Passage, or something like that

There's an element of strangeness in it: being half in love with something for as long as one can remember and then, one day realizing one doesn't like it anymore. This was the case with my (erstwhile) addiction to coffee and sadness. One morning, I woke up, fixed myself my usual cups of caffeine and gloom and, after a few sips, decided I wanted no more of both. 

I poured them into the drain, turned the water on, pelted the sink with disinfectant, and scrubbed with more force than usual. 

I went out to buy some tea and bask in the sunlight.

Coffee

via Explore

Coffee and Christmas

(photo from Coffee Mood)

I treated myself to a tall Toffee Nut Latte for my first taste of Christmas at Starbucks. Toffee Nut is the only one in their Christmas series that I buy. This particular cup comforted me. The very mild coffee jolt, the hint of toffee, the nutty aftertaste -- all blended in with my after-work exhaustion and turned into a homey, peaceful feeling. The day seemed in no hurry to begin, no thanks to the gray clouds smearing up the sky, no thanks to the drizzle which, however much intending to be propitious, still seemed like an unwelcome intruder to most, me included. Like most people, I have an aversion to rain. It depresses me, dulls my energy, slumps me down to melancholia. But this morning, the coffee acted as balm. The aches didn't seem as salient.

And so, I sipped away, thinking of the blue-and-silver tree in the office, loving the lack of greens and reds and yellows in it, wondering if this Christmas was going to hold any magic, at all.

The exhaustion brought about by roads and crossroads and detours and highways, the mind's fatigue of housing images of roads and crossroads and detours and highways.

The only thing I want right now is to sit beside you and have that calming, unpretentious talk, of words and lines and stanzas, and the worlds in the words and the lines. Over nice mugs of hot coffee. Sweet. The warmth, tactile.

Rainy Days and Mondays no longer bring me down

"Each moment is a place you've never been." 
— Mark Strand

It's been a while. The days have gone by, one after the other, in a seemingly perpetual stream of hours and people and places.

But let me start with my dad, and the cherished hours the two of us, once upon a sunny morning, whiled away in music, and talks about melody and lyrics, and performing on stage, and the Beatles and Crystal Gayle and books and writers, and family, and life. Priceless, that's the word that comes to mind. I am lucky to have a father who understands me and whom I understand and with whom I can talk to about things in languages that are familiar to us both.

And, from there, comes everything else that's keeping me on a high these days:

the job I have that's become more than just a job, recently, something more than a reason to get out of bed at a certain hour and drag oneself to start and complain about and finish because one has to, but something that has finally, finally turned into a place where I know I can be (extremely) productive and useful and, yes, happy, at the same time;

the weekend getaways that are proof of the importance of work-life balance, the bouts of conversations and laughter--be it in holes-in-the-wall, or bowling joints, or a cinema where "Transformers" is proof that robots can also wear shawls with flair (hello, Megatron!) or loud music-infested joints, or quiet cafes--that are best shared with well-trusted buddies, or peers with whom one can be comfortable, or new-found friends that one is getting to know better;

and, not least of all, the moments I spend with myself, those few, precious hours that keep my sanity intact and my sense of the world and my reason for being in it, in place, where my only companions could only be either of these: a good book, or a good song. And where the only constant is coffee, with sugar and lots of cream.

Synching

Facebook status for the day: "why is the moon so slight,/ And why does it seem that as soon/ As I locate myself, I move/ Away again/" -from "The Insomnia of Izumi Shikibu", by Mookie Katigbak

(insert roses here)

As if copious amounts of coffee weren't yet enough, you fix yourself another cup while trying to recall in which movie it was that the girl said she could never be with a man who didn't know who Dostoyevsky was or was it really a movie or was the girl a girl you knew and you realize the girl was you and the thought leaves you pensive and staring at the roses

painted on the cup

What's yours?

"As though the very act of unbosoming one's secret self were simply another way of affirming it."
-J. Neil C. Garcia, Myths and Metaphors-

It's funny how we eventually find ourselves looking for the things we love, even as they intermittently blur themselves from our immediate surroundings, even as we find ourselves losing them in the course of the day-to-day, because the drone of the quotidian is a plane that's easy to disappear into.

