Tonight

Tonight was a night of facing of fears. We were required to attend a mysterious event wherein the university isn't liable for any injury / unpleasantries imposed on our person / belongings. I stalled myself, got there 15 minutes late, and found myself locked out with a bunch of other people who I am guessing were mandated to attend and were quite confused as well as to what exactly it was they were attending, and mildly shocked to find themselves unable to do so.

As we looked up the second floor windows of the building, we could see strange figures motioning in dim yellow lights and shadows in the purple lit corridors. It seemed as if the whole building was the stage. I stood outside for a while, trying to understand what I could see from where I was and failing. It seemed fantastic. We rescheduled our reservations for Sunday.

It has been a while since I've last commuted at night. I realize that nothing beats the cold night air, bright yellow lights, and the general suspicion that people cast towards each other.

What happened was I forgot about the traffic and left home about 6.30 in the evening (the play was supposed to start at 7). All the passing buses were full, so I resignedly got in a near-empty jeep instead. Inside was a pretty lady who was headed for the Fairview mall, and I tried to imagine what her date looked like and why she would date such a person (I was desperate for distractions). Eventually, the jeep filled in, among which were a hesitant couple and a band of women who were sharing a big bag of vinegar chips. I did my best to look uninterested.

I got down at Philcoa and weaved my way through the brightly lit street vendors. I got behind a woman in purple with a large sweat spot on her lower back and puzzled over it. Then I tried to forget about it by observing the faces of incoming pedestrians. I hope I won't have sweat spots like that when I get older.

I was on the UP jeep when Gino called to say that the gates were closed and we had to reschedule, which was a relief, because we had the mini-chairs due tomorrow and I wasn't even close to finishing yet. So I got to the building where the play was being held and met him there. After that, we bumped into Hannah and Don who also didn't make it to the play, and they wouldn't believe that my braces were off even though I was standing in front of them and saying that I didn't have them anymore.

Don: Lies! Lies! *peers at me*
Hannah: *peers at me*

Boo! >:O (Well, okay, so it was dark and everything, and I totally caught you off guard.)

All in all, it made my day. And all I could do as I sat on the bus was sigh happily and smile at the lights that whizzed by and wished that the ride wouldn't end so soon.

Mute. || Dengue Delusions.

There was a spot on my lung.
And it so happened that every wheeze made me
Think of you and I tried hard to stop breathing for a while.

All day long the TV antennae outside tipped from
Side to side, trying to catch every signal,
Line, sound, anything.
Against a sun-bleached sky it was the looks of a
City still trying to find its way in the world.

Where the winds cross, that's where I am.
I'm looking down where you might be walking,
Wishing that somehow, you'd want to be holding my hand
At that moment
Flocks of birds pass my floating thoughts
They don't think twice about what they see.

(You are so vague.
So much so that I write poems about you
Just to see what it would look like.
I want to be able to read something I wrote
And see you instead.
Who are you?)

I pick up where I left off, but
I realize that my old shoes no longer fit.

I want to go to where you are and
Sing you a lullaby.
You'll look at me half-lidded and
I'll still be there after you close your eyes.
But I know that you'll be far away
So far away that the stars can't reach you
And my words will simply be whispers that you
Won't be able to understand
Just by looking at my mouth.

I am at the bottom of a well
And that's where you'll wake up to.

The World Breaks Us Every Moment.

Our lives can be so small,
Scrawled out on wind-blown papers.
Each breath we take
Is a breath like infinite others,
But we forget them just as soon as they go.
What have we done,
Muting ourselves like this.
Spending years like they were seconds.
We should know better.

The dreams we had
Can be crushed underfoot,
And nobody would mind.
We didn't realize that
What we thought were the big things
Were actually the small things,
And we thought we've lost everything.

A Slip of Complaint.

Today I had my plates for breakfast,
With leftover black chicken on the side.
Mechanical drafting is trying very hard
To turn my arm into a robot.
Lectures are trying very hard, too,
To turn it into mush.
It feels like robotic mush.
Either I'll paint my nails pink to cheer it up
Or black to help it express itself.

In class my seatmate put on perfume.
I didn't have the heart to tell her I'm allergic.
My breathing tubes are screaming.
They can't see the point of putting perfume on
Twice in the same hour.
(And neither can I.)

On my way home I realized
That I like the smell of smog.
Well, better than what my seatmate had, anyway.

Notes From Yesterday's Green Yellow-Pad.

