So I’ll just say fare thee well, 2011

11 in the morning of December 31st. Everyone’s writing their goodbyes to 2011 and their lists of New Year’s resolutions. I’m listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s Wednesday Morning, 3AM, trying to figure out if this is some prophetic moment like “listening to Tommy with a candle burning and seeing my entire future,” while visions of a young Dustin Hoffman come into mind instead.

I wonder if this year will conclude with the same uncertainty The Graduate ended with — a few laughs, then a pause, and the question “What now?” in Elaine’s and Ben’s eyes. There are so many loose ends I’ve left this year, and I haven’t managed to do anything about them. But every night, before I go to sleep, I think about them just the same. There is the sinking feeling, an uncanny sadness that I can’t really explain, or don’t want to. Maybe time has hardened me on the outside, crumpling the remaining vestiges of feelings into an incoherent mess that can’t decide whether it’s pure anger or regret or disappointment. This has definitely not been my year, emotions wise.

But I suppose in other aspects of life, 2011 has been good to me. I’ve (re)discovered what I really, truly love and value — literature, music, art. I’ve written and written and written, found new bands and musicians to listen to on rainy mornings, picked up my sketchbook, taken photos upon photos without having to worry about grain. I’ve been able to spend my afternoons between bookshelves and I’ve found a new reason to smile whenever I start remembering old things. Slowly, I am learning to hope again.

There is still a lot of room for improvement, though, especially in the art of growing up. I am trying, and I hope my silence and civility can attest to that. I want to prove Papa right when he tells my Tita, “Mabait na si Abby ngayon,” to show him and everyone else I hold dear that I am much less the cold, self-centered bitch I was before. I can be kind. I want to be kind.

But satisfaction, much less happiness, can take years to achieve. I don’t expect this coming year to be any better than the one that is now past. I’m at an age where the dreams of a bright-eyed teenage girl no longer apply to me, particularly because I know that I may continue to wish on the stars, but things won’t really end up the way I planned. At the start of the year, I had told myself that just a little bit more and I’d finally be free. I promised myself that I would try again and that I would do whatever I could to make it work. I — we could be happy.

Things change, though. And life goes on; you win some, you lose some. But loose ends are loose ends, and more often than not, they can take a lifetime before one or the other decide to tie things up and finally put them away. I don’t want that to happen. I want to take my envelope and finally hand it in to the Admissions office, to cinch those remaining decimals for my targeted QPI, to spend time with the friends who have been there for me through thick and thin, and finally, to say the words that need to be said, whether they be “I’m sorry,” “Please,” or “Good-bye.”

Because that’s what this entire thing boils down to, undoing the crumpled mess of incoherence and finally setting things straight. There are things I may never get to do anymore and people I may never get to see again. After four (or more) years of being surrounded by familiar faces, I’m now confronted by the prospect of a strange new world where one has to be braver than before. But before all that, I must first say what I need to say:

To those I may have hurt this year, I am so sorry, I truly am. To those whose attentions I had turned down, I hope you find others who are more deserving of your kindness.

To those who have hurt or angered me — those with the angry messages that caused me to panic in the middle of EDSA and those who have made me the villain in their stories — I forgive you, and I hope God will be good to you.

To those who have spent idle afternoons and idle evenings with me, the girls and boys with whom I could talk to about anything and everything, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. Life is wonderful because of you.

To Papa and the kids, I’m sorry for being such a pain in the ass sometimes. I’ll try to be a better daughter and sister, I promise.

To Mama, I miss you. Hope everything’s peachy keen up there.

To that family who took me in for three days in Caloocan, thank you for showing me what life is like for so many of my fellow countrymen. Someday, I will do what I can to try to make things better for those who need it.

To the teachers who believed in me, all the way from freshman to junior year, thank you for encouraging me to find what I love best and to do it. Your literature and theology (but really, more of Kierkegaardian philosophy) classes shall not be put to waste.

To you, to you, to you. Transitive and transient you, with whom I’ll always associate my once upon a time dreams of  a happy, quiet future far away, oh Boy from the North Country (even though you’re not from there). I’ll never forget you. I couldn’t even if I tried.

Finally, to God, because I still believe even with all the crazy nonsense being thrown about nowadays. What a year, eh? You put me on a roller coaster, You did. But thank You, anyway. I’m just glad to be alive, and I’m learning to be grateful for what I have.

