sairo in a skirt

special request

2008-04-21T22:41:00.003+08:00

A former student from my very first year of teaching asked about my essay "How to Deal with Dying." It won third prize in the 2007 Free Press Awards, tied with a piece by Chari Lucero. I remember I promised relatives I'd give them a copy. So, friends and relatives, here it is.

How to Deal with Dying

Step 1: Do Some Post-Lunch Wallowing
Where: Your Grandmother’s Kitchen
When: 11 February 2000

You know you’re dying when you find a lump the size of a bean in your left breast, a small hard thing where your heartbeat should be. You found it there a couple of days ago, moving around like a pebble under the pressure of your searching fingertips. At first, you don’t believe it. And so you probe again and again, hoping every time you sink a finger into flesh that you would feel nothing. That you just imagined it. But twenty minutes later, your breast is tender, there are red crescent marks on your skin, and the lump is still there. Rock solid. A fact.

So you’re put under strict observation and a vegetarian diet that may help the growth to subside. But although you have faith in the healing powers of your stepmother and in Zen macrobiotics, you don’t feel any better. You know there’s still a big chance you might need an operation. The Big Chop-Chop. Slice you up like a fillet, pluck out the offending mass and sew you up to look like The Breast of The Bride of Frankenstein. You remind yourself that you will have to pay someone big money for the privilege of having all that inflicted on you.

Wow. Cancer. It’s hard enough being a wannabe writer in a country that doesn’t speak, let alone read, the language you write in. Now you have the Big C to deal with. The great-great-grandmother of all life-threatening diseases. It isn’t enough that you had quit your web design job in Ortigas just a month ago. And that you’re living on meager savings rapidly approaching bankruptcy levels. And that you’re not yet over getting dumped a week after your birthday by an idiot whom you had been planning to dump six months before but couldn’t – out of rocketing hormones and misguided pity. The good doctor has also told you to stay away from stressful activities. This bit of wallowing is giving you a fair amount of that.

So you try to calm down and think happy thoughts. You fail. You remember that it’s been months since you’ve written anything that passed the test of the Cold Harsh Clarity of Morning. Despite all the interesting nervous-breakdown-inducing things that keep happening, you can't seem to translate anything into good writing. So you go into the kitchen and make yourself a cup of hot chocolate, Mexican style. As you take out the tablea, the soymilk, vanilla essence, cinnamon and chili powder, you tell yourself that manual labor gets the creative juices flowing. But you don’t fool yourself.

You had spent the previous week systematically disinfecting your apartment in the hope of inviting a Muse, any Muse, into your writing life. All you got out of it was a spic-and-span house and a headache from staring at a flickering computer screen. You decide to focus on making your drink, whisking vigorously at the chocolate tableas you had dropped into a bit of simmering water. When it turns a smooth glossy dark brown, you whisk in the soymilk, vanilla, cinnamon and chili. You pour some into a cup, purse your lips and blow cool air over the liquid surface. The froth retreats under your breath, then floats back. It is dark, bitter, sweet, with a hint of sourness that stays at the back of your throat. Thick as mud. Just like your life.

You look inside your grandmother’s fridge and shudder. Food products pumped up with growth hormones—cheese and eggs, chicken and pork—all engineered to cause lumps to appear all over your body. You want to shout, to let your voice reverberate through the almost empty house like the voice of an ascetic carried by the wind across a red desert: Repent! The end is at hand! Instead, you close the refrigerator door. You sigh and realize your fingers are again pressing against the side of your left breast. You feel nothing. No lump near the bone where a cleavage ought to be. You press again, this time a little harder. You feel it there, and imagine it taking root beside your heart.

Step 2: Soak Up Some Family History
Where: Your Grandmother’s Dining Table
Date: 18 February 2000

It helps a lot to be visiting Lola Santa these days. Here's someone a lot more miserable than you are. Faced with a sad old lady with a big scary suppurating wound on her left foot, your self-involvement and your problems amount to just a hill of bean-sized breast lumps in this crazy world. She's bitter and sad about a lot of things. You decide to cheer her up by getting her started on how things were when she was a conceited tomboy with half of Laoag City's eligible bachelors chasing after her.

A portrait of a much younger Santa Pascua Batoon hangs on your grandmother’s bedroom wall. You can just barely see it through the half-open door from your place at the dining table. For some reason, it had always frightened you as a child. Looking at it now, you find nothing in it that should remotely evoke fear: an oval-faced young woman smiling impishly at someone behind the painter’s left shoulder. In the painting, she is wearing pink silk and pearls, her hair billowing behind her like a dark cloud, glamorous at eighteen going on thirty.

When you were six, you remember asking her if she got tired posing for the portrait. In reply, she showed you the black and white studio photo on which the painter based his watercolor strokes. You felt a strange disappointment when you first saw that photo because there her dress was cotton and had broad black stripes. In the studio on that sweltering 1930s Laoag afternoon, there were no pearls around her neck and she wasn’t smiling. It is the same small framed photograph Lola has asked you to place on her headboard earlier this morning. Could be a trick of the light but now you think the ornate silver frame looks too small for the woman inside. Her elegantly penciled brows hint at impatience, the flaring nostrils hide the beginnings of suffocation.

Since yesterday, your grandmother has insisted that ripe mango mashed with rice is the only thing she can and will eat. When she looks as angry as she does in the photo, you know better than to contradict her. Between bites of the sticky yellow stuff, her scraggly eyebrows waggling like geriatric caterpillars, Lola tells you that this exact same photo was at one time displayed in all the city shops Up North, in Laoag. The photo studio wanted to show off this newfangled technique called backlighting. It made her dark mane blaze with movie star electricity.

After seeing Lola gumming her mango lunch, her bird-bones quivering to reach a glass of water, you find it hard to imagine that this exact same body could once throw heavy projectiles at young men with ease. She had been an athlete at the Normal School before The War. Track and field, javelin and discus throwing kept her trim and shapely. You aren’t surprised that so many guys went for her. In all her pre-war photographs, hers always is the most beautiful face, and she always wears the most blinding smile.

These days, Lola Santa seems happiest when talking about her exploits as a maldita heartbreaker. She tells you of one particular guy who she says looked just like your idiot ex ("quite tall with curly-curly hair and very long kulotikot eyelashes"). Lola’s pre-war beau used to gather small hard green mangoes every morning, around which he’d wrap fevered love letters written the night before. At lunchtime, knowing she'd be there, he would toss these little bundles through the open window of Lola’s sala. All this effort, even if he knew that the feisty Santa kept a special basket of rocks to throw at him. She would throw back the green mango missiles as she chased him down the street, shouting Ilocano curses and shaking her fist the whole time.

Coming home from school, Lola would ride a calesa and Mr. Eyelashes would run alongside grinning, trying to catch her eye. One time, this loco nga lalaki even has the audacity to jump into the rushing calesa and sit beside her, batting his lashes. Lola, of course, looks the other way, pretends not to see him. Enchanted by her profile, he doesn't see her fist coming, only feels something solid smash into his chin. It is enough to knock him out of the carriage and onto the street. She never looks back. She doesn’t tell you any other stories about that brash young man. Maybe he died in The War.

Step 3: Don’t Let Them See You Cry
Where: Your Grandmother’s Wake
When: 23 February 2000

Your Lola dies at around 7 AM yesterday morning. The night before, she complains that she can’t eat. To avoid another bout of hypoglycemia, she asks you to open a can of sweet chocolate liquid. You are surprised that she gulps down everything in seconds, even slurping in the last drops before going to bed. You are roused early next morning by the maid. Lola cannot breathe, you need to call a doctor. The maid stands beside the bed, wringing her hands. Your aunt and your Ninang take turns thumping her chest, giving her CPR. You are afraid the exertions will collapse her ribcage. It is just a few minutes past 6 AM.

You can still see your grandmother heaving in the middle of her queen-sized bed. The sweat-soaked sheets like a parody of childbirth. Her hands are rough, dry like broken twigs. They are deathly cold. She convulses, tears in her glaucoma-cloudy eyes. She tries praying the 23rd Psalm but cannot get past the first line: “The Lord is my Shepherd... Apo Dios! Narigat ti matayen!” She wonders why it is so difficult to die. Your Ninang starts reading the Psalm from a leather-bound Bible. It feels too much like her last rites. You don't want to believe she is about to go. Someone takes Lola's hand from yours, feels her pulse.

Through the doctor’s gibberish, you manage to understand that her pulse is either very weak or has stopped. You notice that your Ninang has been crying. Your aunt has been quiet the whole time. They manage to revive her once or twice. But what is left of your grandmother is no longer lucid. Just a pair of unseeing eyes and faint moaning. Her death mask beginning to take shape. Finally, the effort of living becomes too much for her. She stops breathing.

It is only then that you realize a person dies little by little, in increments measured by the unmaking of molecules. Hands and feet are the first to go, being farthest from the heart. After this, death creeps slowly and silently, inward and upward, until all that is left is a cold mass of hardening cells. A routine check by the doctor shows that her blood sugar had shot up to 500 during the night. Apparently, too much sugar in the blood produces acids that make it painful and difficult to breathe. The doctor says it was acidosis that killed her. You will always think it is something else.

As you sit huddled on the pew closest to the casket, you can feel people looking at you. They are wondering why they don't see you cry. In this most spartan Presbyterian church, you are not expected to beat your chest, tear your hair out, or jump onto the coffin. But your quiet proves unnerving to a congregation used to seeing a trickle or two dabbed away discreetly with a cotton hanky. With the way your aunts orchestrated the program, you are close to doing just that. But you stop yourself. The entire clan has metamorphosed into a family of penguins decked out in white tops and black pants. You think it too silly for tears. Then you hear your cousin draw his bow across the strings. He begins to play Brahms' lullaby on his violin, a song Lola had hummed through the years as she put each of her grandchildren to sleep. This time you cannot stop yourself. You grab a tissue and run out of church.

Step 4: Look Through Your Inheritance
Where: Your Grandmother's Living Room
When: 11 March 2000

You think you got your inheritance early when you turned eighteen and was diagnosed borderline diabetic. It appears that is just the first installment. You find out yesterday that both great-grandmothers on your father’s side died of some cancer, ovarian or breast. The little growth you are cultivating in your left breast is actual testament to the endurance of family legacy.

You try out a pair of Japanese-style chopsticks at lunch today. You find them more difficult to use than the chunkier Chinese-style wood chopsticks. Yours are slick with lacquer, burgundy with delicate tapered ends. Inlaid with what you think is mother of pearl, they are part of your inheritance from Lola. You do not expect to get any of your grandmother's antique jewelry. Even if you want to, all that has been tossed out with the garbage a few years ago by your balikbayan aunt home for Christmas from Canada.

How it happens: Lola keeps all her pre-war jewelry in little dark medicine bottles. Tita Cherry decides to spend a post-Christmas December afternoon cleaning out Lola's closet and throws away most of the bottles of expired medicine. The ones that she does leave untouched in the closet turn out to contain the real expired medicine. Your aunt spends the rest of her vacation shuffling around the house with swollen eyes, peering hopefully into wastebaskets. Until today, she cannot forgive herself for throwing away what could have been a fabulous inheritance for all female Roldans to come.

There is a heavy necklace in bright yellow gold with a big letter S that is supposed to have been yours. You are six when your grandmother lets you hold it for the first time. It is heavy with gems that form the curves of the S, and bordered by small sparkling diamanté. It was the first time you felt glad to have been named Sandra, and not Michelle or Christine like all your other friends in kindergarten. Now you picture in your mind those precious little bottles being shattered from the weight of hundreds of tons of wet ripe garbage. You imagine the twinkling stones and gleaming metals drowning in unnamable cocktails of household and industrial chemical waste.

So all you get is a lacy sequined blouse circa 1960 that Lola used to wear when performing with her rondalla group. You lay it out on the sofa with the rest of your stash. There is also a beaded sequined evening purse that you try (but fail) to get dry-cleaned this afternoon. You get some pieces of lace tatted by Lola which you plan to stitch onto a nice sleeveless blouse you have yet to buy. You also get a broken Chinese sandalwood fan that Lola never got to use. She always set aside her nice things for when there's a special occasion or for "next time," which is how she calls the future.

Step 5: When You can’t Deal, Space Out
Where: In Front of Your Computer
When: 18 March 2000

You reach a new level of desperation. If there’s a face product called Hope in a Jar, why isn’t Health by Homepage downloadable from a friendly neighborhood website? You want to fix yourself but can't figure out where to start. You are tired of being this depressive hermit type who watches cooking shows all day on cable television. So you lurk through the Internet looking for answers. You go to a search engine but can’t think of a word to guide you. You type LUMP. Your dialup connection blinks into action and begins the slow search for LUMPs throughout the electronic realm.

Waiting for the results to appear, you imagine an appalling scene. You picture yourself five months from now looking the way your grandmother did right before she died. Loose scaly skin, wobbly teeth, desiccated hair, sharp bones poking out from everywhere. The only healthy, pulsing, living thing recognizable in you would be your lovely little tumor, by then a distended balloon of flesh protruding from the left side of your chest. It is true the human body can survive even under the most extreme conditions. It may really be true that left alone, some very unhealthy anatomies will find it most difficult to die.

Your grandmother knew what she wanted and what to do about it. She fed on sweet mangoes and drank chocolate flavored drinks until her blood sugar shot up to five hundred. She died sweet as all the spun sugar desserts you are no longer allowed to eat. You imagine the rest of your life. No ice cream, no cheesecake, no more dense dark bittersweet chocolate. Sometimes you get nightmares of gnawing painfully on your own bloodied arm to stave off the sugar pangs wavering over your tongue. You are too tired to read. You think this is all just about having nothing to look forward to. Then you realize it is the same thing that killed your grandmother. You feel hopeless. You log off.

Step 6: Invent Good Memories If You Don’t Have Any
Where: Your Grandmother's Closet
When: 22 March 2000

She always keeps the closet locked. You know she trusts you if she asks for help looking for something or another in her closet. Being the chosen one feels both like an honor and a nuisance because she would always forget where she had hidden the key. Is it behind the door or under the mattress? Sometimes you find it lurking in her coffee cup. Now you find it masquerading as a bookmark in the leather-bound Bible given to you after she died.

There were times when Lola felt she needed to read a Citadel Church worship service program circa 1991 because she liked that particular Scripture reading. By this time, she could no longer make the trip from the house on Bugallon Street in Project 4 to Citadel on Katipunan Road in front of Blue Ridge village. The church program would turn up only after digging through several mildewed leather handbags that invariably held loose change, broken fans, used toothpicks and crumpled tissue paper. You are surprised to find there photos of unknown people taken in the 1940s, all smudged with broken coral-red Revlon lipsticks that smell strongly of chemicals.

Usually, the thing she needed would just be a blanket in an overhead compartment that was too high for her to reach. You remember her telling you, as you dragged a chair before the closet’s open doors, that she used to be the tallest in school at five feet, four inches. Even taller when she wore heels with those stiff bell-like skirts with the petticoats. You remember groping through the bunched masses of bed linen while she talked about how it was an effort to keep her stocking seams straight when she was all dolled up like that, with silk cabbage roses on her party dresses. You still a shiver of fear that you, standing now at five feet, four inches, might also end up feeling as shrunken and unloved as the old woman looking up at you from the bed.

The blanket she wanted was always one of those big warm cotton things woven in La Union. She would send these by pao-it to Laoag to be laundered in the cold waters of the karayan. The blankets always come back stiff as cardboard and rough with starch. You always wondered how she could sleep at night without getting hurt. One time, she told you that as a child, she once threw a very heavy solid gold bracelet into that same river. It was ugly because it looked like a man’s bracelet, something a barbarian would wear. You asked why she could afford to throw away such a valuable thing. She laughed, saying that her father once owned huge tracts of land in Ilocos and Isabela, as far as the eye could see. She never talked about your great-grandfather after that, or how they managed to lose everything.

Your grandmother never threw things away. Her aqua-blue polyester public school teacher’s uniform hung in her closet twenty years after she retired. Your earliest memory of Lola was when she started teaching you how to read. She would sit beside you afternoons at the dining table wearing that blue polyester dress. Together, you would go over those mimeographed leaflets that read ‘Ba Be Bi Bo Bu.’ Slowly, laboriously, you went through each sheet, wondering if there was a secret message behind the squiggly figures and repeated vowel sounds. Eventually, you figured out they meant nothing and got bored with the routine. But you were too scared to tell Lola you wanted the lessons to stop. It just wasn’t done.

The aqua blue dress hangs in the closet beside a pair of bell bottoms the color of ripe eggplants on acid, a shade straight out of Sesame Street’s 1970s psychedelic cartoons—a bright purple that hurt your eyes if you look at it for too long. The only time you saw Lola Santa wearing those pants was in a photo. She is sitting in the garden surrounded by her pink bromeliad orchids and her beloved bonsai. Her curly hair is cropped short. There is a tiny baby in her arms, it could be your older brother. She looks down softly at her first grandchild. She smiles.

You see that picture again recently, searching through photo albums, looking for a certain plant with dark glossy leaves and pink flowers that no longer grows in the garden outside. As a child, when you still visited your grandparents every weekend, you used to pick a single trumpet-shaped flower the moment you arrived. You would look at the furry yellow insides before tucking it behind your ear, inhaling its scent of ripe bananas. Today, in this bright room, you look at the photo of Lola Santa and the baby in her arms. She is humming Brahms’ lullaby. You want to believe that the baby smiling in her sleep is you.

coming soon

2008-01-31T18:52:00.000+08:00

my submission for the soon-to-be-brilliant anthology Coming Soon, edited by kimi, egay, and chingbee. sana matanggap. heh heh.

Some Facts You Remember From Ten Years Ago
674 words

Everyone knows blood is a fluid that’s 55% plasma. That is, it’s water—with a lot of proteins, salts and other stuff dissolved in it. Hence, the lipsmacking salty taste much loved by vampires. The other 45% is made up of red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets floating around merrily in that clear plasma. What gives blood its iconic bright red color is the hemoglobin, which being iron-rich also explains that surprising metallic tang you detect when your tongue seeks out a tiny ragged cut on your lower lip, slightly left of center, in the fleshy part where he bit you.

The whole thing actually took less time (6 minutes, 48 seconds) than you thought (an hour at the very least). And it hurt so much more than you’d expected. But of course you knew about the pain involved—never mind what romance novels say about hearing violins and/or trumpets and/or the music of the spheres in the background—you’re not that dumb. You know that when something fairly large and rigid and bent slightly to the right forces itself into a space too tight even for a cute pink Playtex tampon with the diameter of a #2 Mongol pencil, something’s gotta give.

And that something is called a hymen. It’s a fold of mucous membrane much like the inside of your cheek. Said fold partly covers the external vaginal covering, sort of like your vagina’s way of playing peekaboo. In many cultures, it is physical evidence of chastity, the body’s rather flimsy way of keeping the enemy at the gate. Your gynecologist can tell you that hymens come in three popular shapes: (a) crescentic, with the widest part at the bottom and nothing on top; (b) annular, or ring-around-the-opening; and (c) redundant, with folds which may cause it to protrude like a third set of labia. In rare cases, the hymen is imperforate, stretched like a drum across and perfectly sealing the opening, requiring surgery to allow the menses to flow out. But you don’t have a gynecologist because you never actually needed one. Whatever form your hymen had been is now immaterial.

What’s clear is that it got torn at the exact moment that he was holding you down, both your thin bony wrists held above your head by his right hand and you were saying no no no no nnnmmfff muffled against his left palm, which smelled like those Marlboro Reds he chainsmoked at the rate of two packs a day. You tried to kick and/or push him off you but you just couldn’t move. Then again, he was significantly heavier at 168 lb to your 94. And besides, even your legs were pinned down and stretched wide open. And even if you could scream, there was no one else to hear you that night in his dark apartment along Esteban Abada in Katipunan. There really was nothing you could do.

But enough of that. Let’s talk about viscosity. Smart people say it is a fluid’s measure of resistance to being deformed by either shear or extensional stress, or resistance to flow. Normal people, however, percieve it simply as the thickness or thinness of a fluid. Either way, it’s not always easy to measure viscosity because some fluids are Newtonian (viscosity dependent on temperature but not on shear rate or time), some are not (opposite of previous).

Viscosity is measured in centipoise (cps), with water as the standard at 1 cps. Pork lard is between one to two million cps (extremely thick, almost solid) while honey is around 3,000 cps (quite oozy). Blood is, yes, thicker than water but not by much at only 10 cps. And so you wonder at the rate the blood is flowing from the inside of your thigh, down to your leg and onto the yellow tile floor of the shower. For a few seconds, you watch as your blood mixes with water: how the bright red spreads in slow wispy circles into the clear, into the wet. How it flows away from you. How it disappears.

Food and More Food

2007-12-28T16:24:00.000+08:00

got this meme from the love of my life (paul, not kitty). am taking time off my busy christmas vacation to stay all day at gateway to shop (made lots of money off the naughty-and-nice christmas cupcake business gina & i had) and enjoy the free wifi. the signal is strongest on the 3rd and 4th floors but from figaro (where i was earlier) and from mandarin oriental cafe (where i am now), it's pretty good too.

the lack of posting here shows me just how insanely busy i've been this second semester. am hoping the rest of the sem will be a little more kinder to my nerves and my eyebags. i'm hoping i'm wrong but methinks i've only had 3 full nights of sleep this second semester. boo hoo. but i did earn more money. yay. but overall, i've had to deal with more dullards. boo. but in terms of food finds and takaw-mata adventures, the 2nd half of 2007 has been fabulous. the polymath and i plan to end the year with lunch at cafe ysabel. yehehey.

and but so... the meme:

What were you cooking/baking ten years ago?
shoot. i honestly don't remember. in 1997, i had yet to take control of the kitchen so i guess i wasn't cooking much back then. i remember much more clearly the culinary disasters that marby and i had circa 1993 involving excessive cornstarch, bad strawberry wine from baguio, and cream (mercifully, not all in the same dish).

What were you cooking/baking one year ago?
again, i don't remember. i must have baked something for christmas to give away to friends and relatives since i'm much too cheap now to go shopping for individual gifts. ooh, i do remember The Great Brownie Bake-Off. i needed to write something for my creative nonfiction class under neil garcia so i decided to compare the brownie recipes of alston brown (good eats), irma rombauer (joy of cooking), and nigella lawson (domestic goddess). i followed their recipes and served up samples during my workshop session to bribe my classmates as well as get flavor comments for the ending of my essay. kasi, when you bake 3 different batches of brownies in one day, it becomes hard to tell them apart after a while. the domestic goddess won, of course, for subtlety and best cleavage.

