a december song that keeps looping in my head and whose lyrics i can't remember so i am making them up while i am too lazy to look them up via google

Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock.
Jingle bell rings while jingle bell sings.
Rowing and prancing and jumping to sing.
That's the jingle bell that i want to ring...

hey. it's my blog.

i forgive thee

The gray-lit sky outside the windows tells me the sun forgot to shine. I have to wear socks and thick jogging pants just to stop shivering. All this cold air will keep coming after me until I close the windows shut, and even then, the stillness around me will not let up. I love storms. I love them better on weekdays.

I live near a church. Maybe too near. The priest inside that bricked holy dwelling has never heard of subtlety. He is screaming, to anyone within loud speaker radius, to admit his sins and ask for forgiveness, which are two different things. I am reaching out the window, to unhook all the wet laundry hung on this long pole because I can't stand to look at their drooping wet shoulders. They know, and they don't have to tell me, why they are sad.

They're not going to get any sun. I bring them in and forgive them.

how to unstress, for women only

You know what you need to unwind your brain? A Ferris wheel. No kidding. You sit inside one of those squarish buckets and ask the manong to crank it up to full speed. Disappointingly slow at first, and then weeeeee! The centrifugal force whirls your worries up and around and away from you! You walk away from that experience with a renewed sense of wow. Imagine, no man involved. If your knees are wobbly, it's not because you've been banged inside out. It's because of the Endorphins streaming in your brain and the adrenalin you've pumped during all that whirling. If you throw up after, it's not because you're preggy; it's because the small, hair-like organs in your ears, the ones that can sense balance in your life, have been jolted out of their routine. If you moan, and someone hears you do so, it's ok. Unlike in that alternative, with a man involved. And there's no morning-after awkwardness. Hell, no. Instead, the awkwardness is immediate. "Ma'am, aren't you too old to act like that?" the manong manning the Ferris wheel asks, just before you give him a right hook, one so sincere it would make Manny Pacquiao proud. But then you are still woozy, and you miss the manong's jaw by no less than two feet. You land back-first on the cold pavement. The onlookers crowd around you and wonder why you have that silly smile. You savor the moment and continue to smile. Seriously, who needs a one-night stand when you have a Ferris wheel?

wiki mo mukha mo

Some blogs of college students I've been to bemoan this problem: their professors have excluded Wikipedia as a source to be used in their term papers. One student went as far as to say that it's not fair to exclude encyclopedia x from sources to be used just because it is community-maintained. "What a hassle!" that student wrote. What a hassle indeed. Imagine, you go online in an Internet cafe or at home. Your instant messenger is on, your various accounts on Friendster-like sites need to be updated, your blog beckons, that anime series you've been following closely is now up on Youtube, you have emails to read and reply to, you have new photos upload to Flickr. So many high priority items, so little time.

Oops, you have a term paper. (Dammit, what a hassle! We have to carefully word our chosen problems, go through previously done studies on it, sort out relevant from pointless data, evaluate the merits of contending positions, critique how the problem was handled, side or not side with an established position, and offer in the end our own position with carefully documented verifiable authoritative sources. I have a life! Hello! Who in his right mind invented the University anyway?)

So. You're online. No need to go through the isles of books in that dusty geek-infested library. You just need to stuff enough paragraphs into those portions called by many names, usually, "introduction/ background of the study," and "review of related literature." Google to the rescue. Wait. Can that thought. Wikipedia it should be. That professor, he doesn't know how much he intrudes into the personal lives of his students. "I'll show him," you mumble with pride, "he'll never know I've paraphrased my paragraphs from Internet sources."

Ok. We get it. We get it. A true and deep-down hassle it is. Pipe down.

Let's jump over into an ideal world for a moment--one far, far away from this one, where miraculously, people can make time to research and separate their thoughts from those of their sources. In that world, maybe those professors are right. Maybe.

When those academics say that Wikipedia cannot be used as an authoritative source of scholarly claims, they actually think (and they are probably insane, you might say) that you actually want to jack up the credibility of your arguments in your term paper. You do this jacking up, of increasing the persuasiveness of your paper, in part, by citing documents written by credentialed scholars who actually took risks by leaving their names on those documents. That means those people are responsible for what they wrote. Silly isn't it? Your professors actually want you to assert in writing that your points are supported by people who stood by what they thought. They are no fun, those professors, even in this ideal world. The Internet, they think is entertainment, entertainment and hearsay, especially collaborative hearsay where hearsay authors are all the more anonymous.

Sources on the Internet per se are not all discredited, the professors add, as there are refereed journals and PDF of books and websites with sensible content. But still, they see collaborative projects like Wikipedia as akin to a public bulletin board where anyone can post anything. Suppose one needs accurate information about sexually transmitted diseases, do we consult a public bulletin board where nonmedical people can post their opinions which may mislead the public? Further, the possible untraceability of authors allowed by such an online collaborative library can dishearten a serious academic who may happen to be your professor. Naturally, for the wide-eyed curious passer by, Wiki is fine. This brings us again to how silly those academics are: they think you are not just a wide-eyed passer by, that you are a serious student. (Hello!)

The classic example of sources acceptable to academics are the entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which are authored by credentialed and respected scholars in their respective fields. The thing is, academics expect this to be the yardstick. They impose this expectation, reasonably, to sources, and dismiss those that fail this criterion. A collaborative bulletin board like Wiki the professors see as having content that is amorphous, or editable ad infinitum, and authored by the anonymous public. Had every entry in Wiki been restricted for editing by only a handful of credential-checked individuals, that might change the attitude professors have towards Wiki. Think medical journals online, or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Academic elitism is not compatible with Wiki's democratic leeway for public input, maybe we should remember that.

If one were testing in class how fast one can highlight and copy-paste Googled up entries, then Wikipedia wins, hands down, as the source of something written about mostly everything. But those skills, fine examples they are of hand-eye coordination, are not what are tested in writing a term paper.

But we all know the bottomline: you don't want to write that term paper, neither here nor in that ideal world. All that cognitive effort is such a hassle. It is easier and more convenient and more sincere to whine. So whine. But in whining, you don't even want to stand out. Standing out with your specific witty and memorable whine takes some research and some thought.

And the effort to be original is such a hassle.

man strangled with miniskirt almost survives

The nightsky fell on October 16. It wobbled a bit as Rony saw his girlfriend of two years having dinner at McDonald's Philcoa at around 7 pm. Police reports were to indicate later that night that the girl in a miniskirt who lives in Project 4 had texted Rony. She was to meet her boss to discuss her promotion at 7 pm, so she cancelled her dinner plans with her boyfriend. The stocky 5'8"" Rony initially took the news as a good thing. Promotion is good. Having dinner by himself for one night couldn't possibly hurt. But it did. He walked towards the McDonald's entrance gripping his cellphone hard. He had only seen the two from afar. From the yosi vendor's stand under the Philcoa overpass, Rony had seen the girl in whose smile he drowns lean towards that bearded son of a bitch, the same one who was about to die. She had smiled to the man across that small table for two. But the nightsky was yet to fall. Rony stopped walking, deliberately. He pocketed his cellphone, which contained Mary Grace's text messages, all lies for all he cared. He took a deep breath and looked up at the nightsky. Maybe it's an obligatory thing, he thought. Flirt to get the boss' attention, get promoted, settle back to her life with me. He stood just outside the entrance. The polluted air, the throngs of passers by, and the indifferent traffic at Philcoa gave no clue that the weirdest crime that was to be recorded at Police Station 9 was about to happen. Rony gave his girlfriend the benefit of the doubt, and stared at them, again, from outside, without being noticed. Her hand traced a wayward strand of hair on her face, slowly placed it behind her ear, smiled coyly, and touched the man's hand, stroking it. Time stopped for Rony. That moment his heart was ice. His eyes lost the capacity to blink. He walked into McDonald's and asked the attendant behind the counter to give him a butterknife.

here's to the birthday boy: me (no, not that dancing orange cat!)

wallpapers anonymous

Hi, my name is Ayen. I, ah, change my PC's desktop wallpaper every, ahm, fifteen minutes. It's not an obsessive compulsive disorder, nothing like that, I'm sure. Just that the wallpaper dulls a bit after a while and I just have to reach into my picture folder and try out some new ones. More of to jibe the image with my current mood. Nothing wrong there, right? Ah, good. Now I have thin blades of grass, a close up of them, with the blue sky in a fade from light blue to darker blue from bottom to top, and the blades are caught in a still slant to the right, like the wind shoved them there when the camera shutter closed, only that a digital camera was used. I stole this from flickr, you should steal photos from there, too. Neat collection. One time I stretched on my desktop this carefully framed detail of a zen garden. A rock smaller than a quarter of the PC screen rests of the upper right corner, and the sand around it ripples in concentric circles. Someone raked it into that pristine stillness. I turned it into gray scale and adjusted the contrast. You can do that to images with a lot of image tinkering tools, like Photoshop, or Picasa. Ooops, that's it. I'm bored again. I'm flipping through pictures again, large wallpapers, in my picture folder. There's a closeup of a crab on a sunny beach with the hazy image of a couple in the background. I love this one. I stole it. From flickr. It's been fifteen minutes. And you know my name. How fleeting.

would you look at that

I've been too busy rummaging all over the Internet for writing gigs that I forgot to kick back and enjoy the grade I got for my PhD subject in the semester that just closed. The subject is Creative Writing 341: Advanced Workshop in Nonfiction Narrative. I've written about the manuscript I turned in in a previous post. The highest grade is a flat 1.0. The lowest, the failing mark, is a 5. Getting a 3 means you passed, by a hair. I got 1.25. (That means a lot of my classmates got a flat 1.) Not bad for someone who's not even in the PhD program.

ronin

"Overspecialize and you breed in weakness."