The pull soon comes and we give in, only too willingly.

I experienced such a relinquishment--consciously, at that--when I came across where Garcia described how "lingering in it can induce in you such feelings of sharp melancholy", pertaining to "one's solitude as a poet".

I make no claims, at all, of being one, oh no, that would be a sacrilege.

I meant that I realized how I would always have that hunger for words and the many designs I could make of them and out of them--no matter that they are clumsy, at best and feeble, at worst.

There would always be that desire to design some imagined tapestry, because I know that I have my own loom on which to weave--my years and the gaps in between, for even in those gaps, there is, and there will always be, something to create something with.

As, of course, there would always be that struggle with the self over what is real and what is imagined, over the self and the desired, that all too consuming desperation which can only find rest in line, in stanza.

Arrgh. Total lack of understatement up there.

Convoluted, convoluted, convoluted.

I need another cup of coffee.

Gloria Jean's Cafe, Robinson's Galleria

So this is what it's like on a Monday morning here.

There are too many people, too much noise from the adjacent road, too many conversations going on, that my powers of alienation refuse to shut out. The jazz music from the store's speakers are drowned into paltry strains.

OMG, there is an Anthony Hopkins look-alike sitting on the couch two meters across mine, eating a grilled sandwich, could be BLT or something. Blue eyes, and all. Yup, he's white. The guy, I mean. M-- says he looks more like James Gandolfini.


Noise, noise, noise. Zone out, Shan.

Nope, can't do it.

Grrr.

And now, for something light...

My lunch:

After lunch:

The only thing missing was a breeze.

Caffeine update

BEFORE: Double tall mocha, please.

NOW: Double, non-fat, no whipped cream, 2 packs Splenda,tall mocha, please.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. -T.S. Eliot-

Last Saturday, I received what was probably one of the best news via text message that I've gotten in a long, long while:

AN ENTIRE WEEK OF FREE COFFEE FROM STARBUCKS!!!


Life is great!


Cheers, darlings! I leave you with this very amusing attempt at balladry by some anonymous chap (or girl, for that matter):

Caffeine is my shepherd; I shall not doze.
It maketh me to wake in green pastures:
It leadeth me beyond the sleeping masses.
It restoreth my buzz:
It leadeth me in the paths of consciousness for its name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of addiction,
I will fear no Equal™:
For thou art with me; thy cream and thy sugar they comfort me.
Thou preparest a carafe before me in the presence of The Starbucks:
Thou anointest my day with pep; my mug runneth over.
Surely richness and taste shall follow me all the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the House of Mochas forever.
(source: quotegarden.com)

So, Kathryn Bigelow is James Cameron's ex-wife. Interesting fact. Guess too much genius does split a unit into two.

Anyway, had an interesting conversation with a friend today, over coffee and after-work relief. Don't you feel lucky to have people to talk to, just because? I do. And this after years of self-inflicted isolation inside sturdy walls, built with much care, one gray brick after the other. What a relief it is to realize that once the teenage angst and the depression of my early twenties had crumbled down, so did those walls. Once in a while, I do find myself feeling the urge to put them back up, brick after brick--but only once in a while. And I always find myself stopping half-way. There's almost always something that distracts me.

(End of speech and cheese)

Been raving about "Avatar" this week. I'm not a fan of Sci-Fi (both film and Lit--I hated my College Sci-Fi class so much, I built walls around me the whole semester), but this movie grabbed me and grabbed me hard.

Oh, hey, I ended up circling back to James Cameron (sans Kathryn B.), after all. Completely unintentional, thank you.

Have a great afternoon ahead.

And, sitting there in the middle of that crowded cafe,

you are brought out of your invisible bubble and the jarring din of the people around you rushes into your quiet like a sudden stream.

Just like that.

