Pampahaba ng buhay:

Girl friends--

Daddy

...it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

-"Sonnet 116", William Shakespeare

Once upon a sleepy afternoon in a sleepy town, I was seven years old and, rubbing my tired eyes, I sauntered over to the hammock in the backyard, where my dad was reclined, poring through the day's newspaper.

"I just finished Beauty's story. The drawings are kinda strange. But the story had a lesson."

"Ah, yeah?" my dad's eyes didn't leave the page he was at, but I knew he was listening. He was always listening. "And what's the lesson?"

"Um, that a person's true beauty can't be measured by his or her looks?" I squinted at the afternoon sunlight.

"That's true. Good that you read it that way," he looked at me briefly and kept quiet, in case I had something more to say.

I gave him a grin, nodded and skipped away, proud that my dad approved of my take on the tale. Our conversations, then, were short and crisp, but we understood each other, counting the few sentences, and all. His good opinion meant the world to my childish heart and to this day, world-weariness and cynicism aside, I still seek to please him in what way I can, and more so now, that I'd already given him so much heartbreak and disappointment.

Whenever I finish a good book, read something smart online, or come across music by the artists we both like, there's always still that urge to tell my dad about it. I've long stopped harping about "lessons" or "morals", and, instead, bicker to him with all the candidness my blase heart can afford to express through the distance and the phone lines. At most, I hear him laughing, or giving me verbal nods at achievements I tell him about, could picture him--ever the benevolent man that he's always been--shaking his head, could hear an inaudible sigh escape from his weary chest at whatever recent sadness I share with him.

After all these years, my dad is still my go-to guy when something ground-breaking cuts a mark on my turbulent life. Though these days, I try my best to refrain from over-reacting to things, try my damnedest to stay strong for the sake of my family, as I know they have their own troubles to take care of.
The winds of time have taken away so much of what once was there. But the strength of my father, fired ever so constantly by the love he has for his children, has remained unwavering.

To this day, I still think of that hammock in that little town. And to this day, I remain that little girl, looking to my father for consultation on the things that matter, for concurrence on decisions I have to make, for a shoulder to cry on when the tears prove too difficult to keep in.

And I could only pray that I, too, could be those things for him, someday.

Unfortunately, it was already 3 a.m. when I woke up, and there was the whole business of whipping up breakfast to take care of, and the irresistible urges to just stare at some blank wall, in between irrepressible bouts of checking my Twitter wall and looking up movies to download, so that the plan to continue reading from the page of the book I'd left off yesterday afternoon was forgotten.

It's a gloomy, drizzly morning right now, and I have found the perfect way to spend the day: watch Woody Allen's "To Rome, With Love", prodded to look for it as I was from a post on Twitter that said this could as yet be Mr. Allen's best movie, to date.

Waiting for this to come out:

From the weekend couch:

Yann Samuell, 2003

tap, tap, tap.

In four days, I was able to finish three articles.

The first one was a writing assignment so unceremoniously dumped on to my lap and for which I made a big, grumbling fuss about, one-hour deadline, and all, but oh, the satisfaction at having won against the clock was almost as sweet as the nod of satisfaction from he-who-gave-me-the-task.

I had a day each to finish the other two, but, of course, me being the way I am, I waited until the last three hours to work on both, and couldn't believe how great a master pressure can be, for I managed to alt-tab, type, pause, type, alt-tab (repeat X number of times) between the two word files, and come up with, I should say, still decent write-ups. I enjoyed writing the profile most. People are an interesting subject to study, and tap the letters on one's keyboard for.

I'm making lots of progress with the novel I'm reading, too, so this should be a good weekend.

But now, for some shut-eye. I hope to still be in a reading mood when I wake up.

"Dearest, I feel certain, that I'm going mad again. I think 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'm doing what seems the best thing to do." - Virginia, "The Hours"

Black Maps by Mark Strand

Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know
you have arrived,

nor the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.
Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.
You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
Its maps are black,
rising from nothing,
describing,
in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
its emptiness,
the bleak temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.
And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours
do not exist.
Your house is not marked
on any of them,
nor are your friends,
waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only you are there,
saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.

