable." (Beats me why this is a matter of such significance that I gleefully tossed my first draft of the Ponge paper to scour to Nolledo's novel.) And I don't even know if "tolerable" is the correct word. So, PLE classmates, a little help here?

4
This is for all the bitter old people who (to paraphrase My Chemical Romance) have the shit scared out of 'em by us adolescents:

"When adults say, 'Teenagers think they are invincible' with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, becuase we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible becuase we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."
- from Looking for Alaska by John Green

HAHAHA, peace and love, people. :)

Standing right in front of me

2008-03-19T23:44:00.003+08:00

What happens now? For four days, the pious sit huddled in make-shift chapels in the middle of asphalt streets, chanting the Pasyon to the tune of whatever latest song caught their attention. Jesus Christ, yeah, dude died on the cross, yo. Until Sunday, the trains shall be motionless. Birds will delight on hearing their feet tick and tack against the steel roofs. Brothers will most probably lounging in hammocks while chickens scuttle beneath them. Green mangoes shall be peeled.

I'll be here, in Katipunan, no witness to that, kept company by Francine Prose, Gala Dali, Francis Ponge and Aime Cesaire. This is not a well-intentioned sacrifice of a well-meaning schoolgirl. This is plain absent-minded stupidity coupled with inherent laziness. Ai-yah. And me gots less than five hundred bucks to my name.

I should have gone at the first fade of sunlight, with nothing but Blue Angel and a change of underwear in my bag.

*

The girl next door, they say she looks like me. Except, of course, she has breasts. Comparatively, they simply exist.

She has long brown hair, curling from the shadows above her ears. Her lips are thin. When she smiles, a semi-colon deepens in the corner of her mouth.

Maybe some time before Easter, I could knock on her door, holding a mug of Swiss Miss in one hand. I might say, "Hello there. Have you heard me through the wall?"

*

A part of me wants to sit on the steps of that (obscenely arrogant) church in Varsity Hills, gnawing on Chickencow barbecue. Hm, Chickencow. I wonder if they're open today? Oh, sadness: a girl, alone on Lent, chatting up the waiters and waitresses, sipping RumCoke. Yes, why not?

I also want some Cherry Coke. (Do they still make those? Had I been the only one who liked its curling sweetness?) And some Cappuccino Mudslide. Would it be in bad taste to head on over to Rustan's and get myself some liquor? Yes, I think so -- even I know that much.

*

The flower shop across the street is closed. No one, apparently, wants to buy flowers during Lent. Why, though? They're on full-swing Valentine's and November 1st. Why not Lent? Love and death (in the pages of some tattered leather-bound book) -- potent combination, big sales? Or is it because you can't have a cup of coffee afterwards with Jesus? Because he has no tombstone to lay daisies on?

*

Holy fuck the palaspas, it's only Wednesday night.

Samson went back to bed

2008-03-16T21:58:00.006+08:00

Sasha is doing a paper on thingie-poet (haha) Francis Ponge, as well as Estrella Alfon and ohmygodiloveyou Lakambini Sitoy. And a story about a nekkid Satan and something called "Hasten the Tomatoes" or "Quick, the Potatoes" whatever is brewing in my head.

That was a completely unrelated introduction to this:

Previously on Happy Mondays...

It was on the second of April last year, the first monday of the month, that the Happy Mondays Poetry Nights was successfully launched @ Mag:net Cafe in Katipunan. Tomorrow, March 17, marks the 24th installment of the bi-monthly reading -- a rare feat in consistency and the completion of a year-round series of Poetry Reading that featured veteran and multi-awarded pillars of the Philippine poetry scene, as well as some of the brightest and most promising young poets in the country today.

The idea of having a regular poetry reading in the cafe was conceived by Mag:Net owner Rock Drilon and young poet from the Ateneo Andrea "Drey" Teran sometime in March of last year. The goal was to establish the cafe as a regular venue for reading poems. The project was commendable since public readings of this type are hard to come by; the opportunity to read literary works is often dependent on (and limited to) literary festivals and workshops.

The Happy Mondays Poetry Nights project has brought on stage some of the most revered and respected young and established poets in the country: from Marc Gaba, Angelo Suarez, Mookie Katigbak, and Conchitina Cruz to Marne Kilates, Marjorie Evasco, Krip Yuson, and Gemino Abad. Frontrunners in Poetry in Filipino like Benilda Santos, Mike Coroza, Egay Samar, Jospeh Saguid, and Caloy Piocos have also graced the readings.

Visiting Fil-am poets Patrick Rosal and Joseph Legaspi have joined the celebration of the word and have read from their acclaimed collections. Rising poets like Mikael De Lara Co, Arkaye Kierulf, Allan Pastrana, and Emong De Borja have become regular Happy Monday readers, alongside upcoming and talented younger voices from nearby colleges and universities who are now part of the Happy Mondays reading family.

And the family is still increasing, twenty-four happy mondays after, a testament to the power of the written and spoken word, and the sublime negotiations in between.

The anniversary reading tomorrow will run from 7 to 10pm and will feature the following poets:

1. Rebecca Anonuevo
2. Teo Antonio
3. Gemino Abad
4. Edgar Samar
5. Alfred Yuson
6. Marne Kilates
7. Victor Penaranda
8. Lourd De Veyra
9. Angelo Suarez
10. Mike Coroza
11. Kris Lanot Lacaba
12. Joseph Saguid
13. Mikael Co
14. Eric Melendrez
15. Karen Kapco
16. Pocholo Goitia
17. Adam David
18. Keith Cortez
19. Khavn Dela Cruz
20. Sasha Martinez
21. Celine Martelino
22. Pancho Villanueva
23. Ria Torrente
24. Kash Avena
25. John Torres
26. Mia Tijam
27. Kristian Abe Dalao
28. Carlos Piocos
29. Ken Ishikawa
30. Corin Arenas

plus other readers still to confirm. Admission is free. Genuine Moleskine Notebooks will be raffled off, courtesy of Avalon.ph. Kitakits at makiwasak!

(From Joel's blogspot.)

So, children, let's go. Lia and I (plus hot random blockmates) are heading over right after Sir Krip's fiction class. Come on. :)

(If you cringe at the thought of me further butchering poetry by reading onstage, you could always go to the bathroom. Or go downstairs and mingle with the street children, hehe.)

They keep each other amused

2008-03-16T01:25:00.005+08:00

Have any of you seen my life scurry past? Last seen with A Disgustingly Thorough History of French Literature stuck in its scraggly hair.

Followed by a moonshadow

2008-03-06T22:53:00.007+08:00

Since I'm moving (I still don't know where exactly, but hey) I need to get rid of some of my lovely, lovely books. The first list can be found here. Like, go.

Oh, and in conjunction with that essay/poem I wrote, "I stopped reading romance novels", I am now selling, er, romance novels. I've got Fabio on my bookshelf, and I'll give it to you for a hundred or whatever.

Hay.

I'd go to Quezon Ave. for some moolah, but as everyone in the FA Room knows, that is most likely to be bleak.

UPDATE: Added to list is J. Robert Lennon's The Light of Fallen Stars and Alice Hoffman's At Risk. And will be uploading pictures of my babies this weekend in my LJ.

Help this soon-to-be-homeless chick out. :)

And thanks, Tricia! :p

The sweetest goodbye

2008-03-06T12:14:00.005+08:00

Dear kids: In a couple of weeks, I shall be homeless. Again. (I'm just getting poorer and poorer by the damned second.) I need a new place to live in.

Wala lang. Send out them pigeons. Else I'll camp on the doorstep of everyone I know.

I talk to cats.

The Bible didn't mention us

2008-03-03T14:14:00.005+08:00

Miss me?

1
I have not been abducted by aliens and put alongside cows and dolphins. No antiseptic capsule was constructed with me in mind, no silver jumpsuit was sewn from fibers found only on a moon in a galaxy named Sardo. No swashbuckling pirate, no down-on-his-luck cowboy, no bored multimillionaire decided to kidnap me. No one threw me over his ship, his horse, his Benz. Not even a tricycle. I wasn't thrown, gagged, my hair all a-tangle, in a ditch in Marinduque, with the remains of a popsicle in my bound hands. Any tacky impersonator of Jame Gumb did not strip the skin off me, because frankly, I doubt anyone would fit in to it the way it looks now. I have led a completely boring weekend life of DVD marathons (ohmygod, laglag ang panty ko kay Jean Reno sa Leon!) and hopia mongo, chronic oversleeping, and uncharged mobile phones.

2
I have been reading Ann Beattie's Secrets and Surprises, at Sir Larry's suggestion. I have been suffering from Literary Booger Complex. I have never had this strong an urge to hurl a book across the room for its vomitociously galing literary merit.