Five snacks you enjoy:
1) real camembert made from unpasteurized milk
2) kwek-kwek from UP
3) cheetos, especially the jalapeno variant
4) instant kimchi ramyon in a paper bowl (my korea survival food)
5) cold buckwheat noodles with zarusoba sauce from a bottle and fake wasabi

Five recipes you know by heart:
1) three variants of banana muffins (kahlua, rhum, and orange-splenda)
2) mixed dal soup (lots of ground and fresh coriander)
3) morocco-inspired ratatouille (lots of paprika)
4) bahala-na laksa (made with ho fan and whatever's in the fridge)
5) bahala-na pasta (again, using whatever's about to rot in the fridge)

Five culinary luxuries you would indulge in if you were a millionaire:
1) my very own kitchen stadium
2) monthly takaw-mata sessions abroad
3) become a cheese affineur in france
4) go to japan and have an edo-style sushi meal
5) foreswear vegetarianism and eat my own weight in jamon iberico

Five foods you love to cook/bake:
1) banana bread
2) brownies
3) soft-boiled eggs
4) chicken neck adobo and boiled pork bones for kitty
5) anything that will make the polymath happy

Five foods you cannot/will not eat:
1) people (they're filthy!)
2) dogs (because they constantly lick their nethers)
3) cats (siomiao)
4) rats/field mice (there are so many other things to eat, like bugs)
5) chicken heads (i prefer my food not to stare at me)

Five favorite culinary toys:
1) my calphalon pans (soooo pretty)
2) this little italian-made wooden peppermill i bought years ago
3) my microplanes (haven't used them yet, just like looking at em)
4) all my silicone bakeware and cookware
5) wooden spoons (just can't cook without them)

Five dishes on your ‘last meal’ menu:
1) cheese omelette made perfectly by the polymath
2) oysters in butter and garlic by tita daphne
3) perfectly ripe raw milk camembert with crisp grapes
4) one of those mini baguettes freshly baked in the vietnamese refugee village in the outskirts of puerto princesa, palawan
5) one of those ginormous plate-sized crabs papa used to get from the south when we were in grade school, heavy with bright orange aligue, with pinakurat vinegar as dipping sauce

Five happy food memories:
1) that first risotto the polymath and i cooked together, with really fat prawns imported from project 4 (courtesy of tita daphne's largesse). this, like most of our best meals, was the result of cooking-on-the-fly and pure greed. i remember we put the prawn heads in a blender with some hot water and actually giggled/groaned when we saw the mush turn bright orange from the fat.
2) eating lamb vindaloo and palak paneer for the first time with tenzin and kalinga at shankaranthi restaurant near crimson house in jegi-dong. the first of many many good meals prepared by ramu the pakistani cook and eaten with our hands (a huge no-no in korea). despite occasionally bumping into the crazy kazakh museum curator there, shankaranthi became one of our favorite haunts. it was dark, musty, almost hermetically sealed (read: bad ventilation) and sometimes smelled like cockroaches but we loved it dearly.
3) that dinner with eung hwa at mad for garlic restaurant near coex mall. as the name suggests, everybloodything on the menu (except for the wine, thank goodness) had garlic. my favorite appetizer of all time would be their roasted garlic fondue. how to eat it: squeeze out squishy cloves of whole roasted garlic on warm crusty baguette slices, dip into boozy gruyere-and-emmental fondue, and cram the lot into your mouth. try not to die of happiness.
4) the sagada picnic series with the polymath. honestly, this one deserves its very own blog post. even if it happened way back in april, i still feel happy remembering even just occasional minor details (the wine cork that refused to yield, chef aklay's magical quiche, the bread studded with nuggets of smoky etag, the macaroni halo-halo, the old people rehearsing their gong dance outside the episcopal church, dodging cow patties that dotted the baseball diamond, the random baked stuff bought from the co-op). i'm gonna cheat and also include here that first meal we had at the log cabin--a haven after walking through town in the miserable rain. we ate in the kitchen, or more precisely at the table by the kitchen. the perfect meal.
5) tasting spring food for the first time on a rooftop restaurant at ssamzi market (the open plan building/art gallery/shop complex) overlooking busy touristy insadong. it was part of one of the walking tours we had for the 1st seoul young writers festival. eating fresh sprout soup and cool sesame-seaweed salad with alejandra costamagna right after a visit to a knife gallery courtesy of the korean novelist whose name i can never remember is one of my top korea memories.

may 2008 be even yummier! woohoo!

the night before the first kiss

2007-09-25T22:21:00.000+08:00

exactly one year ago, i was in my room in seoul doing some last-minute fiddling with my luggage. it's almost midnight there right now. i had stripped my room bare, almost exactly as it had looked when i moved in six months before, just filthier.

and this time last year, i was on the way home from tenzin and kalinga's new apartment somewhere in jongno. i almost missed the last bus back to anam because i gave a last impulsive hug to tenzin. good thing my friend ferdie was there; he called out to me seconds before the door swooshed closed and i had to run up the steps just before the bus lurched and started its slow way across the city, until the only thing i could see of tenz were the neon lights of jongno's bars and nurebangs bouncing off his glasses.

so tomorrow, the polymath and i will be celebrating that first awkward kiss at the airport, done lots of teeth banging and noses getting in the way, and an eye on the lookout for my dad who was late picking me up. "celebrating" for us basically involves cooking and eating. haha. ha. not sure yet what dinner will be though. maybe some vegetable risotto. i wonder if it's possible to make a guinness sorbet or granita. hmmm...will be fiddling with the ice cream maker again tomorrow.

yay.

saved from the wrecking ball

2007-09-01T05:00:00.001+08:00

so i recently revised this story that's been in suspended animation because the book project i wrote it for seems dead in the water. so i decided to revive it and see if it can be turned into a modern fable of sorts for another anthology. go see for yourself. and do let me know if it's any good.

The Safe House
Words: 2,125

From the street, it is just one box among many. Beneath red clay roof tiles baking uniformly in the sweltering noon, the building’s grey concrete face stares out impassively in straight lines and angles. Its walls are high and wide, as good walls should be. A four-storey building, with four units to a floor. At dusk, the square glass windows glitter like the compound eyes of insects, revealing little of what happens inside. There is not much else to see.

And so this house is in every way identical to the thirty-odd other buildings nestled within the gates of this complex. It is the First Lady’s pride and joy, a housing project designed for genteel middle class living. There is a clubhouse, a swimming pool, a tennis court. A few residents drive luxury cars. Neighbors walk purebred dogs in the morning. Trees shade the narrow paths and the flowering hedges that border each building give the neighborhood a hushed, cozy feel. It is easy to get lost there.

But those who need to come here know what to look for—the swinging gate, the twisting butterfly tree, the cyclone-wire fence. A curtained window glows with the yellow light of a lamp perpetually left on. Visitors count the steps on each flight of stairs. They do not stumble in the dark. They know which door will be opened to them, day or night. They will be fed, sometimes given money. Wounds will be treated, bandages changed. They carry nothing—no books, bags or papers. What they do bring is locked inside their heads, the safest of places. They arrive one at a time, or in couples, over a span of several hours. They are careful not to attract attention. They listen for the reassuring yelps of squabbling children before they raise their hands to knock.

It is 1982. The girl who lives here does not care too much for the people who visit. She is five. Two uncles and an aunt dropped by the other day. Three aunts and two uncles slept over the night before. It is impossible to remember all of them. There are too many names, too many faces. And they all look the same—too tall, too old, too serious, too many. They surround the small dining table, the yellow lamp above throwing and tilting shadows against freshly-painted cream walls.

They crowd the already cramped living room with their books and papers, hissing at her to keep quiet, they are Talking About Important Things. So she keeps quiet. The flock of new relatives recedes into the background as she fights with her brother over who gets to sit closer to the television. It is tuned in to Sesame Street on Channel 9. The small black and white screen makes Ernie and Bert shiver and glow like ghosts. Most of these visitors she will never see again. If she does, she will probably not remember them.

She wakes up one night. Through the thin walls, she hears the visitors arguing. She can easily pick out an uncle’s voice, rumbling through the dark like thunder. He is one of her newer relatives, having arrived only that morning. All grownups look tall but this new uncle is a giant who towers over everyone else. His big feet look pale in their slippers, a band-aid where each toenail should have been. He never takes off his dark glasses, not even at night. She wonders if he can see in the dark. Maybe he has laser vision like Superman. Or maybe like a pirate, he has only one eye. She presses her ear against the wall. If she closes her eyes and listens carefully, she can make out the words: sundalo, kasama, talahib. The last word she hears clearly is katawan. The visitors are now quiet but still she cannot sleep. From the living room, there are sounds like small animals crying.

She comes home from school the next day to see the visitors crowded around the television. She wants to change the channel, catch the afternoon installment of Sesame Street but they wave her away. The grownups are all quiet. Something is different. Like something is about to explode. So she stays away, peering at them from under the dining table. On the TV screen is the President, his face glowing blue and wrinkly like an old monkey’s. His voice wavers in the afternoon air, sharp and high like the sound of something breaking. The room erupts in a volley of curses: Humanda ka na, Makoy! Mamatay ka! Pinapatay mo asawa ko! Mamatay ka! Putangina ka! Humanda ka, papatayin din kita! The girl watches quietly from under the table. She is trying very hard not to blink.

It is 1983. They come more often now. They begin to treat the apartment like their own house. They hold meetings under the guise of children’s parties. Every week, someone’s son or daughter has a birthday. The girl and her brother often make a game of sitting on the limp balloons always floating an inch from the floor. The small explosions like guns going off. She wonders why her mother serves the visitors dusty beer bottles that are never opened.

She is surprised to see the grownups playing make-believe out on the balcony. Her new uncles pretend to drink from the unopened bottles and begin a Laughing Game. Whoever laughs loudest wins. She thinks her mother plays the game badly because instead of joining in, she always finds her mother crying quietly in the kitchen. Sometimes the girl sits beside her mother on the floor, listening to words she doesn’t really understand: underground, revolution, taxes, bills. She plays with her mother’s hair quietly while the men on the balcony continue their game. When she falls asleep, they are still laughing.

The mother leaves the house soon after. She will never return. The two children now spend most afternoons playing with their neighbors. After an hour of hide-and-seek, the girl comes home one day to find the small apartment even smaller. Something heavy hangs in the air like smoke. Dolls and crayons and storybooks fight for space with plans and papers piled on the tables. Once, she finds a drawing of a triangle and recognizes a word: class. She thinks of typhoons and no classes.

The visitors keep reading from a small red book, which they hide under their clothes when she approaches. She tries to see why they like it so much. Maybe it also has good pictures like the new books her father brought home from China. Her favorite is about different animals working together to build a new bridge after the river had swallowed the old one. She sneaks a look over their shoulders and sees a picture of a fat Chinese man wearing a cap. Spiky shapes run from the top to the bottom of the page. She walks away disappointed. She sits in the balcony and reads another Chinese picture book. It is about a girl who cuts her hair to help save her village. The title is Mine Warfare.

It is 1984. The father is arrested right outside their house. It happens one August afternoon, with all the neighbors watching. They look at the uniformed men with cropped hair and shiny boots. Guns bulging under their clothes. Everyone is quiet, afraid to make a sound. The handcuffs shine like silver in the sun. When the soldiers drive away, the murmuring begins. Words like insects escaping from cupped hands. It grows louder and fills the sky. It is like this whenever disaster happens. When a fire devours a house two streets away, people come out to stand on their balconies. Everyone points at the pillar of smoke rising from the horizon.

This is the year she and her brother come to live with their grandparents, having no parents to care for them at home. The grandparents tell them a story of lovebirds: Soldiers troop into their house one summer day in 1974. Yes, hija, this same house. Muddy boots on the bridge, guns poking through the water lilies on the fishpond. They are looking for guns and papers, ready to destroy the house. Before the colonel can give his order, they see The Aviary. A small sunlit room with a hundred lovebirds twittering inside. A rainbow of colors. Eyes like tiny glass beads. One soldier opens the aviary door, releases a flurry of wings and feathers. Where are they now? The grandparents say the birds are gone, eaten by a wayward cat. But as you can see, the soldiers are still here. The two children watch them at their father’s court trials. A soldier waves a gun, says it is their father’s. He stutters while explaining why the gun has his own name on it.

They visit her father in his new house in Camp Crame. It is a long walk from the gate, past wide green lawns. In the hot sun, everything looks green. There are soldiers everywhere. Papa lives in that long low building under the armpit of the big gymnasium. Because the girl can write her name, the guards make her sign the big notebooks. She writes her name so many times, the S gets tired and curls on its side to sleep. She enters a maze the size of a basketball court, with wire barriers making her turn left, right, left, right. Barbed wire forms a dense jungle around the detention center. She meets other children there. On weekends, the girl sleeps in her father’s cell. There is a double-deck bed and a chair. A noisy electric fan stirs the muggy air. There, she often gets nightmares about losing her home: She would be walking under the trees of their compound, past the row of stores, the same grey buildings. She turns a corner and finds a swamp or a rice paddy where her real house should be.

One night, she dreams of war. She comes home from school to find a blood orange sky where bedroom and living room should be. The creamy walls are gone. Broken plywood and planks swing crazily in what used to be the dining room. Nothing in the kitchen but a sea green refrigerator, paint and rust flaking off in patches as large as thumbnails. To make her home livable again, she paints it blue and pink and yellow. She knows she has to work fast. Before night falls, she has painted a sun, a moon and a star on the red floor. So she would have light. Each painted shape is big as a bed. In the dark, she curls herself over the crescent moon on the floor and waits for morning. There is no one else in the dream.

Years later, when times are different, she will think of those visitors and wonder about them. By then, she will know they aren’t relatives, were given names not their own. Although faces never really change, in a child’s fluid memory, they can take any shape. She believes that people stay alive so long as another chooses to remember them. She regrets that she cannot help those visitors even in that small way. She grows accustomed to the smiles of middle aged strangers on the street, who talk about how it was when she was this high. She learns not to mind the enforced closeness, sometimes even smiles back. But she doesn’t really know them. Though she understands the fire behind their words, she remains a stranger to their world. She has never read the little red book.

Late one night, she will hear someone knocking on the door. It is a different door now, made from solid varnished mahogany blocks. The old chocolate brown plyboard that kept them safe all those years ago has long since yielded to warp and weather. She will look through the peephole and see a face last seen fifteen years before. It is older, ravaged, but somehow the same. She will be surprised to even remember the name that goes with it. By then, the girl would know about danger, and will not know whom to trust. No house, not even this one, is safe enough.

The door will be opened a crack. He will ask about her father, she will say he no longer lives there. As expected, he will look surprised and disappointed. She may even read a flash of fear before his face wrinkles into a smile. He will apologize, step back. Before he disappears into the shadowy corridor, she will notice his worn rubber slippers, the mud caked between his toes. His heavy bag. She knows he has nowhere else to go. Still, she will close the door and push the bolt firmly into place.

what the starbucks oracle told me

2007-08-20T00:31:00.000+08:00

i don't actually go to starbucks anymore as the polymath and i would rather get our overpriced beverages at the coffee bean at trinoma. but if i were forced at gunpoint to order a starbucks drink, i would get a tall decaf cappuccino with soymilk, mainly because caffeine makes me nauseous and insomniac, and cow's milk tastes icky sometimes.

now i stumbled over a starbucks oracle which aims to tell me who i am based on my drink preference. i'll let you draw your own conclusion. the last item rings true though. har har de har.

Behold the Oracle's wisdom:

Personality type: Hippie

In addition to being a hippie, you are a hypochondriac health nut. You secretly think that your insistence on only consuming all-natural products is because you're so intelligent and well-informed; it's actually because you're a sucker. You've dabbled in Wicca or other pseudo-religions that attract morons and have changed your sexual orientation a few times this year. You probably live in California. Everyone who drinks tall decaf cappuccino soymilk should be forced to eat a McDonald's bacon cheeseburger.

Also drinks: Beverages with lots of marketing that says they're herbal and organic
Can also be found at: Whole Foods, indoor rock climbing facilities

while i'm still happy about this

2007-07-16T01:05:00.000+08:00

i finished writing a story about 2 minutes ago. it was written for the milflores anthology of flash fiction. i just emailed my entry to the editor a minute ago and i'm still feeling pretty happy about it. really hope it gets accepted. started writing the story around 7 p.m. sunday, and i finished it 1 a.m. monday. for the first time, i jumped into the writing without first knowing and seeing the whole story in my head. it's a scary approach, and i'm not sure i'll be doing that again soon.

Palm Sunday
740 words

She walks into Myeongdong Cathedral, a small wet cedar leaf in her hand. An old gentleman at the church door keeps the leaves fresh in a bucket of water, and hands them out in lieu of the customary palm fronds. Dressed in jeogori and paji, the traditional pajama-like outfits worn by monks and old people in Korea, the man greets her in English. He is the only person there to smile at her. Being the only foreigner in church, she stands out, and is mostly ignored.

Inside, the cathedral is more than half empty. The oldest church in Seoul was built in the gothic style, and remains unheated to this day. The air inside is damp and chill, the high vaulted ceiling is crowded with ghosts and echoes. The faithful are largely in their Sunday best: the men in suits, the women in traditional layers of silk reserved for special occasions. Their long coats and pashminas are their only concession to weather. Most matrons have lace veils perched like doilies over lacquered hair dyed in shades of caramel and milky tea. In their spring hanbok, the women bloom like rows of tulips, with teal, cerise, chartreuse, and mauve petals.

The mass begins with chimes and clouds of incense. An acolyte speaks from a lectern, the words ringing through the cathedral’s nave even without a microphone. As the cold seeps from the granite floor through her shoes, her socks and into the ankle bones, she realizes her mistake: the mass will be in Korean. Clearly, the English service for foreigners is being held elsewhere. Another look around confirms another suspicion: only she and a young Korean man on the pew behind her appear under fifty. With her brown skin and his fuzzy pink sweater, they are the only ones who look out of place.

The mass is in chumdemal, the formal language used to address authority figures and those of higher rank like parents, professors, middle management, and God. She knows this from the imnidas that regularly appear at the end of each sentence. This early, in her language studies, the most she can do is half-heartedly bow and mumble Annyong haseyo at anyone who pays her any attention. She doesn't understand the sermon but takes comfort in knowing that after the rumbling and the hissing, a soft imnida will be murmured at the end. Unlike the fluorescent-lit clap-intensive tambourine-and-guitar charismatic masses back in Manila, this one is a solemn affair. Every single utterance bears the weight of remorse, and the old faithful beat their breasts in a synchronized ritual that feels very pre-Vatican II.

She shivers. The thin wool sweater over her cotton blouse is no match for the damp chill that hangs in the air. The young man behind her seems uncomfortable as well. She imagines he is embarrassed. His shoes squeak each time he moves to kneel or stand along with the rest of the congregation. From the creak of leather, she knows he has dropped to his knees, like everyone else. She, on the other hand, has chosen to stay seated on the wooden pew, trying to keep warm. There is a rustle behind her, barely discernible from the murmuring all around.

A hand touches the small of her back. At first, just a fingertip tracing a few millimeters of skin between the waistband of her skirt and the hem of her sweater. Then a man’s palm, warm and rough, slides under her clothes to rest briefly on the deep curve above her hip. A moment later, it is gone. For more than an hour, she sits, then stands, then kneels. But she no longer listens for the imnidas, just waits for the unseen palm to touch her again. It never comes. A series of chimes signal the end of mass. She gathers the courage to turn and look at the man behind her. But he is gone. She walks out into the sun this early spring morning, and takes the long subway ride back to her dorm.

Years later, in her tiny Mandaluyong apartment, she will dream of a day in church. A warm hand against her skin and a man’s voice, rumbling and hissing in that language she no longer understands. She will wake up at dawn and see there is no one else in the room. As sunlight slowly filters through the curtains, she will tell herself over and over: it happened. It really happened.

an old friend

2007-07-03T10:57:00.000+08:00

exactly one week ago, i met up with an old friend, whom i had last seen at a train station in seoul last year. it was great to see him again in warmer weather and happier circumstances. we had agreed to meet in UP, which he attended the same time i did. funny how we met only last spring in seoul, when we actually had a common friend back in college.

so this was how i saw him again: i was sitting under a tree at the sunken garden, across the street from the educ building. kitty, the love of my life, was peeing and pooping and snuffling at the grass all around me. we had both just come from the vet. then i see my friend walking from the direction of vinzons hall, smiling and waving at me. it's the smile that gets me every time.

i won't bore you with details anymore. but in that one day, it was like we were back in seoul again, just talking and laughing for hours over really good food. except there was no kimchi because he wanted filipino food. he was occasionally snitty at the wait staff, just as he was in seoul, when things were served less than perfectly. and there was also the dancing, not in a bar surrounded by old drunks and working girls, but at the phil stock exchange building on ayala avenue.

it was midnight, and the place was deserted except for the janitors and security guards doing their rounds. we had been sitting there and talking about saudade, that feeling of sadness and longing that you get when you miss someone or something you really like. i got out my palm and made him listen to a madeleine peyroux cover of leonard cohen's "dance me to the end of love" which i plan to dance to at my wedding next year. i told him to listen closely to the words and i watched his feet tapping while he listened with his eyes closed.

he didn't say anything at the end of the song. he just hooked up his ipod to his ear and then to mine, pulled me to my feet and started teaching me the salsa. quick-quick-slow, quick-quick-slow. there were was a lone jogger making his way down ayala avenue, past the line of taxis waiting for passengers. the only light came from the 24-hour mcdonald's across the street. at around 1 a.m., we ran out of songs and decided to call it a night.

between the quick hug and the slam of the taxi door: "you made me happy today." i don't know when or whether i'll ever see him again. either way, it was the kind of goodbye we both needed.

a year ago

2007-06-24T22:37:00.000+08:00

exactly one year ago, i made a call that changed my life. i was sprawled on the carpet of my tiny dorm room in seoul, struck down by homesickness, despair, and other unpleasant things. in short, i was crying like heck. calling my mom didn't help. neither did calling my sister. so i called the polymath, who was the actual source of my misery. snippet of half-remembered conversation:

him: o, what's wrong?
me: (waaaaah!) ... (waaaaah!)
him: take your time...
me: i feel awful. i'm just sooooo tired.
him: ...
me: i'm tired of all these guys around me. they won't leave me alone eh.
him: ...
me: they just won't stay away. i don't want them. i want you.
him: ...
me: do you understand what i'm saying? i want you. nobody else.
him: (makes hushing sounds) don't cry. tahan na.
me: but what's it gonna be like when i get back? i'm just so, so tired...
him: it'll be fine. we'll be fine.

on hindsight, i'm slightly suspicious about what i remember. i could be making up all that. it's like something from a movie. a really bad movie. heh.

the cutest boy in the world

2007-06-21T23:42:00.001+08:00

at least, according to me. haha. ha.

eerily familiar #4 (last of the series)

2007-06-21T23:19:00.001+08:00

this time, i'll let the images speak for themselves. first, me again:

next, me with less melanin. kinda doughy, eh? and milk-fed, like veal.

and me if i'd been born to frolic on the sands of the carribean. feel irie!

eerily familiar #3

2007-06-19T20:41:00.000+08:00

here's the original photo again.

and here's how i would look as an elderly person:

don't i look fabulous? if i play my cards right (or wrong, depending on your perspective), fifty years from now, i'd be a drugged out lola tripping on painkillers. yay.

but the creepy thing about this photo: i actually resemble my paternal grandfather's sisters, especially my lola caring.

my poor sick doggie

2007-06-19T20:24:00.000+08:00

brought kitty to the vet today. she hasn't eaten in two days, spends the whole night crying and keeping me awake, and has been particularly irritable. when she bit my face last night after she snuggled into my pillow, i knew something was up.

turns out she has some serious liver problems, probably connected to some blood parasite. the vet who analyzed her blood at the UP vetmed lab said that the infection may have started some time ago from an old tick infestation.

so for the next two weeks, kitty is on a special l/d diet and has to take doxyvet antibiotics and a liver tonic. she's a really picky eater. if she doesn't take to the special diet, we'll have to confine her at the vet hospital. she's eaten a bit, and didn't spit out too much of her medicine.

really really hope she gets better. and i hope she lets me sleep tonight. i'm exhausted from all this worrying.

eerily familiar #2

2007-06-16T23:56:00.001+08:00

second installment in the face tranformer series. first we start with the original: me looking like a doof. taken sometime 2006 in a tiny dorm room. note the wayward bra strap and the pink bimpo.

i ran this photo through a face transformer website and it gets artsy all of a sudden. lookee:

so this is how i would look if i had been painted by boticelli. i dunno if it's a big improvement though. but the goof factor is definitely minimized. i would love to get a tan this lovely. and already i'm wondering if i can find this particular shade of lip gloss.

this last one would be me as painted by modigliani, which i like very much. not only do i look tragic and depressed, i also seem to have shed 40 pounds. if only losing weight were that easy.

eerily familiar #1

2007-06-16T18:58:00.000+08:00

the polymath pointed me to a cool website that transforms your face (actually, a photo) and shows how you would look if you were younger, elderly, painted by modigliani, 50% chimp, or a different race.

so, of course, i had to try it out. had fun thursday night morphing my face (actually, my photo) and got acquainted with some eerily familiar people. first posting the original here (photo taken last year in my tiny dorm room in seoul), plus how i would look had i been born han chinese.

the other transformations will be posted one at a time starting tomorrow. so come visit again, people.

first day of skool

2007-06-13T20:16:00.001+08:00

three things from today:

1) i got lost going to my first classroom (a building labeled pldt-convergent tech something). i know that sounds really really stupid but having spent exactly 1/3 of my life in up diliman, i get lost if i'm anywhere else. like makati, for example. to be honest, i get lost if i'm outside my qc haunts. tried to read the maps around and follow directions but i ended up horribly late. eek.

2) the kids seem okay. although i detected a certain smugness from the boys who grew up going to school there. not surprised. really looking forward to the intro to fiction class. science nerds--i like em already. heh.

