the point

The problem with Sundays is that Mondays come right after them, forcing you to optimize being irresponsible and care-free and restful and take as many deep breaths as possible out of the office and just not think about work and consequences during Friday nights. That way, waking up on Saturdays is an event in itself: double hangovers, where'd I put my things, I'm just glad the week is over, and you get to reflect about your work which isn't so bad as long as you're not in the office, and the workweek is rotten only because you're a vegetable 24 by 7, and suddenly a jolt—tonight is all I have because tomorrow is the last day before everything begins again.

Damn you, workweek, sumpain ka even. You hear? The Sisyphean loop of things. The suffocating nearness of it all.

I object to peace of mind and fun and mental renewal with a consume until tag on it. It's not right nah-uh not right. The peace of laundry-day Sunday is not too far from the peace enjoyed by a man to be hanged in the next half hour.

I want longer weekends. You hear? I want them stretched. I want the end of fun deadline extended, moved away, far away, as far as I can throw it, out the window even. And while you're at it, wash my other teddy bear. It's beginning to go dark brown on me again.

At least I get to see my wife sleep on weekends, curled up in a blanket, pristine and ageless. If there are hints of wrinkles on her, it's not her fault. I put them there.

shades of brown

My coffee cup at home, a small unevenly browned one, I brought to the office to replace the one I use there, which was not as brown and whose circumference was bigger. That means the coffee to sugar to hot water ratio I follow at home and the one in the office are different. So I don't always get that 'sipa' I want out of each cup. To standardize, I did what I did, because I have another mug just like it, also at home.

My small coffee jar at home, a thoroughly green one, I left there. It comes with a small spoon, smaller than a teaspoon, which, when heaped with coffee--that heap mixed with two heaps of sugar and hot water near the brim--concocted the exact caffeine 'sipa' that logs me out of afternoon stupor and early morning daze.

Such a small cup. Form a C with your right hand, open it up a little, and that's the cup's circumference. It's height is just three-fourths the length of my hand. So much for so little.

When I was an undergrad, morning cups of coffee defined the house hierarchy. On the breakfast table, where I fixed the family coffee, colors said who was who: pink was my mom, blue was my stepdad, and I was yellow. I remember abandoning my assigned cup; my brother had poured something on it, turning it to the color of shit.

And the shit that I take from morning till night has significantly darkened with time. Deep, uneven dark brown.

go girl!

I keep getting pats on the back by email and by tagboard from friends who've read my blog: they think I'm a girl. Then, some of them who've read my entries that more than hint of my heterosexuality, they gasp and tag and comment back: syet, lalaki ka pala. I want to apologize to them—I'm not a girl—as if I let them down or deceived them or challenged the assumption that writing this girly could not possibly belong to a guy.

But I never saw my writing as girly, but simply writing.

Remember Ally Mcbeal? I keep telling friends I took male sensitivity classes, which softened up my grip-view on the world. But that's not true, I've always viewed the world this softly. Still, to be talked to as if I need to prove something called manhood: that, contrary to surface reading, I really am another hormonally poisoned brute, insensitive to the nuances of words said and the depth underneath them, evasive and elusive on commitment, lousy with house chores.

I'm still partly these things. Pero, sige, whenever I get another Go Girl! I will return the gesture with Thanks, pare, wahoooo!

I mean, how else do I prove I'm a guy?

and i cringe

When I try to recall what undergraduate life was like, it is almost as if another person lived it, and not the current me.

On a large rug on the second-floor of my family's apartment, one of our many transient dwellings, photocopies of readings in six different subjects lay around me. I'm pillowed on my hands clasped behind my head, seeing nothing but white ceiling, ignoring the muffled voices of my family in the other room. At almost nine in the morning, Mom is dressing up my two younger brothers to take them to Grandma's house, where they can play till Mom fetches them after five.

Yes, Mom, I'm leaving for school after I finish typing my term paper.

I lock the door behind them, fix myself a cup of coffee, and go back upstairs, to my room, to continue staring at the ceiling. I brush aside some papers with my foot, to make a larger space to lie down on, and fight the drowse-inducing cadence of very faraway sounds.

I'm a philosophy major asking the ceiling why I am academically required to try and find the central algorhythm of all knowledge. I don't even have a girlfriend.

How did I manage to wake up and sleep feeling all important, all throughout junior and senior years, as if my thoughts, which were restated echoes of dead white male Anglo-Saxon thinkers, rippled forth and changed the core of things? Back then, I couldn't even fry an egg without piercing the yolk.