And with that, and hopefully with quite a few explosions in the sky tonight, I end the year.

Baby, it’s (kinda) cold outside

My family and I went to Tagaytay today. We used to go there often when Mama was still alive, mainly to visit the small plot of land Papa owns. When I was little, I used to walk around the field beside the lot and step on as many makahiya leaves as I could. Within the makeshift fence surrounding our lot, the grass enclosed has grown to twice my height.

Papa really loves the place. Maybe not as much as he loves Baguio, but he really likes how easily accessible it is for a weekend getaway. He’s planning on building a house on our lot sometime soon, and he wants to use part of it as a bed-and-breakfast. Three floors or two, with a loft and maybe bay windows, simple and minimalist with wooden furniture. The best thing is, Bag of Beans is a stone’s throw away from our place.

The café has expanded quite a bit from its original state a few years ago. It still maintains its motif, though. I really like the painted walls, the elaborate lamps, stained glass windows, mismatched chairs, and white drapes. It’s quaint and cozy and bohemian. We had lunch there this afternoon.

I had pumpkin soup and chicken parmigiana. The soup was really good, nice and thick and warm and served with crusty bread and butter. The parmigiana was okay, nothing too special. I’ve gotten used to Papa’s parmigiana which always has a lot of tomato sauce and cheese, so the lack of these was kind of disappointing.

We also ordered a family-sized steak and mushroom pie, which I wasn’t able to eat until we got home. It’s still good, not the same as it was when Bag of Beans started out, but we keep ordering it whenever we’re there nevertheless.

What I still really love, though, is their apple pie a la mode. I’m not a food expert but I like how it isn’t too sweet, and they always serve it freshly baked.

Tagaytay itself is a really nice, quiet city. Just a couple of years ago there weren’t any high rise buildings in the area, but with the quickly expanding real estate developments, there are now quite a few of them. I’m not too keen on commercialization, but somehow Tagaytay still manages to maintain its charm. Nearby Nuvali and Eton city bring in a lot of modernization to the general area, but the old houses and small-town shops and restaurants that were already there when I was a child are still standing. People still stop their cars by the road to buy flowers and fruits from the small stands that line the highway.

Along the main road, there is also a house after which I will pattern my future home. Papa also really likes its design. It looks old-fashioned and Mediterranean, with an adobe roof and an open corridor framed by arches facing the garden. Someday, I’d like my house to look like it.

The view of the Taal volcano and the lake surrounding it is always beautiful, no matter what time of the year. Property facing this view is really expensive, though. I don’t know how expensive the plots of land surrounded by pineapple hills are, but with such a landscape I suppose they’re also pricey.

I haven’t done an outfit post or fashion entry in this blog, so please indulge me. Since Papa told us yesterday that we were going to Tagaytay today, I asked my sister if I could borrow the Old Navy sweater my Tita gave her for Christmas. Michelle Williams in last year’s Blue Valentine is my current peg, so I wore it over a floral dress and with my Cole Haan country ankle boots.

I also wore the flower ring my friend Chrissa gave me and used Mama’s vintage shoulder bag. Woodsy, somewhat rustic, grunge and not too girly, just the way I like it.

sleepy eyes, eep!

I think I’ll do more outfit posts sometime, maybe starting this January. But for now, that’s all. Mushy New Year’s resolution/hopes/dreams/whatever list coming soon.

I am tired. I am true of heart!

from "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers

This morning, I woke up clinging to the hazy remnants of a dream.

I arrived home late last night, a little past two in the morning. I didn’t drink much, just a glass of champagne and a lot of soda once my face started to get warm. Most of my friends came, all of us in white (or its variants) according to the theme, and we managed to have fun even though the alcohol wasn’t exactly overflowing. It was safe, it was wholesome, it was (for lack of a better description) all grown up. Everything was fine and dandy, until the morning came.

That dream stung. I opened my eyes to sunlight filtering through the gaps between my curtains, and I cried. I haven’t cried like that in a long time. The worst part of it was, I didn’t even know or understand why.

