Fast and furious

For fast fiction with a zing, check out Blagador's micro-fiction, which he arranged using black-and-white photos. The Polymath is one of my "kids"; I have an entire brood of writers who call me Mum, Mudra or Madder—a name I earned because I was, dagnabbit, the oldest among the fellows of two national workshops I attended. I'd like to think that I and my house are a safe haven to them; many of my kids have come or stayed over to chat, read, eat, borrow books, watch TV, or, yeah, even to iron a shirt.

I'm as proud as any mum.

A writer's writ

My flights to and from Cebu last year were often delayed, once by as long as four hours. Sometimes I arrive a little after midnight.

I'm not too fazed by such delays or when I'm in a long-haul flight. Maybe it's because nowadays I'm rarely in a hurry to go somewhere—the wonderful trade-off when I junked my power suits and took up writing. I work at home, in my own space at my own time (which, alas, also means I shoulder my own health care, withhold my own taxes, and forgo 13th month pay).

The delays give me pockets of time to surf or write—I am rarely without Samwise, my usually dirty iBook—or to read (what's the use of scrimping on clothes to buy books if you don't carry one with you all the time?), or more recently to blog, using my trusty Tungsten, inherited from my dear friend Jon (the Tungsten looks bedraggled after five years, but still works beautifully).

I also love solitude (I didn't always, but have grown to love my own quiet times). And I don't mind being exiled to my own devices.

That's the beauty of writing. It's "work" we can do almost anywhere. A pen, paper, or, if one is lucky, a laptop with battery juiced to full.

Many of us writers are always writing: when we look at someone, we are more likely subconsciously storing in our mind how the neon lights play against his pallid skin, blue and pink against his forearm, or how the corners of her mouth twitch when she lies.

Perhaps writers look at life differently. Part of us often step back and catalog an event taking place. Our being “in the moment” is lived thrice: once, when it happens; twice, when remembered; thrice, when reduced to words.

Vignette

That's it. Time to sleep now. After wasting precious time on HBO's Nanny McPhee, I finally have something that strings together the mandatory five words: shoes, discover, murder, subterranean, compatibility.


And what do you know—I actually had fun.

I was snug in my bed, dreaming of a world without clocks, when a call girl who lived down on the tenth floor was helping her American lover commit suicide before dawn. Not really sure if she’s a call girl or he was American; to my neighbors on whom I eavesdropped while we were crammed in the elevator, every Caucasian is an American and every American’s dark-skinned companion with a harsh accent is a prostitute. The roving security guard had discovered the American’s leather shoes littered behind the building, one shoe on the pavement, the other lounging atop a parked car’s hood. A resident had opened his window to throw out a cigarette butt, and saw the body sprawled on the roof of the next-door warehouse that was our only line of defense against the sight and stench of the Pasig. The woman had shown the police his suicide note. She said all she did was help push him through the narrow window. His heft could barely squeeze through the steel frame, and she had heaved and strained at the effort.

If we were still talking to each other, you’d tell me assisted suicide is nonetheless punishable, like homicide or murder. Seventeen years out of law school, and you still cannot get over your Juris Doctor. Esq. remains appended to your name, perhaps now more of a consolation when no man has given you his name to use.

So subterranean of the inamorata, you’d sniff. That is so you. You have to use words mangled beyond recognition when there are other terms more imaginative for those you do not wish to associate with: troglodytes, hoi polloi, the great unwashed. Once, you mispronounced Worcestershire to the waiter, and I wanted to correct you like I did when you confused unconscious with subconscious, but I didn’t, and suggested you get ketchup instead. It was then I knew for sure I was no longer your friend.

It wasn’t a question of compatibility. We share the same seamstress, the same distaste for the thin, pinched voice of CSI Miami’s Emily Procter, the same acid test for our dates. I am halfway deaf in my left ear and you in your right so when we couldn’t catch the dialogue on TV, we’d lean forward and demand in unison: What?!

The eleventh hour

Oh, the weight of a million things to finish by the day's end.