3
I have a copy of Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse on my bookshelf. My grandfather, fresh from the hospital, got it for me -- they all told me it was the only copy they found, after scouring bookstores upon bookstores. At Borders, there it was, sitting lone and alone, flanked by Barthes' books on Mythologies and Signs, seemingly waiting for that one person who would stride through the door with its name reverberating in his mind. Oh, thank you, everyone.

4
We've been productive, haven't we? I started working on them ideas germinating in my widdle mind, and got "The Evident Muse" (don't hassle me because it's a freakin' cheesy title, orayt?), "Sunday Morning", 90% of "The Eye Maker", and another one very tentatively titled "Nacho Libre" because I have no idea what to name it... Yeah-huh, I gots my short story mojo back.

Oh, and I think I wrote two poems. I think, I think.

This might suffice as an explanation why I look and sound and read out of sorts. Me back from dead, ug ug.

5
No way to measure time / when you cannot see the sky --

Falling slowly

2008-02-29T12:06:00.004+08:00

The buses leave at 1:30. By that time, I'd still be in my polka-dot flats, velvet-ish black vest, with a gold pleather bag slung on one shoulder -- not exactly rally outfit.

I don't know why I feel like I have to be there. I've always been apathetic, dismissing politics with a Pfft! from my marshmallow tower. I shake my fist and hurl invectives at the sorry state of our country, only in the comforts of my home, or when I've drank enough to giggle at every little thing. Possibly the conviction of two nights ago, drinking mass wine by the tumbler: "Let's go to Makati," we all said, all of that filtering down to today. I have to be there, I think, and this saddens me because I do not trust the man that was instrumental in creating this movement. Cynical, jaded -- who knows who is telling the truth? But does this truth really matter, when it will probably, eventually, bring on the bigger, biggest truth most of us are clamoring for? I do not trust this man. I'm sorry, but he looks slimy. It is easy to see him rubbing his hands together in some cobwebbed corner while some Man-in-the-Shadows performs the Steepled Finger Pyramid of Evil Planning. I do not trust this man. He is lying about something. He must be. About the same conviction here as I have of being in Makati today. Cynicism, jadedness. Whatever. I feel that people are holding on to the catalyst he is offering because it's the best thing we've got, the only thing substantial enough to lead 50,000 people out of their fist-shaken homes and out to the streets. Hope, I think, the rather tarnished kind of hope. The way gravedancers dance to a looming Liar's Moon and hope for rain. I am mixing my folklore the same way I am mixing my convictions. Fuck it. I'm eighteen, I'm reading Ann Beattie and doing papers on Francis Ponge and Kerima Polotan-Tuvera. I am not to be bothered with this, because nothing ever changes, we'll be stuck in this quagmire until we all have enough money and willpower to ship ourselves over to the nearest first world, and the Philippines will just be bitter air at the back of your throat. Fuck it. And then. And then. Then this slimy guy comes along, muttering passwords to big-issue acronyms. Supercilious. Greasy. I cannot trust this man. If I had children, I wouldn't let them near him. But he holds something in his crowd-waving hands, something that'll wrench me out of my siesta later tonight, after all the Modern Poetry and Non-Western Literature have swam within my underused, paranoid mush of a brain.

Some of the girls and I are heading on over to Makati later tonight. I knock on your Makatian doorsteps in case something dreadful breaks out, and my appendages aren't strong enough to carry me back to the buses. Sanctuario, my darlings.

Possibly later, I'll head back home with nothing to carry with me but the memory of a swaying crowd, most of them unable to give a sound reason why they are bothering. A part of me knows that tonight won't be recounted to my grandchildren. I'll mention it to a man, perhaps, in the future, after some inane argument about the lights left on, and I'll just suddenly lash out with something like, "I fucking went to Makati, you fucking dick, and I didn't believe I'll get something wondrous there either!" But that's about it. My mother is not to know. My roommates are all a-twitter.

I have to change into rubber shoes. Polka-dot flats simply won't do.

Excuse the salad stains

2008-01-16T12:04:00.001+08:00

Written on my desk, Phil. Lit. in English -- The past is only the future with the lights turned on. Turned on daw. Makes sense, I think to myself, taking the teensiest of breaks from multi-tasking: half-listening to a discussion of a poem by Alejandrino G. Hufana (damn my irreverence) and reading more of Wilfrido Nolledo's But for the Lovers on the sly.

"She is passionately shredding the coconut," says my profesor. Immediately (because my my mind works fast in things like these:) I imagine a woman in her prime, straddling a coconut-shredder, her floral skirt hiked up to mid-thigh, legs damp and glistening, every lithe surface separated from everything else, undulating, with each hard motion, each intense press and pull of niyog to the spiked circle.

In Nolledo, a few pages ago, Hidalgo de Anuncio, aged Spanish nobleman, tragic clown by profession, remembers the consummation of his marriage to one Mariya -- she with her self-mutilated vajayjay, gash traversing the planes and curves of her young body that she appears to be one giant gaping wound. He stabbed through her bandages and blisters, eliciting from that blessed pyre what could not have been ecstasy but exultation, not sex but sainthood, for she was joining not him but a gringo God . . . brutal, beatific. A beata from a brute . . . . says page 209 to 210.

So bury me in memory / his smile's your rope / so wrap it around your throat demands my desk.

You're just a sad song / with nothing to say pines Gerard Way in another deep cavern in my head.

I'm just a lonely ghost / burning down songs -- it comes back to me: yours truly making emo at a balcony in some hotel somewhere, listening to the disembodied vocalist of From Autumn to Ashes: glaring right back at the sea, watching mismatched (but who am I to say, really?) lovers canoodling under a tree, smiling at the sight of a passing bicycle (lolo is steering, lola is daintily perched between his arms, his legs).

"Go to sleep, Cinderella," said Hidalgo wryly. "For tomorrow we die."

DAMN! NAKA-LACE THONG!!! gushes my desk one last time, a large white arrow pointing to an absent, unsuspecting stranger once sitting in front of it.

I could leave my own mark, immortalize my own schmaltz in the form of shamelessly horrid pseudo-poetry (until the next repainting) on the wooden surface, or I could just rather make people think, swoon, perhaps, saya aww -- I could quote Billy Collins: "Excuse the salad stains, but I'm in love."

The little spies

2008-01-14T11:41:00.001+08:00

Family update: Baby cousin Ashley spent her second birthday dressed in a lilac gown, in the arms of Jollibee -- who "accidentally" let one gloved hand wander momentarily to my flat behind. I could have touched his ass, but I doubt he would feel it.

Spent Sunday with my family (yes, I have one) -- Mom and I running around Festival Mall looking for shoes and secondhand books, the boys in tow, grumbling, holding our bags. John Vincent's average is above 90, Gabriel Joshua needs Chapters 4 and 5 of his thesis and my father thinks brown looks good on him.

*

Writerly update: Woke up at three this morning to the sound of my calves shrieking in pain. Must've been all that traipsing around the Metro last night. Opened my laptop, admired a shiny new gadget attached to it like a cyst (thanks to my mother for filching a Flash Drive for me), then started hammering away at the keys. End result, one odd sunrise later, is A Knock on the Door, four pages (uncharacteristically short for me, sufferer of Acute Literary Elephantiasis) of my first ever completed short story of the year. YEEEY!

Which means my ever-pending Red Earth has been whining repeatedly and continuously due to neglect. One damn scene refuses to be written. Tadyakan na 'to.

*

Friend-ic (what's a modifier for friend?) update: Blockmates and I had an inuman thing at Aila's pretty fly pad -- we watched Rent for the umpteenth time, ate Nikay's pesto, and urged Sandelicious to go on. I also watched people fall off like flies, succumbing to sleep. At which point, I opened the windows to scream random adulations to slumberous Loyola Heights.

I missed you crazy peoples!

*

Voices in My Head update: I need to get into that My Chemical Romance concert. Angst na kung angst. Sarj and I shall be in it together, and my emo prowess, combined with her innate ability to spread terror and horror to the ends of the earth shall make Mikey and Gerard Way to fall on their knees in front of our Chuck Taylors.

Oh, and Paramore's Crush Crush Crush is stuck in my head.

Sick advice

2008-01-11T01:55:00.001+08:00

I have kept my silence for far too long, that Sarj as even asked me whether a sinturon ni Hudas blasted my arm off during the New Year celebration. Now, for someone who's blubberingly terrified of holding a kuwitis, someone who spent months mustering enough courage to use a freaking lighter without flinching, that wasn't happening. I spent my New Year's Eve eating molo and letting my rubber froggie do all the noise for me, thank you very much.