There were words inside me, perhaps. Or something heavy in my chest that I couldn’t let out, an “I miss you,” or an “I’m sorry” that I never had the chance nor the courage to just say to someone, whoever it is, out there in the world. There were things I wish I could do, places I wish I could see, people I wish I didn’t have to say goodbye to. Maybe it was all of those combined. Or maybe it was a longing akin to Brod’s Sadnesses: sadness of the could-have-been, secret sadness, sadness of love without release.

I’ve had dreams like this before, but they only started happening a couple of months ago. Every time I woke up, there was that same heavy feeling, the same remnants like wisps of smoke. Different people, different shoulders to lean on, different hands around mine. I knew them in the day, I know their faces and their voices and the ways they walked. But my dreams were always questions I was too afraid to ask myself: Could it be you? Or you? Or you?

My fear now is to really love again. It’s frightening, the prospect to love and not be loved back in return. I am getting too old for this, for all the tiring mind games that teenagers play.

It’s just that, when your heart gets broken by the same person one too many times, you kind of just close up shop afterwards. It doesn’t matter how old you are. There are moments of weakness and vulnerability when you start hoping (again) that he or she would remember you and would change his or her mind. Then there are those (hopefully) longer periods of sanity when you put up your guard a little better and stand at a distance, hoping someone else would see you’re worth that “Hello.”

I can’t help but wonder sometimes though, could something happen with the ones I’ve known a while? By some miracle, would I bump into my current crush in a gallery or a gig and finally get the courage to tell him that maybe we should hang out sometime? Or would I become closer to a friend, discover a way to unlock his unreadable self, and maybe someday find myself sitting with him on his couch, my chin on his shoulder, watching him post-process photos on his laptop? So many possibilities but equally as many hopes that may just get dragged down to the dirt.

The thing is, I don’t want someone to expect something from me that I cannot give or be. I’m not the girliest of girls, at least not in the traditional sense. I love baking and Disney and Zooey D and I appreciate some vintage dresses and some floral and Once Upon A Time and cute little puppies, but I don’t like pink (even though my room is “old rose”), I don’t watch Gossip Girl (anymore) and Pretty Little Liars and The Vampire Diaries, and I don’t like posting sad quotes in Helvetica imposed on faded photos on Tumblr. I dig Batman (who doesn’t?), the LOTR trilogy (I used to know how to write in Tengwar), Harry Potter (I’ve stuck with Harry ’til the end), Doctor Who (I went as Eleven for Halloween), 60s music (Bob Dylan!), electronica (Daft Punk!), war movies (WWII ones, especially), graphic novels (Alan Moore! Adrian Tomine!), and outer space (“We’re made of star stuff.”). I laugh a bit too loudly and I curse like a dude. I want to look like an Audrey Hepburn but I kind of act like an Ellen Page. All of these, plus the fact that I’m loyal to the place I call home. I’ve never dated a guy who went all the way down south for me because it was always so inconveniently out of the way.

I suppose it’s just that bit of loneliness (and admittedly, bitterness) that comes creeping in every now and then. My dreams have a way of telling me the feelings I have inside that I have been ignoring. I try to cut down on the romantic notions nowadays and focus more on work and the things I love doing. I don’t know if it’s working, but I do hope someone out there will appreciate that.

Maybe I should stop writing about ~*~feelings~*~ now, it’s getting kind of old.

Hungry holidays

Ever since the holiday season started, I noticed that I’ve been eating a lot more than usual. I could finish whole cups of rice now (by cup, I mean the ones you get in small, individual bowls in Chinese or Japanese restaurants) when before I could only eat half or two-thirds and give up because I was already full (no really, I don’t know why, I’m not anorexic or anything). Nowadays, in between meals, I would need to have something beside my laptop on my desk that I could easily munch on while working, whether it be an opened pack of Honey Stars cereals or a brownie someone gave me for Christmas.

I have to admit, I’m not exactly one of the most health-conscious of people. I’m a bit conscious of my weight and my waistline, but I hold the pleasures of life above them. So what if I don’t fit into my old pair of jeans? I’ll go out and buy a new one. Liz Gilbert (the Eat, Pray, Love woman) and the Italians got it right, I might as well enjoy la dolce vita and be happy.