- Major Motoko Kusanagi, in the anime film Ghost in the Shell

I'm differentiating between achievements and duties: I'm updating my résumé. I'm sorting through my previous published and ghostwritten work: I'm updating my portfolio. I'm at home taking in odd writing jobs and taking care of my wife: my bundy-clocking days are over.

All my bags are packed.

how to survive a near death experience

1. Stay away from the light. People who came out of near-death experiences often cite bright lights, especially a big one above or behind them. This tunnel-like light has been reported to be enticing, as it magnifies the calm that accompanies one's out-of-body time during near-death. Presence of mind at that moment spells either moving on to the hereafter or coming back to the here and now. Decide to stay alive. Resist the overwhelming peace. Close your eyes, look away, float back into your body, remember that you still have unpaid credit card bills. Hmmm. Or you can give in to the peace and float into the light, having examined your options.
   
   
2. Be careful. It pays to be cautious. Look both ways when crossing the street. When drinking medicine from a bottle, read the label to make sure the cross and bones symbol is not there. Chew your food carefully so as not to bite your tongue. When your child tells you there are monsters in her closet, believe her. When your boyfriend or girlfriend has something in his or her hand and is pointing it at you in the dark, say, "It was just a passing fling, baby. You're the one I love in this life."

how to kill your maid

Admit it. You hate your maid. Not only do you want her out of your house, you want her out of your house without a pulse. If only you could get away with murder. With the following simple steps, you can. Let's go kill that maid.

1. aim and swing

Swing the pipe down on her throat as she sleeps. Wait for her to choke and snap her eyes wide open and bolt up on the bed. Swing the pipe down again, not on her throat this time, but on her head. Adrenalin will make her momentarily strong, unmindful of the pain. If she covers herself with one arm while grasping her throat with the other, move to the other side of the bed. Raise the pipe as you would a baseball bat. Aim for her nape. Breathe in, swing down with your whole body, bring your fury to the base of her skull.


2. roll and hide

Note how much saliva the dead can cop out. Stuff one of the dishtowels in her mouth. Plug her nose with balled up tissue paper. Push her body till it rolls off her bed and thuds on the floor. Grasp her feet with both hands and drag her to the sala. Place her figure, lengthwise, on one end of the old carpet you unrolled earlier. Roll her up.

Take a moment to stand quiety. Stretch your limbs. Regain your normal breathing. Wipe the beads of sweat on your forehead. That bitch was pain. Alive or dead. Note the time on the wall clock: 2:00 am.


3. drag and drop

Drag the body out and lock your front door. The trash collector's cart should be just around the bend. Grab one end of the rolled-up carpet, heft it up like a sack of rice, kneel and let its weight fall on your shoulder. Slowly rise up. Walk towards the bend. Only the streetlamps are witnesses. Listen for sounds anyway. Drop the body on the grassy side of sidewalk, beside the cart. Make some space inside the cart by removing some trash bags. Lift the carpet in a lover's carry position and gently let it settle in the cart, avoiding any loud thuds. Cover your cargo with the removed garbage bags. Step back, away from the garbage scent. Take a deep breath. Stretch a little. Rub your shoulder. Go back to the cart and start pushing.


4. stash and leave

There it is. The garbage truck with a compactor, the one that's parked every Tuesday night infront of an abandoned store. Two streets after another bend is a videoke bar, where the truck's crew are now singing, drunk. Keep pushing the cart till its front touches the truck's bumper. The compactor is open and smells of dried garbage. Stand still, look around for anything strange, like a bystander from behind a post staring at you. Never hurts to check. Remove the garbage bags covering the rolled-up carpet. Haul the carpet up, taking care to look at both ends, just in case the maid's hair or feet juts out. Carry the roll, lover's carry style, to the mouth of the open compactor. Drop the cargo. Go back to the cart. Grab all the garbage bags and stuff them in the compactor till the carpet is covered. Walk back to the cart and return it where you found it earlier.


5. alibi and goodbye

Resist the temptation to look at your hands in the dim lamplight, to sniff yourself, to check if you smell of garbage and of that old carpet. You have time to wash off when you get home. Walk as though you were coming home from work, tired and zoned out. Look straight ahead. Without checking your watch, it should have been, as you have estimated days before, just around three in the morning. Don't zip your eyes left and right. If a subdivision tanod spots you, asking what you're doing away two streets away from your house, tell them you threw away your dead cat in the compactor around the bend. That is why you are perspiring. You had been trying to find a place to throw that thing into, until you remembered that parked truck. Tell the tanod he can inspect the truck if he wants to, which of course he won't. Bid him good morning and walk back to your house.

blood on my fingers

The second draft of my memoir, a high-stakes, meaning-of-life piece (at least for the author), as Jing Hidalgo called it, survived the second round of the workshop this morning. PhD classes can really make you bleed, but they are worth it. My often long and alliterative sentences, Jing added, remind one of the prose of Henry James. But I have to do something to mix up the sentence structure to vary the rhythm so the reader does not get annoyed. I have described in my memoir the houses I lived in and moved out of, with me as perpetual tag-along to my mother, who was really the one moving in and out of her mother's house, in a search for a permanent home, a unified family, some lasting kind of homely peace and comfort that alludes to Kerima Polotan's "the sounds of Sunday joy." (And that is a very long sentence, like the ones in the first paragraph of my piece.)

When Mother and I pushed the boxes deeper into the back of the truck, a neighbor asked if we were leaving that apartment, the one that looked down on the road, with its second floor roof as pointed and quiet and still as that of a church's. Mother said yes as I carried more boxes piled up on the sidewalk into the truck. Neighborly small talk was rare for us, and Mother wiped her hands on her flowery shapeless duster's sides and chatted, with a wrinkled old man with sideburns, taking a break from moving the contents of our lives into yet another anonymous vehicle. We were used to this. All this moving from house to house, but this house, I never wanted to leave this house, this two-floored oddly-placed dwelling on the elbow of nowhere.

Mother, in the piece, finds her Sunday, but even though the persona of the "I" does not, the piece ends on a note of hope. Eighteen pages of home remembered and described and a plot found and connected through scenes and sometimes, interior monologue. The narrative is told, or at least attempted to be conveyed, through understatement--a technique for which I only have this lifetime to perfect. Kerima Polotan has perfected it. So has her daughter, Kimi, who is my classmate in Jing's class. I also do not have Ricci's arsenal of imagery and mood achieved through metaphors and turns of phrase. I am not a poet like she is. (There is so much work to do. Ricci, by the way, is another classmate, and is already a teacher of creative writing. Compared to most of the people in class, I am an upstart.)

My memoir's narrative style is not straightforward but oblique, and a great deal is simply implied; left for the reader to deduce and intuit. The "episodes" themselves jump from past to present to an earlier past and shifts again to the near-present--something that signals a possible problem, Jing said, just in case the reader cannot follow the shifts in time. The story stands well enough on its own, she said and adds that maybe I should give it a year and look away from it and come back again. It is only after such a sabbatical that one can examine the portions of one's own life on the page, and see the gaps and holes. Right now, the memories and emotions dug up might be fresh. I suppose, this is what Cel went through. A two-category Palanca 2006 winner, her own memoir turned in for workshop wowed the class. Then Jing told us that Cel had been writing about it for a long time, waiting for the tranquility in her to cohere just the right aspects of her experience and come off with a lingering insight. And she did.

Writing about your own life is never easy, especially when you intend for your manuscripts to pass off as literature. Throwing facts on a page together and sequencing them in time is not enough. Facts do not have to make sense, they just are. Something has to drive the narrative. A conflict, a dislocation, a dissatisfaction, a threat. Something has to be done to signify that that conflict has been addressed, discovered to be false, or acknowledged as something one cannot resolve. The persona of autobiographer or memoirist, which functions in the same way as a character in fiction, must somehow change in relation to how the conflict is ended. If I weren't taking my masters, I would not shoulder all these burdens. But then one wants to write. And one wants to write beyond the mere facts, even if one has to bleed.

post it

Having a blog is like having a diary with its pages open and tacked on a corkboard for everyone to see. Including you. You walk past it now and again and are reminded of how long ago you last tacked a note there. Well, I'm here now. Hello to the world. Work has been keeping me dumbed down and dormant. It is keeping me that way still. But I ran down the hallway just to peek at you, and leave this: I haven't forgotten.

fishing for coffee

After sending Anne off to work at 3:30 am (she works nightshifts as a call center supervisor), I was left alone on a street where none of the stores were open, except for a burger stand and a fish petshop. I needed some coffee. I ran out of supplies at home. The burger stand had some six different type of iced tea, several kinds of Pepsi, and bottled water of various sizes. But no coffee. The attendant at the fish petshop told me that, on the day fish came to like coffee, they would begin selling some.