Now. It's about two weeks into the Year of the Rat and yes, I am resurrecting my potato-mouse doodles as we speak (all hail the implied nose) -- and I haven't done anything remotely productive except trudge through NVM Gonzales's A Season of Grace.

So I haven't been amputated, I haven't decided to live like a hermit in an underwater cave in the middle of nowhere, I haven't flied out to Latin America to get a tango-strutting lover with too much chest hair. Too bad for you, I'm back.

(Oh my gooood -- MYX is playing that music video of Regine Velasquez and gasp! David Hasselhoff and it's squeee! in a decidedly horrified manner.)

An update on my life: I spent the first week of 2008 with a fever that hit just before school started. Sucks. I won't go into the gory details, it was an infection or virus thingie watchamacallit whatever but let it be said that it was a kind of fever that made your teeth shiver in pain. I learned some stuff, though, in those days (thankfully long gone) that I shall carry with me through the rest of my days:

1 - Do NOT watch House while sick. You'll come up with all sorts of highfalutin, incredibly lethal-sounding names for a sneeze.

2 - Put that cigarette down. It ain't a good idea.

3 - It is highly probable you're going to throw that salad back up, so don't even bother. And yeah, it's still gonna come out green.

Anyways, am better now, traipsing the Metro, playing Sims and Hellgate, defragging my laptop and whatnot. I'm back, I'm still as noisy as ever. Bring it on, 2008!

Take your Vitamin C! :)

On an open fire

2007-12-30T00:21:00.001+08:00

Random updates to tide you over:

1
Reading Isabel Allende's The Stories of Eva Luna and it's a case of literary envy. Almost makes me want to open my dreaded Red Earth story document and hammer away at the keys. Almost.

2
Uploaded our share of fidgers from last week's Christmas dinner at ZoeDee's. They're in my fugly-ass Multiply and my new baby over at Facebook. I removed as much of the incriminating photos I could find, but Zoe's album found a way. Pasko naman eh, haha. Ogle away, kids, ogle away.

3
This has been the best year. Ever. :) I want to hug everyone, haha.

You know it's Christmas

2007-12-21T23:10:00.000+08:00

Watching TV Patrol (World) this afternoon, seeing that SLEX is clogged like a shower drain in an all-girls dorm room, that veggie prices have skyrocketed, that Charise Pempengco (who I saw on Ellen) is coming out with an album, that the criminal minds in Hong Kong are attaching drugs on the CD cases of pornos, I thought: All I really want for Christmas is some ol'-fashioned fruitcake, some Jeanette Winterson books and a pair of knee-high boots.

And my mom calls me to say, "We're having SPAM for noche buena."

"Cool. Uh, can't we at least have hotdogs to grill like we did last year?"

"Uhm, how about corned beef?"

"To grill."

"Stranger things have happened."

*

Popping Strepsils and gigantic yellow-pills to keep myself out of bed for tomorrow night's dinner. Food, booze and cam-whoring (oh yeah, and friends) here I come.

*

Watching SNL's Dick in a Box to remind myself to update my Christmas Wish-list. Hay.

*

Last days in Dumaguete. (After which my mother wound up frantically texting everyone from my grandmother to Sir Krip, because I sort of forget to tell her I'd already gone back to Manila.) I remember taking Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Michelle's gigantic pile (as in tambakan) of books in her dorm room, slipping it into the back pocket of the borrowed cargo pants I was wearing, and reading it bit by bit from Forest Camp to Silliman Beach to Justine's pad. Oh, and the last car ride to the airport. I scribbled this here on my now-overflowing journal and just stumbled upon it now:

"I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac."

Hurray for melancholy whores. :)

Waves are crashing

2007-12-16T18:59:00.001+08:00

. . . And stars are falling all for us.
(Because it is stuck in my head and I need to send it out there so it'll feast on the LSS-hugging corners of your minds. *Evil laugh*.)

*

Anyway. The last week of class shall be a flurry of required novels, smuggled novels, and dinners with lovely people. ZoeDee and her crabcake thingies. Rar. :) And splendiferous coffee. Oh, gosh. Blockmates and blockmate friends, see you on the 22nd. :)

Then it's off to the wilderness of Cavite, then to Calatagan for some frozen beach-ness. Christmas Eve has, lately, been a night of grilling hotdogs with my brothers, chasing chickens (to my father's consternation), making molo soup with my mother, and sleeping on top of my uncle's billiard tables; dinner consisting of tacos, sushi, pizza and the odd estupado; the brothers who squirm from your hugs, the father who blushes when you kiss his cheek, the mother who stares at you for two seconds before she lets herself be smothered with an awkward hug.

Won't have it any other way.

Aww.

Ahem.

*

Last Christmas, I realized that the induction to adulthood was barricading one's self in one's grandmother's room with a ton of Christmas wrapper, hardening one's heart to the squeals and pleas and flimsy excuses (Ate Sha, kuha lang ako ng . . . ah, hair brush . . .) of little cousins everywhere. Nothing like knowing other people's gifts and near-suffocating one's self with scotch tape to know that you're a freaking adult.

*

Random(-er): That song by Jose Mari Chan that begins with a trapped-in-a-tomb-voice that goes Whenever I see boys and girls never ceases to freak me out every single time.

*

Another random brainfart from the depths of my past journals:

"The reality was, you only knew you were loved if you were left and returned to, if you were ignored and then craved. Occasionally you would be seen for slightly less than the sum of your parts, and that was love, too. Love announced itself with a sting, not a pat. If love was love, it was urgent and ripe and carried with it the faint odor of humiliation, so that there was always something to be made up for later, some apology in the works."
- The Brutal Language of Love by Alicia Erian

Jack Frost nipping at my nose

2007-12-14T13:01:00.002+08:00

On taking a breather from the mountain of Coetzees, Polotan-Tuveras, Fuenteses, Lahiris, Joaquins, Gonzaleses, Pounds, Heideggers, I picked up a book with a florid green cover (from my ever-present stack of floridly-green-covered books) and thought:

"I want a 6-foot-2, 200-pound Norwegian slab of a bodyguard who had been a detonations expert before; a manicurist and hairdresser before that; an interior decorator before that; would schlep a little black kitten called Lucifer around; and watch One Tree Hill with me while we devour a tub of vanilla ice cream.

And his name shall be Sven, denied a part in Baywatch for having the compulsion to look lovingly into the camera ever so often, denied a part in an Off-Broadway musical about homosexual loving for being too masculine. Loveable, Self-Esteem-Issues-Plagued Sven."

'Tis all.

You in the front row

2007-12-09T21:23:00.001+08:00

One-thirty in the morning. The streets are teeming with spectators of the tricycle drag race along Katipunan. I walk from the dorm to McDo, either because I was feeling a little masochistic, or I didn't want to spend twelve bucks. Or maybe most of the trikes are revving up their engines, and the rest are parked all over the road, their bets in their pockets. Or a combination of the three.

*

The girl at the counter asks, "Can you wait?"

I've drifted off, traipsing once again into La-La Land. I ask her what she means -- "Ha?"

"Yung fries po," she says.

I nod. She looks like that girl in elementary whose face welcomed a projectile Reader's Digest Condensed Books, thrown by one mentally unbalanced (yet to be diagnosed and medicated) classmate. I'd been sitting behind that girl when that happened, trying to memorize Joyce Kilmer's Trees for a graded recitation, when the book whizzed by. The first instinct was to look towards the direction of the attacker.

"Sige, I'll wait," I said. I turned to look through the glass doors, waiting for the tricycles to roar by, along, through.

*

The woman tending the newspaper stand calls for me to be careful. "Miss, may gang war ngayon. Ingat kayo."

I only smile at her warning, the token concern given to passers-by. I walk through the boys wielding pipes and balisongs, wondering if I die with a Quarter Pounder meal in my arms tonight. Tomorrow's headline might read, Babae, tatanga-tanga, pumagitna sa gang war. A picture of me with a two-by-four sticking out of my eye, footprints on my Minotaur shirt will be in black and white. And the lady selling the papers would say, "I warned her" and shake her head. "Yosi, sir?"

Five minutes later, nearing home, I think: Apparently not.

*

PS - Paramore and Feist got nominated for the Grammy awards. Yey. :)

Up late

2007-12-08T04:08:00.001+08:00

It is three o'clock in the morning. Maury is on television, keeping me company as I wait for you to come home. This fear is taking over my life, says the marquee.

On screen, a woman cowers behind a chair, incoherent at the sight of a plate of quivering red Jell-O. Her screams lock in her throat, only slowly seeping out of her mouth -- grotesque, open, ignorant to the taste of tart strawberry gelatin. I wonder if there is a sepia-tone image in her mind, that of a man trying to keep his guts inside his body.