I love food. I love cooking, baking, watching other people cook and bake (I’m a big fan of Anthony Bourdain, Jamie Oliver, and Nigella Lawson), and of course, eating food. I grew up in a household where every meal was of vital importance. My father would cook eggplant parmigiana and beef stroganoff and pescado al horno and puttanesca and kare-kare and my mother would bake food for the gods and brazo de mercedes during the weekends. My grandmother was also a fantastic cook — I remember her sweet jamon, her pancit, her lengua estofado, her callos.

Whenever my aunt has us over at their house in Alabang, she always has either roast turkey or chicken, paella (marinara or negra), and her own version of callos based on my grandmother’s recipe. It’s no wonder, then, why my siblings were all so big. We all like to eat. Just recently, Tita came back from Canada (where she and her family also live) with two huge bags of candy for us. They were full of Rockets (aka Smarties) candies, lollipops, bubblegum, Hershey’s, and Cadbury.

It was only a couple of years ago when I picked up my parents’ hobby of cooking and baking. Living alone during the weekdays helped foster this, because I sorely missed eating real, home-cooked food instead of fast food all the time. Whenever I had spare time in the evenings, I would make rosemary chicken or gambas al ajillo for myself. After my mom passed away, I took it upon myself to put her oven to use. I started baking cupcakes and cookies and brownies when I had the time. For gifts this Christmas, I decided to bake chocolate chip cookies for people instead of buying actual gifts.

Yesterday, on the other hand, after my meeting with my fellow officers from our organization, I passed by Xocolat, a place I used to frequent in my earlier years of college. I bought a box of six brownies for me and my siblings. Xocolat brownies are my favorite brownies ever (not including the home-baked ones, of course), especially their Original Sin and Citrus variants. Unfortunately, they were out of Original Sin, so I got one Java Buzz (with espresso and cashew nuts), two Adult (with Belgian chocolate chunks and rum), and three Citrus ones. These are made with premium dark chocolate and have a lemony topping. My youngest brother and my sister both loved it.

I think I might just be preparing my tummy for the onslaught of parties and buffets for the following days. Either way, I’m perfectly happy even with a pound or two gained. Calorie-counting be damned! I’m bound to shed some of the Christmas weight once the stress of school starts again in January anyway, so keep those chocolates and cakes coming.

Inside all of us is a wild thing

“I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last.” – C. S. Lewis

I remember reading this book when I was a kid. I don’t remember when and where, but I remember the illustrations of the horned giant monster and the little boy in the white wolf suit. Maybe I had found it in the shelves in my kindergarten classroom, or maybe I had a copy of my own. But when I saw the hairy monster on the large screen in the movie theater one day, I knew that I had seen them somewhere before. Memories from my childhood, including a sad little velveteen rabbit and a self-sacrificing giving tree, suddenly returned to me.

I never got to see Spike Jonze’s 2009 film adaptation in the cinemas, but I did get to catch it on TV once. It was equally adorable and heartbreaking, just as how I remember Maurice Sendak’s book was. I could go on and on about how Where the Wild Things Are is a great film that captures the terrible loneliness and anger kids can sometimes (or often) feel, but I won’t.

Yesterday, I bought Dave Eggers’ novelization of the film’s screenplay that he co-wrote with Jonze (along with a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, as you can see). The Wild Things is basically a longer, wordier Where the Wild Things Are for adults who grew up reading the Sendak original as well as for those who just want a good story, albeit rather dark amidst Eggers’ characteristic humour.

The Fleet Foxes playlist was playing in iTunes while I was reading the first chapter of the book, and the combination of folksy forest cabin indie music and reading about Max being shooed away by his older sister reminded me of the simpler (and sometimes sad) days of childhood. Everyone likes to recall their wonder years through rose-tinted glasses, but there were times back then that a lot of us would rather forget.

My aunt talked to me recently about what she observed about me. She said that she knew I didn’t receive as much affection as I should have from my parents when I was little because they were always away at work, and when my siblings came one after another, all their attention was directed to them. I was a shy and lonely kid, she said. Growing up and even well into my teenage years, I would throw tantrums and get angry at my parents for God only knows why. I don’t really remember the reasons anymore, but I was a brat. I always had to get what I wanted because I never got what I really needed.

“Inside all of us is a wild thing,” goes the tagline of the Where the Wild Things Are film. The monsters of our childhood, at least the ones where not everything was nice and peachy like a Disney story, can stay with us even when we are older. Those fits of anger and jealousy and hurt and heartbreak were there when we were five or eleven. Back then, we would have thrown our things all over the room and knocked over our plates of food. At 14, we would have slammed our bedroom doors and answered back. Now, we choose to get even in whatever possible way.