And so the waiting begins.

two minutes

I tug at a string of white metal beads and the sluggish gray afternoon light comes into my corner office, like a visitor waiting outside the front door, who was told, casually, that the boss will see him now. The vertical blinds had swept to one side and let me view the grills visitors sometimes step on, on their way around the museum, and down into the basement where my corner is tucked away safely. I am like those Russian keepsakes, those porcelain or clay vases that twist open to reveal another replica, which in turn twists open, showing a deeper layer, and in that, another, and another, and one more. I see through my window, past the metal grill, banana leaves and plants torn by winds, and past that, an old electric post, the wooden kind; a tree that used to stand firm and brown and proud in a forest in a secluded elsewhere, but now has to just stand still, braced by metal and weighed down by appended wires, catatonic and looking down on a gray parking lot, and up at a sky that does nothing but rain. A "ting!" from behind me. My coffee has now been reheated. I tug at the beads and the blinds slide to cover my ivory basement view, leaving me again in the soft gold circular hum of my desklamp and the swirling scent of recycled coffee. The keyboard, and my boss, becons. I sit and sip and slide words on the keys.

discrepancy

It rains just when you think you wouldn't need your umbrella on your way home from work. The sun slips behind the puffy cottons of clouds for too long and you think your dripping dry laundry has a chance of making it to the closet, neatly folded, this evening. On both instances you're wrong. So now you're looking at toes wiggling at you asking you when was the last time your feet got to wear a matching pair of socks. Your pants cover them up and you walk and talk briskly, drawing attention to your persona and to your presentation, and not to your unevenly colored socks. But your toes know better. Toes have an aesthetic conscience. It gnaws on you. And you tell them to give you a break because the sun needs a day off and this sudden whim of that shining source of light has thrown the schedule of the rains out the window. A slide comes up the screen and you tell unseen anonymous faces in the darkened room a story about the picture on that slide, and they believe you. The universe all around and through out follows a balance. You have reached in to that law and mastered it and that is why you can persuade. But your toes know better. Good thing your shoes hide them well. You hope, this evening, that it doesn't rain. You wiggle a toe of a prayer and that's all you have. That's all you have.

just moved in

Yup. We're digging this place up and building almost from scratch. Most of the contents of Boulevard Avenue will be moved here, like old furniture. I've been running back and forth between blogs--old and new--and I've been seeing a lot of my old posts. Like old furniture, some of them could use some tweaking, if I ever plan to display them again. So, while I relearn how to speak html, I will keep writing about life as it shoves me around. Meanwhile, you will please notice some links on the sidepage. A lot of them are busted. Some just link back to where I began. Got a lot of work to do. Anyway, I'm trying to lift an entire section, a whole street of my life if you will, and making it feel at home in a new city. Hope you like this place. Because I do. See you around.

ayen who?

Word-weaver. On quiet mornings, Ayen's sleepy eyes open and he rushes to the keyboard running after words he faintly heard, if only his 60-word per minute fingers can catch them, before they fade into silence. He likes to think that his MA Creative Writing classes at UP Diliman are either smoothening his prose or jacking up his typing skills.

The domesticated man. To Ayen and his wife, Anne, their six-plus cats are stress-relieving stuffed toys who shed all over the house but just won't fit inside the tubes of the vacuum cleaner. They won't fit because they inspect the contents of the refrigerator everytime it's open, and they eat as though they were refugees who, right after reaching the shore nearly starved to death, heard on the radio that the world will end by lunch time.

Pen for hire. Though he is presently bundy-clocking at the University of the Philippines Diliman Information Office, Ayen also freelances to suit your writing needs. His cat, Bolabola, is always screening his emails, so you'd better address the cat nicely. Send Ayen a note at animnakambing AT yahoo DOT com.

notwithstanding me

The last person you want to confide in is the guy in the mirror. When you confess, he's not interested; he knows it already, whatever it is. When you confess anyway, he gets bored and shoots you accusing looks: you're being melodramatic. When you close your eyes, he's gone, but he's really there, seeing you for the sham that you are. When you turn the other cheek, you see exactly that cheek, and not the other one. When you so don't care for his approval, he can't even begin to feel sorry for you. When you do feel sorry, he magnifies your self-shame. When you approve of yourself, he grins, because by then only he is approving of you. When you're so into yourself, he mimics every move you make, and then you notice he's faking it. Living with a shadow is better: you at least don't have an image and likeness of you sneering.

replacing the lock with sandwiches, or just how tired i am this morning

We locked ourselves in this morning. The frontdoor lock died on us. The knob from the inside turned this way and that, but the door wouldn't budge. Dumar toyed with the lock this morning, the silver-finish one that I bought yesterday, because we had foreseen that that lock was giving in, which it did this morning, the moment Dumar touched it. Dumar is our boarder-turned-little-brother, only that he's taller than Anne and I combined. (Last night he couldn't get in and had to give me some missed calls. He was at the front door and his key was useless.) While my wife cleaned the sala, which had a mountain of mess--things we don't really need and things we do need but just not right now--Dumar fixed the lock, removing the old one, which was somewhat embedded in the door's wood, and replaced it with the new one I bought. My hands were so weak I could only hand him the handyman pliers and screwdrivers, and hold the door firmly. I still have cramps on my left leg. We are still recovering from the forced departure of our maid (see previous entry). My head is numb and my dreams are weird, meaning I am really tired. I fixed Anne and I sandwiches for breakfast. Neither of us could cook. That means that the cats will also be eating sandwhiches. The old lock and its keys are in the trash by the way, which I have to dispose of tonight. Oh, the domesticated life.

allergic to maids

Day six of life after we kicked out the maid. What is it, what is it that my wife and I keep doing recently? Oh chores. Wait. My back is telling me something. Oh, that it hurts. Househelp, I tell you, needs to be replaced, like used-up batteries, every so often. Every three months would be good. Polite and effortful they come to you. Then the weeks go by and their annoying habits and ways of taking over your lives begin to surface. And you want to kill them. They want to squeeze every little thing out of their stay in your house--food, television, salary advances, time off, more food, avoiding chores or doing them late, bad cooking, taking too long in the bathroom, sleeping in the afternoon.

When you tell them, the first time you meet them, that you are willing to pay for their service, you should make it clear you don't want to put up with a moodswinging always pouting Eat Bulaga-zealous person who can't understand your intstructions, despite your sharing the same language, nevermind that you sequence your orders and use simple declarative sentences. Always, you are threatened by the onslaught of domestic wrinkles. Often, you simmer into a rage and when you tame that temper, you are still in a foul mood, and that's inside you own house, which should be your sanctuary from the absurd world. (Insert groan here.)

Haaaay.... at least the maid is gone. And the more we take over the chores and rediscover where all our things are, the more we have control over our domestic lives.

I am actually writing a science fiction story set in the near future when maids are drugged every three months in order to forget the last three months. Their bank accounts of course don't lie and they and their families do get the money sent to them. But the fresh start is there. The chores they have forgotten to be aware of, their bodies still remember, and will remember again. But it's back to the getting-to-know you stage again--and they are all polite and effortful just like the first time. The moment they hint that they want to remember the last three months, or that they wish not to forget the next three months, you fire them, and get a new maid. Or you forcibly inject them with the reboot drug. What? Oh, my wife is calling me. She's done with the laundry. I'm going to hang them all to dry. Tsk. Someone's gotta do it. I'm forgetting something, what is it what is it? Oh, I have to cook rice.

how to apologize to rice

I've asked my wife to buy another rice cooker, because I've turned to cinders the last two cookings of rice I've tried to perfect. You really shouldn't deal with the assembly of food when you are tired. Food are sensitive. They feel you. Plants wither around depressed people and love birds die when housed in a cage inside a home where a couple does nothing but stab each other with invectives. The same goes for rice. Eventhough you did not intentionally neglect them, all they know is that you have neglected them. And when you say sorry it's too late. They're gone. Cinders. Technology to the rescue.

erwin

Though his mask hid his face, Erwin's jaw dropped. Above the San Francisco bridge, the Hob Goblin dangled his screaming girlfriend with his right hand, while aiming the other at the traffic below. "Noooo!" Erwin screamed, his voice muffled by the winds. The Goblin let out a sarcastic laugh. He truly was enjoying this. Erwin's muscles tightened. Standing on one of the bridge's thick support wires, he couldn't do a thing, though he was a sprint away. "Take one step and I drop her. Take one step and I rocket the support wires till maybe a dozen cars slide off into the cold waters below." The scenario was similar to what the earlier Goblin nearly pulled off. "I know what you're thinking, hero, but the son outlives the father, the successor outperforms his predecessor." Another long laugh. "Deal with me!" Erwin pleaded. "Let them all go!" "As you say, webhead." The frames of life slowed down. Erwin ran and dived for the girl, his right wrist aimed at the Goblin, the other toward a spot on the bridge. The Goblin fired rockets. Erwin's web splattered on the Goblin's visor. Erwin grabbed his girl while the other webline connected; swinging from that one, he saw that the Goblin had recovered, that the support wires had snapped. The Goblin took to the air, eyeing Erwin. The bridge was groaning. Cement and steel tilted and cars began to slide to one side. Erwin threw his girl toward a support beam and fired webbing to both cushion her impact and keep her there. Gunfire from the maniac above, slicing his webline. Now, Erwin was airborne, in a free fall while the Goblin sped toward him, ignoring the girl. Erwin took out his cellphone, as he saw cars beginning to fall from the bridge. A hero is never alone. "Hello, Clark? Putang-ina tulungan mo ko!"

