Nonsense!

As I was retrieving some of my old UP files (recorded into cds from 2002 onwards) and copying them back into my larger hard drive, I browsed through the folders and found a poem I wrote for a Poetry Workshop Course I've enrolled in during the second semester of Academic Year 2004, under Professor Paolo Manalo of Jolography fame.

Our assignment was to write a nonsense poem, and I thought of creating one made up entirely of single-syllable words. Here's what I came up with:

THE PIG AND THE LEAF
By Maryanne Moll

In the gut of a pig lived a leaf,
Which,
when it turned eight,
Called its own ear and told it to make lunch.

'Tis this leaf that turned to a pen when it was twelve,
And then to stone.

The pig,
Poor thing,
Kept its own gut right on track by the words of its king.
“All hail the green thing that can turn itself into one thing and then some,
For it knows the life of gnats.”

The sty stank of pears,
And of airs,
And of hay,
And of clay.
The mind of the gut of the pig roiled
In mad ayes
To the words of its king.

And then,
One day,
This pig,
Just like the leaf that lived in its gut,
Turned eight,
With a mind to call its own ear to make lunch.
And then it was twelve,
And then it was a pen.

And then,
It was stone.

As I was reading the poem aloud in class, I noticed that, line by line, the poem began to make some kind of sense to me, and at the very end, it seemed to be telling me something of grave importance. Everyone else in the class felt the same way. I also felt the same way about the poems of my classmates. It was rather surreal, but I suppose you had to be there to understand the feeling. And now I wonder, are we just making our lives too difficult by always trying to make sense? Does every single detail in life always have to work together neatly and precisely, like a clock that never needs winding? Can we, even for just a few days a year, just let go of our standards and our labels and our Derridas and our Althussers and our Nietzches and our Kants and our de Saussures and our Spivaks and our Foucaults? Or are we, being humans and thus cursed, forever doomed to be constantly mired in the search for order?

Sometimes it tires me, I admit, to always have to know why and how things work. These days, I'm just not in that mood. I watch vampire movies and find them funny. I watch ghost movies and find them comforting. I watch documentaries about conspiracy theories and then close my eyes and try to merge them all together inside my mind to create a large, icky mass, somewhat like a hairball, and find relief that I still know what time to get up in the morning. I eat ice cream for breakfast, five peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, and finish off an entire 1.5 liter bottle of C2 iced tea after siesta. And then I write new stories. And I notice that my new stories are getting quite better. I don't write like I used to anymore, but now I also have the gumption to own up to the things that I didn't have the gumption to even face before. Chaos is good. Nonsense is good. Zoloft is good.

Year One with Jim, in photos

It all began with a teeny tiny pink 4 gigabyte flash drive with a silver chain that made the flash drive look like a charm, and a cup of hot chocolate at four o'clock in the afternoon. Seven hours later, we were still together and talking, and I could sense that both of us were trying to find a way for the night not to end.

Of course the night had to end and it did end. But what followed is something that went on and on. Here are some photos from what we have been through for the past twelve months, all taken with the iPhone he gave me as a gift.

We did a major redecoration of our apartment, the College of Chaos. From a very cluttered, highly disorganized apartment for one person and thousands of books and files, we turned it into a nice and cozy and orderly living space for two. However, witness the chaos of redecorating the College of Chaos.

From this: The four feet worth of unfiled files, the furniture that have been turned into things for holding books and files, the audio and video cds, the cd archives, the dead files that have to go to storage, the old bookcase I've had since 1998 that was already breaking apart from the weight of all the junk I had it carry over the years, and the basic mass of materials that always seem to gather in a writer's home. And if you're a writer like me, who never throws anything away, then you'll understand how big a logistical problem I've been having for years.

Jim and I went from that chaos to this:










I love this new area rug that's beside our bed. And I simply adore that green lamp that I have been wanting to own since I was a teenager, because the green glass shade and the tall brass stand and pull-down chain switch evokes in me the feeling of being in an old library. As for the bookshelves, I have so many books that I can't arrange them in the shelves any other way. Some books had to be laid on top of the upright books. There are even books behind the ones that are stored upright. And each time I remember how Jim had assembled that computer table in the first photo, I always laugh a little at the memory of the sight of him on the floor, trying to figure out which were the #14 screws, which were the #8 screws, which was platform 3, which nut goes with which screw and onto what hole in which metal post, and on and on. He kept saying, "This is so bad."