41250006 by -mirandak

But how different things are when love comes along!

As cheesy as it may sound, I think that we become mature when we learn to really, truly love. When we’re finally able to put others before ourselves, no matter how scary it may be, that’s when we’ve finally grown up. In the story, Max returned to his mother, finding his supper waiting for him and still hot. Love is both frightening and frustrating, but it’s also the same warmth and comfort we looked for when we were children and still continue to seek now. But more often than not, we don’t realize that it’s always been there in front of us. We’ve just been too stubborn and childish to see it.

Spaces between pages

Tennessee Williams once said that the longest distance between two places is time. Science tells us that time itself can be used to measure distance, that the sunlight that reaches us here on Earth is a little more than eight minutes old, that certain points in space to another can only be traversed in lightyears.

But more often than not, distance is measured in layman’s terms. It’s measured in the inches between two people’s hands, in the spaces between book pages hiding small notes from strangers, in the kilobytes traveling from his MacBook to yours as you converse, albeit through an LCD screen, about things you never thought anyone else would want to talk about. Distance is that week-long silence between him and her, between old flames and new ones, synonymous to that uncanny awkwardness that just won’t go away.

A couple of months ago, I was browsing through the books in the Philosophy section of the bookstore across the place where I stay. I found a Michel Foucault book that seemed interesting, so I opened it to one of the first few pages. To my surprise, placed carelessly between them was a small piece of paper with a note. It seemed like a girl’s handwriting, and the smileys sort of gave the writer’s gender away. I don’t remember what it said exactly, but I think it said something like, “I’d like to write a love story. Care to write it with me? But first, let’s play hangman!” with a lot more smileys and a small drawing of a gallows and an incomplete mobile phone number with some blanks.

I honestly had no idea what I was going to do at that point. I wanted the book, but there was that note. It was obviously from a girl, and I really don’t swing that way. I lingered at that shelf for a while, until after a few minutes I ended up placing the book back and picking up a different Foucault book.

The Foucault book I got instead

Whoever she is, she must be one smart girl to be reading Foucault. Either that, or she knows exactly what kind of boy she wants to meet — someone who reads, knows what the panopticon is, likes to spend his afternoons carefully running his fingers across the spines of the few books on philosophy that bookstore has in stock. Her distance is one of time and space, the depth and breadth of her patience and the days between her note and his arrival. A few days later, I went back to the bookstore, and the book was gone.

When I worked for a summer at the Greenbelt branch of Powerbooks back in high school, I learned the ins and outs of bookstore life. It was kind of like being a librarian for a few weeks, wearing the old royal blue shirt that the employees used to wear, arranging books in shelves so that some covers faced forward while others showed only their spines. I learned how to differentiate paperbacks from trade paper books from hard copies, how to assist customers and bring them to the sections where they could find the books they were looking for.

Those who know me best are aware that my ideal scenario for a real-life meet-cute would be set in a bookstore. I’ve had my share of missed connections — the boy with glasses at the Manila International Book Fair who picked out the Borges and Camus books I was looking at, the boy in white loafers browsing through the graphic design books in Fully Booked High Street. I never said a word to them, and they never said a word to me. My distance was in my reluctance, in my fear and in my silence. Perhaps, just perhaps, this is the worst and largest distance of all.

Untitled by Saucestin

But I can tell you now, though. It’s always nice to bump into someone in a place where some of the greatest (and sometimes most overrated) minds in history remain alive around you. To linger in one section with another person in silence, eyes wandering over the same titles and thinking the same things, or to converse over a wooden shelf as you both move down the aisle, hands touching book covers and glossy pages on opposite sides of the shelf in unison. It can be anyone, like your friend from high school you haven’t seen for a while, or someone you’ve just met.

The great thing is, the distance that separates you now is just the height and length of a wooden shelf, or a foot in between as you stand side by side facing paperbacks and hard-bounds. It’s not much of a distance, and that’s always the best kind.

Let me tell you something about my side of town

Let me tell you something about my side of town.