Yesterday, I saw a lady jeepney driver.
She braided her long hair back, wore a denim jumpsuit, smoked, and drove like a devil.
I saw her orange jeepney from the bus.
One moment she was right outside my window
and a few seconds later she was gone.
(Like, wow.) I've been waiting for this day to come.

I was on my way to school for an unusual meeting thinking I was late,
but I turned out to be the first one there.
I spent a while rereading memorable parts of my inbox when a groupmate tottered up.

Our task was to eat balot and write a poem about it.
Here's mine:

In our hands lay a river stone
Where inside red rivers coursed through like in maps of old.
We are gods
Moving the world with our tongues
Breaking, destroying, engulfing,
Marveling in the iron taste.
Wanting more.

It was edited to go with all the other people's stanzas, and that group output was awesomer.
We presented it today and everybody was impressed (or so I like to think.)
On the way home, I kept chuckling and smiling to myself on the jeep, bus, and tricycle.
Everybody must think that I'm either in love or retarded.

Thanks to Gino for keeping three-fourths of me un-drenched today and sacrificing one-fourths of yourself. You are a darling. I promise to bring my umbrella from now on and repay you one unsuspecting rainy day.


So here I am in an internet store, because the laptop at home has been kept away from me. I'm trying to concentrate on the mysteries of how floating counters came to be, but I'm just itching to be somewhere else.

Where Do We Go?

We walk hand in hand
In a field of time.
Our cat feet crunch
The ice and frozen grass.
We break off a point
And reel at the numbness.

Onwards, onwards.
It's no place to rest.
The wind howls and urges
Pushing with the weight of the sky.
Nothing to be done,
Yet so much to do.

Who knows where we're heading?
All around is more of the same.
Countless trails,
All meandering and lost.
They mean nothing to us.
We find our own path.

Warm Bodies.

I like your mute gray jeans.
On the bus, a woman regarded me with dark eyes
As she peeled the skin off an orange and
Thoughtlessly dropped it on the metal floor.
I felt something rough and heavy hit my shoulder
And I looked to see a glimpse of blue,
Its carrier struggling to conquer inertia
As we all do.
The bus stopped for a man. Stopped until he reached his seat.
I imagined that this man's life
Would be the kind that the world stops for.
Unlikely, to be honest with you,
But we should stop clinging to the lie
That everything is as it seems.
Sometimes I find myself spending time
Imagining opposites.

The summer days are about to end,
And in my head my thoughts are waking.

____________________________________________
Wrote this today at the registrar's, where I sat beside a man who was applying for his masters. He urged me to take my masters while I'm still young. Endless thanks to Philip for helping me out yesterday. I hope your suede shoes are okay. Today I am finally super officially a student of the College of Home Economics! Boo CRS for resetting my pre-enlistment! Lord help me get my subjects back D:

Someone Must Have Cut the Seconds in Half.

My mum and I went to a piano store the other day. It was owned by a lithe, young man who had music at his fingertips. (He looked a bit like a gangster hero, really, but if you put a bowtie on him, you won't be able to tell.)

Ah, music must be a wonderful thing to own.

After lunch, I turned on a little Satie and nestled in the corner of a cold room. I imagined it was a rainy day and the next thing I knew, it was almost 5. Our days are so fragile. We can kill them instantly.

What if I decided to live my life for myself and imagined that it was how it's supposed to be? Then I might wake up one day and realize that I'm already confined to a wheelchair or something and I can't do a thing about it. I guess in that way, our lives our fragile, too. We shouldn't delude ourselves.

Ghosts

People are apparitions.

What you see through the flickering windows in the subway are like frames from a million different spectacles put together into one silent moving picture.

Let me ask you, if we lose our memories, are we still ourselves?
We are made up of memories, remember?
But we lose so much of them and re-invent ourselves all the time that if all the past MEs and the past YOUs asked for their own place, they'd fill up a small city.
We are not who we were yesterday.

Can you imagine that tomorrow, you will disappear?

Anonymity.

I don't like famous people.

I suppose a statement like that would have a lot of implications, but I didn't write that out of ill-founded envy or anything. It's just that..well, when people are high and up there, they tend to think they deserve to be there and forget old friends. Also, they miss out on people who really love them for who they are. I mean....I mean...I mean.

Consider the undiscovered genius who you meet as an acquaintance. You are introduced to the unconventional orientation of his thinking, and your perspective of the world is promptly altered. You discuss ideas, you change his mind, question his opinions...yada yada yada. People like that are human. And..well, for the normal, sub-elite citizen, a situation like this is as unlikely as, say...winning a book signing pass for Neil Gaiman's awarding ceremony, knocking him unconscious without anybody noticing, sneaking him out the back way, and engaging him in said conversation once he regains consciousness.