Another woman is being chased around the studio by a giant yellow chicken. This time I am sure, judging by the hoarseness with which she calls for her mommy, that she remembers when she was five, running down the street as screeching chickens nip at her heels.

When I was a kid, no chickens went after me. No man knocked at my front door, holding his intestines in his hands. Instead, I planned my wedding and named all my future children. My greatest fear then was that no boy would stand underneath my bedroom window one evening, holding a radio high above his head. Or that the crush of the week would ask another girl to the Prom, and they would dance and dance and dance past midnight. Nothing, really, that would scar me for life. Nothing that would keep me up at nights.

The show goes on with more screaming, more bleeps and more winks to the audience from Maury Povich. You still aren't home, you haven't even called. Perhaps you're using your hands for something else, say, holding a radio above your head, waiting for some other girl's window to open. Perhaps, even, cradling your bloody guts to your self.

I should sleep now, or turn the TV off at least. But I am afraid you will not come home tonight because, who knows, you might have been attacked by some roosters you interrupted at mid-crow.

> Ladies and gentlemen, from watching Maury at three o'clock in the morning, waiting for nothing but the hunger to get me off the bed. And it has. Off I go for some Quarter Pounders. Ta.

Just don't ask me how I am

2007-12-05T16:05:00.002+08:00

Today, while in bed with Migraine, I called Insomnia up. (My Imaginary (Um)friend was still in Sudan with his koalas.)

"Want to go out for halo-halo?"

And he said, "I don't go out while the sun is up."

Just don't ask me what it was

2007-12-05T15:32:00.001+08:00

Am in bed because Insomnia decided to ask me out last night. Because my Imaginary (Um)friend was off taking pictures of koalas in Sudan, I said yes.

I put on my Chucks, threw a blanket around my shoulders, and off we went on a date. On a date while the MMDA drilled some holes in between the yellow pedestrian lane lines.

I drank a Margarita, he kept to his San Mig Light. We smoked as we watched flea-bitten dogs stumble by, counting how many were missing an ear. He told me I smoked too fast, I told him the butterflies in my lungs demand it. Cigarettes are not peanuts, he said.

He asked me how I was.

I told him I was okay, but he disagreed.

We started to bicker. I cut him off, began with the word no. He laughed and said You argue like a man. I shot back: Well you whine like a girl. And then we fell silent, but we were grinning like mad.

And then he took my cigarettes.

He asked if he could hold my hand. I would have said something schmaltzy like But that would make it harder for me to go, but, well, that was a tad too schmaltzy and it was already 4 AM, too late/early for confessions. (Or probably a conveniently perfect time for them.) So he held my hand.

On the way back home, he asked why I was with him tonight. I told him I had no choice. (I remember the little quiz Margie gave me the other night, the one about the strawberries. I won't fence them in. I'll eat as many as I can get. I couldn't help it, I said to the farmer.)

At the front door, he asked if he could kiss me. I said Not on the first date. He grinned and said, Baby, you know this isn't the first.

Am in bed because Migraine then jumped into bed with me in the wee hours of the morning, just as I waved a feeble goodbye to Insomnia who was then already whistling as he went down the street to visit another girl.

"I've been waiting up for you," he said, smoothing the curls from my face, tucking the blankets higher around my neck.

"Don't call me a whore," I mumbled.

Daytime of the night

2007-11-30T22:15:00.001+08:00

Last night, an hour before curfew, I thought, "What if I walked around with my KATIPUNAN press pass? Will the checkpoint people consider the magazine as a "legitimate" publication? Can I say, Arts & Lifestyle, dude. Step aside? And if they insist on taking me to jail, can I say, I don't think you should do that. You know who my boss is, huh? April Jo-han-na Sescon, mo'fos!?"

Last night, at curfew, I thought. "What if David Blaine was having a show in Luneta right now, where he has to stay inside an aquarium for nine days, and what if he can't take it anymore, he has to leave the aquarium because all his blood vessels are bursting like longganisa and no one's around to help him? And, besides, will the aquarium be considered as his home, that if he leaves it by some splendirrific magic trick, he'll get sent to jail?"

Last night, an hour into the curfew, I thought, "What if the curfew simply goes on and on and on and let's say all the bathrooms in the building conked out and I desperately have to pee and the only place I can do it in is in the freaking bushes across the street?"

Last night, two hours into the curfew, I thought, "What if I went out right now? What if I went out disguised as a homeless person carrying a tattered Lucky Me carton over my head, singing Adeste Fideles? Would they bring me in? Would they falter when I raise the carton higher and say this is the only home I recognize, mortals!?"

Last night, three hours into the curfew, I thought, "What if my dad is out right now? What if -- Oh, shit."

Last night, four hours into the curfew, I thought, "What if someone from, say, Croatia, has been planning to serenade me? What if he planned to do it in such a grand manner that he'd drop out of the sky from a hot air balloon painted with stars? What if he gets shot because they all thought he was a terrorist, because the white mums he has in one hand could be a bomb and the guitar case slung over his shoulder could be a rocket launcher? What about this chance at true love?"

Last night -- well, this morning -- at five, I thought, "What if Art imitated life?" But it was in a dream.

They've boarded up the cinema

2007-11-29T20:16:00.001+08:00

Fast, labo updates before I head off to the great abyss that is a long weekend:

1 - At 11:24 this morning, my mother texts: Will not meet. Trillanes is walking in Ayala. And I had an image of him simply walking. On his way to lunch probably. I bet he had no idea na tapos na yung recess sa hearing. And did anyone else see that military guy with the Lucille Ball wig?

and so

2 - Because Sen. Trillanes "exercised his right to exercise," I couldn't watch Enchanted. And the government has announced a 12 MN to 5 AM curfew -- or so my mother says; I think she just wants me to stay put, hehe. So today's plans scrapped, tonight's plans down the drain . . .

therefore

3 - I had to keep myself from going mad. Staying in bed wasn't an option, since my dreams of becoming a vegetable have been temporarily put on hold in lieu (leyooo, fuhnee) of higher aspirations, such as, well, uhm, not being a vegetable. And since I'm lazy, I ignored the heap of schoolwork gathering dust in a corner of my shelves. And since last night Yaps told me to get a Facebook account . . . well. That was that. (Add me!)

and last night, too,

4 - I went back online after living under an internet-less rock for a few days, and found out that Joey Nacino and Sir Ian Casocot won the first and second prizes (places?), respectively, for the fiction category of the (clicking Google, wait, wait, wait) Philippine Graphic/Fiction awards. :) Yey! Congratulations po. Much hugs to you.

In conclusion

5 - Happy long weekend, errybooty!

5432: Scenes from childhood

2007-11-28T17:23:00.001+08:00

Six years old, a decidedly simpler time: my mother always working, my father forever disappearing, my brothers mere blobs. No lectures yet on preferring Barbies over GI Joes, no reminders to stay off trees and leave them worms alone. I climbed over stacks of gravel in empty lots, skirting raisin-shit of goats, chasing after dragonflies. Later, when all their wings have been torn off, I would be on my knees, cupping my hands through puddles, in search of tadpoles. Later, I'd throw rocks at boys and call them names I've overheard from shirtless men in kantos, holding lapad in one hand, with a sleeping baby balanced on their pot bellies. My knees are primed to bend that I could duck; those days, boys threw stones back. Later, I'd be running from Aling P's projectile slipper and/or Mang T's askal pets, a melon ice candy burning my grubby hands, sineguelas lumping my shorts pockets.

I would come home at six to catch Ghost Fighter. My brother Joshua on top of the table, covered in chicken grease and baby powder. My brother John in the middle of the bed, barricaded by pillows. My mother's spare pearls inside a box on the dresser, change from my father's pabilin money beside that.

And then the maid would screech, "Putangina kang bata ka, saan ka na naman nagsususuot?"

I would have loved to say, "Defying stereotypes, getting lost", but the words are as yet unknown to me, not to mention too long -- she'd whack me on the side of the head anyway (conveniently where the mud has not caked on my curls) because I dared show off my English skills.

*

The weekend after my first few days in kindergarten (the career girl at four years old). My father is cutting my hair.

We are in the front porch of our bungalow-type apartment. His red motorcycle is to my right, the green wire cages housing chickens are to my left. Behind me, my father is singing a Bon Jovi song in an operatic voice. Every once in a while, he will tell me not to laugh so much, lest my fidgeting make him tear a bald spot through my hair. Obediently, I'll quiet down. Sometimes, a hiccup comes out. Snip-snip go the scissors, the roosters would crow. I wanna lay you down on a bed of roses, my father will sing again. He is so close, I can feel his chest rumbling before he bellows, not an unpleasant pressure on my back. For tonight, I sleep on a bed of nails. I giggle. He will tug my shortened hair gently. Huwag ka malikot, ineng.