To get here, you’ll have to drive a little farther than where you’re used to. Down the highway, into the expressway, past the rows of factories that line the road. To your right is the airport’s tarmac, to your left, the bluish waters of the bay. There are no buildings more than five floors high, no glittering skyscrapers save for a few that are separated by fields of green, all in a place right on the border between farmland and the last stretch of the Metropolis.

I live in the largest suburban area in Southeast Asia, a vast expanse of low horizons and the quiet buzz of lazy Saturday afternoons. On weekdays, I stay in the city, amidst the loud horns of trucks and shouts from the streets 12 floors below my window. I’ve learned to get used to the hustle and bustle, to the quick pace one must keep to survive in an unfamiliar place. But I can’t say that I’ve learned to love it, because I don’t. I am not a city girl, and I never will be.

To me, there is nothing so appealing as a slow-paced world where you feel that you have all of time in your hands. In the village where my old school is (less than half an hour away, depending on schoolday traffic, from where my house is), rows of large houses are covered by the boughs of tall acacia trees, protecting afternoon joggers from the sun. Everything is quiet and even the air is different, almost like you’re not in the same country anymore.

People go around my neighborhood in their house clothes, unafraid to step into cafes and malls wearing the same thing they wore to bed the night before. There is something so Californian about the sunlight and the red tiled roofs and the date palm trees in the middle of the avenues. The rich live only a few minutes away from the middle class, and sometimes they live in the same place. We speak with a characteristic lazy drawl and a twang after every letter “o”. English comes naturally, and it takes a while for many (but not all) to adapt to Filipino. When we talk to each other, it’s always in English, with a “Dude!” when we’re getting pissed.

It’s like Wisteria Lane. It’s like a lot of things, but at the same time, it can be terribly, terribly exclusivist. The cities outside can change a perspective or two, but can we help it that all our lives we’ve been separated from the rest of the world? That we grew up with each other, will grow old with each other, and will probably all be buried in Manila Memorial someday?

We’re a strange bunch, my kind and I. I can’t speak for every single one of us, but generally, we share common traits. We’d rather stay in and drink at people’s houses than party at clubs all the time. We’re exposed to village gossip from an early age, from the scandalized murmurs in mothers’ gatherings every weekend afternoon at the largest house’s porch, served iced tea and pasta and some freshly baked whatever that Tita just brought out from the oven. I make beso your mom, you make beso mine. I know you because you’re the son of Tita or Tito’s brother or sister or distant cousin, twice removed, the prom date of a girl a couple of batches higher, who was the kabarkada of a co-varsity of my best friend. Everyone knows everyone.

Also, it hardly ever rains. Or floods. Or anything, really. When it does, it’s over when it’s over.

I wonder if I’ll be stuck in this place where time almost stops. Will I settle down here, drive home from work in the city every night, spend Saturday lunches with the girls like sina Tita do, do the groceries with my kid in the shopping cart seat, wearing velour sweatpants or breezy white dresses and slippers? Will I bring my kids to football or basketball or piano practice when I’m not at work, support my friends who open stalls during the holiday bazaars?

It takes a while to outgrow everything and to actually want something beyond one’s comfort zone. But this will always be the heart of suburbia, with its small neighborhood stores and the familiar faces everywhere. This is the world weaved together by Tirona and Concha Cruz and Zapote and Acacia and Madrigal, the place I call home.

Music post # 2: Music and Poetry

I’ve been meaning to make another music post for a while now. It’s been too long since I last uploaded a playlist on Tumblr, and I’ve had one ready for posting more than two months ago.

click on the image to download the playlist

It pretty much sums up my mood lately, a bit of mellow Kings of Convenience and Andrew Bird mixed in with some happier-sounding The Kooks and Guillemots and a dash of good old 80′s new wave from The Pale Fountains. I’ve put the mix up on mediafire for those who want to take a listen. As for the playlist title (Mixed Messages), well, the schizophrenic mix of songs would be one explanation. Anyway, this is for those people who are experiencing quite a bit of confusion with people who can’t seem to make up their minds. Or for people who like a weird combination of music that initially makes little aesthetic sense. The track list is as follows:

1. Always Like This by Bombay Bicycle Club
2. Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear
3. A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left by Andrew Bird
4. Stay Out of Trouble by Kings of Convenience
5. Plasticities by Andrew Bird
6. Junk of the Heart (Happy) by The Kooks
7. From Across the Kitchen Table by The Pale Fountains
8. A Minor Incident by Badly Drawn Boy
9. Made Up Love Song #43 by Guillemots
10. Death (live) by White Lies
11. Come Back When You Can by Barcelona
12. You and I by Wilco
13. Your Heart Is An Empty Room by Death Cab for Cutie

Also, this mix is dedicated to those who need it. Could I get any more cryptic? Don’t think so.

