Beauty amidst chaos.

Twelve-year-old Tutu .

Too busy to compose? Then, retro post!

Summer 2003

10:00 AM

I woke up early, 6 a.m., and found myself on the bed nearest the balcony (not the bed I originally slept in) and I wonder what time in the night I switched beds. Breakfast was not the first order of the day--I had to see to the washing of the clothes and the putting of the shirts in the small drawers. Summer mornings are pretty in Boracay, like a brown toddler in a yellow bathing suit. On my way to the terrace to hang the freshly laundered clothes, I spied several mayas going about their usual Tuesday morning rituals and I had to stop what I was doing to watch them for awhile.

5:45 PM

I am sitting here on the beach. While walking earlier, I saw a small boy utterly naked. I laughed. At least he could still get away with things like that. Most of the people around me look happy. Two middle-aged women dumped their beach things near me and smiled as if to say, “Hey, lady, watch our stuff, okay?” I smiled back. They went into the water wearing identical black T-shirts and long shorts, swam for awhile, and then sat very near each other on the bank. Everywhere kids are posing for snapshots and people are taking pictures of the horizon.

Me, I am content just watching the sun set.

7:00 PM

This is how I spend my days: Mornings,  I laze around in my nice, cool room. I go out the balcony to catch my bit of morning sun, watch the mayas at work, observe the other hotel guests as they go about the business of waking up. I try to fix myself a semblance of breakfast: Coffee or tea, Vienna sausages or Spam eaten straight from the can. Some days I watch a bit of TV or use the computer, other days I just go right back to sleep. My days start late in Boracay. After finding out that the sun rose at the other side of the island, morning walks along the beach became uninteresting. Around noon, I bathe and join my husband for lunch, scour the talipapa for souvenirs, or lounge in one of the restaurants/cafes serving sweets. Noons are busy here. Of course, everyone lunched, the unwise go swimming, tanning, sailing. There are always hundreds of people milling about--walking, idling, conversing.

Three p.m. to sunset, I go for swims, have Banana Choco Peanut shakes at Jonah’s; sometimes I go sailing, perched precariously on nets or nylon threads woven together on boats locally called “paraws.” At night, my husband and I have dinner and by midnight enjoy a beer each, while listening to Reggae music played by a live band . . . or stargazing. 

Away from the city, the stars here blaze oh so brightly.

Thank God the tickets were free.

Sleepy after the H. Connick Manila concert. At least Mom seemed to have gotten some joy out of Harry shaking his tush at the audience and, good god, sending balut eggs flying into the air (some hit the concrete partition between the orchestra and balcony seats, splattering several unfortunate souls below with the eggs' contents, they were dressed to kill pa naman).

Here are some fotos (the best I could do with a camera fone):

"Without you love, I am not only very alone, but . . . lonely, lonely, lonely."

Thank God P got back from KL already. I had been sleeping fitfully since he left. He brought home chocolates and an Apple USB modem for me. Yes, I still don't DSL or use cable Internet for I only use my computer for e-mails, blogging, a bit of Web surfing and reading, and occasional project tweaking. 

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it (Bertrand Russell).

What excuse except madness?

Two, three, sometimes four books acquired every weekend and not second-hand/bargain-priced or on-sale ones at that, but NEW ones, books still heavy with that fresh-off-the-box, fresh-off-the-press smell, the one (smell) that I secretly like burying my nose in because it reminds me of my youth, my early introduction to bookstores and libraries, the rainy days spent curled in bed when school was cancelled, and the summers when life itself acquired a languid, almost slow-as-molasses pace and the days seemed to stretch to forever. Ah, to have books to smell and to hold! Reading, after all, is as much a sensual and tactile activity as it is an interior/intellectual one, which is why I can never comprehend people who read books online. What is the point of reading a book if you can’t take it to bed? 