In a week chock-full of chores, today was an exhibit of fraught multitasking: While keeping an eye out on the pasta sauce simmering to my right, I was washing dishes and studying Dean Alfar's The Dragon in the Bell published in this week's Philippines Free Press. My copy of Free Press was spreadeagled above the sink, two laundry clips pinning it away from the splash of dishwater. Dean's story is up for discussion in my fiction class tomorrow, for which I also need to read another story (gah, must breathe) and submit a vignette that should contain these words: discover, subterranean, shoes, compatibility, and murder. And, just so there's no pressure or anything, our venerable teacher Butch Dalisay requires that we write "fiction that matters."

So.

The food's all done and waiting for The Coach, the kitchen floor's mopped free of stray garlic peel and tomato sauce, and the house is being aired out of the smell of anchovies.

I'm closeted in our bedroom, the curtains swept to the side so I can look out to the skyline for those times when I need inspiration for the vignette. The TV's turned on so I won't feel like I'm missing out on today's Law and Order. My fingers are poised over the QWERTYs.

Several long gazes at the skyline later, I still don't have a clue how to string the five words together. (It's the subterranean that's killing me.)

What was it that Butch said last week? "Fiction: Do it well. Do it honestly."

Well, here I am, honest to the bone, and I remain bereft of a workable plot. So I blog. Particularly about what Janet Burroway said of the paradox of least wanting to do what we most want to do: "We are in love with words except when we have to face them."

This difficulty is my fault, of course. My writing muscles have stultified from disuse.

According to Burroway, "The habit of mind that produces stories is a habit and can be cultivated, so that the more and the longer you write, the less likely you are to run out of ideas." Writing, she says, is mind-farming: "You have to plow, plant, weed, and hope for growing weather. Why a seed turns into a plant is something you are never going to understand, and the only relevant response to it is gratitude. You may be proud, however, of having plowed."

Time, then, to dig through the dirt. I will remember the poet William Stafford's advice to his students to "write to their lowest standard."

Struck by lightning

Much could be said about Jack's Ridge: how this resort and restaurant complex high up in Shrine Hills, Matina, was once a Japanese outpost in World War II; how it had been under water before the sea retreated and left clams on the mountaintops; how the coffee shop, they say, fails to produce brews as spectacular as the Ridge's view of the city and Davao Gulf.


But all that is overshadowed by what Jack's Ridge had given me.



I was taking photos of the moon "riding on ghostly skies" when lightning flashed low on the horizon as I pressed the shutter.




It gave me this:

Poetry, by hook or by crook

I took to reading—and truly enjoying—poetry rather late in life. Away from the classroom.

To me there are three kinds of poems: those I can enjoy without creating another frown line; those I revel in for their sound, sense and sensuousness; and the many that make me think I should just stick to fiction.

(Of course there is the obligatory Rilke and Neruda*, every other yuppie's must-have poetry for brown nosing or bluff sophistication. The rule in cocktail conversations: When all else fails, bluff.)

I wonder if, when I struggle over poetry, I am one of those Billy Collins mourns over in his Introduction to Poetry:


But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means


I'm still scratching my head over some portions of Whitman's Song of Myself. Some time ago I downloaded his poetry into my iPod, and I probably looked funny frowning in concentration inside the crowded MRT coach, his words pouring into me, and I barely hanging on to the pole and my sanity.

* A lifetime ago, drowned in heretofores and Know All Men By These Presents, I thought Neruda was a friend of my cousin Aris when my cousin’s poetry referred to Neruda's Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines. Oh, the shame.

** Photo borrowed from someone else's site in one of my Net trawling trips. Can't remember whose, unfortunately.

Babel

Sleepy little town—that’s how a Davaoeño describes Panabo. If you consider the staggering kindness of strangers (they carry your bag, ply you with food, offer their homes), how most businesses revolve around the marketplace, and how a hefty pork barbecue costs only P10, then perhaps, yes, Panabo is one sleepy little town, never mind its designation as a city of Davao del Norte.

Its noise, however, is another matter.