Music is like literature to me. I love them both equally, and I don’t think I can live without either of them. Like many other people my age, I’ve been making mixtapes since the glory days of the cassette tapes, recording songs I liked on the radio the old school way. I have stacks of Imation CDs in my room filled with Tori Amos and The Cure and The Shins back when Limewire and CD burning were still alive. And like I said, I have a thing for musicians (or guys with good taste in music, basically).

One of my best friends Manica brought me a vinyl record of Simon and Garfunkel’s debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3AM from New Zealand. I literally cried out “Oh my God!” (Alone. In public.) when I saw what was inside the plastic bag. I love Simon and Garfunkel (“Mrs. Robinson“? “Bridge Over Troubled Water“? “The Sound of Silence“? “The Only Living Boy In New York“? Oh, come on). My dad has a thing for 60s and 70s folk music and he used to make me listen to the duo and Don McLean a lot when I was younger, hence the somewhat hippie taste in music.

I’m pretty over the moon now about having my own vinyl record, although we don’t have a record player at home. My Lolo had one in their house a few years back before he passed away, I hope it’s still there. I really want to hear the record as it was once heard by a generation of young girls in the 60′s, with all that added background noise we never hear on digitalized songs nowadays. I’m anachronistic that way.

The thing about music, particularly songs with lyrics, is that it’s a lot like poetry being played out. The best songs by the best composers and lyricists are always the ones with the best messages, just like the best poems. The 60′s was an era marked by some of the most poetic songs of the 20th century, and the children of Woodstock and the Anti-War movement were like the new Romantics (read: the Romanticism of Lord Byron and his other nature-loving friends). I once dated a guy who was both poet and musician, and the combination was a good one.

Take for example, Raymond Carver’s poem, “Waiting“. Sure, it’s in free verse. And fine, it’s a bit cliched. But how many Adele songs have sprung from this same theme? Or Bon Iver? Or even Taylor Swift? Don’t tell me “If you could see that I’m the one who understands you / been here all along so why can’t you see?” isn’t about waiting. Lyrics are poetry in themselves, and although the music is what constitutes the aesthetics of a song, the words are what we quote in Twitter and make typography graphics of in Tumblr. Same goes for the lines from a poem.

People often think poetry is pretentious. It certainly comes off that way. If I recite a line from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, you can bet that someone out there will roll their eyes at me. Or maybe people are just uncomfortable with it because it seems, for lack of a better word, corny. No one does a Dead Poets Society and writes the girl or guy they like a poem anymore. It’s almost as obsolete as the good old harana (serenade).

But I like poetry. I like reading it, not necessarily analyzing and critiquing it. It’s always nice to see words flow wonderfully down the length of a page. Understandably, it’s not for everyone. And I’d really rather not have another guy writing poems about me for me (it can get a bit creepy). But poetry is an acquired taste, and sometimes it’s even an art in itself.

11/11/11

I suppose everyone will be making their own 11/11/11 entries about the epic wishes they made (or will make, depending on which side of the world you live in) and the wish lantern festivals they’ll be attending tonight. That’s all well and good, but instead of focusing on what I hope to have based on a wish I made – whose validity is dependent on precision, because if I made it a fraction of a second later than 11:11:11 then it may be null and void – I think I’ll focus on a couple of wishes (albeit small ones) that have already been answered. After all, I doubt the wishes of the ungrateful would be heeded by the Big Guy in the Sky.

First, meet Severus, my trusty new companion. He’s like my own TARDIS (cookies for those who get the reference!), efficient and useful in ways my Toshiba brick-of-a-laptop Sebastian was.

I’ve always wanted a MacBook, and my dad said he’d get me one as my graduation gift. I got it a bit early (little more than four months before my actual graduation), and I’m thankful for that anyway, considering the small Acer I’ve been using hasn’t exactly been cooperative.

