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.