And just as we were about to collapse out of sheer exhaustion after turning the College of (Literal) Chaos into the College of Chaos (Theory) -- which I have been studying secretly for over a decade now -- a good friend from PhilMUG turned up with two tickets to the March 15 Harry Connick, Jr. Big Band Concert, and he gave us these premier tickets for free. Imagine that!

I found the concert wonderful. I love big bands, and for a bit of time, a few years ago, Glen Miller was set up to play continuously for days on my iTunes while I was working on a particularly annoying small project. Jim himself isn't really a big fan of big bands and the blues, but about fifteen minutes into the show, I could see he was starting to get mesmerized. It was a fun night of music, good-natured and self-deprecating humor from the star of the show, talk about halo-halo, and balut-throwing exercises by some of the band members.


And then there were the travels to several different provinces. A sunset flight:


A hotel room:


Another hotel room:


Yet another hotel room:


And yet another hotel room:


Me in a mirror inside yet another hotel room, whiling away my time while Jim was doing his fieldwork:


Puerto Princesa:


Somewhere in Clark:


Palm Beach Resort, Laguna:


Eagle Point Resort, Laguna:


Rockpoint Hot Springs Resort, Laguna


Saud Beach Resort, Pagudpud:


This was the bus we rode to Saud, which I thought wasn't running and was due for the junkyard:


This was the "bus terminal:"


Of course neither of us dared to sit on this chair:


We always travel with these two bags, my small brown trolley and Jim's blue overnight carry-all. The black one is Jim's laptop bag. I almost never bring my MacBook Pro during our trips because I take advantage of the trip to catch up on my reading and journaling and the writing of first drafts of stories by hand on pads of legal paper.




I carry the larger luggage because I'm the one who's always tasked to carry the flat iron and the toiletries, and of course my usual stash of Moleskines and books and legal pads and fountain pen ink.


And then there were the lunches, the dates, the movie-watching in cinemas and at home, the window-shopping for the things we like, the drives we took just for the heck of it, the walks in malls and the attending of launches related to the Macintosh, the online chats, the email exchanges, the surfing through YouTube for old music videos of the Electric Light Orchestra, the tequila nights, the vodka nights, the champagne nights. It was a wonderful Year One. We've been through so much, and the first year seemed like ten years and it felt as if we have been to the moon and back, and from the beginning of time and back. We have been through the Crusades, we have witnessed the Spanish Inquisition, live through the Great Depression, and survived the bubonic plague and most everything in between. But through all these, we are still together, and we have found the best place to be. Home. The College of Chaos.

From Pasay with love

I woke up late in the morning of my birthday and saw a huge box waiting for me on top of the dining room table in my mother's house in Naga. When I opened it, voila!


Nothing like two dozen bright red American roses and a wonderful card from the man in my life to add to my birthday cheer. He wasn't there that day, though, but he came over for a visit the very next week and met my family.

I admit I am horribly late in updating this blog, but my hands have been full with changes and people and ideas and words, and my plate has never been even part empty. But I am coping. I am writing stories again, and I have filled in my blog with one post for every missing month, and have found a way to shorten the sidebar, which many people have already complained about before. See? I'm dealing with things now, little by little, one day at a time, and I'm grateful for every chance that I get to write and finish a piece.

Rest assured that I'm okay, and that with the love I'm receiving from all of you, from Pasay to Makati to Camp Crame to Quezon City to Naga to California to Canada to New York to London, through all the channels open to us, I'll be back again with happy updates. Please feel free to visit my archives, reminisce with some of the posts, and remember who I was then. Because somehow, at some point in time, that person has become no longer. Here I am. This is me now.

Light

Midnight beckons with perfect complacency, knowing it is hours away from daylight. Together we heed the call with mist in our breath, and as you engulf me in such silvery darkness that borders on illegitimate light, I clench my teeth lest my soul fly away.

[Image Credit]

My warrior

My son Chandler turned eight today. And what a male person he has become!


One evening, during the Holy Week, we were all in the van on the way to church, and we had to go very slow beside a candlelit procession, the people chanting prayers as they slowly walked on alongside the van. As we looked outside the windows, Chandler said, in a low, gruff voice, and with great exaggeration on the plosives, "We're going to battle the devil."

That he knows which side he's on does not make me such a bad mother.

The fictions we tell ourselves

It is done. I am free, eleven years too late. But I feel nothing, nothing at all. I know that my story will not end there. There is enough of God and space to write a million epics of hurt and bestiality, just as there is enough of time to redeem oneself and forget. Yet some things will stay on. Like the air. Like God. Like hunger.