3) but it really is a different planet over there. on hot days, my up kids cooled off with dirty ice cream from the mamang sorbetero outside fc. or with fruit shakes from casaa. at the new school, there was a BTIC frozen yogurt stand. mwehwehwe.

some alleged weirdness

2007-06-08T18:04:00.000+08:00

saw this meme on the polymath's blog, who'd stolen it from fairlycloudy, who'd stolen it from faye's extra dirty mind. felt compelled to do it even if i have other stuff to do. my brain needs a bit of downtime after three days of learning how to teach "the areneow way" (more on that some udder time).

so i'm supposed to write 6 weird things about myself. but here's my caveat: if you step back far enough to see the bigger picture, every little thing that everyone does can arguably seem weird.

1) i'm constantly talking to myself in my head, bitching about stuff, remembering stuff, planning stuff, wondering about what stuff i want to eat, read, cook. but mostly i try to remember stuff, and remembering for me is pretty much equal to reliving it. and if i happen to remember something i did or said that was particularly stupid, i find myself humming, clearing my throat or making some sudden nonsense sound. it's like a reflex. so if you see me sitting quietly (or being borderline autistic) for a long time, just listening to the yakking voice in my head, and then i suddenly make a weird sound or start humming, you know that's my way of kicking myself inside my head.

2) i like picking at my dead skin cells. if i feel one tiny hangnail on one finger, i rip it off (which occasionally results in a bloody little mess) and look at the nail beds on my other fingers to see if i have other little hangnails to rip out. sometimes when i get too lazy to give myself a foot spa, all the walking i do results in some miniature flaps of dead skin curling up from my sole. they seem to follow the tiny contours of my footprints (as opposed to fingerprints, although that weird peeling has happened on the inside of my right thumb). so i pick at em. i leave my hair alone (ie, i don't pluck them out) but i constantly fiddle with it.

3) when my dog wants to hump my leg (or sometimes, my head), i let her. and i take videos of her in action, sometimes with early U2 songs in the background. imagine this: close up of a small furry white dog, panting and humping a leg, while Bono sings "Sunday Bloody Sunday."

4) i always feel compelled to finish whatever food is in front of me. growing up, my titas always made me feel guilty about the biafra babies in africa and the starving children of negros. i used to get away with it but now it's made me kinda fat. sometimes this devolves into mindless eating--i can finish a huge bag of chips without realizing it because i get kinda hypnotized by the rhythm of chewing and the nice crunchy sounds made by teeth crushing dehyrated fried potatoes.

5) i hate it when things are not in their proper places, or not aligned, or somehow look asymmetrical. when this happens in my kitchen (usually when papa or the maid is around), it just drives my nuts. there is always a logical reason when i deliberately place an object at a specific location or position it in a certain way. and i really hate when people don't realize the implications of my arrangements and mess everything up. uhm, this is a disease, no?

6) i feel truly depressed and subhuman when i'm hungry. and i mean depressed in a wallowing-in-self pity kind of way. but the moment i eat something to end the hunger pangs, it feels so good everything feels right with the world and i'm thankful i can't do cartwheels because that would be very embarrassing. imagine doing cartwheels in front of the fishball vendor. sheesh.

ice cream update

2007-06-02T02:32:00.001+08:00

i had problems with the last batch of ice cream i made. the texture was kinda weird. nice when perfectly frozen but melts horridly, halfway between watery and nubbly. the only thing it had going for it were the divine chopped chocolate chunklets i had mixed into the softly churned ice cream.

but of course, i had to fiddle with it. so i melted it all down at the stovetop. gently, as to avoid boiling the cream. then i whisked into it four beaten egg yolks, to give it a richer consistency. i like how yolks smooth things out. putting in the whites might have turned it lumpy. couldn't risk that.

after 10 minutes over a low fire, the coffee cream and chocolate chunks melted into a lovely mocha custard. i let it cool on the table and left for galleria. the problem started when i asked my brother to put the custard in the fridge once it reached room temp. the damn thing thickened and set, of course. that would have been perfect if i had wanted pudding. but a disaster for ice cream.

so i warmed up a little milk and thinned out the custard. thankfully, loosened up but stayed cold enough for immediate churning. i wish i could say at this point that it's now finally perfect. except that the only milk in the house this evening was the gross evaporated kind (bought by kuya) that comes in a little tetrabrik. so, okay: the texture is now smooth and dense. but, dammit, the flavor is a little off.

argh.

but i must say... i know what to do next time. so i won't forget, here are 2 recipes for ice cream:

Mocha Chip Ice Cream

2 cups cream
2 cups soymilk
3/4 cup sugar or splenda
4 egg yolks
4 tablespoons instant coffee
1 cup chocolate chips or chunks

heat cream, soymilk, & splenda in big saucepan over low fire. avoid boiling. add coffee powder & mix again. beat egg yolks to death. temper yolks with half cup of coffee cream then whisk slowly into saucepan. heat for 8 to 10 mins till thick-ish or spoon-coatish. cool to room temp. chill in fridge for 3 hours. check consistency. if needed, thin with warm soymilk, half cup at a time. churn in ice cream maker to soft-serve consistency. pour chips slowly into churner & mix for 5 mins. freeze for 3 hours.

Durian Ice Cream

2 cups cream
2 cups soymilk
3/4 cup sugar or splenda
4 egg yolks
1/4 tsp salt
1 to 2 cups durian preserve, to taste

heat cream, soymilk, durian & splenda in big saucepan over low fire. avoid boiling. whisk to dissolve durian into cream. beat egg yolks to death. temper yolks with half cup of durian cream then whisk slowly into saucepan. heat for 8 to 10 mins till thick-ish or spoon-coatish. cool to room temp. chill in fridge for 3 hours. check consistency. if needed, thin with warm soymilk, half cup at a time. churn in ice cream maker to soft-serve consistency. freeze for 3 hours.

bardy gifts

2007-06-02T02:18:00.000+08:00

was at galleria this evening to get my pasalubong from my buddy, partybread. he gave me some Bard-related goodies bought at shakespeare's globe theater, where he watched othello at groundling level for 5 quid. he said he was spitting distance from the stage, and may have gotten spattered by the actors at some point.

anyway, he got me a replica of a copper groundling penny--sort of like an olde tyme theater ticket or token--excavated from the foundations of the original wood-and-thatch globe building. it features the bard's face and signature, and the inscriptions: "admit to my plaie" and "one penny in the yard". on the other side is the theater and "shakespeare's globe 1599-1642".

the other nifty gifty is a yellow pen with scented ink and a hamlet quote: "it smells to heaven." and it does. heh.

yes, it was

2007-05-31T23:02:00.000+08:00

after dinner and a long tiring day, the polymath and i fell to talking.

s: long day.
p: yeh.
s: really tired.
p: welcome to my world.
s: ...
p: may was a bad month.
s: yeh.
p: you were sick a lot.
s: (cough)
p: i was always tired from work.
s: (cough cough)
p: april was the best.
s: yeh.
p: ...

then he had to go home, an hour or so away.
and now i'm waiting for him to tell me he's home safe.

sigh.

the most mundane

2007-05-28T18:30:00.000+08:00

it's the last monday of may and things are getting even more hectic at casa sandrita. quick update:

1) still coughing, which is scary. so i'm going vegan for the next 3 weeks to speed up the healing. will have to be vigilant also about hidden dairy and sugar in stuff i eat. to make the vegan vow feasible, i've stocked up on leafy veggies and mushrooms and salad stuff. will commence chopping herbs (basil & coriander) after i post this. i would kill to have fresher produce but i live in the big bad city. since my flat is spitting distance from a mall (and a new one across the street from that), i buy my nosh from the grocery. i try to shop on days when they've just replenished their veggie stock; otherwise i might end up with dead & wilted greens.

2) my friend partybread is in england right now for a conference. he sent me some photos of castle coombe, a village near bath, with an old crumbling church. but he's in london now, and just sent a video of the poet's corner (at westminster abbey?). lots of dead white guys there, all the names we read in school. methinks my friend is going on an english major's pilgrimage, as watching othello at the old globe theater (a replica) is also on his itinerary.

3) went to church last night after a long-ish spell of not going. sat with my cousins, R & G (due to give birth july). G asked how the wedding plans are going and when i said we haven't done anything actual planning, she gave me an earful. she told me to at least imagine what kind of wedding i want, to draw up a wish list. some ideas:

wedding in may 2008
on a rooftop, with maybe kites (balloons are evil)
ceremony ends at sunset
no color theme, just cream or bone or ivory, maybe old gold accents
paper planes for invitations
no wedding cake, just a big stack of iced cupcakes with little flowers so everyone can eat
easy sings capital I, cel sings lowercase N, polymath picks the music to eat by
marby is best man, ricky is maid of honor
kitty is flower dog

hee.

lookee! photos!

2007-05-23T00:30:00.000+08:00

these were taken with crappy camera phones. so be nice, okay?

thtill thick

2007-05-22T11:50:00.000+08:00

came down with something thursday night. it's already tuesday noon and i'm still in bad shape. been coughing. voice still really hoarse (i suspect i'd sound froggy on the phone if i tried to call anyone). it's really annoying because i can't work on my little side projects in this condition. argh.

a 2nd false memory

2007-05-16T17:34:00.000+08:00

was with the polymath the other night at the block. while walking there to meet him, i had this sudden image of miranda de quiros looking very different from how i remember her.

we used to be neighbors and our parents knew each other and so i spent a lot of afternoons in her house after school. i must have been six. i remember she had one book with line drawings of 2 hairy people having sex. i also remember how she used to make ken do funny things to barbie, complete with dialogue and sound effects. it's pretty funny now but at the time, i was always a little scared of her.

when we were both in kindergarten, she was extremely tall for her age. she stood at four feet, eleven inches. in kindergarten! i think she was also already wearing a bra. in kindergarten! i am not making this up, i promise you. but by fourth grade, we had drifted apart. she was already firmly entrenched in the cool crowd by then, with other hormonally precocious girls at JASMS. also, by fourth grade, she had stopped growing. i think by the time we were in high school or college, she was still 4'11". she was also, uhm, a little less slender by then.

anyway...

so as i was walking to the block from my house to meet the polymath, i had this sudden image of miranda, smiling and walking and looking much thinner and really really hot. just that. a flash in my head of miranda de quiros as a hottie.

can someone please tell me if she really is thinner now? i hate to think that my mind is playing tricks on me again. i don't really watch the news, especially not abs-cbn. too depressing on so many different levels. i'd rather bury myself in sugar-free ice cream while watching egyptologists try to figure out if the mystery mummy in niagara falls is actually rameses the first.

baker turns ice cream maker

2007-05-16T16:46:00.000+08:00

it's too damn hot to bake these days. so even if i have cookie crumbs and cream cheese ready for a cheesecake, they still languish in my fridge uneaten.

thanks to the new fridge my sister bought last year from friends who migrated to the states, i can now easily make ice cream using a cuisinart ice cream & sorbet maker thingy my mom gave us some years ago. because the new fridge freezes things more efficiently, i can just store the little revolving freezy tub in the freezer and make sorbet or fruit slushies whenever i have orange juice on hand.

but i got tired of using the gadget in a half-assed way so i decided to make real ice cream. my first attempt was, of course, a disaster.

i got this chocolate ice cream recipe from epicurious.com that resulted in a sludge that was more pudding than custard. it almost wrecked the machine. it was just too thick to allow the paddle to rotate. so i tipped the sludge into a bowl and stirred in a cup of soymilk to thin it out. it froze into a dark and dense chocolate ice cream.

but because i have this bad habit of fiddling with a good thing, i almost mucked up half of the custard by pouring in a little too much mint extract. unfrozen, it tasted like chocolate mint toothpaste. but frozen, the flavors dulled a little and turned out perfect. am glad i'm the only one in my family who likes weird flavors so i have that all to myself.

i tried a new recipe the other night -- mocha chip ice cream. the recipe looks a little dodgy because there's no egg or cooking required. just lots of cream and milk, cocoa and instant coffee dumped into a bowl and whipped. some vanilla. and i substituted splenda for sugar.

the problem i think came from one tetrabrik of "cream" that some genius (me) had left in the freezer. it explicitly says DO NOT FREEZE on the outside of the tetrabrik packaging. i thought if i thawed it out, it would be okay. NOT. the water in it turns to ice and the milkfat sort of curdles weirdly between the little shards of ice. i couldn't very well whip a block of frozen dairy product into the other ingredients so i grated the mess into the sludge i was making. since the other ingredients were already chilled, the grated cream curds didn't melt or meld into the mixture.

still, it worked out in the end. it had to because splenda is expensive. a few minutes before the ice cream got churned properly, i tossed in some chopped ghirardhelli semisweet chocolate into the soft ice cream. so now i have mocha chip ice cream with little studs of cream in it.

yay.

summertime time time

2007-05-16T16:27:00.000+08:00

and the living's easy...

well, not really. it's getting really hot in the afternoons again. and humid. the dogs here at home are constantly hiding under beds and couches.

lots going on in the house today. the part-time maid has been cleaning and washing laundry since this morning. i've been trying to work through this heat as well.

funny how the minute i went online, i got four instant messages from friends i rarely see. then later, i saw tenzin and phuong online and got to chat with them too. and a former student who kept saying nasty things about the recent elections.

tsk, the company i keep... sort of.

let's talk megapixels

2007-05-12T22:07:00.000+08:00

the two people who still visit this blog may have noticed the utter utter lack of photos here. it's not that i don't have photos to post--i have several gigabytes' worth of photos in my hard drive and on CDs. and lovely photos they are too.

my problem is sifting through them and choosing the prettiest ones and making them web-ready will take waaaaaaay too long. i'd have to fire up photoshop for that (a rogue copy of which, thanks to my recent reformat, i no longer possess) before i can upload em.

you see, i use a casio exilim 6.0 megapixel camera, which in these 10-megapixel days isn't impressive at all. but snapping away with my lovely resurrected camera results in gonzo photos, megapixelly speaking. the average file size of my photos is between 1 to 2 megabytes. and i have a couple of thousand of them hibernating peacefully in this laptop.

of course, as tenzin pointed out to me last year, i can always adjust the settings on my camera. at the moment, i create photos with a resolution high enough to be used to make those monster billboards on edsa. a simple change of settings will let me take web-ready photos that need no fiddling.

so why do i insist on what i have now?

well, one summer day outside jogyesa temple near insa-dong with my buddy JD, i captured a lot of nifty details using that resolution without even realizing it. i remember taking photos of people at prayer who were circling this stone pagoda. they walked counter-clockwise several times and would pause and bow towards the pagoda from various directions. i just kept snapping away while looking for the best angle and orientation for this old man in dark grey pajamas, praying and waving incense sticks.

once i got home and started looking through the photos in my camera, i spotted a tiny figure seated on one of the tiers of the pagoda above the head of the old man. i zoomed in as much as i could and found it was a doll dressed as a bald monk and smiling serenely at me. it was a little creepy at the time but now i see it as a of benediction of sorts.

so... i'm keeping the camera settings. but who knows? maybe one of these days, you'll finally finally see some photos here.

apparently, it's all in my mind

2007-05-10T14:48:00.000+08:00

there is this moment i remember that seems so real i can feel the certainty in my bones, under the skin, just beyond my fingertips, the shadow of some flavor on the tongue.

i'm rushing down one of the wider streets of myeongdong early in the morning. the wind whips the grey knitted skirt against my calves. i'm wearing my bright red sweater, the color of fire and summer. i can feel the cold start to creep into my toes. the air is sharp and crisp. it bites at my cheeks, makes my eyes water. it looks like i am crying but i'm not. behind me are business hotels in primary colors, with names like ibis or ibex. around and above me are tall buildings, miles of retail space crammed with what koreans call fashion. pastel colored scraps of clothing worn in layers that make otherwise pretty girls appear like candy-colored mummies. there is migliore. and lotte young. and kosney. sunlight hits glass at an angle so i can't see what's in the shop windows. somewhere in the midst of this steel and glass and pavement is the oldest church in korea, the cathedral. it is early autumn and leaves haven't turned yet. i run as if there's someone after me, chasing after my heart. but i'm just rushing to a subway station to catch the train home.

the strangest thing about this moment is that it didn't happen. but i think it captures the panic and grief i used to feel almost every day when i was thousands of kilometers away from people i loved most. although i learned to love other people there, i have to say it was never enough, never the same. even if i tried.

...

on a separate note... been reading diane ackerman's Alchemy of Mind in between bouts of work. had tried to read ackerman's Rarest of the Rare but failed to sustain a feigned interest in monk seals, monarch butterflies and other endangered species. my indifference to wildlife can also be seen in my TV-watching habits--i just cannot stand those nature documentaries on national geographic. but i do like stuff involving excavation, bones and crumbling artifacts.

fever & flashbacks

2007-05-09T23:38:00.000+08:00

been having the strangest flashbacks all day, all of them involving seoul and alcohol and various friends/acquaintances of various nationalities. i can think of several triggers:

trigger #1
i recently clicked through the korea photos i had backed up on my hard drive, to check how well my laptop worked after my buddy partybread spiffed it up with new memory and a reformat. i felt compelled to just click through all of them one night, and i just noticed after a bit that i'd been giggling and crying and it was already light outside my window. that was 3 weeks ago.

trigger #2
been chatting a lot with a very good friend back in seoul. something he's been waiting for for a year now is finally happening and i'm really happy that there'll be one less lonely foreigner in seoul by month's end.

trigger #3
although my cable TV apparently doesn't have the arirang channel, i discovered that KBS world is on channel 75. so far, i've seen a documentary of a japanese girl talking about japan and korea's messy joint history (the girl's body language reminded me of kanako), and just this afternoon, a short and slightly xenophopic feature about a girl's coming-of-age ceremony in sri lanka. actually, i thought i was looking at a school for girls in india, but when the film crew was asked to step out of the classroom, i recognized the squiggly ensaymada-like swirls of sinhala script painted on the building's walls. and that, of course, reminded me of my friend kalinga who has to stay in korea till 2008. he's in film school, i think.

but beyond the triggers, there lies the flashback phenomenon itself. was chatting with good friend R (who is PhDing in michigan now) late one night recently, and he asked me if i missed korea at all. everyone who asked this question when i got back last september got an earful of vociferous denials from me. as recently as last month, i'd tell people i would not willingly go back and live/work there.

so anyway...i told R that i mainly miss the friends i made there. i also told him i honestly miss the fact that there was no pressure to make a living when i was there since we received a very generous stipend from the korean government. i really did enjoy that, haha. ha. no wonder the wealthy people i know here in manila are always so bloody chipper. who wouldn't be happy to blow 30 dollars on a schmancy meal and not care too much?

but i must say what i miss most was the strangeness of the whole experience. that life i had, that self i constructed is in many ways very different from what i have here. everything was different over there. in the beginning, i felt betrayed by nature because the sky was still light at 8pm and everything was too damn cold. now that i'm here in warmer weather, i can choose to remember the washed-out colors and the watery light and the blooming and the hush and the seeming perpetual aloneness. and actually miss all of it.

trigger #4
i could be coming down with something. been feeling feverish since 2 in the afternoon. not quite delirium and hallucination but still...

P.S.
hey, polymath. methinks you been working too hard. je tu manque.*

*je tu manque is french for i miss you. but i find it so appropriate that "manque" as a noun speaks of a lack, a shortage. a gap and an emptiness.

wanda the witch

2007-05-08T18:52:00.001+08:00

finally found the spiel for this. yay.

The story of Wanda the witch is brought to you by the letter W.

Wanda the witch lived somewhere west of Washington.
Around her waist, instead of a belt, she wore a worm.
Wanda had a pet weasel.

Weasel: I am a weasel.

And on her head, a wiry wig.
On Wednesday, in the middle of winter,
Wanda walked to the well
to get water to wash her wig.

But the wheel on the well was worn,
and Wanda grew weary.

So she waved her wand,
and her washtub filled with warm water.
But just as Wanda was about to drop her wig
into the warm water, a wild wind
whipped the wig from her hand
and blew it away forever.

Which taught Wanda this lesson:
witches who wash their wigs
on windy winter Wednesdays
are wacky.

This witch story was brought to you courtesy of the letter W.

2 songs for my wedding next year

2007-05-08T18:03:00.000+08:00

yes, really. i'm not kidding.

Capital I

We all live in a capital I
In the middle of the desert
In the center of the sky
And all day long we polish on the I
To keep it clean and shiny
So it brightens up the sky
Rubbing it here
And scrubbing it there
Polishing the I
So high in the air

As we work we sing a lively tune
"It is great to be so happy on a busy afternoon."
And when we're through with the day's only chore
We go into the I
And we close the door

Capital I, capital I, capital I, capital I

Lowercase N

In a cold and far-off place
There was a lowercase N.
Lonely and cold, she would stare off into space
And it was known that she would cry now and then.

Lowercase N, standing on a hill.
The wind is very still, for the lower-case eh-en...

(occasional, unearthly "oohs" in background now)

And then one day a rocketship
Came racing from the sky.
It landed on the hill and there opened up a door
And somethin' started comin' outside...

A lowercase N!
(She's not lonely anymo-o-re)
They are standing on the hill
(There are two that stand for su-u-ure)
The wind is very still
For the lowercase eh-ens!

a happy thought

2007-05-08T17:28:00.000+08:00

What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?

You will perish of fits. Repeat this to yourself: "Things can work out even if I don't get my way. Things can work out even...."
Take this quiz!

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so i'm back online

2007-05-08T16:49:00.000+08:00

that was a loooong hiatus, eh?

lots have happened to me since i last posted here. will try to keep the updates brief.

1) got engaged (february 9th) outside gloria jean's in cubao.
2) got into the 46th UP writers workshop in baguio (last week of april).
3) vacationed in sagada and besao with polymath and my parents (holy week).
4) won 3rd place for the essay in the philippines free press literary awards (april 10th). i tied with chari lucero.
5) got hired to teach part-time at the ateneo (mid-april).
6) got hired to teach part-time at berea arts and sciences high school (ditto).
7) got several projects that will bring me a little cash (ongoing).
8) learned how to make ice cream and sorbet (2 weeks ago).
9) reconfigured the furniture in my living room to make way for huge couch my dad bought. antique book case still waiting to be hauled out to the other house.
10) had kitty groomed (last week) so now she looks like a puppy again.

may looks to be a busy month. will have to contend with government bureaucracy sometimes this week for certain documents i need for new employment. ha ha ha. busy does not always mean fun.

but things are looking up -- will be boozing with baguio batchmates tomorrow night at K's pad in katipunan. i like what she calls her "dorm room" because it's on the 17th floor and has a fantastic view of the pseudo-grids that make up some parts of quezon city. she also has this framed photo of her dad by the window. i must say... spitting image.

last song syndrome

2007-01-23T11:47:00.000+08:00

i would think of these two songs every so often in the past 25 years. am pretty happy i found em on youtube. so now i just click when i need my nostalgia fix. both songs were written and sung by the same guy (according to youtube comments)--steve zuckerman daw. my friend E has a term for this: trafficking in nostalgia. can't think of a better way to say it.

but i do have to say this

2007-01-02T00:47:00.000+08:00

sometimes, at night, i just find myself crying. i can't explain it clearly. well, maybe i can--but i'm not yet ready, so let me just ramble a bit here and hope it will be a bit coherent in the end.

they always catch me unawares, these flashes of desolee*. often, it happens at night. always when i'm alone, but sometimes there can be other people too. i try to keep it from happening by keeping busy. i pack my days with stuff to do, which is easy because i do have tons of things to do. but still, it happens because you can't be constantly doing something all the time. you slow down for a bit to rest (and these days, everyone is telling me to rest a bit)--before you know it, there it is. the tears well up, and you reach for the kleenex.

why does it have to happen at all? this kinda reminds me of a question someone asked me quite recently: why did you have to cry? believe me, i dearly dearly wish i don't cry this easily. is it even a choice? i wish it were. my crying has given me grief all my life, with certain people accusing me of wallowing, or being spineless and useless and weak. i could just stop, actually, make that inner vow to never cry, to never allow this or that person to hurt me again, to refuse to even feel hurt. but i've done that, did it for years, and so now i'd rather "give it all up" (to quote tenz, he knows what i'm talking about) than go back to how i was back then. what they don't know is that a lot of it is rage that i've just tucked away for some reason or another. convenience, maybe. or shame for wanting to be just a little bit happier.** or not wanting to mess things up with people i care about. i know i have to manage this better but there it is.

i'm not sure if it's just about one thing. i suspect it's many little things that are connected to two or three biggish other things. i just know that it tells me that things are not all okay on all fronts, that i have to square things with myself and with other people. all of a sudden, i'm reminded of a song*** that sounds very happy-clappy but there's a bit there about wanting to knife someone in the heart. that should give you an idea. so, lyrics at the bottom of the post for your enjoyment.

and it's strange how it's my over-30 female friends who understand what this is like. like Pj, who sometimes gives me a lift to katipunan. she's all chika-happy and deliriously busy with 3 jobs all the time and i once asked her why she just crams her life with everything the way she crams her huge bags with stuff like cracker-munchies, razors and lysol spray. her answer didn't surprise me: because you have to, to keep those weird thoughts from happening.

the last thing i need to hear in reply to this post is something condescending and dismissive along the lines of "you need to stop thinking too much," which i admit has been said to me too many times by various people who are no longer in my life now. sometimes, the thing we need most is someone who'll just really listen. but in this case, i suspect i need something much more solid to hold on to. like what my friend, Yj, told me when we had our first and last fight (she's still my friend in case you're wondering): "but those are just words! words! lip service!"

true, true. (i find i'm quoting from my favorite people a lot in this post; in my head i see and hear them saying these lines delivered just so--does this mean i'm really going nuts?)

but yes, she's right. we can have all these good intentions and feelings, and say all these things, and apologize if we screw up but really, it's what we've done and what we choose to do now that's really important.