siege

Siege woke up with a fork stabbed on his right leg, just above his knee, while the drunken scent and snores of naked Latino men and women hung all around him, on a love bed so large and so soft he felt he would drown. He lifted the dead-weight of an arm of a woman hugging his waist. Where are my pants? he thought. Siege flicked his head and shook it. He ran his hand through his hair. Pizza. He reeks of pizza. How long have I been out? He pulled the fork out of his leg. Some of the skin came off with the fork. The wound healed in front of his eyes. What universe is this? He knelt on the bed. He was at the center. All around him were naked sinewy bodies. To a harem he shall go, he remembered saying and then pressing a button. There! On the carpet. Siege stood and his knees wobbled. Why do I feel so weak? He avoided stepping on one butt and breast after another. He got out of bed. So stoned are thee, he whispered to the crowded bed, the remote beside his right foot. It all made sense. Someone tinkered with his relaxation program. Oh he's going to kill someone in his dorm. Siege pushed the button and the room faded like a TV screen; it went dark and then bluish, the default setting of his immersion program. Siege crawled out of the desensitization tank and saw his roommate at the center of his red bed, with a fork on his leg in a sea of naked sleeping men. I guess, Siege thought, I have to recalibrate the program. The real world keeps butting into his fantasies. A knock on the door. He wrapped a towel around his waist. It was the pizza guy, a long haired Latina girl, the one whose breasts he avoided stepping on. Siege licked his lips and let the towel go. Maybe the program is fine as it is. As the girl was handing him the pizza and her bra, the naked men on his roommate's bed woke up, and walked up to him. To a harem he shall go. He thought of pressing the button again. And decided against it.

unapproved testimonial for a friend

Teacher Noel's heart skipped a beat when he saw the rows of girls all in skirts. The permutations shocked him. Christmas morning came early.

boots

Storm's gone. I miss it already. I was forced, yesterday, to use this one umbrella, a really big one, with the signature colors and seal of my alma mater, the kind of memento you keep in boxes that age in your attic. My wife had brought with her one of our umbrellas, and I had ruined my green one last rainy season--never got it fixed--and it was pouring yesterday, what with those hard winds slapping the rain around, hitting me with a carpet of water at each wind's shove. I ran back inside, stepped out of my wet shoes, ran upstairs, and pulled up a chair to step on. The big umbrella was on top of our closet. Tearing the plastic wrapper, I sighed as I stepped back from the window, to give the umbrella room to unfold. It was big after all, and as it openned up, somebody's laundry slammed on the window, and then vanished, caught up in the torrent of wind and rain. I closed the umbrella, went down stairs, put my shoes back on, and openned the door. When the wind shifted and rammed me with rain, I took back my sigh. I had a dome on top of me, big as a beach umbrella, shielding me from hard rain and torn up shreds of plants. If only I had a pair of rain boots to match my umbrella's color.

unbreakable

Ramirez could barely see through the blood in his eyes. He smelled his own stink, tasted his own blood, everything he ate and drank had gushed out, and when a switch fell down voltage routed his whole being, sending a thousand tiny painful simultaneous stabs to his core, his feet kicking puddles of his own piss and shit; he would scream if he could, but even lifting his eyelids open needed the strength of his entire being. So when he tried to curse them all he did from his barely moving lips on his bluish-red swollen face that hung on a limp neck was mumble.

A hand grabbed the hair on the back of Ramirez's head, pulled it up and settled it on the chair's backrest, leaving his jaw to fall open and saliva to ooze out. "Just tell us what we want to know," said the gentle but persuasive voice.

"Ab jub balaaa," Ramirez tried to say.

"We know, we know. You just balance the books, sign the checks," the voice said in a sing-song mockery, "and keep the money in the bank for your distinguished clients. On and on, you've been repeating that since we hauled you in six hours ago." Mirano's hand let the head go and it fell down and sagged to the right. Had it not been for the restraints, Ramirez would have fallen over.

He won't break, this man, Mirano thought, at least not in the time we've been allowed to tease out the clues from him. Mirano whipped back to his Captain, who nodded. The Captain wants to talk. The door swung close behind them.

A match struck and inflamed both cigarettes. Mirano and his Captain inhaled deeply and then winced. The abandoned factory still smelled of rusted metal. The thick air of the evening was stale, just like the hole they're in.

"They have his family, Sir, that's why he is this--"

"We got something."

Mirano threw his lighted cigar and killed the tiny embers with his heel.

"We can't break the encrypted files in his laptop, but there's a pattern we saw, and it might be a clue..."

The door swung open and a raging Mirano grabbed Ramirez by the head. He screamed in the half-dead man's ears, over and over, the same question, till the Captain managed to tear his grip from Ramirez's face.

Mirano sighed and inhaled the smell of puke and blood and piss and fear in the room. He paced frantically as his Captain spoke to the tortured soul: "Just tell us what we want to know." And the Captain's eyes slid from the pulp on the chair to the pacing man who said, almost under his breath, a question that will get them closer to the heart of things.

"What is the missing pulse?"

testi for my two baliw friends

Camille

A veiled woman walking down the street caught my eye. So still were her shoulders when she walked. The air around me thickened. A breeze unveiled her face, undressing her long hair and I couldn't breathe or move at the sight of her. "Shoot to kill!" my captain roared from behind me. "She's the infidel we're looking for!"

Abi

She poured a spoonful of the skull-marked bottle and swallowed it. Bitter. Just a slight sting in her stomach. She expected nausea but it didn't come. But then, that's me, she thought. I can take on anything. Except him. Him was the he walking back from the men's room, dodging other restaurant customers, flirting, with his brown eyes, with the waitresses. She took a menu from a waiter passing by and propped it up on her table for two, shading the gestures of her hands. She emptied the bottle on his coffee. "Hi, love," he said and she glared at him, and then she looked away. "I'm sorry. Old habit." After a thick silence, he said, sipping his coffee. "You sure there are no hard feelings?" She put everything she had in that smile.

exile

After an ear infection that sidelined with me at home, I'm back in the lounge that is my new workplace. I call it that, a lounge. So relaxing. My corner inside its inner room is stuffed with a large box filled with my stuff, one so big I have to sort them out tomorrow. Because I'm a sloth and disorganized, the lounge people did me and themselves a favor: they bundled and shoved together all of my stuff. I think I'm going to write each of them a Friendster testimonial, by way of thank you. I'm still working for my alma mater's PR arm, though I've been relocated, because I am Godforsaken anti-social, and my boss knows writing can be mood-driven, to a quieter place. It was not that silent this afternoon though, when college students excitedly argued their project proposals to my boss, who held the power to veto cash grants to students' artistic endeavors, for which they wanted university funding. I felt relieved to listen to their emotional gestures and spontaneous laughs. I'm not that old, but being around people who are, can make you. So I have to thank my boss for understanding the quirk of a man I am, and for exiling me here, in the lounge, as opposed to the other, tunnel-like office, where I had probably aged 10 years. Feels good to be back. No, this can't possibly be exile.

campus life

2006. school's in.

catatonia

2006. flight of stares. promise of rain.

bundy clocking woes

2006. exile.
2004. in my mind.

the domesticated life

2006. replacing the lock with sandwiches, or just how tired i am this morning. allergic to maids. how to apologize to rice. boots. regardless.

puta ka!

"No, Marcus and I are not an item, we just hang out!" I yell to the FX-load of people: the driver, the two passengers seated up front, the four in the midsection, and three with me in the back. Only Judith beside me is the intended audience. But this is how you avoid admitting everything during the cramped ride back home. You keep your voice down until your best friend infuriates you with her prying and you cry out in denial.

"Louder. I don't think the MMDA lady outside heard you," says Judith. I can feel glances, hear random bits of murmurs inside the FX. I am the one nearest the door. Is this bitch daring me?

I pull the doorhandle before any of three passengers near me can protest. The morning rush of sirens and engine roars and bus horns blast inside the FX.

"Manang! Yoohoo! Yes, you! Marcus and I are not a couple!--"

"Puta, Ellie--" Judith interrupts, but I can scream louder.

"--we are just going out! Nothing wrong there, di ba!?"

The FX brakes to a sudden stop. I let Judith reach the door handle across me and pull the door shut. She glares at me.

I glare back: "Happy now?"

"Miss," says the driver,"could you two just text each other about your lovelife instead?" His rearview mirror frames for me his exasperated eyes. He clearly doesn't need this so early in the morning. The FX is still not moving.

"Oo nga, keep your personal lives to your--"

"Opo, Lola,--" Judith fires me that look: let's-just-get-this-over-with, --"my friend and I are sorry."

"We'll be quiet the rest of the way. So sorry po," I add.

The other passengers sigh and resume their bored looks. The driver guns the engine back to life. There's a knock on the driver's window. He rolls it down. It's the MMDA lady. Via the rearview mirror, the driver shoots me that look: nuissance. I shoot him my indignant counter-look: live with it.

"What did I do?" the driver asks the blue-uniformed manang, who tells him to shut his engines off. He does. She glares at him and walks to the back of the FX while waving for other vehicles to pass us by.

"Lagot ka, Ellie," Judith whispers.

"Puta ka," I say under my breath.

The door swings open. The manang to whom I hollered my exasperation a while ago is eyeing each of us in the back. Her eyes settle on me.

"Were you the one who yelled at me?"

I blink. No one says a word. The manang’s eyes roll up and she sighs.

"Just make sure," she begins. I can feel it: everyone in the FX is just as attentive as I am. "Just make sure that Marcus isn't seeing anyone else. Mahirap umasa."

I am stunned. Judith is giggling. The manang looks dead serious. I can hear mumbles of sus maryoseps behind me.

"Partner!" another blue-uniform yells from across the street. "What's going on?"

The manang turns to her and yells back, "It's ok." Then, in her normal voice says, "just a potential accident." She smiles that knowing smile and slowly closes the door. The driver scratches his head. The engines coughs to life and we slide away from the manang and speed up on the road ahead.