Aside from Severus, I was also finally able to get Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes for myself. I spent the rest of this week’s allowance on the last copy (sans plastic wrap, because someone took the last sealed copy) of the book in the Fully Booked Katipunan branch. It’s the same copy I was browsing through the night before, and surprisingly I finished more than half of it in less than an hour.

The thing about Tree of Codes is that it’s pretty tricky to read. It’s not the kind of book you’d appreciate on a Kindle or an iPad. Tree of Codes is a work of art in itself, die-cut from Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles. A few pages in and I got the hang of it, and I was pleasantly surprised by how the language sounded. Tree of Codes is poetry in prose, and it’s also a visual feat well worth the Php 1.5+k I spent. Thank you, Lord, for leaving me the last copy.

Later tonight there will be some lantern festivals in Banchetto Megatent in Ortigas and in Cuenca Park in Ayala Alabang. The paper wish lanterns have all been sold out, but I’d love to see them float up into the sky. I’ve had Tangled-like dreams of paper lanterns in the sky for a while now, and it’d be something to experience it for real. A friend of mine also said that there might be paper lanterns in our batch’s Blue Roast before graduation. The combination of blue roses, paper lanterns, good music, good company, and all that lovely sentimentality would be a great way to end my stay at our university.

As futile as wishing may seem to realists, I’ve always been a romantic who’ll readily believe in the power of hope and faith. I might not get exactly what I’ve asked or am asking for, but I think things have a way of turning out alright. I’m just grateful for everything I have right now, and I do believe contentment is some sort of happiness in itself.

To the love of my life, wherever, whenever, and whoever you are

photo from fuckyeahronhermione.tumblr.com

Dear you,

I was listening to Coldplay a while ago and I suddenly remembered the first time I met you. It was in one of my dreams when I was still 13 (or around that age, at least), and in it I was walking down a white-walled corridor towards a doorway. When I pushed the doors open, I found myself outdoors, in the middle of a large crowd of people who were waving their hands high above their heads and singing along to a familiar song. There were bright lights coming from a stage, and I think I could even see fireworks from afar. And there you were, in the middle of the crowd, and you looked at me. Somehow, even though I couldn’t see your face clearly, I knew it was you.

I’ve never forgotten that dream. Not after all these years.

As time passed, I met different boys whom I believed to be you. Some were lovers of music and had a strange sense of humor, some were tall and conventionally romantic. There were moments when I would find myself amidst fireworks or songs I loved, in the middle of a large crowd under the night sky, and I would look around, hoping to see you. But I never did.

I’m probably getting my dream all mixed up, though. What if it wasn’t outdoors, but indoors? What if there wasn’t really a large crowd, or music, or fireworks? It’s been too long. All I’m sure of is the night sky, some lights, and you. Have I already met you? Are you still there, or have you been around all this time? What if we had our chance and missed it, or what if we made a mess?

Maybe we don’t even like the same things, or maybe we do. After all, I don’t think I can date (much less end up with) someone who doesn’t read or share at least some things and dreams in common with me. You might like Vonnegut and Harry Potter, but you probably also read Stephen King and Palahniuk. Maybe you’re a Marvel man to my DC girl. Or you listen to Phoenix and Ray LaMontagne but you don’t like U2 or Nat King Cole, like the Eraserheads but not Up dharma Down (really? I mean, why not?), prefer Nickelodeon to Disney, want to visit South America instead of Europe, and so on. Little things, easy compromises. As long as our fundamental values are similar, it’s all good.

Besides, it’s really always been the words, the affinity for language and its use in conveying things that need to be said. But at the same time, it’s also always been the silence in between. It’s the same silence that passed between us when you looked at me for the very first time.

Know, however, that I wait for you in the heart of the suburbs and by the window at the 12^th floor, in between shelves in bookstores, among the linen sheets and pillows in hotel beds, in corridors between classrooms. Your timing isn’t exactly wonderful, I understand that now. But I’ll wait for you anyway. I hope you’ll forgive me, you know what for. Know, my dear, that I love you now, always have and always will. I loved you in those whom I loved, and I love you in the wind that passes from here to where you are. I love you in your absence and I will love you in your presence.

Someday, someday. I’ve seen too many 80′s movies and read too many books, and maybe I’m a little in over my head. But hope springs eternal.

Love,

Me