* i don't know what to call them. "the blues" just doesn't work. neither does "the sads". "desolation" feels overwrought. so i borrow from the french for "i'm sorry" (je suis desolee) and hope it doesn't sound too pretentious.

**
okay, cringe-worthy provenance: i caught the hollywood remake of that japanese film Shall We Dance on cable yesterday, the one with richard gere and j-lo. the not-quite salaryman character of richard gere says something like that to susan sarandon, who i must say has an amazing cleavage for her age.

***
You Keep It All In
Artist: The Beautiful South
Album: Best Of-Carry On Up The Charts

You know your problem
You keep it all in
You know your problem
You keep it all in

That's right
The conversation we had last night
When all I wanted to do was
Knife you in the heart
I kept it all in

You know your problem
You keep it all in
You know your problem
You keep it all in

Midnight, a husband getting ready to fight
A daughter sleeps alone with the light
Turned on, she bears but
Keeps it all in

Just like that murder in '73
Just like that robbery in '62
With all these things that have happened to me
I kept it all in
Why do you keep on telling me now?

You know your problem
You keep it all in
You know your problem
You keep it all in

That's sweet
That conversation we had last week
When you gagged and bound me up to my seat
You're right, I do
I keep it all in

mea culpa and all that

2007-01-01T23:49:00.000+08:00

to those who patiently check here every so often for updates (yes, both of you), i am really really sorry for being a lazy-ass blogger the past three months. below are my reasons:

1) we had to dismantle the desktop computer again and i didn't know how to hook up my laptop to the dsl here at home. and am too cheap these days to buy a wifi card. actually, i just don't like paying for internet, heh heh. but finally, the desktop in my brother's room is back online and so am i.

2) been sleeping at our grandparents' place since the end of october and my time here at our house is limited to barking orders at the guys fixing up the house and my scuttling to the mall next door to buy hardware.

3) i have lots to write here and pictures to post but i haven't had the time to scale down the photos to web-friendly resolutions. also, i spent the first half of december writing a nonfiction piece for the UP workshop. meaning, i was actually productive!!! hahaha! no time to blog!

but to give some of you something to read, lemme post some of the stuff i wrote in the past year or so...one of these days. my flashdrive is in my bag somewhere but i'm kinda too lazy to get up and get it right now. more patience, please, my darlings. muchas gracias.

(this is the point where most people would write their yearend summary lists of music and videos and films and books. uhm... i'm kinda not in the mood for all that right now.)

i will, instead, end with a short list of 5 people i am extremely grateful to have spent time with in 2006, off the top of my head, in no particular order:

1) the polymath (yeeha)
2) germaine
3) eung hwa
4) tenzin
5) tita maryan

if you didn't make that list, don't worry. the list is actually much longer, and i look forward to making up for it spending more time with you (yes, you!) in 2007.

bad sairo. bad.

2006-11-21T13:11:00.000+08:00

am such a lazy blogger. or to be more precise, i'm too preoccupied with hardware and plumbing* these days to indulge in virtual navelgazing. just a list of what's been going on:

1) the polymath and i met up with this kid we sort of adopted. i was partly sleepwalking the whole time as i hadn't had any sleep the night before. so i don't really remember what i did or said that night. we had dinner and hot chocolate and i think we all talked a little. but mostly i was trying to keep awake. next time, jj, i promise i'll actually be lucid when we meet up.

2) i turned 30 last sunday. had a lovely time with the polymath, just lounging around the greenbelt area. a good lunch and then some tea al fresco, under the trees. we had our feet up, just enjoying the silence. and watching all these guys wearing manny pacquiao t-shirts by nike. he (the polymath, not manny pacquiao) gave me a book he got at shakespeare and co. and he wrote something on the flyleaf that makes me kilig even now. hee.

3) am now enrolled in N's nonfiction class. my penalty course, but which i like to call my punishment course. the highlight of the first meeting: a guy in that class does this for a living -- poses as a girl and seduces australian guys into doing a long sexchat session with him. sometimes he's a hot teenage girl from alabama or dakota, sometimes a lesbian from sweden, other times just a regular gay man. and he just recently graduated from the royal pontifical university of sto. tomas with a degree in journalism. N, who has the same background, said, "i'm soooo proud of you! and i'm so envious of your job."

* not euphemisms, people. to those with filty minds: i refer to the real thing--PVC pipes, elbows, drain stoppers, a faulty shower line, ceramic tiles from spain versus those made in china, etc. not the most interesting topic.

now that i'm back...

2006-10-17T00:50:00.000+08:00

what have i been up to? what's been happening to me? people have been asking and i've been too preoccupied to answer adequately. here's a list:

1) had lunch and dinner with the polymath a few times. most recently at a high-choloesterol place aptly named butter diner in cubao. we've also done amici and kitchen in makati, and likha diwa in UP. looking forward to doing bellini's and bizu with him soon. haha, seems all we do is stuff our faces. maybe we should do chateau verde as well.

2) visited coco's corner. wonderful view. very cozy apartment. amazing friend.

3) seen the new GCF building. yes, A was right. it does look like a mall. part of me misses the long subway rides to onnuri at seobinggo with chef T, and seeing him blink back tears when the pastor that he calls johnny litton gives the benediction.

4) shopped for new shoes at shangri-la mall and gateway. it's still not fun. damn these high arches!

5) had much-needed aromatherapy massage at urban spa, shangri-la mall. unspeakably good. the bonus was meeting a masseuse who was also recently in korea and we chatted a bit about "kuya P" and how he's a barrel of laughs and much much more.

6) brought kitty to the groomer. she now looks less like a filthy mop and more like a lhasa apso. B said she underwent a personality change when i was away. but now her evil diva ways are back--snappish, vicious, constantly cranky. but stil...she's perrrrfect!

7) cleared out 80% of the junk in my house. had it all carted away by the maintenance crew. all that's left to clear out are my closet, my baul and my files. since chef tris brought my stuff from korea, the room has been a mess as i don't have shelf-space for my new books. yargh.

8) met up with the architect who will guide me as i attempt to make my house liveable again. it has literally gone to the dogs and am now mightily trying to reclaim the house for us humans. i've seen the budget and it's one of the reasons i can't sleep right now. hahaha. basically, we're retiling the bathroom & installing new fixtures. will also repaint and refloor the entire apartment. installing a new floor is the most expensive. yargh again.

9) goodbye, white elephant piano! my tita is helping to get rid of the piano that has been here for 15 years. no one's using it and we need the space. it's owned by my grand-aunt and had a lot of sentimental value. now it houses a lot of mice. hope this will help my rodent problem.

10) had lots of fights with someone about a dog that destroyed my newly-renovated kitchen. i really don't want the dog to destroy the renovations that i'm about to make for our apartment. seems it's at a stalemate but i stand my ground: i'm paying for the renovations so it's either me or the dog. simple as that.

11) got a call last friday from a good friend in korea. yes, i miss a lot of the people i met there but the top two would be E and T.

12) am writing a story. the subway figures in it. the rooftop, too. and maybe the view from namsan tower. definitely cheonggyecheon at night and seeing jongno tower. and vodka mixed with baskin robbins kiwi lime sorbet. am considering putting a bookstore in there, either bandi & luni at COEX or kyobo at gwanghwamun. but i still have to get the plot under control. i've never been good with plot. which is why creative nonfiction has always been easier for me. my life has always been more interesting than any story i could invent. i guess i'm boring that way.

13) eek. my stalker is back. can't believe M gave him my number. eek.

lots more happened but i'll save that for some other day/post. am sleepy. oh! wait! here's one last development:

14) finally have photos of the polymath and me together. will post them here soon. haha, we look goofy together. which is nice. we can't be perfect all the time.

just six days left

2006-09-19T20:58:00.000+08:00

not to be reductive about it but i find that saying goodbye is always heartbreaking business. whether it's to a friend, a lover, your family, a city whose people you mostly hate, a way of living you've slowly gotten used to...goodbyes are still terrible, terrible things.

still, one hopes.

tenzin and i had this conversation late last night after several rounds of gin tonics, bacardi and vodka tonics at this rock club* in jongno. we had been moping about the departure of so many of our friends, and my own leavetaking next week, and the fact that he and kalinga will be left here for the next 1.5 years.

because much as i'm excited to go home, crimson house has come to feel like home. i don't know when this happened exactly but after some field trip or another to yet another museum or folk village or buddhist temple up some mountain in the countryside, it just felt like the biggest relief to come home to a cramped room 304, crimson house at jegi-dong, dongdaemun-gu, seoul.

and then there's family. not the one i left at home but the one that i had made while living in this mostly lonely city. again, we're not sure when that happened. maybe it was at sokcho, when kalinga was holding my head up while i was vomiting at the beach, and tenzin was filming me while i tried to drunkenly light some fireworks on the wet sand. with john, maybe it was when i told him to put the "gross, melted chocolate" in the freezer to firm up.

but definitely, by the time john left in early august for tokyo, we knew that something precious had been formed and that it was all the more valuable for its being temporary. chef tristan left for home friday last week, and really, it hasn't been the same without the sulphury smell of his revolting breakfast of boiled eggwhites and chocolate protein shake.

so, yes, i've been crying again recently. but mostly because of so many good memories that's making leaving for home so much more painful that i ever expected. but as i told tenzin last night, i'm just really glad we have this capacity to find home wherever we go, and to become family to those we allow to get close enough to us.

what i really gained during my six months of living in seoul is not mastery of the korean language (haha-ha) but the knowledge that loving people isn't that difficult after all.

* goes to my the top of my list of places/things not done/discovered sooner while living in seoul. being at the quaintly named rockers (60s and 70s rock and roll club) was like being inside that high fidelity movie. the guy at the bar constantly played the most amazing pop music, the highlight of which was todd rundgren's "i saw the light", a song i had been looking for after i first heard it on a pivotal six feet under episode.

and i feel human again

2006-09-13T10:49:00.000+08:00

i haven't slept in two days but at last, i'm done writing all my papers. i only have seven 1-page reports to write but i'll leave that for friday. i think i need to treat myself a little more nicely starting now. i have a meeting at 2:30 pm at the KLTI office. that's more than an hour away by subway. i only have time for a quick lunch.

my brain just stopped working. am having to retype every word here because of all the damn typos. guess my hands are shaking and my nerves are shot.

big day tomorrow. it's the KLTI seminar, our final project for the Asian Writers Residency Program which i have been part of for the last six months. each of us six asian writers have to deliver three short lectures/talks on the following topics:

(1) our life here in korea - to prove we haven't wasted our time
(2) what we think of korean literature - to show that we haven't wasted their time
(3) introduce our country's literature - to fulfill the requisite culture exchange component

i like to think i was clever with my titles but now they just look pretty lame:

(1) going solo: six months alone in a city of eleven million
(2) rarefied voices: tone in some korean literature in english translation
(3) news from the islands: some trends in philippine literature in english

too many colons, eh? and i have to admit, these are chika essays. mainly because (1) any jargon might be lost on the audience and (2) i am unable to produce any passable jargon in the first place. haha. ha.

i need a massage and a facial and a deep-conditioning hair treatment and a facial peel and a visit to the dentist and lots and lots of cuddling from the polymath. which is pretty funny, considering that we've never even held hands.

downtime for my brain #2: mp3 roulette

2006-09-11T16:25:00.000+08:00

been editing like heck and am hoping to finish before nightfall so i can get on with my writing. except that the editing feels suspiciously like rewriting, as the originals are so frickin' bad it's driving me crazy. thankfully, it'll be over soon.

so today is crunchtime and i'm so stressed out i'm itching to break something. like my diet, or a certain person's face, or the record for eating the most number of dried cherries while blogging. instead, i take a break and play mp3 roulette. meme stolen from the blog of the love of my life*.

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Put your music player on shuffle.
2. Press forward for each question.
3. Use the song title as the answer to the question even if it doesn't make sense.

NO CHEATING!**

1. How are you feeling today? ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You.’ Cover by Evan Dando.
2. Will you get far in life? ‘They Can't Take That Away From Me.’ Billie Holiday.
3. How do your friends see you? ‘32 Flavors (Live).’ Ani DiFranco.
4. Will you get married? ‘Devil Mood.’ Smoke City.
5. What is your best friend's theme song? ‘Rock el Casbah.’ Cover of The Clash in Arabic by Rachid Taha.
6. What is the story of your life? ‘Alles Was Lebt Bewegt Sich.’ Barbara Morgenstern.
7. What was high school like? ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’ Cover by Nick Cave.
8. How can you get ahead in life? ‘Northern Lights.’ Lux.
9. What is the best thing about your friends? ‘When I'm Thinking About You.’ The Sundays.
10. What is today going to be like? ‘Teardrop.’ Massive Attack.
11. What is in store for this weekend? ‘38.45.’ Thievery Corporation.
12. What song describes you? ‘Light My Fire.’ Cover by Shirley Bassey, Remixed.
13. To describe your grandparents? ‘Cruisin.’ Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis.
14. How is your life going? ‘H.W.C.’ Liz Phair.
15. What song will they play at your funeral? ‘Stay in the Shade.’ Jose Gonzales.
16. How does the world see you? ‘Close My Eyes.’ Shivaree.
17. Will you have a happy life? ‘99.9 F Degrees.’ Suzanne Vega.
18. What do your friends really think of you? ‘Lighten Up.’ Morcheeba.
19. Do people secretly lust after you? ‘Para la do Para.’ Tom Ze.
20. How can I make myself happy? Excerpt from ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ by Jonathan Lethem. Read by Steve Buscemi.
21. What should you do with your life? ‘Cry Me A River.’ Ella Fitzgerald.
22. Will you ever have children? ‘Multiply.’ Jamie Lidell.

* no, you wacko, my dog doesn't blog. i meant the polymath.
** as you can see, my answers really don't make sense. but fun, eh?

so this is autumn*

2006-09-05T18:24:00.000+08:00

it feels suspiciously like spring. huge clouds are scudding across a sky that is becoming less and less blue as each day passes. it can still be a little toasty, but only if you stand on a patch of sunlight at noon. stay in the shade and you start getting the chills. the days are getting shorter too. when i first got here, daylight at 7.30pm used to freak me out. now i kinda miss seeing 8pm sunsets.

i've been holed up in my tiny room all day, writing stuff. at this point, there are six reports, a book review and two lectures to prepare for. on friday, a ton of editing will be thrown my way. so the three hours a day i spend sitting in korean language classes amounts to a lot of time i could be spending working. yargh.

how to keep from going bonkers? with some prodding from the polymath, i go up to the crimson house rooftop (hands down my favorite place in seoul) for a breather. after a stifling day in my room, it's a great place to spend a summer evening with friends, especially if there's cold watermelon.

these days, though, i'm usually up there alone, with joy division covers, the sundays, and a wool sweater for company. it gets dark really quickly. before you know it, the sun is gone and eleven million lights have blinked on all over the city. in the distance, a large yellow moon hangs low on the horizon, just above the bright lights of namsan tower.

yes, halter top weather is truly over.

* no, darlings, the leaves haven't turned yet. give it time.

top 5 things i'm tired of

2006-08-31T00:44:00.000+08:00

1) crying
2) waking up sad
3) hearing "the subscriber cannot be reached..."
4) busy signals
5) rebooting because my stupid laptop froze up on me yet again

these days

2006-08-30T23:59:00.000+08:00

these days, i wake up in the morning and it's cold, and i hate that i have to wake up and cross the street to learn korean language when at this point (with just a month left before i go home) learning said language is not at all useful to me, and so usually i just go right back to sleep, only to wake up half an hour later because i set two alarms on my flip-phone and one on my pda, and i curse a little loudly not caring that the sweet japanese woman living on the other side of my wall might hear, and i try to go back to sleep, only to sit bolt upright a quarter to nine--with barely time to brush-rinse the morning breath out of my mouth--but still i do my thing and stagger into class between nine-oh-five and nine-fifteen when the thing that i wish most in the world is to simply be lie under the covers and sleep some more, dreaming that i am home with those who love me--but these days, these days, i am feeling a little unloved, and even the people in class tell me it's starting to show

dear john (a letter)

2006-08-24T01:56:00.000+08:00

hello there!

so glad you enjoyed your tokyo trip and that you're safe back home. no more north korea missile threats for breakfast. yay!

there was a crimson rooftop party earlier tonight, to introduce the new manager and also a farewell party for tasol. finally, she gets her vacation! i skipped the party though. was feeling kinda hermit-y, so i stayed in my room and watched that brothers grimm movie on cable. bleah.

but at midnight, tenzin gave me a call and said they're out drinking somewhere on chamsari-gil. so for the first time in my life, i went out alone after midnight and walked the dark city streets (not that far) to get drunk. hooray for first times.

as expected, the japanese kids with crazy hair (the boyz) and squeaky voices (the girlz) were present. everyone was from crimson except for some dour american dude wearing a backwards cap. also met a couple of new crimson house guys: a portuguese guy (paulo?) and a frenchman (benoit).

eugene, tenzin and i shared a pitcher of yogurt soju with benoit and the japanese girls. it was impossible to get a conversation going because i suck at korean, and the tokyo girls just kept saying they were "hanggugo kungbuheyo". riveting, eh?

we all went home a couple of hours later but we did stop by the corner store to buy some 3-for-1,000 won ice cream sticks. as tenzin said: "in honor of our friend, john dewey." a few seconds later, kalinga chucked his ice cream into the trash by mistake (he was drunker than i thought) and they had to buy another one. hee hee.

yup, i'll be going home in a few weeks (26 september!!!). warts and all, i will miss korea. thanks to you, tenzin, and the rest of the guys, i have some very good memories of my stay here. and when memory fails (e.g., that night in sokcho), there's always photographic evidence.

it's 2:30 am now and it's a school night. yaaargh.

WE MISS YOU!!!!

lovelove,
S

PS: we're going dancing friday night in hondae. it'll be my last chance to do that all-access clubhopping thing they have on the last friday of each month. woohoo.

the nasties

2006-08-23T16:47:00.000+08:00

there are four (4) very unforgettable insults which come to me unbidden at the most inappropriate circumstances (e.g., benediction in church, sitting beside the kimchi-scented elderly on the subway, tarahaseyo*-ing in kang young-ah sonsengnim's korean conversation class).

these are vicious and i try to keep them at bay, not always successfully. two of these i witnessed firsthand. one was stolen from one of my favorite blogs**, the other i'd heard about via the ever-reliably-nasty mimosa grapevine***. in no particular order, here are the nasties:

"you've got more fat than bacon, baby!"
- said by R1 to R2 in palawan last year, after R2 weighed in at 150+ lb.

"karaniwan..."
- said by K in reference to Y, a young poet who keeps winning awards.

"it's grotesque."
- said very drily by XX in reference to the outlandish behavior and appearance of XY, who tries too hard to be noticed/liked**** by everyone.

"you have the IQ of a tape dispenser!"
- said by M's ex to a dendrite-deficient underling.

* repeating after the teacher, helpful for memorizing verb conjugations and acquiring that not-very-useful-to-me seoul accent.
** malatemail, your archives make perfect 3:00 am reading.
*** believe me, there is such a thing. mostly bading; not at all botanical.
**** in XY's universe, there seems to be little distinction between the two. it's just sad. first there was the dye-job. then there was the fashionably late entrance wearing a wide zebra-print cloth headband under a brown pleather fedora. very afraid of what might come next.

two degrees of papi gael

2006-08-22T14:49:00.000+08:00

chatted with my sister yesterday, who sent me a photo of gael garcia bernal at some anti-WTO NGO forum in hongkong last december. the lucky bastard who actually met papi gael (superstar na, activist pa!) said they bumped into each other at the anti-water privatization tent.

so my sister said gael looks like a hobo here. i say he looks like a rich and elegant hobo. bet i can't afford those shades he's wearing. bet he has more money now than i'll ever make in my lifetime. haha. ha. idle thought: maybe i should work for an international NGO too?

please don't eat here

2006-08-17T15:00:00.000+08:00

hunger is never an excuse to eat crap. seen at some mall food court in seoul sometime in june. can't remember if it's lotte department store in myeongdong or at COEX mall in the gangnam district. aren't you glad you don't know where it is?

tell-eh-pigeon?

2006-08-17T00:08:00.000+08:00

i swear, koreans are kinda bulol. sometimes in a goofy endearing way, sometimes it just sounds off. when they write english or other foreign words in their alphabet (hangeul), you know things are bound to get screwy.

orange is read as oh-rin-jee. post brand almond flake is spelled as 'peu-oh-seuh-teuh* beuh-rehn-deuh ah-mon-deuh hoo-reh-ee-keuh.' no idea how they pronounce that. they can't seem to either pronounce or write the 'errrr' sound. superman returns is 'syoo-poh-mehn ree-tawn-jeuh' (dunno where they got the 'j' sound at the end). manager is 'mah-nee-jaw'. in the hair salons around my jegi-dong neighborhood, hair is 'heh-awe.' star style is 'seuh-taaah seuh-tay-lee.'

but it gets stranger. at the start of spring term in april, we were forced to call brazil 'peuh-rah-jil', france 'peuh-rang-seuh', and philippines 'pee-lee-peen'. that last one really ticked me off. dammit, can't they see/hear that unmistakable sibilance at the end??? i should know, it's my country! if they can't pronounce fih-lih-peenzzz, they why not just say pee-lee-pee-nasssss?** maybe they'll understand this: naneun hwaganayo. shih-royo.***

anyway. when i turned on the TV (tel-leh-pee-jawn), channel 21 OCN (oh shee ehn) was showing the forgettable ah-nold vehicle end of days (en-deuh op-heuh dey-jeuh). meh. so i reached for the remote.

egads. friends (peuh-ren-jeuh) is on at channel 38 On Style (ohn seuh-tay-lee). the start of the not-new season was announced last night as PEUH-REN-JEUH SEANSON 2. yes, it's a typo. but not mine. they've been broadcasting this little gem for a week now. man, this show sucks in any language. am so glad the show is kaput. it's the most unfunny show ever; could never sit through a whole episode, no matter how i tried. and i was reminded once again why i was ecstatic when brad dumped idiot aniston for angelina. he should've done that sooner.

yay! sex and the city is on. they show reruns every weeknight except the episodes are all mixed up. tonight is 'change of a dress' from season 4. it starts with charlotte in some dancing class, trying to deal with her divorce with her hydraulically-challenged wasp husband. carrie looks ridiculous as always. and i really hate aidan: he's ugly and an insecure a-hole. most importantly, i can't get over the fact that the show's title is spelled 'sek-seuh (insert ampersand) shi-tee'. that just sounds wrong.

oprah on the oprah winfrey show (oh-peuh-rah ween-peuh-ree syoh) is gushing about cakes in miami. shaq, who looks scarily old, is chomping on a cinnamon butter cake. clearly time to switch off the telly.

funny how i endured six years of linguistic oddity when i was tutoring my friend sayo, a japanese housewife (choo-boo in korean) who lived in makati, shopped alone at pickpocket-intensive quiapo, divisoria and relatively shabby landmark. her quirky way of saying things was just that: quirky. and when the lovely kanako (this japanese girl we're all in love with) mixes up her dipthongs, i just melt. hee.

but i must say that i do like how our program manager, yeajin-ssi, has an accent that's softer than the seoul accent i find so grating. her soft syllables go really well with her voice (she sounds like a 5-year-old), the overall effect being an effortless kawaii-cuteness that every young woman in east asia aspires to have. but these other pa-cute girls just end up looking retarded. go watch any TV ad with korean girls mugging for the camera and you'll know what i'm talking about. but yeajin? she's cute and wickedly smart (summa cum laude from seoul national university, korea's UP naming mahal). if we can clone her, there may be hope for korean chicks.