When I am old and grey and full of sleep

and nodding by the lamp, I will take down a book from my shelf and apologize to Yeats for putting his work in vain, and pour myself a cup of tea (yes, tea, not coffee), and remember all the chilled milk teas I have consumed in my lifetime, and wonder why I had never started on the book of fairy tales I had planned my entire life to write. 

Yes, my entire life. 

The moment my dad handed me my first book of fairy tales, I knew it was what I wanted to create, too. And then, I met the Grimm brothers. Then, Cupid and Psyche, and Daphne, with Apollo at her heels. And then, real life came along, soon after, with JD Salinger, and Kafka, and company. Good thing women like George Eliot and AS Byatt were in the wings to help me keep the faith. Oh, but Nabokov, shoot.

So, here I am, paying homage to all the kings and sorcerers, and princes who had wrecked my perception of reality, but most of all, to all the dysfunctional individuals who had helped rebuild my psyche. 

Oh, who am I fooling. 

But, yes, someday I will read Finnegans Wake. I love Alice to bits, after all.

Place, date and time, irrelevant

Yes, I violated the dress code and got away with it. So I'm staying in and taking it easy. Been stretched enough this week so I'm 'a loosen up real good. 

Tea for two, and the boy's been singing Ray Charles and trying his hand on the Beatles. I must be doing something right. Today, I saw someone texting while crossing a busy street. 

Bayo Whats Your Mix 30% nymph 30% elf 30% mermaid 10% human -- walang kokontra. But, oh, this schizo weather. How is it possible that I can't ever seem to get enough of you? Cryptic is what you are. 

The morning stretches out before me, like a giant yawn. Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Natalie Merchant, Aimee Mann, Joni Mitchell. Spending QT with my girls. Slept the night away. For once. Glad to note the sun's toning it down a bit. Orange twilight, yesterday. 

12-year old girl, reading JD Salinger's Nine Stories. Am I making the right decisions? 

Finding comfort in numbness. I am currently obsessed with pens. Life's getting a little too fond of throwing me lemons. Waiting for the door to open! Pinks and paisleys, I love. 

Your coffee has grown cold. I need a Miles Davis/John Coltrane fix. Ah, what a noisy world this is. Been awake for 28 hours, and counting. You keep telling me to stop thinking too much. Know what? Maybe I should. I realize that to get out of this box, I ought to start digging. And I realize that to undo your sadness, I have to undo your childhood. 

I miss the coffee and the conversations. Was that thunder I heard? 

I think I made you up inside my head/

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

My glass of water refracts the morning.
-Sylvia Plath

From the weekend couch:

Thelma and Louise

Ridley Scott, 1991

Norwegian Wood

Tran Anh Hung, 2010

Elm

-Sylvia Plath


I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radience scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?--

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults 
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Don't look for coherence here.

                                           

-mine, I call it, because
these day-hammered fields

of dazzled horizontals
undulate, summers,
inside me and out-

-Mark Doty, "Description"

May has passed me by in a blur of scorching heat and work weeks (the weekends are even more hazy). This city has had more than its share of baking under a merciless sun, but still, the heat seems incorrigibly here, and I have found myself staying indoors even more, as if my natural aversion to the outdoors wasn't yet strong enough.

My download of "The Beatles Anthology" has just completed ("Never Let Me Go" strains--eerie much!), and I plan on making it the soundtrack to the weekend where I will do nothing but laze away, the weekend that tails a 6-day work week that has drunk me to the lees of all, and, any urge to stand up. This bunny's Energizer batteries are all drained out.

Some serious recharging needs to be done.

My Summer Shot

I blame the incredible heat and the sheer blueness of the pool's tiles. Yes, I had no extra clothes and had absolutely zero plans of swimming, but, yes, I jumped into the water, anyway.

So, summer.

And now, hello, June.