Sunday, December 30, 2007

On an open fire


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.

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Friday, December 21, 2007

You know it's Christmas


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. :)

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Waves are crashing


. . . 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

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Friday, December 14, 2007

Jack Frost nipping at my nose


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.

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Sunday, December 09, 2007

You in the front row


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. :)

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Saturday, December 08, 2007

Up late


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.

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Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Just don't ask me how I am


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."

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Just don't ask me what it was


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.

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