Here on my side of Panabo, at the Women’s Resource Center, I am in the middle of the market square. While many tricycles have abandoned the streets and most stalls have put up their boards, a videoke, a jukebox, and a set of oversized speakers on a pedicab all fight for airspace with the Bingo game set up in the quadrangle.

The videoke singer relentlessly scrambles after the lyrics of If You Tell Me You Love Me, but not with My Way; he knows his way around that tune. (Yeah, a videoke isn’t a videoke without the obligatory My Way). The pedicab speakers provide the bass: you cannot hear much else beyond it. And the jukebox, well, there must be a surfeit of coins in Panabo; the poor machine has no rest.

Yet nothing beats the Bingo man.

To fill up the wide-open space, the Bingo man doesn’t just call out the numbers. He cups the microphone with both hands—lest some of his words escape further amplification—and singsongs into it, stringing the syllables in a lilting chain, like the ShoeMart salesladies of yore: GEE FORty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven (pause, wheeze), GEE forty-SEven-forty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven (pause, wheeze), and then a final triumphant GEE FORty-SEHHHven! He pronounces G the Cebuano way: DJEE. As he jiggles the plastic genie bottle of tiles, he hoists it over his head and brings it down roundhouse in a wide turn—yet another art form—and he cracks jokes, makes some announcements, calls out to passersby. Still in the same singsong.

I am glad for the clamor. Makes me feel safe. In this trip to Panabo for a CIDA book project, I am alone in a nursery of a daycare facility. A lone metal bed has turned it into my makeshift sleeping quarters. I am surrounded by gargantuan comic-book and fairytale characters painted on the walls: Garfield (too orange), Snoopy (pretty good), and Tweety Bird (with a disproportionate, stretched torso).

The surrounding noise stops me from gazing too often at this creepy rendition of Snow White near the foot of my bed.

Windoze

If you take an A320 plane, say, bound for Davao like I did yesterday, and you ask the Cebu Pacific guy behind the desk to give you a window seat—so you can get a better view of this fair city particularly if, like me, this is only your second visit there since 1991—and he assigns you to Seat 26F much too cheerfully, beware.

Not only is Seat 26F the last of the tail end, it also has no windows.


Hmpf.

I want. I need!

Night person that I am, mornings can be excruciating, especially when my doctors have not allowed any coffee in my system since October 2003 (alas, I can no longer remember how my Americanos taste).

These babies from Bim Bam Banana are what I need.

Smother is mother with an attitude

My mother—bless her—thinks that I, at 40, am still a baby who needs pampering. (I am.) She thinks I am too thin (I wish), and has someone buy me beef rice from Dimsum Break for early afternoon merienda: beef, peas and shrimp piled over rice and drowned in MSG-rich sauce. "Eat, eat," she urges, and waits as I chew. She prepares for my return to Cebu the only way she knows how: she feeds me.

One of the characters in a story I have yet to rework carries after my mother. Perhaps it is true, what they say, that all fiction is in some ways autobiographical:

"Mama at seventy-eight years has survived a war, eloping at eighteen, working through three miscarriages, selling tocino on the side to raise tuition for seven children, a stroke, a heart attack, kidney stones, diabetes, a recidivist philandering husband. From all these she was shielded by her crusade that nothing bad—nothing—will happen to her brood. She believes in the Family; there is little redemption outside it. The world can change governments, another Mexican soap opera would invade television, roads are given new names, but my mother would not know or care. She has the public schoolteacher’s simple convictions that are renewed every time she feeds us."

—from Home, a work in progress

Pls! Flash the bowl after using*

Ahh, Cebu.

Home.

Where I can sleep for more than ten hours without a headache.

Where all bets are off when it comes to all things salty or fatty: danggit, real chicharon attached to tambok, and lechon that doesn't rely on Mang Tomas for flavor.

Where I don't have to rein in my accent, and I can speak BisDak: forcefully, loudly, in truncated syllables and hardened vowels.

Where our version of learning is to poke fun at our own grammatical errors.


* Comment posted by jued keigh at Himantayon.com
** Photo by jorg3, posted at Himantayon.com

Alone again, naturally

From Rands in Repose by way of Inkygirl

Go, Blakey!

