1:46 pm  12 notes

EXT. PASONG TAMO EXTENSION - NIGHT.

I often catch myself thinking, shouldn’t we be running in this part? Those kids are always being depicted reckelessly running in dimly lit side streets, but do you know how hard it is to fucking run in a typical Manila street?

1. Too many cars double parked.
2. A racing motorcycle (or truck or CRV) will render you dead on arrival.
3. Bangketas (what we call these side-walks) filled with land mines of dog poop or broken glass or
4. The sidewalks being just plain… little. Some sidewalks I encountered were barely a foot wide. What exactly were they being literal about with these footpaths, really? And then in some streets, sidewalks double as house extensions / sari sari store tambays areas so you have no choice but to take to the road. Bangekta does not sound like Bangko (bench) without reason, after all.
5. Everything just stinks (I mean, I grew up here. I know what it is. Doesn’t mean I’m automatically immune to it). The gutters flow underneath.

So that night we were walking (taking on the whole of Pasong Tamo extension) and we had come from an exhibit opening of an artist we’ve never heard of. We just happened to know that it was an exhibit, there was gonna be a lot of paintings, and the good old Pale Pilsen, red and white wine, and pichi pichi. Free.

Art galleries are good looking at art and learning for new things, but also for pictures and posin’ and such. Especially in this day and age of 1x1 instagram frames. The colors of paintings, against all that white, really just good look captured in digital. Makes you look smart, somehow, since it’s automatically more profound than some random cupcake or frappe.

The artist was an impressionist; his paintings were renderings of thick, sharp blobs and tubes emptied out onto the canvas; then teased with a stiff brush to form microscopic plateaus, or combed out into S curves with a metal thing. Pretty easy to dissect, and with about 20 of those things going on, we had a ball.

“What exactly is this supposed to be?”
“You’re supposed, you know, to just stand in front and feel the first thing you feel.”
“Oh. Well, I feel the anger and sadness in this one. See how heavy the paint is here? He dabbled as he was contemplating in between fits of jagged anxiety.”
“I like this one, it’s brighter.”
“Oddly all the strokes seems similar.”
“They’re studies.”
“Do you know that they’re serving red wine?”

We walked our way from there to the train, and actually we walked a little fast lest a snatcher creepeth behind us, and for good measure I brandished the good old pepper spray on my free hand. So that’s our transition  sequence, the part where the garage-rock score gets louder and we’re just smiling even though inwardly, we’re out of breath. That’s how we tell you, we’re either too young or too broke to drive. We do not run, it’s more of a sticky, hyper-walk thing (given the humidity, happens all the time). But the lights are not less dim and our laughter not less true.

2:39 pm

Finally busting out this apricot stick (here) that Tins gave me a few months back. I thought it was just good old lip gloss but it apparently has this nice magenta tone that I can sub when I don’t want to do full-on red. You know how in shows, people wake up from bed, fully made up?

I honestly don’t know how to make this heavier for events or non-everyday things :(

#random #procrastinating #checkoutalltheredbehindme

10:01 am

12:36 am  1 note

9:05 am  1 note

7:23 am

Tonight I entered that weird space of “there is nothing after this.”
When the darkness comes not with the comfort of cool oblivion but of suffocating heat
And you fear that hell awaits past the doorstep.

When there is nothing more I’d like than to lose consciousness, unaware of night’s passing and awaking with light in the sky.

But the night does not will it and instead the thoughts and apprehensions rise up and the fear and the night and the darkness just goes on and on and on and on and on and on…

12:38 am

10:03 pm

I sit a LOT of things out.

7:07 am

10:52 pm

6:27 pm

Mang Joe takes care of graves for a living. The family met him in ‘79 when my then 25-year-old uncle died in a car crash. Joe was also in his 20s then, walking around the cemetery and offering his services to the day’s party of brand-new mourners, indicated by the telltale mounds of freshly dug earth.

He would water and tend the Bermuda covering my Uncle’s lot, make sure it doesn’t succumb to browning, and pluck weeds and twigs out of sight before the clan makes its bi-annual visit - Undas and Uncle Nemy’s birthday. There is no contract but every year the lot is taken care of and beautiful when we arrive, and he would walk by right on cue as soon as the picnic chairs and tupperwares are laid out, and he would share a meal and drink with us, and receive his compensation for the year.