Which is why I think Grigory Perelman is awesome. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8585407.stm)

I'm probably setting myself up for poverty.

Midnight Lines

Madness. || Moods.

I once asked Sister Fatima why God created us in the first place.
She smiled and said that He created me because...He dreamt of me.

I wondered how people could last without a notion of a loving God. Without any God, for that matter. It must be very bleak.
Except...they don't seem to think so. Sometimes I look at them and realize that they're far more self-assured than I am.

I don't think it's a bad thing though (I'll keep my reasons to myself).
Love is a form of madness that I like.
___________________________________________________________

Have you noticed how feelings are always mixed?
It's kind of disconcerting if you think about it.

And is there such a thing as a good intention?
(If you say yes, perhaps you haven't looked deep enough.)

Behind my smile is a jumble of a million other expressions, and I think it goes for you as well.

Worlds Apart.

I get drawn into other people's worlds too easily.

And why wouldn't I? People like to make themselves comfortable and seldom do I find it cold. (I did, once. Find it cold, I mean. And even then I stayed longer in it than anywhere else because it was so intriguing.
I left in the end. It was all a lie.)

Sometimes I find it hard to leave. When I finally find the resolve to, I keep looking back until I realize that I still hadn't really left, just kept walking around.
I'm still stuck in one right now.

How do you get there? Words.
Everybody's words are bridges. The thing is, you wouldn't really know if it'll hold. You have to get on it and see if it will. But don't worry, if you do fall, you won't fall too far. You just flounder a little in space until you get back to your side of reality.
Out of breath, maybe, but nothing serious.
Then you keep to yourself a little until gravity pulls another planet along.

And Vibrations Go Through the Web of Strings That Entangle Us.

So, my first day on the job. Yeah, I'm an independent woman now! Haha! Ha--

Wait, I think I hear my mother calling. Please wait a moment.

_______________________________________

Sometimes I really wish laundry can just fold themselves. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh. Oh, um, nevermind what I was saying.

Er.

So I've found this job. It's italicized because it's..well, I think it's great. And wonderful. And amazing. So much so that (if you've noticed) even if I've been neglecting my blog for the longest time, I made up with it just so I can share to you that you can find profound surprises in the simplest things. Before you get any ideas ('What, you a pop artist now?'), I'll have you know it isn't anything grand.

So I was walking down one of the AS staircases with Gino the other Wednesday. He was talking about how muscle enlargement is caused by reparations of muscle wounding through exercise when a piece of paper stuck to the bulletin caught my eye.

Well, of course, you being smart, you'd think it's the ad for the job I have now. And that's right!  And what do you know, the work location just a block away from my house! Blessed serendipity.
So that's how it happened. And before I forget, it was an ad for an English tutor, for a grade school Korean kid. Awesome.

So on that same day we had an informal interview. They made me answer this English grammar questionaire (which they'd check against the answer key when I've left), settled renumerations, and told me they'd text me within the week.

And surprise! I got it! Well, okay, yeah, you already knew. Really, I've got to work on my surprisiness one of these days.

So the plan was: first, I'd teach James, a 4-year old kid, English. And the moment he finds his toy train more interesting than "Can you tell me how many colors you see?" I'd switch to a practical dialogue with his mum, who is also a learner. (So not what I applied for. But hey, I like this arrangement better. Another tutor was tutoring the grade-school kid. And honestly, I think I got the better deal, hehehe.)

And it's so cool because I think the Korean lady's so determined. Well, yeah, so she brought a new refrigerator instead of repairing her old one because the service center people couldn't understand her English and she gave up trying to explain. And she didn't push through with enrolling for English classes because there were too many Korean people enrolling and they were pushing and shoving. But, well, I can't imagine myself going to Russia and surviving with my Russian prowess (well, I could. But that's as far as I go. And I was being sarcastic with the prowess thing) even though my Russian handbook is entitled Survival Russian. She, on the other hand, just...well...she's here! I think she's very brave. And inspiring. She's doing all this for her children's future, too. Which, I think, is just lovely.

I just hope I'd be able to teach her what she needs to know. And when it's all over, I'd be able to smile and say, 'Just doing my job.'

(Sorry for the cheesy ending. Hahaha. Just doing my job..pfft.)