Deeper waters

Over the summer -- my favorite season of the year -- the man in my life and I have been to four different resorts: Eagle Point Resort in Batangas, Rockpoint Hot Springs Hotel in Calamba, Palm Beach Resort in Batangas, and Saud Beach Resort in Pagudpud. In Eagle Point I was a tag-along for an office activity of his with his subordinates, but the rest of the beach trips were just for the two of us. I got a mild tan and tried to finish reading a Margaret Atwood novel. We swam laps together in the pool, and in the ocean we tried to challenge how far we could swim from the shore, and I got stung by a jellyfish twice. It was funny, actually. We had a great deal of laughing done. He played PSP games in bed while beside him I read some trashy celebrity magazines. I remember looking up from my reading, looking so serious, and saying, "I will blog about this," and him bursting out laughing again. We had the chance to be together and talk, undisturbed by office and client concerns and online distractions, and we got to sleep soundly together with our sliding doors open to the beach and the sound of the waves all night.


I have always trusted my very first feelings about anything. I am one of those people who believe that things can happen in the blink of an eye, and that all around me are teeny tiny signs to tell me what's going on in my world. Sometimes I do misread the signs, especially when I over-analyze them, enlarging them -- a habit which I have acquired since college and which I now believe to be a temporary curse -- but once I go back to that initial feeling, that unadulterated first look, first breath, first heartbeat, and try to render things smaller and denser and purer, I always know what is to become of me. In my life, the first feeling is always the most compelling one, driving me to either glory or madness. All else is segue, all else is transition, to something I can neither ignore nor change.

In September, the first time we met, the man in my life looked at me and asked if we could take a leisurely walk along the shore, barefoot, with our pant legs rolled up. It sounded like a nice, fleeting thing, something like a pretty leaf that could just fly away in the wind. But in the deepest heart of me, where all my life begins, I could already see myself in the future, underwater with him, and I held my breath and said "Yes."

It wasn't all perfect, of course. There were inconveniences, there were problems. Sometimes the sand got rocky, and several times we got cuts from pieces of broken shells. Sometimes the sand was not sand but mud, and then it became sand again. Yet all through that, somehow, in the deep of night when I would stay awake, plagued by anxiety bred by over-analysis, I would go back to that very first feeling, remember that first look we gave each other, the first hello we uttered, and the first breath we shared in the same small space of a finite universe, and I would know that in the pure, instinctive, crystalline knowledge of what was to become of me, he would be part of it, irredeemably, and that would drive me deeper and deeper into that peculiar existence of one who knows but does not know.


And because of that, we are now treading deeper and deeper waters. A few months ago we could still feel the sand -- or something solid -- beneath our feet, but just recently, I found I had to hold my breath and submerge myself fully before I can touch the something solid again with my toes. And onwards we go, swimming, treading, to that part of the water where the earth holds its most ancient secrets, and when we get there, we will cling to each other and allow ourselves to be swallowed up by the irrevocable, unchangeable waters, where no human being can tear us apart ever again. There is nowhere else to go but further into the sea.

[Image credits]

Shore

When you touch me, I am a pearl glinting on the sands of desire, being covered with kisses by a sun that burns through to the tiny grain that is my core, rendering me miniscule yet vast, like a vacuum of waves.

[Image credit]

Shading

Last year I purchased a fountain pen ink called Mata Hari's Cordial, manufactured by Noodler's. I have seen this ink on Pendemonium a few times and I have always wondered about it, and have been rather curious about the "bulletproof" inks of Noodler's. So one evening I gave in to my curiosity and ordered a bottle.

Mata Hari's Cordial happened to be my first pink fountain pen ink. I loaded it into my Pelikan Grand Place with the 18k medium nib, which I have already soaked and flushed and dried the day before, in anticipation of this moment.

I was quite pleased with the color of this ink. On paper it’s shade of rose, what I know to be "Old Rose," and is not at all washed out. The lines it laid down were thick, rich and clear, and it was definitely not the ordinary everyday work ink. It’s actually a nice and proper Old Rose, the Old Rose that is predictable and familiar, the Old Rose of my hair ribbons from childhood, the Old Rose of my grandmother’s silk jewelry pouches. It was absolutely wonderful to use for letters and journals. Here it is on ecruwhite kid finish 32 lb resume paper from Crane, a paper that I absolutely love


I have already edited the scans with Photoshop in an effort to capture the Old Rose of the ink. It should be a medium dark dusty rose, not magenta, not fuchshia, not hot pink, not gray pink, and not faded pink. Not too dark, either, and definitely not washed out. Just the regular rose, darkened a few degrees, and rendered “old.” Old Rose. Very 1930’s.

