LOL

Mentioned in Negotiating with the Dead (M. Atwood): “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.” 

P brought me to Baguio and Vigan to celebrate my 31st b'day. 31--tsk, tsk. I'll probably have to start lying about my age by next year. 

Whoa, handsome. 

Between too little and too much social interaction.

Lifted from Jane Austen: A Life:

“The ability to sustain long works of fiction is at least partially dependent on establishing a delicate balance between solitude and interaction. Too much human noise during the writing of a novel distracts from the cleanliness of its over-arching plan. Too little social interruption, on the other hand, distorts a writer’s sense of reality and allows feeling to ‘prey’ on the consciousness.”

One hundred and one.

While waiting for people to disperse from the Nokia Care counter so that I could have my phone serviced, P and I wandered into Tower Records/PowerBooks. I was magnetized to the books section; P twirled his way to the records section (thank God the Ramoses thought of combining both businesses in just one store. They should be credited for keeping couples happy with each other. When before I used to frown into a unibrow or expel long, tortured sighs whenever P whined about wanting to buy music, when really all I wanted to do was fall into a coma everytime I had to wait for him to painstakingly choose between two albums by the same artist/group whose name I had never heard of or didn’t really care about. P would vacillate between CD A and CD B [Which should I get? This or This? I’d roll my eyes and say, For God’s sake buy them both!]. This would prompt him to run around the store some more, almost feverish, eyes glazed like a heroin addict, and end up buying five albums [which explains why we are still poor]. Now, with the advent of the bookslashmusic store, we can leave each other in peace).

I remember the time we were in Hong Kong for a week. P made daily pilgrimages to HMV and nearby music stores. I say “pilgrimages” because he made several trips there in a day. I kid you not when I say that he opened and closed the CD stores in Kowloon (the ones nearest our hotel). I would be splayed on our hotel room bed, muscles aching all over, at 12 AM, and he’d say, Just relax, okay, I’ll just make a quick trip to HMV . . . do you want me to bring you chicken? He knew how to make me pliant and willing like that. Speaking of HK, they have a wonderful assortment of classic movies on DVD and they’re cheap (and original). I bought a couple of my favorites, those that I find difficult to source in Pinas like old Woody Allen movies, a Robert Quine classic, a couple of Zhang Yi Mous, and an early Ang Lee and Wong Kar Wai.

Going back to our day at Tower Records/PowerBooks, P made several purchases: a couple of local, award-winning digital films and a compilation of classic tunes which he claimed were all for me (his way of saying that he’s still entitled to purchases that are just for him next time). I bought a book which contains a lovely quote that says, “The books we choose, choose us too.” I made a mental nod to myself, while my brain whispered, “How true . . . how true.” I recalled the many times I bought a book only because it seemed to jump at me. While at the cash register, my eyes drifted on the book the cashier was reading. The cover screamed 101 Ways to Spoil Your Husband in bold letters. I looked at the young woman’s face and, though it was very pretty, I could tell that she was very tired. Well, I thought, of course! Who wouldn’t be tired being a cashier by day and going home at night to perform 101 favors for a husband? The lucky bastard . . .

Happy.

Dear friend,

I walked out today to a beautiful, almost spring-like weather. The wind was rustling through the leaves of the trees like a lullaby . . .

Rapture.

From “Painterly, innermost reflections,” Gary C. Devilles, PDI, Aug. 14, ’06:

“Rapture is everywhere and in the mundane. Whether we sit idly watching the sunrise or take an afternoon stroll in tree-lined streets, the day strangely radiates to our immense delight. Wisdom and beauty, we see, can only come from within.”

How beautifully said!

Where I go to kick back.

After submitting what I hope to be the last of my revisions to one of my latest projects, I went to the bookshop with P to unwind. Since the bookstore is appended with a music store, both owned by the same family—the Rs, P did some unwinding of his own, too.

I have great affection for bookshops and libraries. This may sound odd, but when I’m in them I sort of get the tingles. I love running my fingers over the titles on the shelves and furtively sniffing at a book or two (I do this with crayons, too). I like rummaging through the bargain tables because this is where I find my great buys and because, sometimes, I can be a bit niggardly. I go into spasms just thinking about the abundance of information contained in said spaces—all keys to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. (I love all kinds of information. Nothing is trivial to me. I will get the same kick reading about how the cosmos was built to reading how a pencil is made.)