Snip-snip go the scissors. Cock-a-doodle-do crow the roosters. On and on, my father sings and in a moment, he will not be able to keep me still.

My father goes on singing. Two inches of my hair pattern themselves into intricate curlicues on the asphalt floor.

*

My parents are sitting in our wicker sofa, side by side. Behind them, on the wall, print-outs on scratch paper from mother's office, proclaiming Ba-Be-Bi-Bo-Bu.

My father is wearing slacks, my mother's hair riots in curls to her waist. Both of them cradle a bundle of blue and white blankets.

I inch closer and closer to them. I am holding out a glass teacup I'd kept inside the freezer the entire day. I have drawn flowers all over its crystallized surface using my finger, not yet three years old, as is the rest of me.

"Look what we have for you," says mother, her perfect English drawing me closer.

And so I look. Nestled in the bundle is a tiny, wrinkled face half-hidden by a mop of curly hair.

"His name is Gabriel Joshua," my mother tells me.

"Abeng," my father names his first son.

Disinterested, I shrug and make a face. I hold out the teacup farther that it hovers above the bundle-thing. "Look what I got for you," I tell them.

*

This could be a false memory: I am cowering in a corner of my parents' bedroom, flush against the cabinets. My father has chased me from the kitchen. He is holding a butcher's knife roughly a foot from my face. I know I am giggling. I know no he must be fooling around. But then?

My mother's voice, disembodied, exasperated, from the kitchen: Jeff.

I am two years old.

Slots

2007-11-27T22:30:00.001+08:00

I remember when Lego came in mesh bags that bore only the brand sticker to tell you what to do with it. Lego wasn’t supposed to be anything yet – not a horse, not a Formula One racer, not a metropolis, certainly not a 2000-piece space station. Just a jumble of bricks after all, with deliberate knobs marring otherwise smooth surfaces. I remember when they simply came in red and yellow, white and green. I remember when things fell into each other without sound, hollow blocks one moment and the next a larger being, seamless save for the line revealing where they meet, still too thin for a sheet of dust and air to linger. I remember when everything had a place, an ever-present mate – but no one told you what it was, with whom or where. “Insert Tab A into Slot B,” but you had to go blindly. So aimless a direction, that we had to carry it over, beyond toys. Then, knob one to hollow two, plus a four-color option. Girl loves boy, boy may or may not love back. We chanted first came love as we played, reminding ourselves that that is what it is called, that is what we should do. Yet no one told us then how to make a first impression, how to smile, how to tilt our heads just so. No one told us how to start arguments with the words, “I feel.” No one told us that men and women were so different that the other was always two planets away. I remember when there were no t-shirts showing us 101 ways to do it on any hard surface. I remember when it all just happened. I remember when nothing came with manuals.

> After a cup of ridiculously expensive coffee, half a pack of lethal Mentoses, ten kikiam, and lots of moaning and groaning. Oh, yeah, and today's Philo class -- Heidegger. Wasak.

We're gonna go swimming

2007-11-23T11:42:00.001+08:00

". . . to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

*

It is amazing how a room can seem like a home people would dare live in with some curtains, a divider thingie, a tablecloth, Glade and those little pine tree scented paper things. Our room smells lived in and not in the nakabilad na panty kind of way.

Then again, any room with a paper crane and some well-placed Post-it notes is home enough for me.

*

Last night, a crash course in pseudo-French:

"Je m'appelle ca va?" Giggle. "My name is How are You." Uncontrollable giggling.

The language of love nga naman. Now. Attends, je t'embrasse le ciel.

Make it all fall faster

2007-11-20T22:32:00.001+08:00

I think this is some sort of sick joke.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words. Not making this up. First heard this on the FX on my way to Calatagan last Halloween. It had me snort C2 two seats across.

Sad, sad peoples who have this phobia. I can see it now:

"Hi, everyone. My name is John and I've got hippo -- WAAH!!!"

"Hi, John."

How long should a word be that it's actually scary?

Equilibrium? Shiver!

Antidisestablishmentarianism? Pees pants!

Supercalifragilisticespialidocious? Nervous breakdown!

Hohay.

*

"Don't worry. Everything will fall."

Wait. Blink. Wait some more. "Go on, please."

"What can I say? I'm a pessimist."

And tails, we'll try again

2007-11-19T16:23:00.002+08:00

Brainfart, because my muse is out chasing worms with a peacock's tail feather:

Roughly an hour ago: stuck in traffic on my way to Modern Poetry class. And then, like a cow, gigantic man-4WD darts out of nowhere. I am then nose to nose with its bumper. The front license plate thingie reads, in iridescent red, in big tough-guy letters, LAWYER.

This gets me thinking. When I become rich and powerful and get a car that doesn't require me to push it uphill every one hill in a while, Ima get a license plate that reads, SLOB. Or, VOLVO-DRIVING SOCCER MOM. Or, @#*!. Or, MAFLOUFLOU BERRY. Or, the more wistful, WRITER-IN-TRAINING. Or, BANANA. The list is virtually endless.

Oh, and I have nothing against lawyers.

PS - See you kids at the Happy Monday later. :)

Dance to this beat

2007-11-13T22:16:00.001+08:00

Am unwinding in an internet shop because I suddenly found myself for a hankering for technology. Stepped off the LRT-MRT combo one odd hour ago, as I met with my mother dearest in Taft. Doing my daughterly duty of mooching for moolah.

I told her about needing to read seven books for Phil. Lit. And then I told her I need copies of them, since I can't continually horde the books from the libe and I can't actually see myself buying those books because well, I can't afford it. And then I told her that I could have them photocopied and then hardbound (so they could look like legitimate books) in UP. And then I told her I'll go to all the living writers, say, Sir Krip, to ask him to sign a pirated copy of his work.

My mother stared at me in horror.

"Buy the books," she shrieked. "They're books!"

Silly me. We are a mother-daughter team who could go spelunking for books in secondhand shops even if means not having to eat dinner that night. Or all nights two weeks afterwards. Not to mention the eye-rolling we got from the boys at home. Haha.

So I'm going to get seven new books. Nine, if the universe is conspiring. A hundred million thousand when the universe conspires enough to make me rich and powerful. Buwahahahaha. Ha. Haaa.

*

Random updates on Sasha's life:

> Went to school, even though I had no classes for the day. The world is turning on its axis as we speak.

> I made Martin say the word gloop.

> ZoeDee gave me two technically useless but utterly adorable paper clips shaped like a pig and a zebra. Oh, love.

> Nikay is so sex-hay.

> I'm staying in this Phil. Lit class I'm currently taking, although Sir Jimmy Abad every Tuesday and Thursday is certainly tempting. I crush you, Sir Jimmy!

> My back hurts from all that photocopying.

*

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
- On Turning Ten by Billy Collins

Let us go then, you and I

2007-11-12T17:39:00.001+08:00

I realized that I shouldn't be doing all this ew, work on the first day of class. There's still roughly an inch of highfalutin readings over there I have to go through and I've just taken the time off (translation: I peeled my nose from between the illegally photocopied pages of an introduction by Sir Jimmy Abad) to well, er, procrastinate. Blog, I mean.

[How My Day Went]
Anyway. I stumbled into Philo class, ten minutes late. Because that's just who I am. Then I had my Phil Lit in Eng class (I should come up with a better name for that). Classmates kami ni Cat Quevenco and Marie La Vina, plus all my other Math blockmates from two years ago. Anyway. Came out of that classroom with the doom and gloom of someone who has been told she'd have to read seven novels (seven!) before the semester ends, on top of every other thing in the class and other classes as well. Okay. And then I went to Third World Bel for some Third World Lit, where I'm classmates with Trish Elamparo. Oh, yeah, I saw Andrea Teran sa Bel Cafe thingie. Wasak. And then after class I saw Martin and I tagged along with whatever he was up to, then I saw Sarj and we did our thing sa smockets. And then off we went to Modern Poetry, where I heard the word decrepitude used for the first time in the history of human monologues. And then Sarj and I met up with Lia Albano and Gab Murillo to go to the Fiction workshop, and then after forty-five minutes of waiting, waiting, waiting, we left. I think the prof forgot about us. Oh, well. So now I'm here in the libe, doing my goodie goodie schoolgirl thing.
[/How My Day Went]

Oh yeah, and I'm minoring in Lit. Haha. Figured since I'm taking all the required subjects, I might as well call them something. Kahit pampahaba lang ng degree title, hehe. BFA Creative Writing, Minor in Literature. Shiyeht.

Oh yeah, and I'm going to have to really read 'The Wastelands'. Yes, that 'Wastelands'.

