Revisions, Revisists

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.

A few things you should know

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

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.

Electric girls with worn down toys

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.

And it was all yellow

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.

Where the neon signs are pretty

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.

As I was saying

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

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

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

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

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.

Well when you go

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

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!"

An ass in the crack of humanity

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

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

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.

The trees forgive me

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

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

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

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.