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.