So I went to the bookstore to relax and ended up buying a couple of books: Jane Austen, A Life (for me); A Million Little Pieces (for Mom because I know she’s curious to find out what the whole Oprah hullabaloo was all about), and The Glass Castle for Lola because it looked interesting enough. I can never walk out of a bookstore without buying something (the same way P cannot walk out of a CD shop without a purchase, which is a sad, sad thing when one is trying to save money) even though I still have a lot of books lying unread at home and, well, even though I read books for a living.

I should be working, but . . .

I bit into a grape this morning and closed my eyes. It was so sweet and fresh. I could almost sense the process it went through to achieve this perfect ripeness—how it grew from a bud and day by day became heavy on the vine. How the sun must have kissed its dew-wet skin in the mornings and bore into it at noon . . .

First May rains.

Dear friend,

The first May rains fell as P and I were on our way to the car for a night out and I swear I could almost feel steam rise out of the concrete that had been beaten mercilessly, day in and out, with 34–36°C heat (one point short of a fever) in one of the most punishing warm summers of my life. I could almost hear the earth go “aaah” and, of course, all around was alimuom (is there an equivalent English term?), the sweet scent that mingles with the steam rising from the earth during rainfall—heady and addictive—one of my peculiar favorites. I felt a smile well inside me. A few days earlier, I saw my first gamu-gamo circling the dining room lamp and I realized that just as summer came early this year, so have the rains. The showers come everyday now—sometimes tentative, other times in torrents and even though I said in my earlier letter that summers excite me, I must also say that the rains bring me an altogether different joy. A sense of peace, a Zen-like calm, descends upon me during times of rain and often it makes me feel capable of loving everybody. 

Happy birthday, buddy! Mwa!

Dear friend,

Why do I keep going back to the familiar? Always the past shadows me like a parallel universe I can slip in and out of. Like osmosis. A whiff of a scent, an idea, an idle thought and I disappear, my mind's eye bringing me back to old places and haunts; to past sensations and occasions. Like today, I was just reading a book when suddenly I remembered our house in Mandaluyong, the one I grew up in--that rickety, old apartment--and just like that I was there again, standing in one of the second-floor rooms. I could actually feel the coolness of the floorboards against my bare feet; feel its polished smoothness broken occasionally by the chips on the wood here and there. I could walk to one of the gothic-looking windows and peer at the lone narra right across the street--resplendent in summer, bursting with yellow blooms in May--delicate buds that fall gently to the ground that my friends and I liked to throw in the air and kick around--and barren in November, its branches splaying out like bony fingers. I could also see the huge metal post where I once had my picture taken while wearing my sailor outfit, my hair in pigtails. The same metal post my friends and I liked to hug when playing hide-and-seek; liked to throw stones at just to hear it clang like a bell.

I also remembered the time I sat on the hood of a green VW beetle, a boy at my feet. We were just shooting the breeze, talking about unimportant things, when he looked at me, smiled, and told me about a girl he liked. "She has a mole near the lip," he said. I thought of my pretty friend M and so I said, "You mean M?" "No, not M," he said, looking intently at my face. "It's not really a mole. More like . . . a thing. An indention near the upper lip, right under the nose." "Oh," I said and looked away. He grinned. I thought of the tiny mark under my nose created by the tip of a pencil I had the habit of pressing there when thinking in school. It never went away and I have it to this day. I felt a warm gladness spread through me then--from my toes to the tips of my hair--making me giddy. I was seven, he was ten.

This film is hot.

Dear friend,

I thought, for the longest time, that I was the rainy season kind of gal. I loved everything about the rain--the sound it makes on the roof; the sweet, sweet smell it coaxes out of the earth; and the way it gives the impression of purity, of freshness, and renewal at the end of a nice, long downpour. I even bought a rain stick once, you know, one of those cylindrical bamboo poles containing hundreds of minute shells, to mimic the sound of rain whenever I felt the need for it. But, it just recently dawned on me that what I am really is a summer gal. 

I know that I start pissing and moaning at the slightest hint of perspiration on my skin, but I realize that I actually like sweating. I like how rooms get awfully warm at noon and the heat ceases to be a thing I imagine, but a thing I feel. I like how it presses on me--it's tangible, it's in my face--a living, breathing thing. I like the way it quickens my pulse to a throb, makes the blood rush to my face--makes every intake of breath, literally, the intake of life. Summers make me feel alive!

Ah, finally, a breather! Deadlines have been moved. I am (for a few hours, at least) free to look at flowers.