With two more rounds of singing to go, I'm putting all my eggs in the Blake basket. This boy is an artist and a songwriter. He understands music and its nuances. He can fill a stadium electric. It's about time American Idol puts in a performer, one who fearlessly redesigns his songs and not just one who'd belt them out—those are a dime a dozen. Let's find those who'd leave a legacy of music, not just singing.

And such a gentleman. Given the chance to sing last, decidedly a better slot, he opts to let Jordin choose.

Even if he doesn't win, he'd have a good career.*

Team Villa is divided on the issue; The Coach leaves the room when Blake sings. He's a Melinda Doolittle fan, like I am. I tell him mixing is an art, and so is beatboxing. (And then he turns on the other TV.)

_________
*Postscript: Yeah, give the boy a ballad he can't sing, and let Jordin, who sang nothing but, run away with tears at the end. Don't get me wrong: I do like Jordin and she's fantastic, but I'm up to here (see me slash my neck) with mere singers.

Postscript ad nauseam: Oh man, that Chris Daughtry should win tonight, hands down. Love him.

Storm's a-brewin'

Season 70 of the UAAP is yet to come, and already the drama is grinding, grinding, grinding. Much of the fireworks—that we're still hoping won't go off—will center around a ruling issued today by the governing body. A quick powwow with my beloved Coach Joe and The Coach a while ago did nothing to pacify me. Not that The Coach wants me calm: He knows I am at my most percipient and formidable in a fight.

Nobody messes with my boys. Nobody.

"Pure, unadulterated Cebuano"

It hurts to laugh.

While most of my stitches are healing well, the hole on my right, through which a pipe drained blood and liquid for four days, still gapes and throbs. When I sneeze I anchor my tummy in with my hands, afraid that the force might hurl my insides through the gauze. Rising in the morning is a major production: I slowly maneuver to my left, slip an elbow underneath, secure my right palm on the bed, and lift myself up by degrees. It does not help that The Coach keeps our bedroom Siberia-cold (I have to burrow under three covers!); my joints are all stiff, and much of my body refuses to wake.

But.

I cannot help but check out Himantayon for my regular fix of laugh-out-loud Cebuano humor. The term himantayon means—geez, now how on earth do I translate that? (Me, with my clumsy Tagalog.) A pakialamero is more of a meddler and a busybody. A himantayon—from the word bantay—is more circumspect and subtle in his or her snooping, though no less heedful or alert or even catty, though never malevolent. A glamorous gossip, how 'bout that?

(Help, I am floundering. It's like explaining the mechanics of labyog and kumbayot.)

Anyway, this site, which I discovered through fellow Cebuano Isolde Amante's*, celebrates all things BisDak—that's Bisayang Dako or "Big Bisaya," literally, though that translation fails at capturing the self-jest that can be at times droll or comical or tongue-in-cheek or farcical or downright clownish.

I love it. It's home. And I'll read it if it kills me.



* If you crave good fiction, check out Isolde's Dance, deservedly a winner at the 2000 Palancas.

A Round Tuit

One can never have too much rest. Or so I thought. After having been sidelined for more than five months, I'm unusually looking forward to work, family duties, and house chores, even. Yessir, hell has officially frozen over.

June is the magic month to return to the trenches: set up a piggy bank, work out at least 40 hours in 90 days, finish a story. I borrowed tickers from TickerFactory.com to monitor my progress.

For the procrastinator in me I simplified my desktop and got a Round Tuit.





Remember all the things we were supposed to do when we got around to it? Well, there ya go: I finally got a round tuit. Here are more round tuits from other sites.

Lights out

Sunset at 6:05 PM

The art of solitude

The world operates on noise. Too many of us who find some alone time keep the TV or music playing to ward off the quiet. What one perceives as silence could be an acquired deafness.

It is increasingly difficult to imagine life without our handhelds and entertainment equipment. We wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves without computers, TV, books or cell phones. There is rarely space reserved for elegant thought. I see so many in a commute or in a line send text messages or strap on iPods rather than pause for contemplation.

