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