* the letter for 'euh' is a horizontal line (---) and sounds almost like how the french call the letter 'e'. the korean way of shaping the mouth for this sound is too darned hard to explain. here's the french way: shape your mouth into a small O then try to say 'eeeeeee' while keeping that O shape. crazy, eh?

** they also taught us about countries i thought were fictional: mee-gook, yong-gook, choong-gook, moong-gool, eel-bohn, kah-jah-heuh-seuh-tan, hoh-soo. that's the u.s., england, china, mongolia, japan, kazakhstan and australia to you. where do they get these names???

*** transliteration: "me angry. don't like." the syntax is very barok noh? S-O-V and not much else. my buddy eung-hwa (aka pax coreana) says: "korean syntax is very rigid and mechanical, and is therefore a pretty boring language to learn." which is why i have a hard time learning hanggukmal. as a writer, i love playing with syntax. english and filipino allow me room for play and syntactic complexity that seems largely absent in hanggukmal. even a lot of korean literature in english translation seems repetitive and monotonous because there are no pronouns. there is no 'you' either, so if i wanna tell the polymath how cute he is, i can't say "you're cute." i'd have to tell him: "the polymath is cute." makes me sound like a fembot.

recent self-portraits

2006-08-15T03:00:00.000+08:00

me in my natural habitat. note the piles
of unread books, clutter, and the TV on mute
with some ditzy fashion/lifestyle show.

i question the wisdom of posting this here.
but i just had to tell all four readers
of this blog that no one here in seoul believes
this is me. can anyone explain to me why?

a moment of cheesiness

2006-08-14T19:45:00.000+08:00

here's a line stolen from an old friend's blog, which she in turn had stolen from an old episode of the o.c. (i'm so not making this up):

"someday, we'll be perfect for each other."

so, kids, all together now: aaaawww...

now that's we've gotten than off our chests, lemme share a bit more of what my friend said w/r/t that line:

"maybe it's the poignancy of the line, maybe it's my lack of sleep, or maybe i've turned into a sap. but i suspect i snap to attention because the line holds the promise of time shaping us into better persons, so that someday we'll be the perfect wheels to our perfect cogs."

one more time: aaaawww...

things i'm mulling

2006-08-14T01:56:00.000+08:00

1) the effect of weight gain on the dimensions of my hip tattoo. given that the surplus of everything i eat gets divided equally among my cheeks, hips, thighs, and butt, this is a scary scary thought. too lazy to do yoga. wallclimbing here in seoul is too darned expensive. maybe i should just stop eating? my siberian reindeer tattoo is starting to look like a hippo with antlers.

2) getting a bikini wax. because i'm into pain and mutilation. just kidding. while i really am curious about how much pain is involved and the exact nature of waxing-related pain, the real reason, like this entire item, is really too much information. haha. ha.

3) why the past is a foreign country, as pointed out by british novelist l.p. hartley in 1953. it's pretty self-evident, of course. but i'm trying to see how this idea works vis-a-vis a triad of stories by korean writer hwang soon-won. reading him was a little like reading pinoy canon fodder like nvm gonzales and manuel arguilla. but mostly i was bewildered. there seems to be a lot of culturally specific information encoded into the text that did not survive translation. a lot of the behaviors and motives and reactions of the characters i didn't understand at all. maybe because these are "outmoded" (can't think of better word now) ways of thinking, very different from the behavior of koreans i see and meet here in seoul. maybe it's because i really am in a foreign country. i am mystified by the text for at least 2 reasons: chronological distance and cultural distance. this whole frame i'm building is pretty flimsy right now. but if i use pretty words, maybe the end result wouldn't be as embarrasing.

i really want to finish this book review i'm writing but my a/c is now so cold at 3am, i'm dying to get under the covers. will continue writing tomorrow. was supposed to study for the weekly quiz tomorrow (at least i think there's one) but screw it. will just scan my notes before i enter the classroom. haha. i am such a bad student. if i were my student, i'd flunk me big time.

from when i couldn't sleep

2006-08-10T18:16:00.000+08:00

for weeks in the last couple of months, i couldn't sleep at all. or when i did, it would be dawn and i'd stagger into class a few hours later, mumbling "miyanhamnida, sonsengnim" to my professor. this post takes from an email i (think i) sent to the polymath around that time. i don't remember if i really did send it. here goes:

back in 1991, when papa was arrested and kept in solitary confinement at camp aguinaldo for supposed leftist activities, he wrote a poem about us, his three children. when i got to read it during one of our visits a month later, when he had been transferred to the camp crame detention center for political offenders, i was suprised to see that he had described me as onion-skinned. it was the first time really that i had any idea how he as a father felt for or thought of us. he's not at all demonstrative or expressive about his feelings.

i'm not sure where that original poem is now. i remember it as being very creased and smudged, having been folded and unfolded many times, maybe by papa. i'd like to think it's somewhere between the pages of my journals. it's not the most lyrical of poems (it starts with "when this forced solitude brings me to the depths of despair...") but still i cannot think how he could write at all. i cannot even begin to imagine what it must have been like for him, trying to finish that poem. and i am amazed that he could the find words in that place, at that time.

but i am only half-surprised that he turned to poetry during that dark time. he is, after all, a writer. for a week or so, we didn't know if we would ever see him alive again, and i know he felt the same. and so in those hours and days when no one knew where he was, or whether he was still alive, he was thinking of us, his children, and trying to remember exactly how each of us was like. i'm not really sure what triggered this sudden memory. but right now, i realize he really knows and understands us better than he lets on. my father is a brave man, braver in some ways than in others.

the poem ends with the half-wish, half-knowledge that we will all be together again, and that we can finally finally get to know one another. it's been 15 years since that terrifying year, but i know that i still don't know my family that much. in many ways, we remain strangers to one another, even if we don't have to be. we still don't know how to talk to each other. so many years. i want so badly to think all that time hasn't been wasted. maybe this is all just to say i'm missing my family (papa, bernice, kuya, mama) terribly right now?

why am i telling you this? because i can. because i know you'll let me. and even if you don't always know what to do or say to make me feel better (and i know you feel compelled to think of something to say because you know i go on these talking/remembering jags whenever i'm upset), i know you'll read or listen as you always do, as closely as only you can.

and i love you for that.

my orphan dog

2006-08-09T13:17:00.000+08:00

the love of my life (kitty) with a new haircut, on my sister's bed.

here we go again

2006-08-08T21:02:00.000+08:00

spent ten minutes thinking of something to say but can't come up with anything. feeling really empty and joyless right now. been shut in my room for two days reading, and trying to write but the thoughts, the words, they just don't come. well, they did, but i couldn't focus enough to get down a single coherent thought. just a blur of associations that left me in an even darker muddled state.

oh, man. am i turning needy-neurotic-wacko again?

i'm hoping these are just symptoms of a kind of envy. my friend john dewey left korea for tokyo this morning, will spend two weeks in that hyper-expensive city, and then fly back home to minnesota. back home to his family and his friends. maybe i envy the fact that very soon, he'll be in a place that speaks his language, where people are genuinely glad to see him.

or maybe this is just hormonal. you know what i mean.

i know there's no use grousing. i'm in a strange exotic city, lots to explore still, with time to write, and think, and read. some people would kill to be in my position. but still. i really really miss home right now. will try to end on a less neurotic note, promise. here goes:

1) tenzin just called. will meet him up on the roof for a breather and drinks. with my erratic airconditioning, spending an hour on the breezy moonlit rooftop feels a lot like redemption.
2) saw the picasso exhibit last saturday at the seoul museum of art with joan and phuong. spent the afternoon giggling at wild sketches of various orifices and countless mammaries rendered in oil.
3) went shopping for skirt, light cargo pants and halter tops at myeongdong and hyehwa with joan. my spring/autumn wardrobe just won't do for these blistering late midsummer days.
4) talked to B for a few mins this evening. it was choppy but i was just so very glad to hear her voice.

on kimchi and james dean's family

2006-07-30T10:10:00.000+08:00

just got back from sleeping over at the house of a real live korean family. they live in deokso, just outside the eastern part of seoul. their condo unit is on the 14th floor and they have a good view of the han river. this is the same river that cuts through the southern part of seoul.

the dorm manager in tristan's kosiwon (off-campus dorm) invited tris, me, joan & danial (indonesian chef) to his family's house. i met the dorm manager (we call him james dean, pero panget sha, heh heh) last month, during joan's birthday, when we had a rooftop party at their dorm. actually, i dunno why i got invited. i don't live at their kosiwon, and i had met james dean only once before. joan said i'm sikat (may be translated as either popular/famous, or notorious) at their dorm. from what i gather, i'm like a punchline over there. strange.

anyway, i'm glad i got invited. james dean has a good family, very kind. and his apojee (dad) is funny-hilarious*, even if i could understand only 10% of what he said. james's hyong (older brother) and his family were also there. the two kids were the first korean kids i've actually quasi-spoken to. the girl is 14 (but trendy enough to pass for my 18-year-old students) and thinks danial looks a bit like pee (not what you think! she means that korean singer named rain; rain=pee). his omoni (mom) showed us how to make kimchi.

it turned out tasting quite different from the fermented swill usually found at sikdangs (restaurants) because there's no fermented baby shrimp in the recipe. it tasted fresh and light, not fishy at all. the downside for me was the inclusion of white sugar and MSG. (had a migraine minutes after dinner.) apparently, there are thousands of different recipes for kimchi, using a mix of veggies. the different regions, towns, even families have their own timpla. at lunch and dinner, there were at least 6 different kinds of kimchi on the table.

one thing i didn't really enjoy was sleeping on the floor. the western-style chimde (bed), cheksang (table) and euyja (chair) were introduced here only in the past few decades. so koreans really love their floors; they can do everything pretty much at floor level. (readers with dirty minds: kindly stop giggling) anyway, this cultural peculiarity and historical accident has resulted in my not only having right now a bad cough and cold, but also a very sore back. yay.

* for an ajussi, james dean's dad seems more cosmopolitan than young people in that he's curious about other cultures and encourages actual discourse. he asked, for instance, how we eat in our own countries (whether by chopstick, spoon+fork, or hand). he also asked about this quaint custom he had heard of called siesta, which he does not approve of. traditional hardworking koreans like him say that a person who naps after lunch (and here he mimes shoveling food into his mouth, closes his eyes and snores) is a twiji, a pig/swine.

this midsummer night's not so bad

2006-07-28T22:18:00.000+08:00

it's the last friday of the month, and it's all access club night at the hondae district. my buddies (joan, pax, tristan, that geisha boy i like to call damon, and that tyler guy whose real name i forget) and i had been planning this since last month. alas, i was struck down by the flu. so while they're partying and boozing it up, i'm here in my room with a clogged nose and not much else.

but i did have a small measure of fun today, despite this cold and cough and headache. i skipped class again and slept until way past noon. was too weak to do much else. around 2:00 pm, i loaded my laundry into the washer and went out for some real food at hemaru. the new crimson manager noticed my miserable sniffling so she wrote out in korean the name of some cough+cold yak (medicine) for me. i didn't know where the yakkuk (drugstore) was but i found it eventually. nice surprise: the ajussi at the yakkuk gave me the right dosage in english! hooray for the kindness of strangers!

at 5:30 pm, tenzin & i made our way through the rain to the ifls building, where our teachers herded us into classrooms and made us eat a lot of sesame-flavored chapchae noodles, round ttok ricecakes with some sweet liquid inside, something that looks exactly like puto with black sesame and dried jujube on top, foil-wrapped kimbap, battered zucchini, some fried seafood roll of sorts, and chicken. there was also a big pan of watermelon wedges, which i liked. like everything here, they're insanely expensive at 500+ pesos per watermelon. a free dinner is always good.

then we stepped back into the rain and walked to inchon memorial hall to watch a mildly amusing talent show of sorts, with the different levels and classes putting on these performances. our favorite teacher, the kooky kang young ah, joined other eminent phd's onstage who danced in formation wearing huge afro wigs and male drag (suits?). there were also some very good hiphop dancing, as well as what we used to call 'breakdancing' back in grade school.

the highlight for me was this malaysian guy (a famous dancer who also teaches at korea university) who azri said went through some traditional dance. our first sight of him, he was airborne. and he kept leaping and moving like...like blazing white fire. the way he moved and danced, at that speed, leaping and turning with that power and grace, he was several steps beyond merely human. and boneless too. heh heh. super impressive.

but most of the time, especially with the occasional off-key synth pop and some desultory rapping that went on forever, the show was so chemi opsoyo (hellishly boring) that our scarily tall american friend john dewey kept falling asleep. or at least pretended to. mercifully, after a while, the show finally ended.

maybe bad entertainment induces hunger. we ended up at a chicken and beer place across the street from crimson house where the owner kept telling us exactly how to eat our food (e.g., eat the chicken with chopsticks, the fiery tofu-kimchi-tuna combo with chopsticks, the sausages with knives and forks). i like how with john and tenzin, we can have a really good time even with the crappy weather and lukewarm beer, telling vomit stories and whatnot.

tsk. john leaves for tokyo in less than 2 weeks. we gotta throw that boy a party. we'll party like we're in a city of 11 million, party like it's 2006. have no idea what that means, but it'll be great. yes, it will.

NOTA BENE: any mention of beer and ingestion of meat applies only to my companions. which is to say i've been behaving myself, as promised. owing to the fact that i'm still suffering from vestigial flu symptoms, i didn't drink any beer (not even the ones our teachers gave us) tonight. will commence partying maybe next week when i'm all better. hee.

sick as heck

2006-07-27T21:05:00.000+08:00

you've been holed up in your tiny room all day, coughing and sniffling and feeling sorry for yourself. you want to indulge in some good old-fashioned weeping but realize that would just aggravate your cold symptoms. it's amazingly easy to to wallow in self-pity if you're down with the flu and everyone you love is 2,600+ kilometers away.

you want to call your dad or the stepmum or your sister or the love of your life but you don't have enough credit on your phone. and you're too weak to get up to eat real food at a real restaurant. when your phone rings, you wonder who it is, and feel half-happy half-disappointed that it's your favorite tibetan asking how you are, and not someone from home. then again, you never really get calls from them so you sniffle some more and tell yourself that the cold is just making your eyes all watery. you do not cry.

you're too dizzy to read pico iyer's erudite reading of kazuo ishiguro's novels. and you don't have the heart to trawl for what the love of your life calls 'free-floating net junk'. and there's nothing good on cable.

oh wait. after some desultory channel-surfing, you see project runway is on. snippy americans emoting on cam and pouting over sewing machines can be very amusing. there is hope on the horizon yet.

dogstrology

2006-07-22T21:29:00.000+08:00

trawled the net for junk again and found this. it's astonishingly right-on. it turns out that my scorpio dog is perfectly compatible with scorpio me. and it looks like the love of my life (kitty) gets along famously with the other love of my life (the polymath). yay, happiness all around.

the love of my life. photo by me.

SCORPIO dog (October 23 to November 21): The Scorpio dog is such a terrific creature in every possible way that the word "terrific" can be applied. On the surface the Scorpio dog is a picture of calm, controlled and faithful devotion, devastatingly attractive and highly intelligent. But look closer and you’ll find that lurking underneath is a secret double agent with an agenda very much of its own. These dogs are passionate, secretive, intense, dedicated and competitive.

Famous dog most likely to be a Scorpio: Wiley Coyote.

Compatibility with humans: Aries, Taurus, Cancer, Leo, Libra, Scorpio, and Pisces.

the other love of my life. photo stolen from his blog.

ninja kids, dropping acid & that chinese girl

2006-07-21T15:18:00.000+08:00

haven't been blogging lately because my broadband has been very unstable the past week. am now taking a short break from some truly insane translation work.

ever since i posted about that chinese girl, i've received requests for clarification: what exactly had she done to earn my eternal revulsion and disgust? the latest to ask is my favorite uncle who recently emailed me from arizona. am recycling here parts of my reply to him because i have little time to blog these days. here goes:

a lot of people have asked me about that chinese girl's unbelievable remarkable feat. well, simply put, nangulangot siya sa harap namin while we were all talking to each other. not the discreet patago and self-conscious pangungulangot that most people do. instead, i witnessed an absentminded almost-unconscious matter-of-fact out-and-out digging for clams that lasted a full five minutes. efforts applied to both nostrils. but thankfully, one-handed & one-fingered technique lang.

ok sana kung ganun lang, diba? the thing is, we were at an ice cream place that specializes in serving bingsu. it's like halo-halo with softserve ice cream on top, which they serve in a huge communal bowl that's more like a punchbowl than a dessert dish, with long spoons sinking into the slowly melting slush. when i saw what she did, i stopped eating immediately. (actually, i actually felt the vomit rise up the back of my throat.) i was 300% sure i didn't want my dessert flavored with essence of kulangot.

my favorite tito also asked me if i really did experiment with acid (LSD), and didn't i think it was a very unnecessary risk? the following is the rather lame reply i came up with:

i wouldn't really use the word "experiment" there because that would imply a long process of trial and error. it really was just a one-time thing. whatever weirdness i felt that night i think was more from the tapeuy and the nganga, than from the acid. my friend told me that night that it was a particularly weak/old batch, almost a placebo. which on hindsight is a really good thing.

i was younger back then and i know i wouldn't do it now or ever again. but i'm glad i'm not curious about that stuff anymore. at least i can honestly say that i know drugs are pointless. i've tried them, and the experience is neither that great nor that evil to warrant so much interest and attention. it's the stupid and weak-willed people who use them that are dangerous, not the thing itself.

of course it was an unnecessary risk, and i knew it, but i did it anyway. i've done and still do and probably will keep doing a lot of stupid and risky things in the course of my life. i try to keep out of trouble most of the time, but sometimes there are moments when i say 'to hell with consequences!' and just go ahead and try things out. just for the sake of trying things out. but i'm a lot more careful now about what i choose to experience. i will however never claim that i'll always make the right or the smart choices.

as for the ninja kids... that was just shorthand for "preschoolers with the ability to kill, maim, or inflict massive amounts of pain on would-be attackers". they're not really ninjas, but little kids who hold blackbelts in taekwondo. i refer to my cousins josh and gabbie. josh is eight years old now but he got his blackbelt back in 2004, when he was six (six!). my tito proudly informed me that gabbie got hers just last saturday. she is at the moment five (five!) years old, but turns six on august 7th. standing at three feet or thereabouts, she's probably the smallest cutest killing machine in the whole state of arizona.

just like home

2006-07-16T22:40:00.000+08:00

photo taken at a jazz bar in the hondae district. the live jazz band refused to play my requests but i still had a great time. it wasn't cerveza negra but it sure tasted like home. taken 07 july 2006.

hell is a 2-day bus ride to nowhere

2006-07-16T17:35:00.000+08:00

so we're back at crimson house again, a day early.

yesterday morning saw us leaving crimson at 7.30am weighed down by backpacks for our three-day field trip with our writer friends living in gwangju. we got to the aeogye subway station at 8.30am sharp, as requested by the various organizers kind enough to put this event together. after a long-ish wait outside a convenience store, we saw some young korean writers carrying many many many cartons of beer and soju and loading them onto the waiting bus. after a bit, our friends kris and kit arrived, with three other asian writers (a guy from mongolia and 2 poets from palestine) and their handlers. the weather was mild. and so we set off to kangwon-do, where we were scheduled to stay at a buddhist temple and later at manhae traditional village, named after a buddhist love poet.

and then it started raining really hard. and now, a day later, it's still raining. the sheer agony of what we went through is truly blog-worthy but because i don't want to risk feeling worse than i do now, lemme just give some bullet points:

my phone kept receiving broadcasts about the weather, all in korean. but i could see numbers like 250mm and some scarily unidentifiable korean verbs attached to han gang, which is the name of the river that cuts through southern seoul.
we got word that there were landslides all over and many roads were impassable. we got off the bus several times on the highway for smokes and roadside toilet breaks (sans toilets) because traffic was at a standstill anyway. after a few hours, the koreans just started firing up their little death sticks inside the airconditioned bus and poor kris had to tie a bandanna a la holdaper around his face because of all the smoke.
it's a 3-day weekend so lots of people were also stuck in traffic en route to holiday high jinks all over the peninsula. i bet every bus on the road had a huge cargo of alcohol and no food. just like us.
during said toilet breaks, i saw lots of koreanas shivering in the rain with their dinky little handbags, pekpek miniskirts and stilettos. said koreanas also had to, ahem, go by squatting beside the highway in the said weather-inappropriate outfits. wehehe.
on the bus, i alternately slept, read pico iyer's tropical classical and listened to mp3s on my palm (especially my playlists entitled "uppers", "salon downloads", "about a paul" and "shirley bassey remixed"). got bored after 8 hours of this so i took out my camera and watched the video clip i took the night before of the lovely kanako* at the nurebang singing in a voice fit only for a cartoon character.
we spent a total of 18+ hours inside a bus stuck in traffic, in the rain, and still ended up back in seoul the next day. however, we did have a pretty good time last night with the korean writers who organized the trip for us. at around 11pm, we got off the bus and into some fleabag motel, the kind where the bedrooms had no beds and the bathrooms had no sinks. only faucets 6 inches above the floor***. we made short work of our busload of alcohol, amidst some forced singing (kris did a bit of "walang hanggang paalam" and i squawked through the beatles' "i will"), fried chicken, dried squid and various makunat na chichirya.

lots of other miseries happened but not really appropriate for this blog. some things are best forgotten, washed away by this damned rain. on the bright side, as soon as we arrived in seoul, siege and i took the subway for a good lunch/dinner at our favorite pakistani restaurant in itaewon (aka, the foreigners' ghetto) and looked at books in What the Book? couldn't find the ozick book for my favorite person so chose not to buy anything. so i'm now back at crimson, in my usual comfy state, surrounded by unread books and laundry in various states of filth.

* we all have a crush on her, this sweet japanese girl who lives in room 401. after weeks of plotting and pining, we finally convinced her to join us for some yogurt-flavored soju (like yakult that delivers a kick in the head) and lots of bad singing at a nurebang on chamsari-gil**. so last friday night, jon, siege, tenzin and i brought kanako to our favorite soju place. this favorite night-time ritual now includes puffing on chocolate-flavored cigars so we gave one to kanako, too. she knows very little english, lots of korean and of course, japanese. jon knows no korean, a little japanese, and english. tenzin knows tibetan, hindi, english and urdu. siege & i know english, tagalog and lots of curses in various languages. you can just imagine how much got lost in translation (eg, kanako almost took a bite out of her cigar, thinking it was actually made of chocolate).

** our photographer friend from klti, mr. song in-ook, told me yesterday that chamsari-gil means "real life road". very appropriate, as it is lined with bars and nurebangs and more bars, all for the pickling of generations of korea university student livers.

*** once more, i give in to my inner bigot and make tawa at the idea of korea being a developed country. i maintain that it's a matter of software (ang mga utaw) not being able to catch up with the hardware (ang kanilang hi-tech insfrastructure). tercer mundo pa rin mag-isip ang karamihan dito, basta nakalabas na ng seoul. having just survived a hellish roadtrip that inevitably includes stops at roadside toilets with electric hand dryers but no toilet bowls (only those horrific crusty squat-type abominations), i must ask you to forgive my grousing.

non-required reading

2006-07-13T12:46:00.000+08:00

been reading a lot since i arrived in seoul, to fill the hours that sleep refuses to claim, and because i can, finally, without the multifarious distractions that home offers. below is a list of books i've finished reading, excluding the korea lit in english translation that KLTI requires us to read. so, without regard to order or ranking, here they are:

books finished:
1) skyscrapers, celadon and kimchi: a korean notebook by cristina pantoja hidalgo
2) the giving tree by shel silverstein (in korean translation)
3) a user's guide to the millenium by j.g. ballard
4) the global soul by pico iyer
5) video night in kathmandu by pico iyer
6) night by elie weisel
7) the lady and the monk by pico iyer
8) confessions of an ugly stepsister by gregory maguire

books being read:
1) kiss by polly clark
2) the voice at 3:00 am by charles simic
3) sounds, thoughts, feelings by wislawa szymborska

books to be read:
1) take me with you by polly clark
2) sun after dark: flights into the foreign by pico iyer
3) the rarest of the rare by diane ackerman
4) the art of travel by alain de botton
5) cosmicomics by italo calvino
6) dark hours by conchitina cruz
7) tropical classical: essays from several directions by pico iyer
8) the light of belief by bediuzzaman said nursi
9) collected prose: autobiographical writings, true stories, critical essays, prefaces, and collaborations with artists by paul auster

so even without my book acquisition moratorium, i have my work cut out for me. still, this is the kind of work that is very much welcome.

a bit scary

2006-07-12T15:06:00.000+08:00

Who Should Paint You: M.C. Escher

Open and raw, you would let your true self show for your portrait.
And even if your painting turned out a bit dark, it would be honest.

