framed and remembered

A lingering headache is not so much a symptom that your brain may have a tumor, but that the only thing that tumor has, for company, is your brain.

This is me, quoting myself from way back 2004, where my Yahoo 360 blog carried that quote on my shoutbox status. Enduring the writing life remains no different from keeping a disease company.

So it goes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

barking mad

A dog is wailing outside my office. Its high-pitched long barks and intermittent moaning is bothering me. Whoever is pulling its chains must have tugged suddenly--I just heard the dog choke a little, its moaning interrupted, only to resume with defiant vigor, as though insulted.

My office is adjacent to a vet clinic, where that complaining dog is probably being hauled to. It sounded indignant in the beginning, but just now, desperate, as though it was screaming its innocence, "You're making a mistake!" it seems to say, "I'm not really sick! I don't need to be brought here! No, no, this is wrong!"

Since I can't hear the owner verbally scold the dog, I'm thinking maybe the dog is sick.

"No, no, this is wrong!"

Or delusional.

Or maybe I am again attributing meaning, where there is none.

requiem

I had dropped my pen near my right foot and was on my way to picking it up when I heard this rrrip. Half-squatting, with my right arm near the pen, I stopped and froze. Skin on my right knee peeked through the faded blue of the pair of jeans that I love. I closed my eyes: five years? Has it been that long?

We, all of us, are dealt in life a hand of cards: we either play it well or fold at the slightest bluff. We, some of us at least, are given clothes to wear, and still we choose to buy that single pair of jeans, and we wear it to death.

We stand here today to remember, nay, to celebrate the life of an apparel that has served its high and noble purpose well. Like an actor in a play dealt only with a minor role, it has nonetheless played its role to the teeth.

Old pair of blue, you have borne life well.

the point

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

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

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

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

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