Judith is suddenly too busy thumbing on her cellphone to even look at me. Her grin tells me she is already texting the world of what I had just denied, of what had just transpired.

She presses send. I know so, even without looking closely. We have the same cellphone model.

“Good thing you don’t have Marcus’ number,” I mumble, the streets a blur as I look out the window.

“I do now.” At that I scramble to open my bag, but I already know it’s not there.

“Puta ka, Judith!”

sudden fiction in english

2006. unbreakable. puta ka!

the last time i tried poetry

a mouse sped by
and i said hi
that's it
writer's block follows

the last time i tried poetry

a mouse sped by
and i said hi
that's it
writer's block follows

regardless

I am missing, no matter how deep into my ruble of papers I search, a sachet of coffee. I've tilted my desk and it's not among the items that fell over. I've lifted each cat in the bedroom and it's not under them either. Under the bed, the space under cabinets, the nooks where my cats hide my stuff they steal when I'm looking elsewhere. Not there.

Maybe I had consumed it and hadn't noticed. I look in the trash bin. Nothing Maybe I disposed of the wrapper elsewhere. Maybe I never bought that sachet in the first place.

I retrace my steps, rewind the morning as it unfolded. I kicked the blanket down and crawl out of bed. I heard the PC humming to life after I switched it on. My neighbor was playing "Staying Alive," which I could hear when I fixed my first cup of coffee in the kitchen. Got a little irked when I saw the newspaper in disarray; the cats must have been looking for the classified ads. Maybe they want to move out. Then I went back upstairs to write. And then now. No remembrance of where I put that other sachet.

There is a paraphrase of Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is usually the best one. My cats stole that sachet of coffee. They have stolen and hidden stuff before. They could do it again. Fine, they did it. Or I consumed it without remembering where I disposed of the wrapper. My memory's playback is suspect. Or I must have never bought a sachet in the first place. All of these are plausible. No real evidence for any single one of these hypotheses. So much for science.

A leap of faith, maybe. That might help. Which hypothesis feels most intuitively true? The cat theory. Yeah, that one. Why? If I have to explain that intuition, it's because my cats are cute and they steal stuff from my desk. Paperclips, post-its, receipts. No point in this. I couldn't find any stolen stuff where my cats usually hide them. And no point in defending an intuition. An intuition does not need any defense.

Either way I want my second fix of caffeine.

This a time when neither science nor faith helps you arrive at a decision. My investigation can drag on and on and still I would not find contentment. I just have to make that decision myself, regardless of scientific or religious truth.

I'm going out to buy some coffee. Regardless.

school's in

I am holding in my hand my Form 5, a document in my University that doubles as my class schedule list and as a formal receipt of tuition fee payment. This is the shortest time I have spent enrolling in several semesters. Maybe because I did it at the earliest time possible, given how much of sloth I can be when school is just about to burst open. I tried to get myself enrolled on every morning I woke up with my mind feeling a surge of purpose. Hey when the surge is gone, it's gone. Might as well.

Morning one: got my Registration Materials and went to the English Department, to get my dossier for my faculty adviser to check; got my adviser's nod--I can take a master's level fiction workshop and a PhD level nonfiction workshop; got enlisted, and cleared of lost /unreturned books at the library, had my forms assessed at the Graduate Studies Office. (Oh gee, look at the time, it's an hour before noon.) Went home. What you can do today, you can do better tomorrow, when you're in the mood.

Morning two: breakfast tastes a little odd when you are high on cough and cold medicine; coffee, thank heavens, is still coffee, and served to balance what could have been a badly begun morning; had my boss sign my study privilege form (my office is paying for my tuition); went to HR, where, amazingly, everyone I needed to sign my form was actually there; went back to the English Department to return my dossier, where a lecture was waiting for me: "You're not supposed to take this home," said a stern woman behind a desk, while tapping my dossier. "Oh," I said. "Won't happen again." Went home. "Procrastination is the thief of time," said one cliché. I say, "Mug me, baby. I'm rich."

Morning three: such a lazy morning; went to this warehouse that calls itself the Office of the University Registrar; really, it's a warehouse, smells like one, too; got my forms assessed, afterward, I walked to Palma Hall, where I paid a dizzying amount of money for my tuition: P66.00, for six units. Wait, that's not for tuition; says on the receipt it's for student funds. But then I'm a student. I'm funding myself? Why am I required to pay, then? (What? It's only 8:40 in the morning?)

Wow. It's over. Just like that. Usually I'm harassed just by thinking of what I have to do just to get enrolled. But now it's really over.

I have to print out this entry. So I can remember, when I read this at the beginning of the next semester, how, in three successive mornings, the universe conspired to go easy on me.

a walker in the city

When you silently curse your neighbors for the noise they make, normal innocent racket like screaming at a four year old for merely existing, or the full-blast noontime shows they watch, you wonder what you did right when tranquil mornings arrive. Like this one. I wave the bed covers aside and notice tranquility: beams of sunlight light the wooden floor with stripes, filtered by Venetian blinds. Not a child is screaming. Not a single radio in earshot. No television sets are blaring. What could I have done to deserve a moment like this one. I jump out of bed and switch on my PC. Whatever comes to mind, write whatever comes to mind. Lifelike and at the quick.

I am leaning on the ledge of my open window, on the second floor of this suddenly quiet apartment, seeing a portion of a neighbor's rooftop across me that's brown and grey with rust and age and neglect. One part is collecting water, the upturned sheet of galvanized iron and its through is a water pocket, a puddle of rainwater on the roof. I stick my head out further and look for tomcats prowling. I see one. Coming over here. Too far out to be in range of a pellet gun, even if I had one.

These tomcats are as big as my neighbor's little dachshund and they dent roofs when they land on them and they pull down my laundry and scare my domesticated cats into hiding in the closet. But it's too early in the morning to hate them, and I put away the thought of buying a long-ranged pellet gun with which to hurt those four-legged freeloaders. Delayed gratification.

I'm going to add new parts to my memoir, the one due in class in two or three weeks. I am thankful for mornings like this. The quiet ties together memories and thoughts and such, and make my writing easier.

Look, it's taking shape nicely:

"When Mother and I pushed the boxes deeper into the back of the truck, a neighbor asked if we were leaving that apartment, the one that looked down on the road, with its second floor roof as pointed and quiet and still as that of a church's. Mother said yes as I carried more boxes piled on the sidewalk into the lipat-bahay truck. Neighborly small talk was rare for us, and Mother wiped her hands on her shapeless flowery duster's sides and chatted, with a wrinkled old man with sideburns; a break from moving the contents of our lives into yet another anonymous vehicle. We were used to this. All this moving from home to home. Though none of them felt like home. But this house, I never wanted to leave this house, this two-floored oddly-placed dwelling on the elbow of nowhere."

I'm going downstairs to fix me some coffee, and then I'm going to continue writing, while the quiet lasts.

the last bite

Jeremy saw past the daze in her eyes and stared at her pale and seawater-wrinkled fingers. A day and a half on a sinking lifeboat with Martin and no signs of rescue. At least the night and its endless darkness was over. She hated the dark.

Wonder just where this lazy current is taking them. Her wristwatch said half past three in the afternoon. Nothing to do but endure the boredom and hold out an inverted mineral water bottle, with its bottom knifed out, to catch in raindrops. Seawater dehydrates you more. So she and Martin split the accumulated drinking water evenly, and took turns holding it up. Hunger, dehydration, exhaustion, hopelessness, a shark. Jeremy wondered which would kill her first.

Above them, they sky was cloudy-bright, the kind of sky she looks at from her hammock on her apartment's terrace. She misses home, and her long afternoon siestas. "Tell me again," she wanted to ask Martin, "how your boat leaked to death on the way back to the harbor?" But she didn't Martin felt bad enough as it is. His plan to seduce her on his boat didn't work. And now it's life and death. How romantic.

A shark, Jeremy whispered to her self, to rock her back into reality. A shark would kill them. At least, she wished a shark would come. It if didn't come, at least it's something to think about. Better than the endless nothing she is enduring. Better than the thought of Martin raping her on an already sinking lifeboat.

Soon, night would come. So many things could happen. A shark might attack. Or the lifeboat might give out. Or a shark might come while the boat is collapsing. Or a shark might come while Martin is trying to rape her while the boat is sinking. How convenient, Jeremy thought.

She remembered a paraphrase of Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Right, definitely, I'm sure, a shark would come.

Their lifeboat was a lung slowly deflating, a boat exhaling air; they took turns sticking their fingers into a hole on the boat's side; they kept checking themselves for open wounds that would lure in a shark.

They hardly talked. Martin said they should keep quiet, to conserve their strength, so they could scream and wave at a passing boat or airplane for however long it took to get noticed, to get rescued. But what if Martin got tired of conserving his strength, and wanted to spend it all on her?

The sound of motor in the sky. A plane. Martin screamed, forgot the hole and waved both arms. Jeremy blinked and joined the noise barrage. The hole hissed and hissed. The plane was gone. There was more water inside the lifeboat. The boat had gotten limp. The water bottle was nowhere in sight.

That's the second plane that missed them. Jeremy blinked at the coming darkness. So again, where is that shark, she asked herself.

Something in the water moved. Probably nothing. Probably the hunger and desperation setting in. A fin. Out of the water so suddenly. Twenty feet away. Coming to them, fast. Something surely is hungry. They are not the only desperate creatures at sea.

She pointed to the fin and Martin's voice was almost a silent screech, "We're dead." His throat must hurt from all that screaming.