What Artist Should Paint Your Portrait?

losing sleep again

2006-07-12T03:25:00.000+08:00

so it's 3am there now.

in a couple of hours you'll be awake and making that long trip past green fields and into smoggy trafficky metro manila. i feel so empty right now. and maybe a little bit broken somewhere.

i want nothing more than to be home in my own big bed right now, with kitty snuffling and snoring on my pillow. because that would mean i'd only be an hour away from you.

you have no idea how many nights i spent awake in that big bed, just thinking of you: breathing deeply, your skin warm with sleep, in a dark room. and the river somewhere outside.

i remember thinking of the dark water flowing past your house, and despairing that i'll never get the chance to watch you sleep, never get to wake you from the grip of a nightmare and tell you it's all right, i'm here.

but now i'm here. and there seems little else to say or do at the moment besides try to get some sleep.

Hmmn.

2006-07-06T22:35:00.000+08:00

You Are Marge Simpson

You're a devoted family member who loves unconditionally.

Sometimes, though, you dream about living a wild secret life!

You will be remembered for: your good cooking and evading the police

Your life philosophy: "You should listen to your heart, and not the voices in your head."

The Simpsons Personality Test

it's aliiiiiiiiive!

2006-07-02T23:10:00.000+08:00

yes, my friends, i now have my camera back. took lots of photos today but none of them good enough to post here. sorry. school starts tomorrow. am so not excited about it. but... lemme end on a high note.

tops 3 things i like about today:

1) felt really blessed by sermon in church today.
2) got my camera back.
3) had a good talk with 2 important people in my life.
4) discovered an indian restaurant a block away from crimson house, right beside that lovely bistro/cafe/wine store that plays nina simone & ella on lazy afternoons

okay, so that's four. counting has never been one of my talents.

traduttore tradittore

2006-06-30T12:12:00.000+08:00

not sure if i got the spelling right. it's an italian maxim that says "translation is betrayal." and for some reason, after centuries of theorizing, it still seems to hold true. translating from one language/code to another will always entail making choices, deciding what to carry over and what will have to be sacrificed in the name of brevity, readability, &c. there are lots of fancy words for this: information load, cultural content, etc. anyway, the current darling among translational approaches is target-oriented translation, aka fluent translations, in which the text must not appear to be a translation, so that the translator is in effect rendered invisible. sort of like a magic trick.

i would love to be able to do this 100% of the time but with the kinds of texts i'm working on, it just doesn't seem possible. i'm on my third batch now, each batch being a section in a book of poetry characterized by linguistic play and other such experimentation. the first batch of seven poems was difficult because of the various language registers used (dated slang, archaic Tagalog, some dialect) and the fact that several of these featured acrostics. good grief. but i managed to finish those in 2 weeks.

wrestling with the second batch turned out to be much much bloodier. that took me...well, much too long. on the surface, it looked like just four poems that played with repetition and patterns. the first, "balimbing", was easy enough. the second proved more difficult but it was mainly a problem of language register. the third poem was hellish, involving an acrostic, and seemingly endless repetition of the same 8 words in 80+ lines but with different patterns, and therefore different meanings.

the last "poem" in that section was actually a whole series of 20 concrete poems (!!!) that also used a lot of punning, aural and visual. that was like mission impossible for me. most translations scholars will tell you that you just don't/can't translate concrete poetry . at most, you do a prose translation or write a note explaining the content. but no... i actually finished the darned thing, and even managed to replicate some of the sound play via alliteration and assonance. yes, i'm that good, haha. ha.

and now this last batch. fifteen pages of rhyme and meter (the poems follow a traditional tagalog form), some very obscure references and even words that don't apear in my tagalog-english dictionary (the one prepared by father leo james english). argh. been working on this for four months now but very little progress. good grief.

okay, back to work.

meet my friend, kim mincheol

2006-06-28T22:01:00.000+08:00

taken one sunday in may outside some museum at the grounds of some palace. i know i should've taken notes of where we went exactly but i just couldn't be bothered at the time. the palace brochure is among my piles of notes here somewhere.

at 3:51 pm today, my good buddy mincheol sent me an sms, which i'm reproducing in its full korean-english glory:

"Your camera have been repaired~! [1]
It costs 33000 won
Whenever the repair shop open,
we can receive your camera~!"

i felt so happy, i almost cried. really, i don't know how i can ever say thank you to this guy. from the day we met, he's been nothing but helpful--giving me lessons in korean language, taking me ice skating, bringing me to the acupuncturist when i hurt myself ice skating, bringing me to palaces even if it bored him to tears, teaching me the fine art of swilling soju like a true kuryo de hakkyo student. he's helped me send postcards at the ujekuk (post office), has waited for me in the rain for follow-up acupuncture sessions, even showed up to watch me take part in some ridiculous fashion show activity in between his exams and job interviews.

technically, he's my dowoomi, a helper or buddy assigned to me by the korean language and culture center of the institute for foreign language studies of the korea university. he volunteered for this because as he says, "i want to help foreigners adjust to life in korea." and he's so devoted to the task that he even sat through a whole church service in english with me, even if he could follow only 15% of what was going on. other people met their dowoomis only once or twice; we've been meeting up at least once a week, sometimes more because he says i really need to practice korean.

mincheol is 26 in korea but is actually 24 anywhere else in the world. like most korean guys his age, he's done his two-year military service. he'll be graduating with some kind of engineering degree in january and has recently been accepted by the software division of samsung. his girlfriend, hyun-ook, has the prettiest brown eyes i've ever seen (apparently a rare kind of beauty in korea) and is an environmental science major. they make a cute couple, spending the late evening hours studying at the library together. last month, they gave me a copy of shel silverstein's the giving tree in korean translation, just so i can practice my hanggukmal.

when i broke my camera at the korea-togo football game, he was the first person i called. he was studying and watching the football game on tv at the time but immediately, he said, "yes, i will help you when i'm free." and true to his promise, he did bring me to technomart last sunday to have my casio exilim repaired. he lives more than an hour away but he was there to meet me at the korea university subway station, looking as always like a woozy 5-year old just up from a nap. but for once, he wasn't carrying a schoolbag.

"today, i am free!" he lisped. he has a funny way of talking, half-lisping in english, and miming like a kindergartner. he had just finished his exams and a final project where he figured a way to use a mobile phone to control the elevator even from your apartment. it's perfect for lazy, perpetually late people living in high-rise apartments or for people who just don't want to waste a single minute or five waiting for an elevator to come up to the 38th floor from the lobby. what a brilliant kid.

his doowomi duties technically ended with spring term but here he is, still helping me. he said he signed up for dowoomi duties again for summer term, and wants us to be buddies again, if that's possible. i doubt if we'd be allowed to do that but it doesn't really matter. we're good friends now.

taken one saturday afternoon in april by mincheol's friend, kelly (can't remember her korean name). that's mincheol, hyun-ook, and my then-new pink fedora. at an italian fusion place somewhere along chamsari-gil, near the anam subway station.

[1] since i arrived in seoul, i've noticed an inordinate use of the tilde among koreans. maybe because it's frillier (and therefore, better) than any other punctuation mark.

things looking up

2006-06-27T08:11:00.000+08:00

had a good sleep last night, which is to say i actually did some sleeping instead of the tossing and turning that had been my wont the past week or so. and today i actually woke up in the morning, at 6:30, instead of noon. am also getting ready to have a breakfast of barley tea and nutella on wheat-and-rye bread. i know this is the most mundane & boring blog post in the world but i am just so glad right now to be going through a normal boring morning.

photos stolen from jon's blog*

2006-06-26T23:51:00.000+08:00

this was taken at sokcho beach. me telling tenzin to stop filming me drunk. he didn't stop. i am such a source of amusement for these crimson house boyz.

me and tenzin on the subway, on the way to the football game event at city hall. this is what happens when two strong jawlines meet--nothing much, heh heh.

pinoyz at sokcho beach. me, all puffy-faced and tipsy. chef tristan the gym addict the only sober person around (he was chugging some kinda sports drink). the intrepid jose carrlos working to add something to project J. yes, he always turns red with too much alcohol.

this is sokcho. not quite like the beach towns we're used to at home. lots of dilapidated condos and deserted lots. but always always trying to make things better. never got to visit those mountains, me too lazy. the beaches face the opposite direction--east. the sea here is very wittily called "the eastern sea." clever, eh?

this is jon dewey doing an impression of a crazed football fan. and me with horns (a gift from min, siege's buddy) doing an impression of a happy sairo. probably taken before i broke my camera.**

* not really stealing because he gave me permission. yay.
** which is now at the repair shop, well...being repaired. thanks to my good buddy mincheol for all the help. you rock! kamsahamnida!

perma-smile

2006-06-26T15:33:00.000+08:00

it's starting to rain here and it's gloomy outside. what passes for sunshine is cold and grey and smoggy. still, i'm so giddy it's ridiculous. and my cheeks are starting to ache. hee hee.

about a boy

2006-06-26T12:55:00.000+08:00

i have a playlist on my palm that i've been listening to for the past few days. see, i'm having such a hard time sleeping lately. been thinking too much, i guess. and apart from reading posts and looking at paris photos in my favorite person's blog, this is the only thing that helps.

nick hornby's high fidelity (the book and the movie) was the first to make me realize (yes, i'm dumb that way) that a mix tape--or in these mp3-intensive times, a playlist--is a narrative of sorts. at the very least, it can be a compendium of sounds, feelings, thoughts*, longings, memories and promises.

los amantes - ana d
womb - sugar hiccup
nothing but the sky - ivy
un rayo del sol - le mans
cry me a river - ella fitzgerald
when i'm thinking about you - the sundays
on paper - three o-clock
a waltz for a night - julie delpy
sexual healing - marvin gaye
thank you - dido
je t'aime tant - julie delpy
panaginip - brownbeat allstars cover
come here - kath bloom
teardrop - massive attack

* incidentally, the title of wislawa szymborska's poetry collection. been savoring this since i arrived here end of march. and as with this sojourn, i'm just about halfway through the book. i don't know what the last poem in the book is but i want to read it with the person most important to me.

just three things

2006-06-25T19:50:00.000+08:00

1) back in the 80s, korean tibaks apparently studied pinoy tibaks so they could learn how to fight park chung-hee. i met a korean man named saeed recently who is in love with the idea of the philippines having jungles so that the CPP-NPA would have a place to hide. labo.

2) palestinians are very very persistent people. and here, for a particular group of korean writers, they are the cause-of-the-moment. said korean writers are some of the coolest koreans i've met, in that they're not brainwashed into thinking 'corea da best, corea number one' like everyone else in this country. they're a little more critical, and may seem like left-wing bleeding heart liberals because of it. or maybe they really are that.

3) had tequila for the first time last night. (yes, i'm a pathetic late bloomer in that sense. but then, i've always been a straight vodka or dark beer kinda person.) anyway...it ain't all that. i don't see the whole point of it, the so-called thrill or mystique. had 5 or 6 shots and i didn't get drunk at all. just a bit buzzy at the edges. where's the traydor-ness of it all? or is this beginner's luck?

like being underwater

2006-06-25T18:57:00.000+08:00

almost like drowning, but not quite. it's a good feeling. this is how i've been all day since i had a talk this morning with a person very important to me. was crying during most of the call and so i'm not sure whether he said what he said, or if i'd just imagined it. it sounded like there was a promise in there somewhere.

so at the risk of saying something tacky... right now there's something like the beginnings of a smile--not sure where exactly--but it's in here somewhere. maybe at the corner of my mouth or in that place a little below my heart. it's lodged in here somewhere so that there seemed times today that i had to remind myself to breathe.

LSS

2006-06-23T23:42:00.000+08:00

argh.

listened to my new mp3s on the train to daejon today and now i can't get this one thing out of my head. it's not a riff, not even lyrics... it's the start and refrain of that old "womb" song by sugar hiccup ("uh-ha, uh-HAH...uh-ha, uh-HAH...uh-ha uh-HAH..." ad nauseam).

argh.

and it's not even something i can sing along to, because that melody chick's voice is like 8 octaves higher than mine. so it's just here in my head bouncing around. maybe going into that sound chamber at KAIST today messed up my circuitry.

tama naaaaaaa!

HUBO't hubad...

2006-06-23T22:07:00.000+08:00

...yung nakita naming robots kanina, except for one who just got back from a junket in singapore. said jetlagged robot's name is HUBO (human + robo) and he speaks with an american accent. funnily enough, he only understands commands in korean, and can only answer in english. HUBO was an honored guest at a recent CNN special on future technologies. nitpicky me noticed slight lapses in the robot's grammar. but it was still really really cool. which you can't really say about them call center flunkies, give or take a few exceptions.

we spent the day at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), a sprawling campus in daejeon city, 50 mins by express train from seoul. it's where they grow science nerds here in korea, their MIT of sorts.

it's very competitive there, only half the graduates of top science high schools here make the cut. the science high schools already are hard to get into; only 30 students per level. so most KAIST fresh meat are 16 or 17 years old, very young by korean standards because most kids here enter college at 19 or 20. so those bespectacled little geniuses we saw tooling around in cool-but-dorky bicycles should actually still be in middle school but breezed through high school in 1.5 years. at KAIST, says our guide, they never have vacations. no sem breaks!!! no wonder there were all these crazy installations all over the campus.* mass nervous breakdown, anyone?

HUBO is only one of many robots being developed at KAIST, and they all have their special talents. we took photos of ourselves with the little darlings, of course. actually, the other writers took photos while i pathetically begged them to take pics of me too. now we have robots to add to Project J. if you haven't seen the Project J photos, look at them now. you won't regret it, i promise.

so anyway, and this robotics lab we visited is just one of more than a hundred labs at KAIST working on projects too esoteric for me to comprehend.

for example: a sort of "soundless" lab that has these foamy spongy wedges on the walls, ceilings and under our feet (beneath some metal mesh floor) to absorb sounds and echoes. they use this room to study sounds in a "pure/clean" environment. the waves bounce into the wedges, become smaller and sorta disappear into that place where the sloping parts meet. i'd show you a picture if i could. curse me for breaking my camera. argh.

entering the soundless room was...unsettling. we could feel some kind of pressure, like walking and breathing underwater. but of course there isn't any water or pressure. it's just that the absence of ambient sound affected the way our minds/bodies processed/experienced that place. and when we talked in there (asking questions, ooh-ing at the otherworldly feeling, whispering secrets into wedge-shaped holes a la 2046), it was like you were hearing everyone's voices inside your head.

we were there for only a few minutes and i felt weird for a long time after. imagine what it would be like to stay they for an hour. or a day. or a week. our guide, prof. kim**, said the longest a person's been in the room is 20 minutes. longer than that and you start going nuts. and they're not really interested in trying to see how long a person can last in there. they study music and physics, not madness. yes, i asked.

so why were we there? to talk literature with prof. kim tak-hwan, one of the few cool korean writers we met at the seoul young writers festival at the beginning of may. he teaches digital storytelling at the graduate school of culture technology in KAIST. it's a 10-year experiment, all about studying the tech side of humanities -- music, film, writing, photography, internet, etc. the cool thing about kim tak-hwan is when he writes, he thinks multi-platform: one story can be a novel (2 versions: with footnotes for geeks & critics, tapos lite pop version para sa madlang people), a tv drama series, a movie, a video game, etc.

what's funny is that he made his name writing historical novels. and his best-seller is has a feminist tone and agenda, and the persona is a gaesang (korean equivalent of a geisha) who was also recognized during her lifetime as an exceptional poet. the novel is told from the first person POV, mimics the language of the joseon dynasty, and uses no conjunctions at all. but now he's decided to focus on SF because of where he teaches now (how can he not???).

and he's in the middle of writing a historical love story about a frenchman and a korean chick and is set in various exotic locales like paris & casablanca etc. there's enough romance & tragedy in it so that it's going to be filmed, a collaboration of 3 countries: korea, france and the US. he'll be flying to paris and morocco next month to do ahem research for the story. lucky.

* e.g., an eviscerated toilet bowl lounging in an inflatable kiddie swimming pool, foil-wrapped topiary, and what siege called 'old school'--some big super mario coin thingies pasted on some building's wall. i didn't get what he meant, being old school enough myself to know only atari-era games like pong, pacman, space invaders, etc.

** prof. kim something. i feel awful not remembering her name because she is such a character. she's a cellist and sound scientist who also teaches at KAIST. but dammit, why do they all have to be called kim something-or-other. honestly, i know the following people: kim yeajin, kim tak-hwan, kim mincheol, kim eung hwa, and my professor who i just call kim sonsengnim (an honorific equivalent to ma'am or sir). every other kim, i just forget.

shite, i just cannot resist saying this, even if i know it will make me feel dirty: i know kimchi and kimbap. ang corny ko talaga pag madaling araw.

dammit, my teeth hurt

2006-06-22T01:50:00.000+08:00

because i got this box of goodies from my mom in the states
because she wanted to, not because i asked her to
because they don't seem to sell or use antibac hand gel in this country
because subway handrails are the filthiest things in the world
because i've been using Crest (tm) tooth whitening strips recently
because i drink too much tea and coffee
because the peroxide gel penetrates the tooth enamel and jangles the little nerve endings

dammit, i can't sleep. third sleepless night in a row.
what am i doing wrong?

because this is easier than cleaning my room

2006-06-21T23:31:00.000+08:00

lately while listening to mp3s on the subway, i find myself hitting the skip button more often than usual. either my palm's SD card is getting too crowded with mp3s or it's time to make changes in my music library.

some stuff i'll delete:

all eraserheads songs (anti-homesickness songs; but after hearing "maselang bahaghari" for the 5th time, i remembered why i've outgrown ely buendia's caterwauling)
all michael buble songs (icky sticky sappy)
all norah jones songs (ditto)

stuff i'm definitely keeping:

cry me a river (ella fitzgerald; for those senti moments)
all pete yorn songs (mahal ko pa rin siya)
all jose gonzales songs (ditto)
teardrop (massive attack; back to back with jose gonzales cover)
bright yellow gun (throwing muses; keeps me awake on road trips)
nothing but the sky (ivy; gives me a buzz every time)
sexual healing (marvin gaye remixed with shaggy toasting/rapping in background; so i can dance in the subway and get more strange looks from ajimmas)
selected early liz phair songs (can sing along to these because we have the same severely limited vocal range)
panaginip (hotdogs tribute by brownbeat allstars; because i can)
lanca perfume (that old brazilian song from the 80s; ear kitsch)

new stuff i'll transfer to the palm:

songs from shirley bassey remix album
songs from cafe mundo (pang-counter sa oppressive monoculture na nakikita ko araw-araw, token multiculturalism ba...)
van morrison (because pico iyer told me to)
selected tracks from francesca beard, and il postino, english patient & red violin soundtracks (para may WTF moments naman ako)
random weird stuff downloaded from salon.com

been looking for stuff by shrift (bagong banda ni nina miranda [dreamy vocals behind smoke city]) both online and in stores here but so far nothing i can actually carry around. tsk, ang hirap talaga magnakaw ng musika. so i just listen to a lot of yahoo radio, especially the chillout station. memoryado ko na ang radio ads ng subway sandwiches.

stupid realization #1

2006-06-21T03:44:00.000+08:00

it is a truth universally acknowledged, that two people in possession of similar/identical items/vocabularies/tastes/ideologies/etc., must be a couple.* of sorts. this is why:

when you really like someone, and you go out for dinner or coffee, you get whatever he/she has, say, a triple espresso or tazo chai redolent with black pepper, or a cherry-infused green tea, even if all you really want is a blah cafe latte or a caramel frapuccino.
after years of watching the same movies, reading the same books, listening to the same songs, you find yourselves finishing each other's thoughts and sentences, and you know exactly what the other person means even if all you read in the message is a single punctuation mark.
in korea, couples of various age groups declare couple-hood by toting/wearing exactly the same items (e.g., fake nerd glasses [what siege calls artificial intelligence], green baseball caps worn backwards, orange hi-top chuck taylors, hot pink t-shirts--sometimes all four items worn by just one middle-aged couple)

theory has never been my strongest point (or more honestly, just not my point at all), and probably never will be. but here's a try: maybe we do this mirroring because we want to believe we have found the Self in an Other, we want this one-ness so badly that we change the Self into the Other, even if it's just on some wonky level like turning marxist after being poststructuralist for years simply because the Cute Boy/Girl wore a che guevara t-shirt to graduate class one day.

i just read over that previous paragraph and it looks a helluva lot like (a) bullcrap, (b) pointing out the obvious, (c) the result of yet another sleepless night, and (d) all of the above.

at the end of The Global Soul, pico iyer writes of his japanese girlfriend. they've been together for 12 years and yet, they cannot read a single word in the other's language. although (or because?) educated at eton, oxford and harvard, iyer speaks japanese like a three-year-old and gets laughed at by toothless octogenarians in his suburban neighborhood. how the heck did they manage to even last through a day together, let alone a dozen years??? iyer then writes about a private language, what a much lesser writer would call a mother tongue used by a society of two.** simply put, having a private langue is one of the defining features of a couple. the complex theory needed to explain that is sadly beyond my ken.

* adapted from the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice. but you already knew that. what you probably don't know is that all these months, one of the kookier teachers here has been insisting that s & i like each other, are in fact a couple, an item (such a quaint term!) because we carry identical lime green flippy LG mobile phones. it was more mundane than anything: a result of sheer cheapness on our part--part of the hard bargain we had to drive to lower the price by 1,000 pesos.

** that cringing much-lesser writer would be me. cringe, cringe. ok, i'll stop now. gotta sleep.

video night at crimson house

2006-06-21T00:02:00.000+08:00

well, not really.

more like: here are some links to videos my friends made, in which i have some cameos. can't annotate really so just be patient and watch out for my fat face appearing every so often. best seen over a broadband connection, especially the 9-minute namsan extravaganza by siege.

so sit back, relax, and click on zese leenks:

sports day - in which tenzin tsetan choklay, tibetan auteur extraordinaire, captures one day in may where were we forced to do cruel and unusual activities (like learn the world cup dance) at fricking nine o'clock in the morning (!!!). if you listen closely, you will hear me whining in the background every so often. i'm the goof in the pink fedora and wall-climbing pants; watch me spazz.
cast: mongolians (sunder & bayarku), vietnamese (phuong, hung, son), tenzin, kalinga, siege, me, kang sonsengnim (our kooky teacher), and a host of other unfortunates roused too early and forced to cavort on plastic grass

we go to the game - in which the aforementioned tibetan director captures the insanity that is world cup fever in korea. this is the night six unsuspecting foreigners get caught in the red-shirted, balloon-waving, horn-wearing crush, and a digital camera and a girl's heart get broken simultaneously. also features a song that is absolutely perfect for that mad, mad night. pinoys may find the size & mood of the crowd familiar--the last time we partied like this, we kicked a president out of office.
cast: assif (the GI bear from azerbaijan), jon (tall emo-haired kano), tenzin, kalinga (cinematographer from anuradhapura, sri lanka), siege, me

to the beach - yet another small masterpiece by tenzin, this time chronicling the first day of our 4-day stay in sokcho, a resort town with mountains in the west and beaches facing the eastern sea. that day was cold and rainy, so most of us kinda looked miserable. the rest of our stay was much better. am glad tenzin didn't put in the footage he took of me after too much soju too fast at the beach the following night. i'd have skinned him alive. beautiful music and even a poem somewhere in there.
cast: tenzin, kalinga, jon, siege, tristan (gym-addicted pinoy chef & church buddy), me

namsan and then some - a nine-minute epic shot by the intrepid jose carrrrlos during our recent trip to seoul tower. features sarcasm, a cable car ride, strange signs, septuagenarians hooking up, toilet humor, and an unfortunate little reindeer who may or may not have been violated at some point in its sad & lonely existence. watch out for the windows! a must-see!
cast: siege, me, slightly annoyed people in the cable car who kept leaning as far away from us as possible, random people na nilapastangan on camera nang hindi nila nalalaman

seoul under siege - primarily a five-minute slideshow featuring seoul, nami island, historic gyeongju city, and andong in the context of siege's cheekbones. i put this in here mainly for the occasional sandra cameos (always worth the wait, hey?) and one particular photo at 2:39 or thereabouts, where an ahem homely* girl makes kapit really tightly around the arm of the featured boy. watch out also for a curly-haired romanian poet** with a nice jawline & a tiny paunch. nota bene: most of these photos were taken by moi. not bad, noh? man, i miss my camera.
cast: siege's cheekbones, siege's razorcut and very flippy dyed hair, me, lots of other people, more like a benetton ad than anything else (if you can get past you-know-who's cheekbones)

* i must admit: i had, in the past, cruelly labeled her "mukhang katulong" which resulted in some very upsetting moments over a coupla pints of guinness several weeks later. pero look at her naman... o sige, you be the judge na lang, ha?