Looking at the face of the watch resting on your left wrist, you realize it's been almost an hour since you sat down and started reading the book of poems you had impulsively bought from the nearby bookstore and you think, you wonder, what power of self-containment was it that enabled you to shut everything--the drone of voices, the sundry, small human movements, the afternoon heat, the forgotten cup of coffee, the discomfort of staying in one position for a certain length of time--out and get lost in the words, the lines, the stanzas on the pages of the book on your lap? What sort of self-centeredness? What selfishness? What apathy? What trick learned from childhood? What sorcery?

Happiness is...

balmy breeze on a mild Friday afternoon, a cup of very hot, very strong coffee, a book of beautifully-written poetry.

Life is, indeed, what you make it.

Never Alone

The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Trinoma

It feels wonderful to exhale after holding one's breath for so long. And with music flowing through earphones and an ice-cold coffee to cool one down on a warm afternoon, the experience is something of a revelation--the discovery and affirmation that all things, even the most difficult moments are, after all, just moments that will, fear them as we might, pass.

They are moments that will pass.

Etch those words into your heart, my friend, whoever you are and whatever it is that you are going through. We are, if you think about it, never really alone. Not me, not you, not the girl sitting by her lonesome on the table across me, flipping absently through her thick textbook, not the guard standing by the door, greeting the couple on their way into the coffee shop, not the youngish, hapless-looking fellow, clutching at his phone on his way out. None of us. We are never alone. Ever.

Perhaps one really dark day, you will forget this truth. The possibility is very high, given the weakness our natures tend to bend into. Here's a prayer for the moment to pass as quickly as it took over.

Not Just the Coffee

Good thing the 7-Up can was empty, else a good portion of the table cloth would have ended up soaked in the sweet, chemical-rich liquid. Still, the knowledge that it was empty escaped me for a split second and, in that wink of a moment, my heart walloped so hard I felt like wanting to reel from its aftermath. I sat there, steadying myself, awed by the Pacquiao-like (but painless) punch my heart had thrown against my chest.

I am easily startled. A handful of people at work know this and have taken to sneaking up from behind me and shouting "boo!" or "hah!" quite often, making me do any, or all, of the following: jumping, shrieking, shouting an expletive or two, and, always, that hard thump in the chest.

It could be the coffee.

Or not.

I am aware that it's natural to be startled when, well, we're caught off-guard, but lately, the intensity of the pounding in my chest whenever it happens has made me notice that it has, indeed, gone from natural to too much. A friend and I talked about it after the 7-Up episode and he agreed that it can't all be just the coffee (I like mine light on the caffeine, anyway, I mostly order mocha-flavored ones, except for those occasional really drowsy times when I have to force myself to be on the go, then I'd request for an extra espresso shot).

Perhaps I've built my wall piled too high with rocks that when it crumbles because I forget to stand guard, it crashes really loud and hard?

(clip art from clipart.com)

Soledad's Sister Over Coffee

I dropped by Greenbelt's Powerbooks yesterday and, instinctively, found my way to the Filipiniana section (love your own!). I spent quite some time browsing through Dean Alfar's A Kite of Stars, making a mental note to buy it the next time I visited a bookstore. I was still, due to time constraints brought on by work, in a reading hiatus and knew that I had to practice restraint if I didn't want one more book to gather dust on the shelf.

I gazed around to look at the other titles, saw a copy of Butch Dalisay's Soledad's Sister on a nearby shelf, picked it up, read the first page, checked the cash in my wallet and promptly headed to the cashier.

So much for restraint. It was just too good to resist.

I read a fourth of it at a nearby Starbucks (the lighting was poor, but I didn't care), sparing a couple of minutes to preach to my friend (who's not that into Philippine Lit.) that he should read the book I was reading if he wanted his opinion of Filipino writers to change. "Read Dalisay, for heaven's sake. This book was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize!" I told him and, satisfied that I had made my point, happily slouched back into my chair to read.

Guess this means the reading is on again. And, boy, does it feel awfully good!

This Post is For Wowoo

...who, knowing how addicted I am to coffee, gave me this nice little Starbucks mug for Christmas.


:)

Lovin' Purple

Purple and coffee to complete my day.