"I'm not bleeding. Are you bleeding?"

"No," Martin said. "We have a flair gun, with one flair chambered."

"Save it. We can do this."

"Do what?"

"Sharks are sensitive not only to scent but to sound."

The fin swam closer. Fifteen feet.

"We yell it away? Are you nuts, Jeremy?"

"Do you trust me?"

"Just tell me what to do."

Ten feet away.

"Get you fingers out of the hole and pound the boat, open palm, and don't stop screaming."

"You're nuts, we'd hasten the deflation--"

Five feet.

"Do it!"

They do. They scream. The hole hisses air. The fin slows down.

"Don't stop, keep pounding, keep screaming, Martin!"

Martin barely blinked as he screamed. His throat was in pain. The shark turned to circle the lifeboat and Jeremy turned to face it, screaming and pounding. Their voice, in tandem, might just be enough.

The sun setting when the fin turned around and vanished in the silent waters. Jeremy plugged the hole with her fingers. But it was of no use. When the sun had set, more than half of the lifeboat was submerged. Both of them clung to the floating part, exhausted. Their throats hurt.

No sound rippled the sea. The blanket of darkness came. Jeremy hated the dark. No, she was afraid of it. Instead of her phobia killing her, there was another way. She bit her lip until it bled.

mission impossible 3

My friends and I have a joke about Tom Cruise's recent movie. We dub it Mission Impossible 3, subtitled "This time, it just can't be done." Then, we hum the movie theme happily (duhn duhn duhn duhn duhn, dah duuuuuuhn!) and we have a good laugh. The producers, director, and scriptwriters of this film. Who do they think they were kidding?

Impossible Missions Force (IMF) Agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has almost settled down to a life away from the dangers of his job. On the night of his engagement party, he is hauled back into active duty from semi-retirement (IMF agent training) when his former student (Keri Russell) is taken prisoner by a black marketer. Russell dies. Villain kidnaps Hunt's fiancé. He is forced to steal against his agency. The mole surfaces. Hunt kills everyone that matters. End of story.

Why Hunt would retire in the first place was never explained credibly in the film. When he teams up with Ving Raimes, with whom he worked in the first two M:I films, the wind blows through Hunt's hair and he is all smiles: he doesn't look like he has aged at all. A quiet life and that much self-assurance doesn't seem to match. Besides, do you remember a Tom Cruise film wherein Cruise, as the protagonist, actually faced a problem he seemed incapable of solving? Me neither. Cruise can't seem to accept that he can't act. Instead, parts are made for him.

So much for a credible conflict wherein Hunt will face and emerge hurt but triumphant. You sort of get the feeling that Hunt will come out of all this alive, good-looking, smiling, and with his woman. Oh my God, that's exactly how the film ends.

Far fetched scenarios, gadgetry every time, duhn duhn duhn score now and again, a bountiful of explosions, face masks and voice perfectly mimicked, well-coordinated team movements, a villain designed just bad enough but not character-deep so that Hunt remains on top of your waning attention span.

Pretty soon this will be in HBO. Not worth the ticket. If you notice that the pop corn tastes bad during the film, it's not the pop corn, or you, that's a little off. It's the film.

It's just, impossible. (Dah duuuuuuhn!)

x-men 3

Police officers in the lead car in a convoy of black vehicles see a cloaked figure down the road. The figure facing the convoy does not move. The convoy does not slow down. The old man in the middle of the road raises his hand, points it toward the first car. The car is lifted off the ground. The man clenches his raised open palm. The car is crushed. He flicks his upheld arm toward his right. The floating, crushed car is tossed aside like a broken toy. The second car is disposed of in the same manner. The 10-wheeler behind the two front cars, whose freight car contains prisoners, is now visible. The truck will run the lone figure over in seconds. He flicks his hand upward. The freight car is unhinged from the truck. It will skid on the asphalt road until its momentum runs out. The truck surges ahead. The old man raises his other hand and the truck somersaults toward and above him, as though it tripped on an unseen obstacle. It crashes behind him. There are no survivors. The car behind the convoy and its occupants are crushed just as easily. Magneto, now joined by his henchmen, walks toward the back of the truck where locks and hinges burst away from the thick metal door. At the far end of the truck, Mystique, the Master of Magnetism's right hand, stands waiting, now liberated from her captors.

I would not have been able to describe the above scene as tightly if director Brett Ratner had not assembled the entire film as seamlessly, something I did not expect. The previous film (Xmen 2) had one too many mutants. You can't develop character when almost every mutant is allotted some airtime. The first film seemed too focused on Logan (Wolverine), who Xavier had to tame and who Scott Summers (Cyclops) had to keep away from his willing-to-flirt girlfriend Jean Grey.

To me, the first two films felt obligatory, with characters introduced, even if they had little to do with the story's narrative, and scenes where mutants demonstrated their powers were inserted throughout the films. The action felt stale. You are just glad the film is over.

Understandably, the stage simply had to be set so Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Eric (Magneto) could trade dramatically delivered dialogue, with Xavier espousing the Uncle Ben principle ("With great powers come great responsibility") and Eric paraphrasing Nietzsche's Superman principle (it is a disservice to themselves for Homo Sapiens Superior to curb their powers according to the dictates of mediocre human leaders).

Xmen 3 has no such obligatory feel. With the primary Xavier-Eric conflict and hate/fear toward mutants already established, the third instalment to the mutant franchise explores two interwoven plots. The first is Xavier's delicate gamble: under his care all along was a class 5 mutant more powerful than Magneto and himself--Jean Grey (What if she goes wild?). The second concerns the consequences when a "cure" is mandated by the US Government to be injected on all mutants. The cure claims to lay permanently dormant the genes responsible for mutants' powers and appearances (Would all mutants want a normal life?).

Director Brett Ratner made me forget I had a tumbler-full of cheesed popcorn, until the movie's end credits rolled up the screen.

In a flashback ten years from the film's present, Xavier and Eric, then friends, is talking a young Jean Grey into studying at Xavier's school.

"Oh, Charles, I like this one," Eric said as both men and Jean sat in the Grey family's living room; jut outside the window, several feet from the ground were all the cars in eyesweep. Jean was showing off. "I doubt it," she arrogantly said when told she was not the only one with powers.

Flashforward. Jean's traumatic near-death experience in Xmen 2, when she sacrificed herself to save the Blackbird (the Xmen's plane), had broken the psychic restraints Xavier had used to shackle Jean's desire-filled other personality, Phoenix. Phoenix killed Scott, nearly seduced Logan, and with Magneto watching and unable to stop her, she lifted Xavier from his wheelchair and disintegrated him.

Thrilled with his potential new weapon, Magneto brings the wayward Jean to his secret camp, where she is wooed into coming with Magneto's recruited army of mutants to Alcatraz Island, where the facilities for producing the mutant cure was found, and to help destroy the forces that aim to make mutantdom as mediocre as everyone else.

I am relieved that this time, Jean's telekinesis (the ability to move objects with one's mind) has been promoted--from being merely able to lift and shove people and objects aside, to dismantling and shredding and disintegrating matter (and people), and lifting the silvery ashes upward, in a grand demonstration of conceit and power.

And then there is Sir Ian McKellen's incarnation of Magneto, who majestically wields his powers and elegantly dodges Xavier's rhetoric on the need for all mutants to be good. I have a soft spot for villains whose words sting and linger and wound, and whose mere intent can kill a multitude.

I will not mind a fourth instalment.

quarantine

Nothing like cold air pulled in by hard rain to shake my fever-induced headache away. Pulled in. I am inhaling it, with my head half in and half outside the bedroom window. Rain sounds different when they fall on galvanized iron roofs, than when they fall on empty concrete streets. And from the open window, I only see rooftops and hear the tin-can thumping of rain and the now and again distant rumbling of thunder. I thought maybe with all this atmosphere I keep writing about, I am better of as a poet, and not as the freelancer I am now. Deadlines almost always erupt in me as fever. And I have to open the window myself, just so I can breathe.

flight of stares

At some point, staring at the wet laundry on the clothesline swing from side to side brings me to a boat scene, some twenty-five years ago, when seawater, instead of a midmorning wind, lulled me into catatonia.

To a four-year old, getting lost on a long stretch of shore, with same-looking cottages everywhere, is a twilight zone. When you are dwarfed by your relatives, they being thrice your height, a foreigner trying to help, he four times your size, is a behemoth bending down to devour you. The harsh German accent on his English was probably a clue. Where are my parents? he asked. Tired of crying and walking, I turned and walked away, pretending to be more annoyed than scared. He and I were after the same thing after all: my parents. He asked me to come back, as others did, Bicolano accent in their Tagalog, and I ignored them all. At some point, the shore would end. I would find my parents. My parents would find me. Or hunger would deprive me of power, just as my toy robots stop marching when the batteries run out. But I had no expectations. I kept walking.

I remember riding a small fishing boat, one with frames of bamboo for balance, on both sides; the hum of its motor a distant drone, the voices of an uncle and the boat owner behind me. I squinted at the lazy sun muffled behind a carpet of cottony clouds, and I kept to myself. Maybe it was my reward for wandering back to my family's cottage, after nearly three hours of walking.

The motor is turned off. We began to drift. The sea, when you're so far away from shore, is not as postcard-still as it looks from the cottage. It tilts, like a slow prelude to a tidal wave that never really comes. And our boat is gently shoved and rocked and left alone. Thin beams of sunlight escaped the clouds and struck the sea, like a xylophone, and tiny mirrors bounce off the water like music, and like music they fade, as sunlight is curtained once more by cumulonimbus clouds. I should get lost more often, if this much quiet is the prize.