Lately he has been taking care of four more extra lots - my Lolo’s and  Lola’s included, and I wonder what he thinks of tending to the resting-places of the very couple who used to hand him paper bills and soft drinks and inquire about his wife and kids courteously. My dad, a mere high-schooler when they first met, is now a man of 53, and now hands him the year’s thank-yous. I glance at the exchange, at the surreptitious, almost hesitant way that he accepts the money, and in my usual horrible stream of thought, I catch myself wondering about how it will be when it’s my turn to tell him to keep the grass alive on top of my beloved dead.

And then I thought, it might not even be him nonchalantly hanging out beside the tree when it’s my turn to mourn.

10:35 am

I acknowledge: all this anxiety is wrought by fear, and this morning I’m just dumbfound with the realization that I don’t really know what I’m afraid of and why.

Then, read something very comforting re: fear and moving forward. That this could be just God raising the bar so I could show more love and do more under his Grace.

When we step up to God’s divine callings, laying down all encumbrances, including self, and thereby receive more of Him, He gives us increased opportunities to sow and receive more love.  The more we get from Him, the more we can give to others.  And the more we give, the more we get.  God’s abundant love never runs out. 

I should not forget that this is for his Grace. I should not forget the state of Trust I had entered and how it had empowered me and helped me do some of the things which I thought I would never be able to accomplish.

:)

READ IT YOURSELF, HERE

8:36 am  1 note

In the way I get territorial with certain things, I have to start off with saying that I am the original coffee drinker in the relationship. I grew up into it. I mark the onset of my puberty as coinciding with the time I started needing a mug of Nescafe in the early morning, to get my brain cells and digestive system up and running. 

At home, I make mine the way I learned it from my Mama, and the only way it’s ever been done in my house - A flattened scoop of instant, milky and sickly sweet. While I was deciding on my identity and pinpointing the habits and “skills” which would pepper my idea of self, coffee was the romantic vice which I felt necessary to attach to the writer-geek personage I dreamed of turning into, from loving Gilmore Girls and too many books. I called myself “IVed to coffee” on Friendster. My very first email address was coffeefreak07@caffeineated.com (remember MyOwnEmail?). I learned the hard way that I had developed a dependency on the brew: I got intense migraines during late-morning Saturdays when I would skip fixing my cup.

When I first met R, it was caffeine that gave him the migraines. Even drinking soda pop after 9PM would give him insomnia. When I drag him to cafes, to hang out and garner some intellectual dately vibes, he orders chocolate, the hot kind; or decaf when absolutely necessary. And he always slept in late anyway, so he never needed the pick-me-up I had become addicted to. I had understood that it was one of those necessary-differences things which we would add to the “Despite” side of the list (of, you know, just Why).

But now he works a day job, and he needs to get up early five days a week. And in their office, there is a legit press with a paper filter, and ground beans from all over the country always fill their shelves, take-homes and presents from the various farming cooperatives that they work with. Somehow he has started learning to drink coffee, and somehow, he has started needing it even more than I do. I remember two years ago, he came to a point of drinking three cups a day, whereas two already left me jumping all over the place. He even fell sick from UTI and dehydration, and was advised to lay off coffee and soft drinks for a good while till he got better.

He also now always drinks his coffee black. I keep hearing other people say that tasting bad coffee first is the only thing that deters non-black lovers from doing so, and I believe I’m one of the victims (see: Instant as The Household De Riguer up there). I was the original coffee drinker, but he has turned, apparently, into the legitimate one between us. Again, I have to point that out, in the way that I get territorial with things between us.

We each had a cup of gourmet black tonight, him from Sumatran beans and mine from Nicaragua, and it was only one of maybe 10 great cups of black I’ve ever had in my life. In fact, it’s easily in the list of top 5 best cups of black I’ve ever had. I like it because it’s strong, and because it was slow-roasted, it was not very bitter. In fact, it’s been the second espresso from the same bar that I’ve had in two days, and along with my newfound love of the place (and the coffee they make, and the ambience, and it’s being such a destination) I think I’m being persuaded to give up my cream and sugar, because this way it has less calories but it’s still pretty delicious. Not to mention that feels more grown-up somehow, because I’m still working on the writer-geek personage I mentioned earlier.

Anyway. I’m still very very buzzed from that cup, so here I am writing this pseudo-pensive essay to publish along with the requisite snap / Instagram of the day. Also, it somehow feels necessary to commemorate it with more ardor, as Learning Something New About Ourselves doesn’t happen everyday anymore. For tonight it was this: Coffee has now been crossed out of our “Despite” rundown. By reasons both direct and indirect, he has learned to love something that I’ve always loved, and conversely, he taught me new way of loving it as well.

The perfect caption for this one was my favorite French 10 lesson: “Deux cafes, S’il vous plait.”

11:34 pm  1 note