*

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
- Steps by Frank O'Hara

This is how we should begin

2007-11-11T20:54:00.001+08:00

The days leading up to school used to be a flurry of red National Bookstore plastic bags and pressed uniforms. Everything would smell of unraveled plastic cover and Kiwi shoe shine. I would be stocking up on pens and highlighters and intermediate pads. I'd buy earrings. I'd get new underwear. I'd doodle on my notebook covers. I'd stick a photograph of my parents (the one where my dad was carrying my mother and my mom has her arms around my father and they are in a swimming pool) in my planner.

Now, I'm just looking for booze.

Last Friday, after I got tossed and tumbled by the RegCom, I met up with Sarj and ZoeDee in (like, you know) Starbucks. Cuz we Atenistas, haha. Ahem. Catched up on things, which roughly translates to me jumping Zoe because I hadn't seen her in months, me attacking the Dunhills waiting to be attacked on the table, me getting free coffee. We talked about the usual stuff: neon green dildoes, writing styles, threesomes, this girl's boobs, Victor's grand gesture, a washing machine, a diamond ring, more threesomes and shouting matches. And then Xander came and joined us, which means April got fried big time.

Wee. (Sasha is giddy. I can't help it.)

And then more things happened that night, which included an imaginary (um)friend, a bucket of beer, a gigantic burrito, dirty dancing to Enrique Iglesias and an aluminum cowboy/stripper.

School starts tomorrow. I got the classes that I wanted, which means I won't be able to sustain a normal conversation without throwing in something from my predicted mile-high Lit readings. Philippine Literature, Third World Literature and Modern Poetry, plus a lot of Philosophy thrown in. Oh yeah, and Sir Krip's fiction workshop. Oh, gah. What did I get myself into?

School starts tomorrow and random stranger beside me is telling the random stranger beside him that, to quote, "Alcohol is the best way to get girls."

School starts tomorrow and I am yet to figure out if I'd actually be able to wake up for it, as I, of course, am still in sem break mode, which means I woke up at 4 PM kanina.

Oh, well.

I'll see you kids tomorrow. :)

*

Public Service Announcement: Who wants to shack up in my former dorm? I've been staying with Helen and the others (former roommates) in curfew-free Prince David, but I can't legitimately leave my dorm yet if no one takes my slot. So. So. Help. :)

Though her mouth is generous

2007-11-08T22:04:00.001+08:00

James Richardson says, "Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean."

So.

November 2. I am scraping the melted wax of November twos before from my grandfather's tombstone, at the same time trying to figure out why cemeteries are the new lover's lanes. A girl is waiting by the acacia tree. She is looking at the charred ground of what was once a sugarcane field. The boy is yet to come for her. The rumble of his motorcycle is yet to disturb the stillness of the day. (I wonder where other people are. I think about my cigarettes, wonder if they have all gone stale.)

November 3. I do not stay long in my parents house. My father refuses to speak to me, because he might ask me to sleep over. My mother is bent over the stove, stirring the spaghetti sauce. My brother Joshua is thinking about a girl named Ellen, whom he will never meet. My brother John does not realize that all of us is waiting for him to come through the door, grinning like he used to. A small frog has turned its mint-green back to us, watching the wall and waiting for ants that dare scuttle along its line of vision.

November 4. My new glasses make everything clearer. Few people know that they have been mere haze for a couple of months. There is only one person who I bother to sit close enough to that I can count his eyelashes if I feel like it. I count them now, as he takes a sip of coffee in a place no one would recognize us.

November 5. I have talked about how trains are the worst places to meet people. I am wearing a pink skirt that slides along the ridges of my ankles whenever I walk. I am sitting beside a poet I have not seen in a month or so. He wants me to stand beside him two weeks from now, as he talks about Klimt's The Kiss. I see myself, a fading reflection on his glasses. I see other people in them, with me, those behind me: the lovers who never hold hands but would soon; the lovers who would never ever hold hands; the lovers who held hands the entire day, then stopped when the clock struck eight.

November 6. I am introduced to a painter. We talk about Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Kafka. We talk about the demand of objectivity in observing tribes and the inability to pull it off. We talk about how truths are easier to understand and accept when given in a subjective, literary manner. He will ask me if I have a boyfriend. I will tell him that I don't think so. He will then read a poem to me, The Rider by Sarah Manguso. His voice will be soft and steady. He will sound like he has spent quite some time letting words roll from the inside of one cheek to the other. He will be quiet after the poem ends. As will I.

November 7. I am quiet. Not because there is a conversation inside my head that I'd rather keep to myself, a conversation with a being very much like myself -- impatient, impetuous, impulsive, easily bored. I am quiet because I have lost the ability to speak. My throat has prevented me from doing so, like a hand curled into a tight fist, that sand could only sneak and slither to escape. I squeak every time I tell things I want them. I show notes to tricycle drivers, informing them of where I have to be. I could be bent over the toilet bowl later tonight, spewing squid and baguio beans. Instead of groans, what sounds like the scrape of heels on wet grass would come out of my fetid mouth.

Hay. Analyze that, mo'fos.

You should rest

2007-11-02T20:11:00.001+08:00

Halloween is the new Valentine's Day. It has something to do with all the black widows, the fishnet stockings, the open shirts, the peg legs, the leather jackets, the angel wings, the mouse ears, the band-aids, the fake blood, the masticated boobies.

That night, I made someone laugh so hard, he nearly peed his pants.

Sweet.

Lobotomizing enlistments

2007-11-01T19:14:00.001+08:00

I'm on vacation, which means I've gone cold turkey for a while, which means this could get snarky, or could fail at snarkiness and bitchery -- it pendulums here and there -- but all I really want to say is: AISIS, you are the current bane of my existence.

Yes, yes, I realize how pathetic it is to gripe at a freaking program, however ineffective and useless (bakit may manual reg pa, taena!) it is, and I will most probably be just sputtering like mad. I could begin with the fact that I had to wake up at an ungodly hour during a freaking holiday just so I could enlist in classes I was basically coerced to enlist in. I could go on and on and on and I will most possibly cease to make sense after the first tangina, AISIS, so I'll just ask you to scoot on over to Martin's site since, of course, he makes much more sense than I could ever wish to have.

Whew.

Basta. The thing is, I prefer to study Philippine Literature under Max Pulan, Modern Poetry under Vince Serrano and I don't know why but I want to study Theories and Practices of Writing, even if its a three-hour Friday night class.

Hay. I might enjoy Shakespeare and Graphic Novel-ing and Poetry Tutorial (gasp). Shakespeare's interesting inuman conversation -- just ask Marie La Vina. 'Sides, I still wanna know what happened to Ophelia, and what the hell one of King Lear's daughters' name is. Cordelia yata. And Graphic Novel-ing. Sarj is there, which means, well, we can create a force field around ourselves to ward off Narutards. And I was there at Gino Bagsit's Heights Talk and he's a purdy nice guy, even though he basically ignored my Hermionic attempts to answer his questions. And Poetry Tutorial with DM Reyes. Okay, sana eh, pero we're forgetting one thing -- I don't fucking write poetry! God knows I wish I do, but I don't.

I could like the classes I'm stuck in, but basically, there would always be the feeling that I just got stuck there. Every time I'm having a hard time, I'll say, tanginang AISIS yan. Every time I have to wake up, drunk on the way to hungover, every first and third Tuesday morning, I'll say, tanginang AISIS yan. Every time I hate the classes, I'll say, god damn you, AISIS, while shaking my fist at the high heavens, a margarita in the other hand.

Anyway, Sarj and I came up with a master plan to rock AISIS out of its smarmy techie pants. I'm feeling much better because of it. (Then, if that won't work, either I go perform lobotomies on random people with a pair of rusty pliers, or I sulk Monday to Friday, this coming sem.)

Ah! Before I forget, eto pa isa kong reklamo ko -- araw-araw ako may klase! Kalokohan! Gah.

Enlistment Woes, Part 2

2007-11-01T05:46:00.001+08:00

Well. Until I work this thing out (translation: whine to Xander), I'm taking Sir Krip's Fiction Workshop, Poetry Tutorial with Sir DM Reyes, Graphic Novel thingie with Gino Bagsit, Shakespeare (eep!) with Glenn Mas and good ol' Philo 102 with Sir Lagliva.

And it seems I'm a somewhat normal undergrad now, as I've got classes every freaking day. Oh, well.

(Enlisting for the TTh Philo class, I thought: But I'll be drunk after Happy Mondays. Jeesh. Gawin na kasing Happy Fridays, Joel.)

Anyhoos. That's it. Am off to Calatagan in a couple of hours.

Toodles. My imaginary (um)friend is acting up. Oh, well.