** funnily enough, CK was the main cause of the meltdown that occured over the very tasty guinness pints mentioned in the note above. incidentally, said meltdown was witnessed by our favorite tibetan. thank goodness he had yet to buy his video cam when that happened.

digital zen: the sound of one camera breaking

2006-06-20T22:30:00.001+08:00

that was a really dumb title. haha. ha. haaaay.

got back from the beach last saturday night with a lovely tan and no photos except those taken with my little lime green mobile phone. but it just isn't the same without the 6 megapixel clarity of my beautiful dearly departed casio exilim. sigh. so i locked myself in room 304 and started reading a really really bad book (gregory maguire's confessions of an ugly stepsister). it was one of those half-hearted purchases made in an attempt to acquire some light reading for when i want my brain to just zonk out. but dammit, the prose is just so hyper-duper panget. but! being the borderline ock-ock that i am, i know i will end up suppressing my gag reflex and just finish the damn thing. happily, it's just some used book i picked up at itaewon & can easily give away to someone i don't like very much. hmmm... kanino kaya?

much of sunday, after service at onnuri megachurch with chef tristan, was spent alone at hyehwa to buy international calling cards and to get ogled by hundreds of ilocano merchant marines and other random pinoy migrant workers. it was sunday and i figured it was my patriotic duty to give them someone gorgeous to look at for a change. (don't worry, am cringing as i type.) idiot that i am, i spent an hour looking for a hana eunheng (hana bank) atm. ended up walking several blocks to a hana bank building pointed out by a nice family mart cashier guy. only to find out from lawyer friend joan that (duh) you can use other banks' atms! they just charge you sixty pesos for it. attorney stiletto & i ended up talking for hours at a coffee bean and tea leaf sipping scarily expensive ice blended green tea thingies. i tried to ask the barista girl to make it No Sugar Added but apparently, they've never heard of such an animal in this country*. so i had no choice but to suck the sugar in.

apropos of nothing, so i'm back at good old crimson house where i had the biggest scare of my life a little over an hour ago. walked out into the night without wearing glasses or contacts and got ogled/heckled by a couple of drunk ajushees (old men, tanders, thundercats, ta-matands**, lolos) who wouldn't stop giggling hello's at me until i turned and smiled at them. they giggled some more. cute old buggers. i turned a corner and walked to the family mart*** for some much-needed salty while-working snackie-munchies. walked back to crimson with my loot (seasoned dried pollack, soft roasted squid & non-garbage-tasting soymilk) and noticed that the ajussis had gone home. or maybe i'd just imagined them?

anyway, as i approached crimson, i saw three chinese/japanese guys with wildly dyed hair in the smoking area. i'd never seen them before (and with my myopia, i still couldn't see them) and they were watching me weirdly (i think) as i did the whole security card-waving ritual that really is a ritual more than anything else. acting normal but quickly descending into panic, i scuttled into the building, waited jumpily for the elevator, got in and turned... to (sort of) see that the three vaguely threatening-looking guys had come into the lobby after me and were walking towards the slowly closing elevator doors. i panicked, hit the close button, hyperventilated within the elevator's small confines, scooted onto my floor, flat-out ran into my room, and slammed the bolt in place.

i thought i was going to get mugged and the crazy-haired freaks were in the building (!!!). so i fired off a message to siege on ym in an attempt to calm what was starting to sound like my heart about to explode from sheer terror. it took a full five minutes to realize that (uhm) maybe they're just new to the dorm and (uhm) i acted like a total jackass. i'd forgotten that this is bloody korea. people don't get mugged here. you can get spat at (accidentally) on the street or shoved (not/never an accident) in the subway by elderly women in pink Hello Kitty tracksuits and purple sunvisors. but the chances of you getting accosted in the subway between sindang and cheonggu by an indian PhD student whose pickup line is "are you from bolivia?" is waaaaay higher than actual physical assault. but psychic assault... that's a different blog entry altogether. tscha!

* the same way that the first time i went to a starbucks in seoul, when i asked for a pot of "pressed coffee, cafe verona please", the barista guy looked at me as if i had ordered some freshly squeezed iguana juice, crushed skull on the side please.

** horrible dated slang courtesy of siege

*** a.k.a. our favorite convenience store where they sell canned silkworm pupas, canned shellfish that look like blanched foreskins, meat popsicles and benetton brand condoms, salt that looks and tastes like laundry soap, laundry soap that smells like chalkdust, among other delectables. also features a guy behind the counter (the owner?) with a very monk-ish mien. really, he does! i've seen waaaay too many monks in waaaaay too many buddhist temples. i know the look. and he looks very meditative and zen while lugging huge boxes of frozen food into his little flourescent kingdom. will write more later about other characters that populate the family mart kingdom. really, i will! am just in the middle of a crazy translation project right now.

pink flamingoes (clap-clap, clap-clap clap)*

2006-06-14T01:50:00.000+08:00

i really don't get tennis. neither do i get football. but we just got back from watching the world cup game vs togo with a gajillion koreans at city hall.

picture this: cool giant TV screens, lots of beer being sold by ajushees (old manongs), fireworks, couples in identical red outfits, girls wearing devil-horn headbands (di nila kayang dalhin i'm sorry), the savory smell of stewed silkworm pupaes wafting through the night air (made me vomit into my mouth every so often). parang edsa 2 but waaaaaay dorkier. all these silly dances and baduy songs/cheers that kinda underscore what looks like an inferiority complex they're trying very hard to hide.

yes, i'm still wearing my devil-horn headband, a gift from siege's doowomi (korean buddy-helper-tutor dude), min. mwahaha. ho ho ho. anyway...we really wanted to get hammered while watching but walking to & from the toilet through a snarling mob of koreans didn't quite appeal to us.

the game sucked big time. bano yung parehong team eh. nothing happened for like 40 minutes, just some desultory kicking of a ball around some big green field, accompanied by lots of racist hissing and sneering laughter from the xenophobes all around us whenever an african (athlete or audience, didn't really matter) appeared on the giant TV screens. togo scored the first goal. after the break and more pointless kicking, some hottie from the togo team got a red card, and korea managed a goal.

the crowd went into paroxysms of multifarious insanities too underwhelming to describe here. but i had to stand up just like everyone else or risk getting trampled by crazy kids finding validation and profound meaning in the scoring of a goal. yes, horns still on. but be patient, dear reader. there's a reason for my being snappish tonight.

to be brief about the nadir of this night: I BROKE MY CAMERA. it slipped from my wrist 30 mins before the game started, and it hit the pavement smack on the corner of the retractable lens. AAUUUGH. gusto ko umiyak but i'm still in a state of shock about it. hope to get it fixed as soon as we get back from the east coast beaches. must cut this short; gotta pack now. we leave at dawn.

* this is what we thought the korean football crazies were shouting every couple of breaths. apparently, it's "deh han-ming-guk" or "the great republic of korea." i like our version better.

a message from 4 years ago

2006-06-13T13:52:00.000+08:00

was flipping through my journal just now (am waiting for laundry's rinse cycle to end) and saw that i'm pretty erratic about writing journal entries. i only write when something terribly interesting (or simply something terrible) had just happened. and so my journal makes my days seem more anguished than they actually were. funny how we never really put in stuff like: "brushed my teeth and flossed very carefully after having a huge albap lunch with my two professors" when in fact such mundane events are really the stuff of our lives.

and so i saw that i'd jotted down an SMS sent by a good friend on 31 may 2002, right after a breakup with a certain poststructuralist i had hooked up with. it's a quote from louise gluck and it was exactly the thing i needed at the time.

"we are all human. we protect ourselves as well as we can even to the point of denying clarity, the point of self-deception. and yet within this deception true happiness occured. so that i believe i would repeat these errors exactly. nor does it seem to me crucial to know whether or not such happiness is built on illusion: it has its own reality. and, in either case, it will end."

naui chinan chumal*

2006-06-12T20:00:00.000+08:00

as i write this, i'm watching house on OCN (channel 21), eating red ginseng chocolate squares (white chocolate studded with rice crispies & smelling/tasting like a dank-ass moldy potato). am also jumping to the world cup game on MBC ESPN (channel 31) even if i dunno what the hell is going on; the commentary is in hanggukmal. that australian guy who plays dr. jesse spencer is such a hottie. am still a little disconcerted to see robert sean leonard breathing, walking and mugging for the TV cameras; in my head, he's still that sad kid in dead poets society who blew his brains out. i love that dr. house looks constantly demented. he's a hottie too, and the only actor who has me convinced of actually having attended med school. everyone else looks too damn pretty.

so anyway, i had a great weekend.

friday after class, we (me & jose carlos & j.d. from minneapolis na tinatawag naming girl emo; don't ask) went to a tourism trade fair at COEX mall. we had free tickets courtesy of pax coreana, a korean who'd grown up in baguio and who'd attended UP diliman around the same time i did. he's cool. so thanks to our buddy pax, we scored bagfuls of tourism-related loot like pens and cellphone thingies and brochures. we had a nice omurice (omelet+rice) fusion dinner then went home to attend the crimson house roof party.

we shouldn't have bothered. it was sad as heck, just mr. manager, his friend, the ex-manager and a couple of not very scintillating guys from the 2nd and 5th floors. i had to go rescue the two boys by reminding them that we had an appointment we were already late for. am not very good at lying through my teeth so i let j.c. do most of the oh-i'm-so-sorry-flustered acting. we then went to nearby chamsari-gil: j.c. in a pink tank top, j.d. in emo-ish floppy hair, and me wearing a chemi issoyo green silk top. we were kinda playing the "agawan ng demographics" game. ever since j.d. started hanging out with us, we noticed that we had been getting fewer stares than usual from xenophobic koreans in the subway. the stares from angry-looking korean men were now being directed at our thin & looming friend (he's of scandinavian stock, so tall he has to duck to enter the train). so j.c. decided to show some skin, and in a manner of speaking, so did i. for the first time, i beat them both. ha. ha. ha. if i knew it was that easy, i wouldn't have bothered.

we got hammered by chugging down a pitcher of yogurt-flavored soju (a little like yakult that delivers a giant kick in the head) and chewing on an equally giant dried squid. we then dragged ourselves through the rain to a nure bang (karaoke room) run by a nice old ajimma (old lady). the toilet was expectedly nasty, as these places go, but being confronted by a crusty squat-type thingy when you can't feel your feet is just the most horrific thing ever. especially in a country that styles itself as being of the first world. so you learn to hold it in, as real men do. up at the nure bang, we were all drunk enough to pick faintly emo-ish songs from the english list. i remember we screeched & moaned through stuff like "with or without you", "stan", "new year's day", "the tide is high" (which j.c. was surprised i knew; kala niya talaga atomic kitten yung original; tsk kabataan nga naman), "tom's diner", "never been to me." the high point of the evening, i think, was seeing j.d. writhe and shake his very skinny ass to something by the cranberries, "dreams" i think. my personal favorite was weezer's "say it ain't so"; made me feel ten years younger. was suprised to see mono's "life in mono" on the list too. how does that work??? anyway, we saw the rain had stopped so we crawled back to crimson house at around 1 in the morning.

saturday, i think i got up at 2 p.m., having spent most of the night reading pico iyer's video night in kathmandu. went to itaewon with the two boys for breakfast/lunch/dinner at our favorite pakistani resto, spitting distance from the big mosque. this was around 6 p.m. as always, we went by subway getting the same curious/slightly antagonistic stares from the usual xenophobes that often haunt the seoul metro. at itaewon, i had a good mutton biryani (yes, i know it's meat; minsan lang naman eh) and a horrible watery dal soup that i had to make timpla with the salt and pepper shakers on the table. we then went to our favorite english used bookshop What the Book? where i scored iyer's tropical classical. i put the book in my bag with a mixture of thrill and horror and promptly declared an indefinite moratorium on book acquisition. that was two days ago. it hasn't been easy but i think i can actually manage this.

sunday was cool. tristan & i got j.c. to attend church with us. we go to the 11 a.m. service of the onnuri english ministry at its seobinggo campus. yes, that's what they call it: campus. onnuri is one of the super-hyper-turbo-megachurches here in seoul; it even has its own TV station. walking from the subway station to church, we are greeted by row after row of imported cars owned by the onnuri congregation: lots of BMWs & benzes, the occasional porsche & jaguar. the service and the message was good, even if the preacher (a guest pastor from some church in LA) was a little scatty, like a beat poet high on God but having terrible acid flashbacks. we then subwayed our way to COEX mall for a somewhat awful sbarro lunch, then waited for our other pinoy friends. we didn't really do anything, just talked outside, had a high-endish food court dinner, hung out. kinda like what pinoys do on sundays in manila. my friends wanted to buy perfume at the COEX duty free shop but that involves the insane requirement of picking up your purchase at incheon airport, 2 hours away from seoul. WTF??? wag na lang noh.

today is not technically part of the weekend but it sure felt like it. it's the last day of the spring term and there were only four hakseng (students) in class, out of our usual 14. the news team and their engineers went on a junket to jeju island, courtesy of their sponsor organization, the filmmakers had to finish some projects, and i think asma wasn't feeling well early today. we mostly filled out evaluation forms then learned about the weather in korean. after a good lunch at well-being refectory (free yakult!), we went to namsan (a hill they like to call a mountain) where you can find the seoul tower. seoul is supposed to be famous for it but frankly, i'd never heard of seoul tower till a month after i got here. havig said that, the tower has some lovely features better expressed visually. pictures here soon. really, i will. dinner was supposed to be at the swanky Lotte** food court in nearby myeongdong but the department store is closed today for some reason so we ended up eating rather good cheap-ish shrimpburgers at Lotteria, a fastfood place like Jolibee but without mascots and they use real cheese from the netherlands.

* my last weekend
** this is a nation of conglomerates. Hyundai is not just a carmaker; there's also Hyundai department store. Lotte makes not just gum but also drinks, snacks, random food items. it's a department store much like Rustan's but it's also the force behind Lotte World, sort of like a korean disneyland, complete with the gaya-gaya castle logo.

notes to self

2006-06-01T23:07:00.000+08:00

note #1
1) stop overreading; there is no subtext.
2) melodrama is best overheard, not self-inflicted.
3) knock it off; it's all in your head.

note #2
1) play the seoul tourguide sunday & monday to stepmum's best friends who arrive tomorrow for a medical conference in busan.
2) instead of studying for finals next week, go to insadong on saturday to work out a walking tour for them.
3) buy stuff for the family; do not forget the all-important hanbok (traditional korean costume) for kitty.

note #3
may be useful for writing -- here in seoul, they use the word "well-being" (n) instead of "healthy" or "natural" (both adj). hence, you can buy a loaf of "well-being bread" at LOTTE for 200 pesos. the word is further corrupted by being pronounced "welbing" or "welping" depending on the speaker's place of origin.

note #4
1) stop blogging now.
2) memorize your speechee for tomorrow.
3) stop blogging now.

5 "first things" that happened this weekend

2006-05-22T22:25:00.000+08:00

1) friday night, had fruit-flavored soju for the first time with mincheol, my dowoomi (korean buddy) and his girlfriend, hyun-ook. it was more peach juice than soju so we ordered the plain stuff and mixed that in. apparently, korde students are known for being sul-kureh, which translates to "drinks like a whale." which is what some people call me here. now, i don't drink at all that much...maybe they're just surprised to see me knock back shot after shot of the fiery stuff. maybe because i don't look like i drink at all?

2) went ice skating for the first time saturday noon with mincheol. there's a skating rink at the university and so through the alcohol haze the night before, i agreed to check it out. just getting there was a chore; korea university is a big campus, not quite like diliman but seems bigger because it's hilly and the way to the rink was mostly uphill. will spare you the painful details but the whole experience can be summed up as "two hours of falling on my ass." at the end of the futile exercise, my right wrist was swollen (here i blame an old wall climbing injury) and i had bruises all over. mincheol kinda panicked and brought me to...

3) an acupuncturist. actually, hyun-ook brought us there. mincheol mainly made the strange hissing noises koreans make to show that they're deep in thought. btw, they don't like the term "acupuncturist" here in korea. instead, these venerable professionals are called oriental medicine doctors because as yeajin said, "they really are doctors." i just don't like the term "oriental", is all. reeks of exoticization. anyway, after 15 minutes of putting my pincushion of a wrist under a heat lamp, the swelling disappeared. went for another session today and if it still hurts tomorrow, i'll have another go at the needles. now i have to go around wearing a wrist support. it makes a good fashion accessory, and attracts sympathetic cooing from people. while it's not my first acupuncture session, it's the first time that i was actually scared for myself here in korea. i could've really broken something.

4) met a couple of palestinian writers at a party thrown by a group of korean writers. so...first time to meet people from palestine, and first time to hear korean writers talk without feeling a little embarrased for them. i still get a twinge of annoyance when i remember some of the non sequiturs i heard during the seoul young writers festival. granted, the korean writers at the festival had a different agenda. and this gathering was really a sort of "bridge between korea and palestine" (the title of the event), at times overtly political. some people read poems, most of us just ate and boozed.

5) first time to attend a church here in seoul and felt truly blessed by the sermon. the first one i went to (on palm sunday) was myongdong cathedral, the next one (easter) was a baptist church that just left me in a foul mood the whole day because they turned out to have the kind of redneck us-versus-them hellfire-and-brimstone theology that gives christians a bad rep. another one i attended near my dorm has potential but i didn't get much out of the sermon; i will definitely go back there because it's a mere 10-minute walk away. so anyway, last sunday, i attended onnuri community church. a most misleading name because it's a hyper-duper-turbo-megachurch that has its own TV station and everything. masyadong kano yung accent ng kor-am pastor pero may laman yung message that reached out to me.

all in all, a pretty good weekend. also: went malling at LOTTE department store with other pinoys from korde (joan, tristan, ferdie, siege + raffy from some other univ), and to a nurebang (karaoke) at jonggak district where we sang, among other things, some eraserheads and ogie alcasid and other such standards. they even had "anak" by freddie aguilar pero di na namin pinatulan.

playing with light

2006-05-22T00:48:00.000+08:00

some recent photos taken in a small room at a traditional korean village somewhere in andong, south of seoul. you'd be surprised at what you can do with a camera, a window, and that little bit of time given to you between lunch and a tea ceremony. photos by jose carrrrlos, taken may 10th at around 3pm.

where have all the flowers gone?

2006-05-18T23:25:00.000+08:00

i expected spring to last much longer than this. we've been here for only a little less than two months now and already, we've had a taste of three seasons. when we arrived end of march, the air still had a touch of winter chill and there were days of cruel freezing rain. then spring happened, so slowly that we barely noticed the changes. the first day of class, the row of small trees below looked pathetic with spindly branches that were more like bare twigs. we could see the bird nests perched high up in certain trees but they were all empty.

we knew it was spring when we started hearing birdsong mingling with the sounds of early morning traffic. the birds came back from their warm vacations down south, some of them to their deaths. i remember seeing one drop at our feet during one breaktime sometime in april. we hang out right outside the international studies hall where we take our classes, drinking vending machine coffee and basking in weak watery sunlight. and so one morning a bird just plopped dead right in front of us. some people said something about bird flu. i just thought maybe the bird saw some clouds against a stretch of blue, and mistook the glass windows on the third floor for the sky.

i was very tempted to call this photo "on seeing the 97% perfect girl one beautiful april morning," after haruki murakami. but now i think "still life with fat face" is more appropriate. i know it's weird to throw fat jokes at myself pero inuunahan ko lang kayo. at least when i say it, i mean it only 46% of the time.
some coy posturing before going to class. seriously, i really miss seeing those all flowers bursting from the strange swollen bumps on the otherwise skeletal trees. the rains swept the blossoms from the branches in less than a week. i wish i could say that the white petals fluttered to the ground like a thousand dying butterflies but it wasn't anything like that. they just fell with each slight gust of wind, turned brown and gross, and gunked up the gutters.

this is a poor attempt to capture that weird white light that can be seen only when early morning sunlight shines through the smooth petal of a flower. if you turn the brightness of your monitor waaay up and stare at it for as long as you can without blinking, nothing special will happen. you'll just hurt your eyes. hee hee.
here's a photo of plummier times, when everything for us was new and exciting. but after a little more than a month, some mild form of cabin fever set in, and we realized that some measure of alone time was needed to keep us from pelting each other with stuffed bunnies and nacho chips. photo taken by asmarani sometime in april.

a quasi-close up of some flowers on a tree i saw on our visit to nami island last april 14th. i tried zooming in more but this is the closest i could get. the tree was pretty high, as can be seen in the photos below.

some random guy taking photos of flowers. i thought it would be cool to do the same so i did. still on nami island, 14th april.

same scene as above, but without the stranger taking photos. here, it's just some woman about to walk across the foreground in a brave attempt to ruin my picture. i think her attempt worked very well. i don't mean to grouse, just that i turned on my TV for the first time today (yes, it took me that long to find the power cord) and saw part of an episode of House. i think some of the sarcasm rubbed off on me. either that or i'm just naturally this charming.

now, i'm not sure why i took this. it's just some branch on some tree on some island. but of course, it can be so much more than that. i just can't really articulate it so i'll just say "it looks nice, noh?"

the roadtrip soundtrack

2006-05-17T00:55:00.000+08:00

we've gone on three field trips so far: (1) a school junket to nami island--a riverine islet named after some ancient general that's actually a shrine to the winter sonata TV series, (2) the ACPI-sponsored field trip to historic gyeongju city that included an overnight stay at the golgul buddhist temple where someone threw my slippers into the barnyard*, and (3) the SYWF field trip to a traditional village, a temple and a confucian academy down south in andong or thereabouts.

on all three trips, i found myself surrounded by people sleeping with their mouths open. so for lack of anything better to do, i listened to mp3s on my trusty palm tungsten. i could've read wyslawa szymborska or j.g. ballard but i didn't want to risk motion sickness and the possibility of high velocity vomiting in front people i actually respect. so... here are some of the songs playing in the background as fields, mountains and various greenery rushed past my window:

blister in the sun (violent femmes)
tainted love (soft cell)
life in mono (mono)
caramel (suzanne vega)
love will tear us apart (cover by jose gonzalez)
an ocean apart (julie delpy)
knowing me, knowing you (cover by the lemonheads)
killing moon (echo & the bunnymen)
summertime (cover by janis joplin)
nothing but the sky (ivy)
un rayo del sol (le mans)
#41 (dave matthews & tim reynolds)
with or without you (cover by keane)
moonchild (cibo matto)
je t'aime tant (julie delpy)
come here (kath bloom)
marlene on the wall (suzanne vega)
for nancy (pete yorn)
les kid nappeurs (marc collin)
adios ayer (jose padilla)
bright yellow gun (throwing muses)
in a little while (u2)
devil mood (smoke city)
hwc & supernova (liz phair)
underneath it all (no doubt)
homeward (the sundays)
two of us (the beatles)
our house (madness)
into your arms (lemonheads)
cry me a river (ella fitzgerald)
teardrop (massive attack)
teardrop (cover by jose gonzalez)
what i am (edie brickell & the new bohemians)
mrs. robinson (cover by the lemonheads)
tropicando (thievery corporation)

a little crazy, no? keep in mind, folks, that these were three different trips made in a span of a little less than 30 days. plus my playlist was set to random. heh heh.

NB: photos takes april 14th during our trip to nami island, by the talented jose carrrrlos**. they have a swervy music video look to them, probably because the bus was swerving at the time, the photographer had little space to maneuver, and he was restrained by the length of his ipod earbuds. anyway, they also look like they belong to the inside of a CD sleeve. the photo below would be the cover, i think. the snooty artistes among you will immediately recognize the inspiration for it***.

