There’s a reason for the long hiatus in posts, aside from work, from laziness, or from the incapability of sustaining any form of long-term writing, particularly a blog. On an interview for an editorial position at a glittery teen magazine I must admit I wanted in some small way, I was asked by the interviewer, also the editor-at-large, to pull up the blog I had oversold as a fashion/styling/mishmash of whatever.
“Juliet has a gun,” I told her as she started typing the address, and I was already preparing to say “like the perfume” with a small self-conscious laugh in case she misheard or raised an eyebrow or did other glamorous editor-at-largey things, at the same time I started regretting saying the name out loud or that I had a blog at all.
When my page loaded on the (completely foreign) screen (not mine) and she started scrolling and browsing through the entries and humming her approval (?) it felt like this:
And for a long time afterwards I couldn’t open the thing because I kept thinking about what it looked like on someone else’s browser (well she was using Firefox, for one), in someone else’s office being read by someone I didn’t know. A completely belated and useless realization, considering I’d made no attempts at privacy and the nature of blogging being the nature of blogging and so on, but it was still something that jarred me for a while, mostly because tumblogging felt like me talking to myself and a couple other friends.
But anyway. Hello world! Hello, editor-at-large (if by some freak accident you come back here). Felt like something from Drive for a moment there.
To say things! To know how to say things! To know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That’s what life is about: the rest is just about men and women, imagined loves and fictitious vanities, excuses born of poor digestion and forgetting, people squirming beneath the great abstract boulder of a meaningless blue sky, the way insects do when you life a stone.
Fernando Pessoa | The Book of DIsquiet | pg. 258 (via evoketheforms)
Street look of the day : Gorgeous colors on Jacquelin Dianne. Way to wear a galaxy print bodysuit!
The Art of Gardening
To her delight, her husband has taken up gardening. Their neighbor Dave gave him the packets to get him started, and everyday she watches him plant seeds in neat, orderly rows. There will be patches of beautiful sunflowers there, split peas and melons, squash and cabbages; she’s already imagining the sight it’ll be in spring.
What she doesn’t expect though, is to find them all in bloom one morning. Shocked, she goes out to her husband on the lawn, who’s standing with a curiously large walnut in hand.
“Honey, get back inside,” he calls out determinedly. “The zombies are coming.”
{100 words}
Especially lazy. Especially upset. Especially broke.
It was his sister’s gift to him, the jet ski, and a week after his birthday, when the rain started and didn’t stop, he’d called to thank her for the perfect timing.
“I always knew you had this sixth sense about things,” he told her.
The connection had been choppy and he’d had to strain to hear her over the static and his five-year-old nephew screaming on the other line, but she replied dryly, “Great. Now that Anilao is submerged in water, would you mind giving it back?”
“Not on your life,” he’d been too quick to say, and by the time he thought about taking it back or knocking on wood or throwing salt over his shoulder or whatever it was people did to make sure that what they said didn’t come true, she’d already started telling him about the things they’d lost in the flood, the brand new Kia, her favorite Doraemon alarm clock, Miguel’s stroller, Sammy’s books.
It was the last time he’d talked to her for so long—a couple of weeks ago he heard that they’d lost all of Pasig in the flash flood. He went over with the Sta. Clara search teams, but nothing had remained of his sister’s old barangay, just an endless stretch of murky brown water.
He saw the list of the identified dead the other day, and number fifty-six could’ve been Len, but the n had been smudged beyond recognition; in certain plays of light it could just as easily have been Les or Lea or Leo or Lem, and he thinks of all the jet skis in the world he would give for it to be.
-
Unfinished/unfinishable story I’ve been working on since Ondoy. There are sections in this story that trail off or die abruptly, and though I usually have no qualms about cutting out chunks of parts that don’t work, for some reason I’ve been lovingly hoarding each word, so much so that I’ve created three irreconcilable versions of this monstrous thing.
An abnormal love
for a specific object, place or action is mania in Trichotillomania, an impulse control disorder that produces the uncontrollable urge for people (me) to pull out their hair (scalp hair) due to anxiety, depression or stress (writing).
The compulsion is incessant but almost natural, the way some people need to smoke when faced with a blinking cursor and too many ideas while the translation and transition mechanism in your brain is lagging like an obese man at a marathon. That was a bad metaphor, but then I didn’t want to pause for too long to think of a good one and lose a few strands in the process.
What can you tell me about Bravo?
Of all the songs in his iPod, Bravo listens to “Electric Dreams” the most. It has 1478 plays on his iTunes. He often tells Charlie, in his deep, rumbling voice, that it reminds him all at once of cheese curls, lost keys and lovers (in that order). Among the three of them, Bravo is also the most athletic—he runs 10k marathons from Sherbot to Anglia and sometimes practices with the Rogues boys in the evenings. Once, they made him run after the ball, which had fallen in the school swimming pool after the quarterback, Peter Dunn, threw a blind pass that almost dislocated his shoulder. Rita was furious at him after that—his ankles and toes weren’t yet completely organic, and had nearly short-circuited in the water. As punishment—
“Very interesting, and I would like to go into what you feel about Bravo’s athleticism and the Rogues boys later,” Dr. Lee interrupts him with an apologetic smile, “but who I meant for you to tell me about was the first Bravo, the one they called—” She checks her notes. “—Bee.”