Enlistment Woes, Part 1

2007-11-01T05:24:00.001+08:00

Ha? Bakit FA Elective lang nandito? I wanna take Phil. Lit. in English! And Modern Poetry! And Theories and Practices and Writing! Bakit ganito? Sabi puwede Humanities subjects! Wah. Wah. Wah!

Hyperventilation starts now.

I'd rather

2007-10-31T22:01:00.001+08:00

Many hellos to Cor, Allan Pastrana and Kash Avena. Cor went home early, but Allan, Kash and I went on to do the whole Sex and the City shiznit sans Manolo Blahniks. :)

This has been a weird night, and I'm sure you'll all agree.

All hail the toothbrush! :)

Name-dropping: Sylvia Plath

2007-10-31T20:26:00.001+08:00

I am having lunch with Sylvia Plath.

It seems that I am having lunch with a photograph peeled from the wall of a man lovelorn. She is grainy, and though I squint that she may focus, she never does. Parts of her are gone, the spaces between her fingers have disappeared that her hands are like small, smooth plates, cupped ever so slightly, and I think, "How does she hold a pen?" Her hair, once blond, is now the color of smoke seen from a distance.

"Do I want a Ted Hughes?" I ask her.

She only smiles. She does not even look away.

I am having lunch with Sylvia Plath.

She smells like pot roast and gas fumes and never says a thing.

I stand up to leave, she bids me to sit down.

I do not. Instead, I nod to say that she could go on.

In her fingerless hands is a journal. She reads: "Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing." The look she gives me is nothing less than pointed. As in, "There, kid. See?"

"Go on," I mumble.

"There are two opposing poles of wanting nothing: When one is so full and rich and has so many inner worlds that the outer world is not necessary for joy, because joy emanates from the inner core of one's being. When one is dead and rotten inside and there is nothing in the world: not all the woman, food, sun, or mind magic of others that can reach the wormy core of one's gutted soul planet."

I am quiet for a long time, standing there in front of her, my mind assailed with her scent, the non-spaces of her hands, her ashen hair.

"Sylvia," I say. "What the hell does all that have to do with it?"

Take your taste back

2007-10-15T16:47:00.001+08:00

Last night.

In the bathroom, under the shower, she is bent over. Her hair trails downwards, skimming her thighs, almost touching the tile floor. It curls and curlicues into itself, delicate and fine, the way it is in that poem she now struggles to remember.

The water running down her spine is almost like a warm palm. Almost.

Last night.

She wakes up, gets out of bed, and grabs the envelope from the shelf.

It is so easy to let some things go. So easy to throw them away.

She goes back to sleep, where she dreams about a ring and a curtain.

Last night.

"Love," s/he said, "is a series of chemical reactions that fool the brain into thinking you feel more than the need to procreate."

Last night.

She only needs to hear the words.

*

Tonight.

Someone will read a poem and she will pretend it is not about someone she knows.

Tonight.

Did you throw it away?

Tonight.

His laugh is a reply she doesn't want to dwell on.

Tonight.

She is about to say it, but thinks too much. It is a choice between his silence, or words he doesn't mean.

Let me know what spring is like

2007-10-11T14:25:00.002+08:00

I woke up at 1:30 PM, and spent my token 5-turned-15 more minutes in bed, mentally mapping out my day. And then I hopped over to my laptop to do some blogging, thereby ruining the carefully conceived plan made under my covers.

And thunder is rolling outside, which means I can't traipse and frolic in the city of neon and chrome.

Methinks I have to take a bath now. And call the registrar so I can enlist as SOH 879 3/892. And head on over to La-La Land, dragging Moosebert by his orange antlers.

...

Obviously, this whole entry is just an exercise of stalling.

No, Ma'am Typhoon, ma'am. Not yet. Not yet! I have a meeting with destiny!!!

(-_-)

Maliligo na.

They keep each other amused

2007-10-10T22:18:00.001+08:00

My grandmother sent me a text message, telling me about an aunt's friend's itinerary. That he's coming to Manila tonight, though leaving for Cebu early tomorrow morning, then back to Manila on the 17th. My lola adds that he's an eighteen-year-old American.

I can practically see her picking out china patterns and flower arrangements. That, and the more obvious, "Get your skinny butt down here and flirt, for heaven's sake. Didn't I and my bevy of four daughters teach you anything?"

I can just imagine me reading Murakami under the covers, while an overly loud discussion of Mr. Chase Person's finer attributes goes on all over the Belen house.

Okay, okay, okay. So my lola isn't the malevolently giddy matchmaker I've attempted to make her out to be here. She's a sweet lady, a former beauty queen (hehe), with a hankering for mah jong and 5-peso bottles of Coke. My mind's just frolicking in La-La Land, as usual.

But this isn't the only time this has happened -- both my grandmother's behavior and my mind hauled off to La-La Land. A couple of years ago, on her trip back from the States, she took out a thick photo album and pointed to some blurry pictures of a blond boy bent over a newspaper. Resisting the urge to say, "Bigfoot is blurry!" or some other inanity, I asked who Blurry Blond Boy was.

"That's (I forget his name now)."

I nodded what I hope was an interested nod.

"Mabait na bata. Magalang pa 'yan. And really helpful," my lola went on.

"Hmmm."

"I showed him a picture of you."

At this point, my eyes had popped out of my skull. The only recent picture I'd sent her was my high school grad pic. Iridescent blue toga, red-red lipstick the make-up artist sloshed on me, and a fake bookshelf for a background.

And then my lola handed me a blue comforter and some striped bedsheets. And then she said: "Siya naglaba niyan!"

Hm. At the time, I thought it was cute, if not odd. Now, I'm leaning more toward the odd factor.

(Oddly enough, tonight I'm on my bed, covered with the striped bedsheet some guy whose name I can't remember laundered some years ago.)

All this, of course, gets me thinking: Why is it that in family gatherings, the first question ever asked about me (right before asking what the hell Creative Writing is) is whether I have a boyfriend or not? Or the more presumptuous, Balita ko may boyfriend ka na daw, ha from aunts and uncles and the occasional second cousin (who's seven going on forty).

My token answer is, "Wala po," while edging not-so-surreptitiously towards the nearest exit. Whether I lie or, in most cases, tell the gospel truth, all of them never believe me. Jeesh.

"May boyfriend ka na daw."

"Wala po."

"Sus."

Gah.

On my eighteenth birthday, the usual questions came by the bucket. By the seventy-eighth question, which was asked by my tipsy father, I pointed to Sarj, who was sitting beside me (gazing at her San Mig Light with what looked like horror, no doubt caused by the witnessing of my dysfunctional family) and said: "Dy, girlfriend ko po, si April."

True to form, my father never missed a beat. "Pareho pala tayo ng type, anak."

At which point April slugged her beer, and I tried to steer my father away from doing The Spanish Inquisition Act on the few men I've invited.

And then, fairly recently, my mother asked me, as I bought mouthwatering open-toe high heels, "Bakit? May boyfriend ka na ba?" Maybe because I mentioned I could use the shoes to stomp on a few choice pair of balls.

After a split-second decision, I decided to go for the different track. And so I said, "Yes."

Guess who just shrugged and went off to another display rack? I don't know what's kookier: me getting harassed with questions I can never answer correctly, or not being believed when I give them the answer they want. Kahit magsabi ng totoo, o magsinungaling, or make up a whopper that Sarj is my long-time girl-lover and muse extraordinaire, no one freaking believes me. There's an insult in that disbelief somewhere. I just don't want to think about it right now.

Basta. Tonight, I'm going to bed with the men(?) I love most: my orange-antlered Moosebert and a whored-out book by Palahniuk. Oh, and those hot shoes.

Whether you believe me or not.

PS
Oh, and, hello to Tita Bong, the (hopefully) only person in my family to ever read this blog. :)

It's business time

2007-10-10T20:22:00.001+08:00

It's complicated, (s)he says.

*

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in our head to no more that living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

- from The Body by Stephen King.]

We're all in this together

2007-10-10T15:08:00.001+08:00

Happy birthday to Aizen Daryll! :) Arguably The Maverick of the three Sulague sisters -- if they were a crimefighting trio, that is. (Ashley's The Future Hotness, Alyanna's The Smart One Who Likes Hearing Quotes from Shakespeare and Nash.)

Hey, sweetie. :p

You're my wonderwall

2007-10-08T02:47:00.001+08:00

One of my roommates, Ate Mabs, moved out today, to a place in Makati, so she'd be closer to work. I won't go into the details here -- I barely managed to not look like a leaky faucet, blubbering over her shoulder as she went -- but needless to say, I shall miss her. Especially Helen. Like, a couple of days ago, I asked Helen for some acetone and she told me Ate Mabs had some, and then she paused and sobbed, "Yan, pa'ano na tayo 'pag wala si Ate Mabs?"