Now, twenty-five years later, I stare at wet clothes. The Encyclopaedia Britannica on my PC spreads out the entry I am looking for: "Catatonia." To a near-thirty wanderer, there comes a point when the wandering has to stop, something should dampen this imaginative wanderlust. I think it was Socrates who said that to be free of attachments is to see Beauty pure and immortal. If only Beauty could pay my immortal bills, to which I am always attached.

I close the window, silencing the scene of clothes and boat rides, and continue reading. One day I will find a cure for my catatonia, and on that day I will cease to be myself; I will be completely practical, consistently cheerful, with all my anti-social genes replaced by happier ones.

the promise of rain

The brown-rusted patches of a distant rooftop is getting unevenly brown, just as I sit on a window ledge, rubbing my afternoon sleepy eyes. The gray areas are getting grayer. Then, I hear confirmation: a faint tin can thumping. It's beginning to rain.

I am waiting for the thumping to get louder, and to spread to nearby rooftops, but with the storm having already passed, the wind that shook the acacia and guava trees free of dead leaves has become a weak but cold gale. I miss the storm, and the gray-dark horizon and sluggishness it brings.

Beside me is one of those windows of old childhood. Old wooden frame with small glass panes framed inside, with the whole thing swinging side to side, routinely shoved by the wind, and hanging on old and squeaky hinges. A stagnant Sunday afternoon. The remnant of a storm.

I have to hold out my hand, to stop the window from swinging at me, as a cold moist wind shoves it. The gray rooftop farther away has stopped darkening. Raindrops have stopped coming down. I feel betrayed.

I stare out, past the rooftops, into the grayish horizon, willing darkness to come, holding the wind and sky to a promise of rain.

according to color

A bulge rises from the sheets of paper on the floor. The first time it happened, I nearly squashed it. I thought maybe it was a mouse (but then I have nine cats, which cannot co-exist with mice). Now, the sight of a bulge suddenly moving is, well, normal. This one moves in sudden spurts, then wiggles itself free from the pile of papers I've been sorting through all day. A whiskered kitten emerges from the rubble. Blinking, it meows at me, probably wondering why I had again forgotten that I had thrown the previous semester's worth of scratch papers on the floor, disregarding the sleeping cats, which were on the floor first. But this afternoon only one cat had slept upstairs, in the bedroom, where I am compiling my portfolio of previously written and previously published works. Switching jobs means bonding with a domestic side of you you had forgotten you had before: your unemployed housecleaning side.

The kitten walks on the pile of papers on my left, leans on it, and the pile tumbles down. My other cats climb up the stairs and enter the room to see what the racket is all about. Now, there are six cats whose paws are trampling on my stuff on the floor. I grab one and put her on my right. I grab another, and another, and sort them according to fur color.

This could take a while. Unlike the sheets of papers, cats stand up and move about after I sort them.

a biography of whiskers

he surest sign that the bedroom is a mess is a fluffy balled up cat sleeping on all those sheets of papers on the floor. There. He shivered in his sleep. Maybe he's fighting off a tomcat in his dream. One paw is covering his eyes, like a drunkard with a hangover denying the morning after. How am I going to clean this up if I keep staring at him? There! He shifted, exposing his fluffy belly. As I scratch it his whiskers twitch, and then he stretches to his full length, kicking away the previous semester's stacks of photocopies. I used to spend nights writing with only him, Bolabola, sleeping on my books, for company. Now, new cats add to the roster. Behind me, snug-comfy on the beanbag that Bolabola used to completely own, are two more cats, not really cats, just a bit older than kittens: Bangus and Lasing, two new whiskers who sleep in the room at night, on mornings, at noon.

I'm going to have to ask the two beanbag cats to leave me the room, nicely, so I can start cleaning up. But how to convince them to do that when their elder brother is stretching in the center of the room, and I am tolerating it?

kryptonite

Mosquitoes buzzing in my ear more so that usual: I think it's going to rain. At 4 am I am making a bet with myself that, with the summer dawn this humid, I'm better off going downstairs, making coffee, and pretending it's almost morning. I get up from bed and walk slowly, barefoot; if I take big steps, I might step on a kitten. Anne and I have three. I look at the open window behind me, awaiting a slight cool breeze that never comes, and see silhouettes of the six other cats we own, all sleeping on the cool roof, just barely lit by lampposts farther afield. The cats know the cool spots. Right now, this room is not one of them.

If I tell you that work has seeped into me, draining me of life, that I constantly failed to be alive when it was time to blog, that wouldn't be completely true. The neighborhood my house is nestled in has gotten noisier. Prep school age kids scream at every opportunity. Their parent, singular, screams at them and leave them crying whenever possible. The house just slightly around the corner gets band-practiced every other afternoon. The same song. They never get better.

Where have those long quiet nights gone off to?

I used to have Saturday mornings when bird chirps chirped me awake, as I waited for my wife to come home. She works nightshifts. I write during the red eye moments of the day, when everyone is dead asleep. I still try to. But with my moods drained by coping with the noise, I always end up making hand seals, cursing the neighbors and wishing my hexes actually worked, instead of just my middle finger sticking out toward the direction of pointless racket.

Sometimes I wish I had lived in a dead town. I may still do. So many people to kill, just to get some quiet.

how to survive a shark attack, tip #6

Divers, boating accident survivors, and surfers call it a given to find themselves being encircled by a shark. However, they call it the height of misfortune to be encircled by two sharks.

This time you have a harpoon, and only one shot. There are two sharks. Here is how you can make that one shot count.

Make sure both sharks are swimming toward you and that they are near each other. Aim for the nose of one shark. Watch the harpooned shark squirm and writhe and bleed.

Sharks include in their diet seals, dolphins, and other sharks. The unhurt shark might feed on the wounded and forget about you, leaving you free to swim away.

The prudent shark will try to secure immediate gain: it will feed on its dead companion. The more selfish shark will try to maximize overall gain: you first, then the dead shark.

Keep aiming that empty harpoon at the shark, fully knowing you are now up against a selfish gambler.

You now only have one chance to survive: steel yourself, act cocky, extend you aura of unwavering confidence until the shark feels it and decides to be prudent.

But remember, the prudent shark will try to secure immediate gain. Since you are nearer to it than the dead shark it neglected, you ARE the immediate gain.

how to survive a shark attack, tip #5

Accounts from commercial divers point out that sharks are aware of eye contact. This explains why sharks tend to attack more from the blindside, when the victim has little chance to react defensively, than from upfront.

Divers expecting sharks are often carrying a rod or a harpoon. You have neither. But you can fool that shark into thinking you are carrying either.

Here is what you do. Make sure you are facing that shark. Stretch your right arm out and point it toward the shark. Hold your right forearm with you left hand, making sure the shark sees your left arm bent at the elbow. Point all your right hand's fingers at the shark, so that your hand's pointed tip mimics the shape of a harpoon ready to be launched.

As the shark continues to encircle you, make sure you continue to face it. If it changes direction, continue to “aim” your “harpoon” at it.

Three possibilities now emerge.

First, the shark, familiar with divers and their rods and harpoons, will flee. Second, the shark, unfamiliar with divers and their weapons, will continue to encircle you until it loses interest. Third, the shark, unfamiliar with divers and their weapons, will interpret your posture as prelude to a preemptive strike, and will lunge at you mercilessly.

Do not wish for the third possibility.

how to survive a shark attack, tip #4

Most sharks that attack people are of the "bite-and-run" type; preferring to swim close to their target, bite, and then swim away. The logic behind this is that most sharks avoid the desperate retaliation of a wounded animal. Seals bitten by sharks have been recorded to bite back.

Most bite-and-run types are smaller than the Great White Shark, whose one bite could kill you, given its massive jaws and the size of its serrated teeth. The Great White has been recorded to reach lengths of about 20 feet, which, along with its massive bulk, is like a small pointed gray submarine that bites.

Look closely at that shark that is encircling you.

Is Great?

Is it White?

Stay calm and be eaten slowly. Panic and be eaten quickly.

You decide.

the last bout

Brandon Kowalski slowly pulled the white blanket toward himself, revealing his feet. He pulled some more and saw his bandaged right leg. Stitches lay underneath, he knew. He winced as he expected pain to shoot from the right side of his torso, where a thick pad kept in place by bandages covered more stitches. But there was no pain. His wince uncurled his 33-year-old angular face into wide-eyed wonder. "Morphine," he whispered in his mind.

He remembers punching sand-paperish skin while some 80 yards from the shore. "It" pulled away, leaving bleeding holes on his right leg. Brandon tried to hold on to his surfboard, which was now broken in two. The first bite had punctured his lungs with its upper jaw's teeth, the lower jaw's force cushioned by the surfboard. Brandon barely had time to curse. Wincing in pain, with internal bleeding setting in, he scissored his legs to keep afloat, and to look around: where is it? where is it now?

It came from his left side, his blindside, biting into his left arm. The waves separated surfer from surfboard as the six-footer repeatedly punched the twelve-foot shark's nose. It pulled away again. Adrenaline had dampened the wound-pains. He was trying again to scissor, to prepare for round four, but he had lost too much blood. The green-glistening water around him was now a murky crimson.

The humming of motor boats was getting near. With his head above-water, Brandon passed out. He did not see the shark fin rise some ten feet behind him. He did not hear the whish of the harpoon from the fishing boat that came to his rescue. He was unconscious as strong-armed fishermen, pulling him aboard, grunted under the strain of his dead weight. His bleeding bulk was on deck when the fishermen hauled onto the boat the other bleeding bulk from the sea.