* still haven't figured out if this was (a) the result of some territorial dispute with a band of scary mongolian chicks, (b) a manifestation of how much i am hated because most people here think i'm the girlfriend of a certain beautiful boy, or (c) just some idiot prank pulled by a couple of filmmaker chicks from singa & injaaa. three weeks after the fact, C looks to be the most likely explanation.

** a bad approximation of alejandra c's chilean/argentinian accent. probably the coolest girl i'll ever meet this year. God, please prove me wrong!

*** marcel duchamp's 1919 work/vandalism entitled LHOOQ, which is a cheap postcard-sized reproduction of la joconde plus a mustachio hand-drawn over that very famous smile of hers. francophones, kindly stop giggling and/or rolling your eyes.

out of my funk, finally

2006-05-16T23:16:00.000+08:00

so i was in a funk, as some of you may have noticed. no blog updates, no creepy new photos of my face getting rounder with every dish of fish roe on rice that i eat. today is officially one week since i rocked the boat during our roundtable session at the seoul young writers festival. it was a week of "mental calisthenics" (to quote siege), lots of cozy writerly chats with eastern europeans, swooning over the accents of the latin americans and the nice jawline of one particular romanian. the week-long party ended friday night at a club in the hondae district. siege did a performance that absolutely rocked while i crooned my way desperately through noel cabangon's "Kanlungan" a capella. we woke up to the bleakest saturday in the history of human civilization, and the awful gloom officially ended just today.

and so today, after the requisite hours spent learning korean, we hied off to itaewon for some pakistani biryani, then to the philippine embassy for stuff to put in our booth at the international student festival on thursday. we had a long-ish stopover at What the Book?, an english-language bookstore with amazing titles, even within their used book selection. even after swearing not to buy anything, i scored pico iyer's classic Video Night in Kathmandu and The Lady and the Monk. i wanted to get a couple more but... pissayo! too expensive. we had been avoiding the city hall area because of too many associations with the writers festival. such memories may deepen the abyss already inside the empty husks that were our selves.

but decided to go anyway today because the philippine tourism office is at the president hotel overlooking the lawn of seoul's city hall. had to subway back to koryo de hakkyo immediately after to watch a pseudo-latin music festival/concert that was kinda crappy (picture 6 girls in frilly white with scarlet satin sashes around their necks and waists earnestly breathing into mikes while clutching at each other's trembling sweaty hands). still, there was one or two memorable acts, including a very gay-looking spanish duo vouge-ing to an acoustic guitar, that made the 5,000 won fee worth it. dinner at ever-reliable kookdang with the wonderful manang kookdang chatting with us as she wiped down a table. and then...

surprise, surprise! siege found a little packet at the crimson house lobby with my name on it. from the philippines! with orchid stamps! and philpost tape sealing the edges! no return address, my name in handwriting i didn't recognize. i, of course, ripped it open and saw a lovely little gift from my friend E. he's back home in turkey now on vacation so he must have sent it before he left manila. it's been a few hours since i saw the packet but the perma-smile is still on my face. and apparently, i'm not the only who's been blessed today. a good friend of mine just got an email that i know he had been dying to receive. it's great to know that some things are rock solid and not just in your head. yes, some engines can keep running on vapors, relying on wind, lift and momentum; but after today, i can truly say that having a full tank makes a world of difference.*

* do excuse the weird metaphors here. i'm too happy to even attempt to play the artiste tonight.

sunsets, or the lack thereof

2006-05-07T07:38:00.000+08:00

three more things i'm still not used to:

1) there are no colors in the sky at sunset. at least not like the huge fiery streaks the bleed across the sky like we have in the philippines. the sky here is either white or grey. on sunny days like today, it's a pale blue. some evenings, it's a weird otherworldly blue like the color of your favorite bareta laundry bar, plus 5,000 volts of electricity.

2) there seems to be no sunset at all. one minute there's still light, another minute it's dark as heck. and no telltale fire in the sky to signal the difference.

3) there's still daylight here at 7:30 PM!!! the first time i noticed it, i kinda freaked out. i thought it was still 5 PM (because in my mind, 6 PM means sunset and fiery skes) but i looked at my watch and it was past seven. laugh all you want but i felt betrayed by nature: here, i can't even trust the sky to tell me whether it's night or day! i'm starting to see an upside to this, though. i was told it can be daylight here till 8 PM, which means i can go up to the roof and read until said time. yay.

* the first photo is the view from my southeast-facing window. the view above is sunset seen from southwest-facing window. see? no bright colors there. but still nice, no?

view from the top

2006-05-04T00:21:00.000+08:00

the first time i went up the rooftop of crimson house was also the first quasi-sunny afternoon i spent outdoors in seoul. people who live here say the weather this spring has been very very strange. it snowed a couple of weeks before our arrival at the end of march, and the cherry blossoms and other blooming things were quickly blown away by the freezing rains that came in the weeks that followed. so you can just imagine the utter utter joy i felt that day we went up the roof. the sky was clear and the sun was warm on my face. of course, we had to celebrate by taking a slew of photos. below you will see some ridiculous posturing; call them my titanic evita moment and leave it at that.

this is koryo de hakkyo, as seen from the crimson house rooftop. it was still cold-ish whe we took this. more recently, in these balmy days approaching summer, it's normal to see hordes of students sprawled on the lawns. much like the sunken garden at 5pm sans the trash, the poor kids picking through the trash, and the occasional used unmentionables.

and this is me looking ridiculously happy at not having to wear three layers of clothing. see those pointy spires in the distance? churches. there are lots of them here, most of them sporting neon red crosses at night. but don't let the spires fool you. those could be the only remotely gothic thing about the church; many of them are in squat squalid buildings. the spires just make them look good from far away.

speaking of squalid... it's a word that italo calvino uses many times in Hermit in Paris to describe the 1950s america he saw during his brief travels there. and as we all know, that's not at all how america chooses to remember itself. squalid, squat, squalor--these words are just dripping with malice. which is not my intent with the pictures below. it's just fascinating that there are little pockets of squalor hidden behind the spiffy skyscrapers and wide avenues of this sprawling city. take that seoul metropolitan authority, heh heh. they give the city character, i think.

you can see here some old houses squeezed into the small side streets of dongdaemun-gu, aka my neighborhood. note the traditional peaked roofs and tiles used. i saw exactly the same architecture when we visited gyeongju historic city last week. more on that trip in another post, promise.

from this vantage point, seoul doesn't look very pretty. it doesn't smell very pretty either. and this is what suprises me most about seoul--even in the most fashionable and swanky touristy places like insadong, myeongdong and the hotels around city hall, you always always get a whiff of the sewers when you least expect it. like when you're eating ice cream or laughing with your mouth wide open. mukhang makati CBD pero amoy recto. bad wordplay there but am not making this up.

i like this building because it looks so incongruously european. and if you look closely, the house right beside it has a traditional korean peaked roof with tiles and everything. in the distance, you can see some of the buildings of korea university. at night, they light up in lurid beerhouse colors so that they look like a cross between disneyland and hugh hefner's porn palace.

between those high buildings, you can see the elevated street that runs past my neighborhood. i can't really see it from my windows. on our first sunday here, we walked towards it because we were looking for a church and we had seen some pa-gothic spires and the telltale neon red crosses near it. i was suprised at how huge it actually is. it's so there. and yet at night, it seems to melt into the blackness.

the day i took this photo, i actually ran up and down the stairs several times from the roof to my room. it was a cloudy and very windy day best spent indoors in a heated room but every so often, the sun would shine and i couldn't resist the idea of me basking in the sun on the rooftop. so i'd grab a book and run. by the time i'd reach the top, the sun would be obscured by clouds and it would feel chilly again, so i'd run back down to get a wool sweater and this green silk scarf you see being blown artfully by the wind. that's korde (pronounces korr-deh) behind me. short for koryo de hakkyo, or korea university.

this was taken on that same day. yes, it's a backlit photo and you can barely see anything but i do like the little rainbow i caught there in the middle.

these i took on a different day, a week or so later when the weather was definitely warmer. don't knock it. i really tried to look like a three-headed monster wearing a red sweater in this photo. again, that rare sight of a blue sky can be seen behind me.

the big empty crimson house rooftop with no one and nothing in it. not even me, heh heh. that's my orange camera case in the foreground, some parts of seoul in the background. fake gothic spires somewhere in the middle. i just like how quiet and bare the roof looks compared to the noise and bustle of the city out there.

channeling marguerite duras

2006-04-30T23:16:00.000+08:00

no, i haven't turned french. neither have i become an alcoholic. but ever since i got my copy of duras' The Lover (the les editions minuits version, with archival photos of her younger self wearing a fedora much like the one worn by the young girl in the novel), i've been obsessing over how to procure one for myself. that was two years ago. i finally got one recently while shopping at technomart with asmarani. the day before our field trip to nami island, we were supposed to buy just picnicky stuff but ended up buying sweaters and hats as well. no regrets; one of my best buys ever.

as you can see, i am starting learn the fine art of posing for the camera, also known as trying to look cute. been learning from a master for about a month now and i must say, i've made some progress. photos by siege using my casio 6 megapix digicam and bad fluorescent lighting courtesry of room 201, crimson house. taken april 13th. below you can see me and the hat in action at nami island. if you look very closely, you can spot a bit of nami island greenery between the hatband and that bit of dyed brown hair in the upper left corner of the photo below.

anyway, back to duras... seems she had a thing for younger men, too. when she was an old and ravaged writerly lush (around 60 or 70, thereabouts) she took a much younger man as a lover. he must've been a fan, an art student, i think, in his 20s or 30s. the age difference in that later relationship is as mind-boggling as the quasi-fictional one in The Lover. here in korea, it is customary to cause women pushing thirty a measure of anguish with the addition of one or two years to her real age, what they wittily call here "korean age." and so, even in this foreign city, i am forced to play the older woman because they count the months you spend in the womb and you have to grow one year older with everyone else at new year. quibbling over little details like that sucks.

the past week

2006-04-24T22:11:00.002+08:00

still haven't edited/uploaded the recent pics. no time to write much either because i had to finish a paper last week and we went exploring a lot to make up for all the afternoons spent at home (yes, room 304 is starting to feel like home) because a certain person keeps taking long afternoon-to-evening naps, depriving me of a shopping/dinner/gimik buddy. so... some highlights from the past seven days:

monday the 17th -- explored the small streets branching out of chamsari-gil (what we call pedro gil) and found a cozy restaurant where i had my favorite albap (fish roe with rice & veggies in a sizzling pot) and S had some donkatsu thingy. dark like a pub but smells like kimchi. cheaper than our usual/favorite dinner places (kookdang on chamsari-gil, oici wine cafe, etc.). will write more about manang kookdang and the award-winning coffee of oici wine some other time.

wednesday the 19th -- went to immigration office after school to apply for alien ID. didn't eat lunch, subsisted on supermarket camembert, crackers, and a sushi rice triangle from ministop. after immigration, had overpriced watery jamaican blue mountain coffee at some cafe in hyundai department store where i also had a quasi-bruschetta with olives, roasted veggies and blushed tomatoes (!!!). i really miss having a kitchen. but i'm never going back to that place. sagwa talaga ng kape dito sa seoul, kahit sa starbucks.

thursday the 20th -- had lunch at a pakistani restaurant in itaewon near the mosque with my muslim friends (azri, cecep and asma) and kalinga the sri lankan cinematographer. i took videos of everyone singing songs from their countries (malaysia, indonesia, sri lanka) while we waited for the amazingly good food to arrive. it was sooo good! basmati rice! lamb curry! (yes, yes, i ate meat but it was halal so not so bad for me...) raita! biryani! really smooth lassi! not a whiff of kimchi anywhere! yay! after lunch we went to this international food store where i found cornik, alamang, bagoong, patis, indonesian noodles and frozen hopia baboy from eng bee tin. pinatulan ko yung cornik. hahaha.

friday the 21st -- good weather, quite sunny. went up to roof in between writing my paper. it took me 11 hours to finish. i started 2pm and finished at 1:30am.

saturday the 22nd -- watch dvd movie ("art of fighting") at seoul selection, a cool english-language bookstore/expat hangout in front of gyeongbokgung palace, which i have yet to visit. we then explored lovely insa-dong, a tourist trap, a street lined with art galleries, little shops that sell crafts, sweets, etc. lots of stalls on the sidewalks selling hats, jewelry, scarves, snacks, stationery, incense, etc. i bought a jar of citron tea (like marmalade, very lemony with zest, which you mix with hot or cold water), little sweets (six tiny squares of nut and seed brittle including pine nut, sesame, black sesame and i dunno what else), two halter tops from nepal and a scarf from india. that night, S and i watched an episode of desperate housewives on his laptop. it was a nice change to actually watch something in english.

sunday the 23rd -- went to myongdong cathedral with S and met another exiled pinoy, R, who teaches programming at DLSU and is here to study the gaming industry of korea. he's also part of ACPI. R specializes in artificial intelligence applied to gaming, and he plays the violin and the piano. it was fun experiencing the cultural phenomenon called Spring Sale at myongdong (a retail fashion district spitting distance from the cathedral) where most items had 30% to 70% discount. had to endure geektalk bonding between the two gamer boys i was with for a couple of hours because we had to stay indoors to avoid the freezing rain. that same night, we had this crazy idea of having a picnic dinner on the roof of our building. in 5 degree C weather!!! somehow, we enjoyed indonesian insta-noodles, pickled quail eggs from the convenience store, aligue rice, citron tea and indonesian fish kropek. i couldn't find edible plant-derived food at the convenience store save for packets of nasty looking kimchi.

monday the 24th -- after school ended, we went shopping at dongdaemun market. this is actually an area near the dongdaemun sports stadium full of buildings retailing clothes. we could say that we went there to practice our korean counting and haggling skills but i doubt if any of you would believe me. i never knew shopping for a guy could be so much fun, a bit of a power trip. we found a nice spring jacket, some shirts. we kept getting big discounts because the tinderas all thought S was really cute & looked like some japanese actor daw. asa pa. anyway, the resemblance to the japanese actor really paid off because when we saw a stall selling indian stuff, i found juties i really liked. these can retail for up to php 3,000 in manila. the original price for a pair was 45,000 won but we haggled like heck. in the end, we got the juties plus a bracelet and a pocket mirror for much much less than the original price of the juties alone. our total discount was 23,000 won (around 1,200 pesos). may gusto siguro yung tindera kay siege.

high windows*

2006-04-20T19:03:00.000+08:00

my room is on the third floor of my building so this whole "high windows" concept is a bit of a stretch. still, i do like the view from my windows sometimes. above is not a window view but what i like to call "first sunlight." i had just moved into this room and after a week of bitterly cold weather, the sun came out. i spent the whole afternoon reading poetry in bed, enjoying the central heating and watching these squares of light make their slow way across my tiny closet of a room. these days, the weather is still bitterly cold (5 degrees C this morning!) but they've turned off the heating in both the dorm and our classroom. [insert string of expletives here.]

this was taken on that same sunny day (5th of april). i want to say that it's what i see when i wake up but that would be a huge lie. i had to look for a good angle from which to take the photo, a feat, given the tiny space that is my room. i ended up crouching at a height somewhere between the floor and edge of the bed. and it may sound strange to you in manila but in the three or so weeks i've been here in seoul, i've rarely seen the sky looking this blue. most of the time, it's grey or white, covered with a blanket of clouds.

last monday (17 april) was the coldest ever for us and we had to walk to school in freezing weather. as we were walking past the fountain of korea university, siege pointed up at the sky above the school. huge ominous clouds were gathered right above it, looking like they were beaten into submission by some Titan's gigantic hand. everything was eerily quiet and deathly cold. it felt like the end of the world. we wanted to take a photo but we didn't want to be late for class. we're such nerds here.

as i write this, it's 8.30 pm. i look out the window and see my reflected face staring back at me. in the distance, between the two buildings across this narrow street, i see the headlights of trucks flashing by as they speed over an elevated highway parallel to my street. and beyond that, there is a small red neon cross attached to the spire of a small church a neighborhood away. apart from the yellow glow of the streetlights below, it is the only bright object in my window, the only color out there in the cold.

* title stolen from Philip Larkin. despite the foul language at the beginning, the end of the poem comes close to how it feels when i pray. sort of an out of body experience--the same thing you feel when reading a really good book (recently, hwang ji-woo and wislawa szymborksa) or when you kiss someone you love for the very first time.

High Windows
Philip Larkin

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

palm sunday at myongdong

2006-04-17T17:56:00.000+08:00

we got up early and found the subway deserted. the only people there were elderly men in suits and old women dressed for church, some in traditional hanbok attire. while never really the happiest place in seoul, the subway seemed particularly cold that morning.

and as always, we were the only ones laughing there. i've never seen koreans joke around in public like we do at home. it was fun running on this moving platform at sindang station and not bumping into anyone. siege, as always, attracted stares from sleepy koreans. he claims this to be his first performance in seoul. such masks are quite common, to protect people from your yucky germs if you're sick. lots of people bought them recently because there was a yellow dust storm from china that week.

and here's the obligatory turista shot that proves, yes, i was there at myongdong cathedral for palm sunday. we had been told that english mass would be at 9am. when we entered the cathedral, it was mostly empty save for elderly koreans huddled in the pews against the morning chill. a nice old gentleman passed around little piney fronds in lieu of the palaspas we have at home. we ended up hearing mass in korean, with all the "-eyos" and the "-imnidas." very solemn. and they sang the same traditional protestant hymns i heard growing up at citadel, except with korean lyrics. we found out later that english mass is never said at the cathedral, only in this tiny little chapel in some building beside the old church. we caught the last 2 minutes of the english mass and saw a mostly foreign crowd siksikan and tayuan. it was sad to see how much othering goes on here, even in houses of God.

we had breakfast at mcdonalds somewhere in myongdong. greasy fish sandwiches in commemoration of holy week, seemingly fresh orange juice and yogurt with sago served in long paper packets. this is the view from the second floor. it seems filipinos go to all these familiar places. if there were a jollibee here, it would be open 24/7 i think.

myongdong doesn't look very nice in these pictures but it looked pretty good that day because of all the signs that screamed 70% discount on shoes and clothes. good thing we went there with wallets virtually empty because any cash we had would have been spent in 15 minutes or less. it's hard to hang out all the time with a guy as interested in fashion and grooming as you are.

it took a few shots to get this pose right. he's supposed to look homesick here, not gassy. in one shot he was chewing on his fingernails. not a good sight before or during or after breakfast. it turned out okay, i think. below is me and my fat face, enjoying the last bite of my fishy sandwich.

...

2006-04-17T01:55:00.000+08:00

it's three a.m. in seoul and i can't sleep. a song by kath bloom ("come here") has been playing in my head since the bus trip to nami island last friday. it's from the before sunrise movie, i think. there's something about the song that gives me goosebumps. could be her voice, because the lyrics aren't exactly the most profound or eloquent or even syntactically sound. i keep telling myself it's just the cold. but i think it's something else.

There's wind that blows in from the north.
And it says that loving takes this course.
Come here.
Come here.

No, I'm not impossible to touch
I have never wanted you so much.
Come here.
Come here.

Have I never laid down by your side.
Baby, let's forget about this pride.
Come here.
Come here.

Well, I'm in no hurry.
Don't have to run away this time.
I know that you're timid.
But it's gonna be all right this time.

'shiyoyo' is my favorite korean word

2006-04-12T00:59:00.000+08:00

it means 'breaktime', or more idiomatically: 'taking it easy'. when our sonsengnim (teacher) says it, i snap out of my early morning stupor, wipe the drool from my chin and run to the hwajangshil (toilet) to retouch my make-up. or i go to the vending machine for a cup of cheap nasty coffee (only 100 won = 5 pesos). but mostly i go and hang with the guys in my class who go out for a smoke outside the IFLS building. no, i don't smoke with them. it's just more fun there than staring at the grass growing outside our classroom window.

it's also less geeky than looking at our schedules and the club invitations (sports, drama, song, korean culture). kalinga from sri lanka, sunder from mongolia and tenzin from tibet/india being good students during one shiyoyo.

this is me and asma, photo taken by siege. it think my pants were falling down here and i had to hitch them up. or maybe i was scratching my butt. as you can see, to keep warm, i have to wear three layers of clothing (what igor calls my flag shirt, burgundy wool sweater, olive jacket from the black shop) and a silk scarf from tita daphne's trip to vietnam. yes, silk does keep you warm. its lovely sheen is just an added bonus. that's the grass growing quietly behind me.

cecep actually asked me to take this photo of him reading the paper. i have no idea why but, yes, he does look the distinguished gentleman from java here. one of the few times he's not puffing on a kretek. you also see here a tiny fraction of the rather manly profile of azri the sculptor/designer from malaysia. he looks very fetching in a sarong. lovely feet.

this is what we call the news team. yes, they're media people. phuong is a reporter chick from hanoi, vietnam. payara (or something to that effect) is a TV producer from mongolia. that big guy with the cheekbones is tugsu, also from mongolia. they're the first people to be ever late for class. too much shoju.

two engineers from vietnam, son and hung. they work for the same TV station as phuong. they look like engineers, no? i think exposure to certain algorithms marks you for life. the geekiness just never goes away. asma tells me she keeps catching hung staring at me during class. either he likes me (God help him) or he's mesmerized by the nasal drip i get when it gets terribly cold. you should hear me blow my nose in class.

BreakTime is also the name of a small cafe right outside our university. it's a lovely place to read and have coffee or hot chocolate on a warm spring day. like most places, they offer free broadband internet. they serve organic tea and coffee and play christian praise music is english. they also serve pretty little cakes topped with exquisitely cut fresh fruit. haven't tried those; too expensive.

these photos are from the first time all six asian writers invited by KLTI got together. the thai guys were a week or so late so they're still playing catch up with the hangeul lessons. binlah is apparently a very famous writer in thailand, and is the reason why i got to meet some very nice business students (aka taipans in the making). they needed to interview someone from thailand for some class project. i knew couple of thais so... i set up a meeting for them.

me, asma and cecep outside BreakTime. it's warmer inside of course but there was some kind of fashion shoot going on so we were forced to stay outside.

cecep looking very distinguished, with the lights of dongdaemun-gu in the background. he's like an indonesian vim nadera. lots of interesting allusions in his poetry. and he performs with a band! i got some of his MP3s. very trippy. some tracks have a kind of hobbit house/beerhouse feel to them.

siege pretending he's saying something smart or witty but is actually just posing for the photo. looks like a girl here. not his best side.

me trying to look pensive. photo taken by me. nice scarves, no? very warm too.

nagtatampisaw sa koryo de hakkyo

2006-04-12T00:51:00.000+08:00

so for the 6 months that i'm here in seoul, i'll be studying korean language at the korea university in anam, in the northern part of seoul. it's considered the top private university in korea after seoul national university, much like the jesuit-run ateneo is the 2nd best university after UP naming mahal. i know my ateneo friends will hate me for saying that but the fact that they have to go study in UP for their graduate degrees says something. anyway... this is me at my new school.
photo taken by asma, one cold spring day in april. it opened in 1905 and used to be called boseon academy or something to that effect. now it's trying to be a global university so its institute of foreign language studies is getting a lot of PR. we took a walk around the campus a few days ago and we wandered into the LG-something building. it was unnervingly hi-tech, i almost cried for our poor little 3rd world UP. we were like, "this is a school?" it looked more like a space station. the building is considered one of the top ten learning facilities in the world. i wanted to take pictures but i didn't want to look like a tourist in me own school. ha. anyway, here, it looks kinda hogwartsy. except we learn hangeul instead of spells.

i realized quite recently that siege takes the best pictures of me. am still not sure how he does it but i look much much better in these recent photos, dontchathink? he just lets me squint at the sun and fiddle with my scarf and somehow he makes it all look good.

this is me cursing under my breath about the cold weather but the amazing siege managed to catch the "pu..." in punyeta and made it look cute. dirty little secret: i didn't bathe the morning this photo was taken. it was a saturday and we had just finished eating a really gross breakfast at some cafeteria. i had ordered some soymilk drink that tasted like the bottom of your fridge's vegetable tray after random greens had melded into a green gunky ooze at the bottom. i couldn't believe people here pay good money to drink something that tastes like liquid vegetable garbage. isn't soymilk supposed to taste like fresh yummy taho?

just to give you a slightly different perspective. lovely arc shapes in the foreground, hey? if you look really closely, that's me grimacing at the memory of what's digesting in my tummy.

once more: me at koryo de hakkyo. taken after a misty spring rain by asma.