***

The problem with me is that I do a lot of buying, but not enough reading (I remember a friend, who shares this same affliction, admonishing me to buy him a DVD instead of a book for his birthday because his reading backlog, he said, “has become serious enough to be embarrassing”). And, of course, with the constant buying comes the cursed drain to the pocketbook and the niggling tug at the conscience, when the sensible other self tries to shame me into some degree of responsibility with admonitions like: “Do you really need another one of these?” Addict that I am, I often rationalize or counter-argue these situations away by snarling at this other self with, “Of course, goddammit, I need to buy the sequel to P. Neruda’s Memoirs because I will die if I don’t. Die, do you hear me?! The damn things read like poetry I tell you. They're sheer genius!”

In the meantime, books pile up. Some still in shrink wraps; some, believe it or not, are more than a decade old and languishing inside old boxes, their spines unwrinkled.

***

In the newest Twisted series by J. Zafra (Twisted 8: The Night of the Living Twisted, which is brilliant, by the way, with Zafra back in good form, although much can be said about the sloppy proofreading), the author posed a question to fellow biblioholics: “Do (we) buy books out of a pure love of books, or is it just avarice? . . . Is it really reading (we) love—or shopping?”

No serious bibliophile will admit to the latter. To buy books to be savored immediately . . . or later . . . (or never) is immaterial. I think that primarily we buy books out of a desire (for pleasure). The buying in itself appeases this desire. The reading lengthens the pleasure. And sometimes if a book is very good, the pleasure stays with us for a long, long time even after the book has been read to conclusion.

Some books, like good sex, linger. We simply sigh and stretch in bed after we've finished and marvel at how good they've been. 

Tell me on a Sunday, please . . .

Finally, Tell Me on a Sunday. Not the Marti Webb version, but the Denise Van Outen one, which is not bad, not bad at all. This is one of my, if not the most, favorites of Lloyd Webber’s musicals, which features such hit songs as “Unexpected Song,” “Come Back With the Same Look in Your Eyes,” “Take That Look Off Your Face,” and “Tell Me on a Sunday.”

P, who initiated me in so many things (wink), also introduced me to Webber and my first introduction to this particular musical was the few tracks included in those Best of Andrew Lloyd Webber cassettes made available in the early '90s.

And now this, the entire musical on CD brought fresh from HK. We’ve been trying to get the Marti Webb recording, but it’s been out of circulation it seems, but Van Outen does not disappoint. Not as edgy as Webb, but definitely competent and believable and just as enchanting. Thank God, Webber decided to make the musical into an entire one-act play and not just as a part of Song and Dance. Repertory Philippines staged Song and Dance in Greenbelt One last year and I remember holding my breath and squeezing P’s hand as the first few strains of my favorite songs were sung by the highly capable Carla Guevara. The second half, which was supposed to be the "dance" part, was a sleeper. The lead dancer was a bit too old to be believable as the protagonist’s “younger” love interest. But, nevertheless, we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. We hope that Rep. will (re)stage Tell Me on a Sunday (the one-act play) in the future, hopefully this year!

Birds.

. . . and because there are trees, there are birds (or is it the other way around?).

I woke up today to the trilling of birds from trees directly outside my bedroom windows. I did not wake up AND hear them, they were actually responsible for my having been roused from sleep. How vigorous they sounded today, how passionate and insistent. I thought, but of course--birds are the harbingers of summer!

Just the other day, Jun and I had been exchanging texts and e-mails about trees: the trees we grew up with, the trees we lost, and the various childhood memories evoked from our interactions with trees. Jun even wrote an amusing blog entry on Tarzan and Trees here.

And now this concerto.

Listening to the birds’ almost frenzied singing I am reassured that everything is all right with the world. Everything is as it should be. Birds still sing from trees! Thank God for the pleasure of hearing them sing, for the simple pleasure of being.   

On poets and poetry.

From the book "Memoirs":

". . . a certain kind of madness, often goes hand in hand with poetry. It would be difficult for predominantly rational people to be poets."--P. Neruda.