I, on the other hand, aside from the whole person leaving thing, thought of other, bigger things. Like the fridge. And the electric stove. And the water heater. And the oven toaster. And the TV. Hehe.

When she'd gone, I looked around at my dorm room and realized, not only the token mushy It feels so empty but the more pragmatic, "Holy fuck, wala nang laman yung kuwarto!" Ang dami naman kasing gamit ni gaga.

Anyways, we'll miss you loads, Ate Mabs. From griping about boys, to having our own personal stylist/fashion police, to opening bottles of Red Horse and spending the night around our table sucking on Lethal Mentoses. And you.

(Insert Spice Girls Goodbye theme here.)

EDIT: Helen tells me that Ate Mabs texted her to say, "Miss you guys. It's so quiet here."

Aw. Wala ba naman yung talak namin ni Helen eh. Hay.

*

And because Ate Mabs has gone, I took the opportunity to sift through three years worth of junk. Now, I've got a clean, color-coordinated closet (cuz I'm feeling OC); four (four!) large boxes of books; shoes in boxes; bigger desk space; a new bookshelf (wee!); and an artsy fartsy wall which includes pictures of random peoplesss, some doodles I made, some doodles by other people, photos by Nathan Archival (wah, san galing yung mga yun?), a (crappy) poem I made on the back of a bingo card, a poem someone wrote for me (awww, barf, hehe) and a memo from the United Hills Association that says, verbatim:

WARNING: Beware of a certain person, in his early twenties, driving a cream-colored car roaming around the village trying to victimize young females walking on the street. The driver stops in front of them, open the door, trying to touch them and shows his private part. . .

Panalo kaya, hehe. I will show you my private part!!! Nyarrr... :)

I thought it was interesting enough to put on the artsy fartsy wall. Problem is, my gaze wanders from my laptop screen to the damn wall often, and in my mind, on loop, is: Oooh, pretty.

Para sa'yo / ang laban na 'to

2007-10-07T23:38:00.001+08:00

Today, I woke up to Manny Pacquiao behaving like a gentleman toward Barrera. I guess I understand why, superficially -- Mexican dude looks like a bulldog na pinagsarahan ng pinto. And there Manny was, who minutes ago was grinning with barely contained excitement, working the crowd to the tune of his ballad, and now, in the ring, hesistant and flighty, none of his "Wee! Wee! Ima punch you now, motherfucker!" attitude. Maybe it's the training camp. Maybe he's thinking of that hot chick who sang the Mexican National Anthem. Who knows?

In the end -- a forty minute fight turned into a two-and-a-half-hour spectacle complete with ad blitzkrieg -- he won, a unanimous decision.

After the fight, Mario Lopez asked him: "Do you have anyone in mind right now to have a fight with in the future?"

"Tonight, I'm going home to the Philippines to celebrate."

And then we said, "Okay, thanks, bye bye Marc."

Hay. It's okay. We love you and all that jazz. Go, Manny. Though I now feel nothing but fear at the havoc you'll wreak in the Philippines once you get back here. Ads galore, another run for politics, seventeen and a half albums. Plus a music video or two.

But Barrera won me over with his, um, stoicism. The interview with Mario Lopez, though I forget the details now, showed a quiet man, a dignified man, who, though he lost the fight, knew, without evident arrogance, that he did the best he could do, he had a great run as a boxer (he retires after this), people loved him and there's always the chance of hooking up with that Mexican National Anthem chick. He's not a detestable opponent. (I remember gesticulating wildly with a bottle of beer at Morales' crushed yet otherwise still muy caliente mug, in indignation and, well, haha, national pride.) Good job, Mr. Bulldog, sir.

This is about the other guy

2007-10-05T19:18:00.001+08:00

Ooh, you are still pissing me off.

You caught me in a lie, I had no alibi

2007-10-03T15:30:00.001+08:00

What is the difference between love and obsession? Didn't both make you stay up all night, wandering the streets, a victim of your own imagination, your own heartbeat? Didn't you fall into both, headfirst into quicksand? Wasn't every man in love a fool and every woman a slave?

Love was like rain; it turned to ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn't find it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn't go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call filled with regret. A letter that said 'Dear you, good-bye from me.' Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you'd known your whole life. It settle and lurked; it stayed with you.

- from The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman

*

It was called evolutionary biology. Under its sway, the sexes were separated again, men into hunters and women into gatherers. Nurture no longer formed us; nature did. Impulses of hominds dating from 20,000 BC were still controlling us. And so today on television and in magazines you get the current simplifications. Why can't men communicate? (Because they had to be quiet on the hunt.) Why do women communicate so well? (Because they had to call out to one another where the fruits and berries were.) Why can men never find things around the house? (Because they have a narrow field of vision, useful in tracking prey.) Why can women find things easily? (Because in protecting the nest they were used to scanning a wide field.) Why can't women parallel-park? (Because low testosterone inhibits spatial ability.) Why won't men ask for directions? (Because asking for directions is a sign of weakness, and hunters never show weakness.) This is where we are today. Men and women, tired of being the same, want to be different again.

- from Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

*

"'I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind." Her eyes were closed. Beads of water decorated her face, and her hair spread out from her head like jellyfish tendrils. "But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It' so soothing. I feel infinitely better now."

- from White Oleander by Janet Fitch

Then we wouldn't have to wait so long

2007-10-02T23:53:00.001+08:00

The little girl's name was Aislinn and a giant lived under her stairs. She, of course, had never seen the giant, because everyone knows that if you saw one, your eyes would fall out and turn into aloe vera on cement cracks. Besides, the giant was far too big for her to completely see. Everyone knows that too.

Aislinn knew that a giant lived under her stairs because she could feel it waiting for her to step on the fourth step, because the gap between the fourth step and the fifth step was the only place in all of stairs of all the world where giants could slip their hands through to grab little girl's ankles under their frilly nightgowns. Aislinn always made sure her feet didn't land on that step -- she'd jump from number three to number five every time.

One night though, she woke from a dream were she chased dogs through a field of bluebells, and found herself thirsty. She got out from bed, careful not to trip on the hem of her frilly white nightgown and tiptoed out of her room, and down the hall.

Aislinn was yawning and rubbing her eyes as she went down the stairs, one step at a time.

She couldn't hear the slight rumble underneath her, crouching under the stairs. And there was simply no way she could see the hand -- as big as her daddy's car! -- slip from between the gap of stair step five and stair step four, and the finger that traced some little whirls and swirls in the wooden surface of step number four.

"Waaaargh," yawned Aislinn the Little Girl, rubbing her little girl eyes.

And the sound rumbled and rumbled. And the finger traced and traced and whirled and swirled.

. . .

*

Sasha is sleepy. Broke too. But the sleepiness is more immediate.

And, like OMGWTFBBQ! -- in ZoeDee's words: "Keep it local, luv."

We'll do it in the dark with smiles on our faces

2007-10-02T13:39:00.001+08:00

1
An aunt notices the absence of butterflies cavorting around a typewriter from this site and asks, "What trouble are you in now?"

2
On the subject of love lives, I ask my 12-year-old brother John Vincent: "Ano naman ang ginagawa mo dun sa girlfriend mo?"

Sighs a long-suffering kind of sigh. "Ayun, binabantayan."

Mga Martinez talaga o.

3
I tell my dad about the pending dress code in Arneow and he gifts me with the wisdom of one who has had three beers at lunchtime: "Ay, naku, ineng, habulan lang yan!"

4
From Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of my favoritestestest books of all time (because it's so spanking unapologetically evil, buwahahahahaha). Ahem: "When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself and ends by deceiving others; that is what the world calls romance."

5
Justine, my dear girl -- sa susunod na punta mo dito, paabutin mo naman ng kahit anim na oras tayong magkasama ha, ija? :) Enjoy Frog. (In Germany daw.)

6
From Roald Dahl (whose book, The Witches, I am giggling over right now): "A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom."

7
"Spend time every day listening to what your muse is trying to tell you," says St. Bartholomew.

I don't love you like I did yesterday

2007-10-01T17:31:00.002+08:00

Taking a page from Sarj's book and drowning all my sorrows with My Chemical Romance.

I'm a teenager, remember?

Will it matter long after I'm gone?

2007-10-01T16:54:00.002+08:00

Once upon a time, there was a prince living at a white tower. He lived there so long that he forgot to feel. He watched the sun disappear into the fleecy pink clouds and all he did was shrug. He lay down on yards of satin that embraced him and all he did was shrug. Soon, the red of the roses that crawled to his window faded into white in his eyes, and the green of the trees was but a different shade of ash.

Yet all he did was shrug.

One day I'll wake up and it won't hurt anymore

2007-10-01T16:32:00.001+08:00

Ooh, you make me so mad.