Now, pain-numbed but awake, Brandon touched his left arm, where he had no feeling, and which he could not move. A knock on the door. His manager, Phil, took off his hat and stepped inside Room 312. Brandon closed his eyes and suddenly felt thirsty.

"From the fans," Phil said, gesturing to the flowers inside the room that Brandon had just noticed. Phil's alcoholic 58 year-old face wore the color of a dead man who rose from the morgue because he had a bet going down, and he wanted to know if he had won.

Phil walked to the table beside the bed. He picked up a ball of wet cotton and touched the bandaged man's lips with it. Due to massive blood loss and internal wounds, Brandon was still not allowed to drink large amounts of water. So he sucked on cotton.

Brandon's manager put the cotton on the tray and wiped his hands on his crumpled coat. His lips and lungs ached for a cigarette.

"How bad is it?" Brandon whispered.

"Your days in the ring," Phil said while cupping his pockets for his second pack, "are over."

how to survive a shark attack, tip #3

Jaws" and succeeding shark movies have always depicted the Great White Shark as behaving like a bully, showing its fin above-water for panic effect, biting a victim and dragging him away while he screams and waves to his friends, and ramming small boats until they capsize.

This "bully" behavior is based on isolated accounts. Great White Sharks have been known to be playfully malicious with their prey, but they munch them slowly, and they tend to encircle their victims a lot, unlike their adrenaline-filled counterparts in the movies. Therein lies your chance to escape. There is a self-defense tip wherein you use your fingers on the attacker's eyes. It works against sharks, too. So, when a Great White lunges at your torso, take big gulps of air before you are forcibly submerged. The pain will be excruciating, as your hips and ribs are crushed. Persevere, squint underwater, find one of the shark's eyes. Now, make a fist, but stick out your thumb. Thumb that angry fish's eye repeatedly, with all your strength. The shark will either be annoyed and spit you out, bloodied and mangled and all, or it will hasten the crushing motion of its jaws.

Two possibilities now emerge. If you've been spat out, the shark will either be annoyed and will come at you again, this time making sure to chew its food well and quick, or it will be seriously hurt and will swim away. If you have some, long nails really help.

If the shark spat you out and then swam away, leaving you bleeding, you may still be able to swim to the surface and wave for help, thus increasing your chances of survival. However, pray that help comes quickly, for that blood trail you left will attract other sharks. And you will not survive a feeding frenzy, long nails or no.

However, if the shark spat you out and intends to come at you again, this is what will happen. You either have a moment before you are mangled for the last time, or the shark will swim around you, like a villain who has underestimated his prey and intends to take no more chances.

In the latter case, remember to look brave, until you black out--either due to your spine being crushed, or due to lack of oxygen. Go back to that fist with your thumb sticking out. This time, pull back your thumb and stick out your middle finger. Watch the shark coming at you. Face it. Show it that finger.

Watch the shark hesitate for a moment. You have gained its respect.

comforting prose

When my head's not swirling due to deadlines and the slight fever they trigger, Kerima Polotan keeps me company:

"Sunday comes like a benediction. All week long, life is a rush and a nightmare; you kill yourself trying to beat the alarm clock, to make the deadline, to get to the corner before the traffic jam; or, if you don't have to go anywhere, you hurry everyone out of the house; children to school, husband to work, maid to market, only to prepare for that mad hour when they come rushing back home so you can stuff them with supper and put them to sleep to renew strength for that sprint our of the house the following day. But Sunday lifts the pressure suddenly and one of its little luxuries is to let the alarm clock ring and ring and ring while you turn around and burrow into your pillow for some more sleep."

Kerima Polotan, "The Joys of Sunday,"
Adventures in a Forgotten Country
(UP Press, 1999, p. 117)

Her prose seems to come right out of nowhere, and now that it's here, you don't want to it go away. But it's gone, whatever it is, and you struggle to read and reread to get more of that magic you think belongs to the words, and it does, as much as it belongs, too, to the spaces between them, and somehow, you think, you want to document life like that: so mundane, so familiar, with a sense of things passing, never being what they used to, except maybe in memory.

"I bought our bread there from a woman who must have been born old, or it was probably just the flour on her hair and face she never completely washed off. A bakery affects me the way a jewelry store affects other women, I guess--I stand there surrounded by trays of cakes and rolls, inhaling deeply, and I cannot quite make out exactly how I feel, as I am distracted by doors opening in my mind through which darts this little girl with her wild curls and her dark knees, clambering up a stool to point with a dirty wet coin at her favorite bun."

"This Way to the Museum" (Polotan, 1999, p. 131)

I want to just catalogue life like that, in its slow, inching crawl to wherever it's headed, never worrying about plot, everything just a swirl of what I see and hear and touch and what's out there, moving and shouting and standing still, dying, resentful, happy, obscene, naive, benign and evil--all at the same time.

So yeah. Nice book.

sticks and stones

The Mako shark is pound per pound the strongest shark there is. Although never reaching the length of the Great White, the Mako is the faster swimmer, and has a reputation of violently tugging at fishermen's hooks until either the line broke or the fisherman fell overboard. A small fishing boat, one story went, was attacked by the Mako they were trying to catch. It jumped right out of the water and into the boat, sending two of the three fishermen into the water. The shark landed on deck as the remaining fisherman's mind swiveled between panic and panic: to jump into the water, where there might be other sharks, or stay on deck and evade a wriggling 12-foot predator drowning in air, wildly trashing about, and rocking the boat.

Rescuers who came to the hysterical radio for help arrived five minutes later to find a silvery gray-blue corpse on deck. It had been dead a full three minutes, yet its tail continued to spasm and its jaws still twitched.

A report filed by the Coast Guard medic who talked to the fishermen who fell overboard said, "James Mathiessen, 34, truck driver by profession, was reported to have yelled in two directions, at the shark on deck, and in the direction of his friends in the water, at other sharks that might come by. John McMahon, 39, high school Physics teacher, and Mark Conneway, 32, car rental shop attendant, said that Mathiessen had yelled more at the shark that was never more than a foot away from him. He cursed it to the ends of the seas with all the insults he knew in his heart to be improper."

"We're thinking there's a correlation," Conneway said, with the dead shark fish-hooked and raised for display at the dock, where an awed audience stood. "James is undeniably more articulate than either of us [Mark]. I think that is what killed the shark and kept other sharks at bay."

"Our boat," McMahon, the other fisherman said, "is not a big one. If a Mako could jump right in and rock that boat hard, as it did, it could also flip itself overboard. But the more James screamed at it the less it struggled. It just writhed and withered and died.”

"I think," Mathiessen said, "I latched into every bad memory in my life and lashed it all on that thing, over and over. I feel lighter, somehow."

”We’re seriously thinking,” said Coast Guard Captain Harold Smith, “to require all fishing boats venturing the waters during shark-hunting season to have at least one very angry, very articulate person on board.”

how to survive a shark attack, tip #2

Two pieces of reliable info have been gathered on sharks: first, they can smell your intentions; second, they rarely die from dynamite fishing. Once you are in the water, do not thrash about wildly; for they will know that you want to flee. Stay calm. Research has shown that since sharks do not hunt or move about in schools, and because they are migratory, they are rarely blown to death by dynamite fishermen. Therefore, while you are calm underwater and a shark is nearby, having a stick of dynamite is not so useless. Here is what you do. Stay calm, do not trash about wildly. When the shark gets near, hold out your arm toward the creature and display that dynamite. The shark will either recognize the explosive and flee, or will suddenly bite your calm arm.

it's not fare

One evening last December, I climbed up a jeepney filled with Koreans; all of them male, excitedly murmuring in Korean, and occupying both sides of the jeepney. One side would take pictures of the other side, and the other side would repeat the gesture. I had to look away or the digital cameras' flashes would hurt my eyes. I've had a long day and a late night at the office.

They looked at me. I looked at them. Three of them took my picture and I squinted, but I smiled. I pulled out my jeepney fare and leaned over the guy nearest me, so that the guy farther away could take my fare and hand it to the driver. It is a custom when riding jeepneys in the Philippines.

The Korean beside me took my fare, put it in his shirt pocket, handed me his camera, and the entire Korean delegate suddenly faced me and became one big smile.

I took their picture, using camera after camera after camera, digitally freezing the all-out smiles of men who all look the same to me.

My fare never reached the driver.

how to survive a shark attack, tip #1

Sharks often mistake humans swimming underwater to be seals or large fish or both. When you see a shark swimming toward you, place your arms parallel on your sides, and swim in a dolphin-like motion. The shark will hesitate and think you are a seal or a dolphin looking like a human, or a human swimming like a seal or a dolphin. Sharks rarely attack dolphins, almost always attacks a seal or a large fish, and sometimes attacks a human. Confusion is your best bet. Remember to swim away, like a dolphin, and to swim like hell. The point is to make the shark think you are a seal looking like a human moving like a dolphin who clings to dear life.

sleep shaving

I don't think I've awakened from a morning shave agreeing with the razor. I'm bleeding again. You walk down the stairs almost every morning feeling stubbles under your chin. It is like Velcro. I live with a porcupine under my chin, an animal that needs constant pruning now and again, and when you prune on mornings that you are half awake, you don't notice the nicks you incur under the blade. Not until you are splashing water and looking at the razor under the downrushing tap water. Blood. Yours. Again. And then you are fully awake. Good morning.