I faced this point squarely when typhoon Reming in October 2000 forced me to confront a brownout alone in the city. A few months prior, I had scheduled some alone-time in Sagada and Banaue, free from pagers, phones and the Internet. The escape didn’t happen, regrettably, but the point is I thought I was prepared for isolation.

I wasn't. The brownout bore down with a darkness broken only by distant emergency lights. No activity or panorama to deflect my solitude. It was unnerving. I was overwhelmed by my bare thoughts, and frantic for cable television or a book.

I did not know when it was when I was first sucked into a treadmill of activity. I just knew I had to simplify my life.

To enjoy a quiet time with myself, no typing into a keyboard, no writing, no reading.

To find pieces of myself in memorabilia and old photos, and laugh at the cuts and scrapes of my childhood.

To think about where I came from, the distance I’ve covered, and the path I will take.

To be mindful of my breathing, just feel the air in and out.

I remind myself of this now because after a forced five-month rest, I can feel the pull back into the busyness vortex, unable to write yesterday, for instance, without listening to music or to the television. A few weeks ago my friend Art asked me how long it has been since my last dive. Blank. I couldn’t remember. “Whoa,” he said. “Now I know you are busy.”

Germaine had been more direct last year. “You, my friend,” she announced, “are a workaholic.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I just have too much work.”

Perhaps I should start listening to myself.

Perfect love

Off to the hospital in a few hours for tests to prep me for Friday's surgery, this time to have four holes bored into me in a laparoscopic cholicystectomy—terribly expensive medico-babble to remove my ailing gall bladder.

Dreading yet another round of needles and stitches, fasting, and sleep deprivation (the nurses' specialty, oh how they excel at it). It's the second in this year's medical drama, and, please God, the last.

The Coach has of late been working 18-hour days, juggling his job and my hospital preps and funding, but—bless him—he still takes time to soothe my fears. When we got wind this morning of the staggering costs that would again dent our budget, he was, in his words, "not worried, but..." And he paused, the mobile phone connection clear enough to relay his sigh, "...I am shaken." Then he gathered himself, becoming the tender warrior that he is, and said, "This is not a problem, Jan. As long as we're together, we're okay."

He sleeps now, bone-tired, and perhaps will only be a bit refreshed when he rises in just a few hours to put in some work before he brings me to the hospital.

Poor dear. How can I tell him I am not prepared for tomorrow when he himself has gone through as much emotional turmoil as I have? He will quote to me one of his favorite psalms, "Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me." He will remind me of the Lord's faithfulness in all the good and bad years we've been together—twenty-one!—and tick off the many things we are grateful for, and then he will hug me, make me laugh and think of all the junk food and trans fats I can finally have in my post-op diet.

Tonight I choose to meditate on Paul's words to young Timothy, "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." The argument is easy to follow: The Lord loves me more than I can ever comprehend, He who knitted me carefully in my mother's womb; His Will for me is perfect, acceptable and pleasing; He is mighty to save; how He desires me to fare on Friday is all part of His purpose for me. There is no room for fear for perfect love—His, and what He shows through The Coach—casts out fear.

Thank you, Coach, for being the Lord's strongest tangible reminder of His love.

Moon and Stars

Here in Manila I have an inordinate interest in the moon. I take hundreds of photos. A few days ago I took one of the moon lingering in the sky after daybreak. Tonight's Jeopardy! tells me this is called selenodolatry: moon worship.


But that's just because only a few stars can penetrate the smog. I love stars more. Sometimes the best part of our dive trips is the time we spend on the sand gazing up the night sky: with stars upon stars it feels like all 6,000 visible stars are on our side of the world. In Apo Island, the marine reserve off Dumaguete, the stars leap out of the sky when the island plunges into darkness after the power generators switch off around 10. Even the fireflies cannot compete. One night we counted 24 falling stars.


Naming the Stars
Joyce Sutphen

This present tragedy will eventually
turn into myth, and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those
loose changes, the rearrangement of
hearts, just parts of old lives
patched together, gathered into
a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see
the outline there: her fingertips
touching his, the faint fusion
of two bodies breaking into light.