Bee. Bee is sterile bed, streaks of blood everywhere, someone screaming for Ativan, the sound of something breaking in the distance, let go, Alpha, let it go—
Charlie shakes his head. “No, thank you, ma’am. We don’t talk about the first Bravo.”
Spent an unhealthy amount of time deciding on the shoes at 3:30 in the morning, after having read the entirety of The Name of the Wind in a little less than two days. The book could do with a three-dimensional female character who doesn’t need Kvothe’s rescuing, and the outfit, a different pair of shoes.
There’ll be a hot time in the town of Berlin
Where to begin in describing my favorite European city. It is not as lovely as Paris, the way Paris is lovely with its cobbled sidewalks and romantic wrought iron towers, or as charming as the old, sacred town at the heart of Prague. At the moment, I am at a loss for a succinct description of Berlin, though when I first arrived I remember thinking that the city was spacious, almost too much so, as it can only be for a girl who has grown up in Manila with its congested roads and overcrowded trains (but I say this lovingly, Manila).
In Berlin, the lights are brilliant at three in the morning and the music thumps on long after dawn. In the day, I’ve found that it is possible to walk blocks (or maybe just one—distance perception as defunct as my sense of direction) without seeing another human being. On a tour at the Reichstag in the afternoon, the guide informed us that if we lived twenty-two years ago we would’ve been in West Berlin. “Now in East Berlin,” he said as we passed the Brandenburger Tor. (“But not really, as we would’ve gotten shot passing through No Man’s Land between the walls.”)
It is a city that disarms you with modernity and history, with its capacity to have lived through pain, and lived, and remembered. It is a city good at remembering. At music, as well, and public transportation.
(Photo again not mine, but by my friend Mariana Fonseca.)
The precise details of Charlie’s birth are known to him only through records. Human, 120 pounds, dark hair, brown eyes, average-sized heart, produced one windy day in August during a championship game that left the laboratory near-deserted. The lone assistant falling off her chair at the sight of him in the doorway, the first bath that rinsed off the last of the liquid steel, the mother they hired for him—all these are familiar to him, yet distantly so, much like the two times table or the annotated Eliot.
His earliest human memory might be Alpha sitting across him in what could be a park bench or a café. She is blinking the one lazy eye rapidly, while her arm jerks uncontrollably as it does when she is excited. She is teaching him Italian. “Gelare,” she yells, accidentally shoving the cone (chocolate, with sprinkles) into his nose (wet, sticky, sweet, divine).
By the end of the trip I’d stopped taking pictures, so this one isn’t mine; it’s borrowed. I suppose that even if I hadn’t left my camera locked up under my bed in the hostel, it would’ve been impossible to capture the look and feel of Prague anyway (or so I tell myself). But this photo comes close.
The walk from one side of the St. Charles Bridge to the other and back is long. There’s a distinct feeling of smallness, being dwarfed from all sides by statues, river, sky; once, rain.
temporary arrangements
day one must be the hardest, but he won’t know because he will sleep through one to day five and a half. he can do that, get up just to eat and shit and go back to bed again. the sheets will be a mess and the occasional soggy fry will be plastered to his knee or forearm, grease melded in the sheets. it’ll be because he has always been a messy eater, or maybe he will have thought of her worn pink slippers while eating and thrown the box of fries from his place at the foot of the bed. christ, all those stuffed bears when he could’ve just bought cigarettes.
on the other half of the sixth day, he’ll open his eyes and for a moment it’s dark and he’ll think of warm things, stars covered by fog, the blank sky before fireworks. but only of those things, and only for a moment.
hairography
There are two reasons for this post, first because
1.) my hair’s been in an asymmetrical bob these days, which is almost impossible to style because of the length. When I was an intern in StyleBible, the beauty editor, Reggie once had her hair parted to one side and swept back with a giant floral clip, something I never thought someone who wasn’t in kindergarten could pull off, but which she did, of course, and with flying stylish colors. Also,
2.) I was never one to invest in hair things, or fix my hair, until my internship days and Meow and Cho endlessly scouring racks for headbands and clips with me standing bored at the sidelines but later ending up with unkempt Zombie hair taught me otherwise. So on a trip to Trinoma earlier, I got myself not one, but two hair pins with both giant and not-giant flowers.
Black rosette hair pins, on sale at Php 185 from Aldo. (Originally Php 255)
Pink floral pins with small pearls, on sale at Php 170 from Accessorize. (Originally.. 70% more of that price.)