I also liked the other qualities of this ink. It dried quickly on the three different papers I’ve tried it on, it did not smear or smudge, did not bleed, and was smooth to write with. And of course, it was fully waterproof, retaining its color and clarity even after an hour of soaking in tap water. Truly hardy for something that looks very feminine. (But then again, isn't that the essence of being a woman?)

Needless to say, I loved this ink. Loved. Because at some point, it started to look ordinary to me. No matter what pen I used, and no matter on what paper I wrote, the ink looked like I was using a felt-tip pen instead of a fountain pen. Over the months the bottle got relegated to the back of my ink drawer. I have purchased several more inks since the Mata Hari's Cordial, and a few more fountain pens, too. Looking through some of my writings from the past year written with Mata Hari's Cordial, I realize why it lost its beauty in my eyes. The ink has absolutely no shading.

Shading in writing is what is achieved when ink pools at the end of a writing stroke, which renders the ink darker at that point, and lighter at the point where the writing is faster and continuous. Shading also appears in strokes that are made slower. Notice the shading on the "s" of the word "this" in the writing below made with a different ink, and on the "t" in the word "resulting."


It's really quite subtle, but I can see those, and it's what makes writing beautiful for me -- that the lines are not the same all the way through, that the colors are not the same all the way through. I like that it looks imperfect, flawed, in a way, inconsistent, because of the combination of the pen and the ink and my strokes. I like how the shading reflects the speed of my thoughts; I like how the shading expresses on paper the things occupying my heart at the moment. I like how unique each handwritten page can look, because I know I feel secure in the constancy of the sensibility that lies underneath all the shading. I laugh, I cry, I don't know what to write, I get angry, I toss things into the wastebasket, I abandon my desk and mope in the rug beside my bed, but I know I'll write again. Much like in love. No day is the same as the one before. We laugh, we cry, we don't know what to to say, we get angry, we toss things away, we abandon our conversation and mope apart. Shading. Line strokes. But it's okay, because love is always there, like the ink, the exact same ink but just in different shades, and we both end up going back to the desk, to continue the writing of the same story.

Now the man in my life has begun to use fountain pens, too. He's on his second fountain pen, but at the moment he uses only one ink, Midnight Blues from Private Reserve, and he has not yet gotten the hang of loading a converter properly. I change inks more often because I have more inks, and I am perhaps more volatile and reactive than he is. But that's just my shading. I am not a felt-tipped pen.

But then what about the Mata Hari's Cordial that's still at the back of my ink drawer? I doubt if I'll ever use it again. Honestly, I did expect something more striking-looking for an ink named after perhaps one of the most enigmatic women in the history of 20th century warfare. I certainly did not expect a prim and proper Old Rose, never mind that a Cordial can be either a candy or a drink made from squash. (I would imagine her Cordial to be black and emit smoke). And why call it a Cordial? Why not just Mata Hari, and then color it the darkest red ever?

But I suppose this is just as well. For after all, for all we know, Mata Hari really just might have been the prim and proper Old Rose that history had never made her out to be, and there, in those spaces between mainstream history and the history that will never see the light, lies her magic over us.

I will never be the spy Mata Hari, of course. I don't have her spunk and her expertise at betrayal. And I don't think she ever truly loved any man. I will never be the prim and proper Mata Hari, either. If I were an ink, I'd be scarlet. But one thing I have that she doesn't is love. I love the man in my life, because of his shading, because of his presence, because he sees me as scarlet and also sees me as bubble-gum pink, because he sleeps beside me, because because. There is no enigma there. Shading is shading. Love is love is love.

By choice

Sometimes when he's not looking, I take photos of him, like this:


Maybe it's because a part of me doesn't want to disturb him when he's engrossed in any of his Apple gadgets. I can see magic in the connection he has with technology. Also, part of me just wants to stay in the background, undetected, unnoticed, and just wait until he looks around to search for me or reach out his arm to touch me or hold my hand. There's magic there, too, one independent of data chips and battery power.

Guess which magic I prefer.

Shaken up in Davao

So the man in my life flies to Mindanao to do field work with his district manager and a counterpart for three days and two nights and I tag along, as usual. We were to fly to Davao from Manila on Wednesday morning, spend the night there, drive to General Santos the next morning, and then take the flight to Manila from there on Friday morning. He picks me up from the apartment, as usual, and we park his car in the parking lot of the Centennial Terminal 2, as usual. And then we get our boarding passes from the check-in area, we get the window seats next to each other, and have breakfast while checking our e-mails online with our iPhones, as usual. I was prepared to have one of our usual out-of-town trips: short, sweet, relaxed, and fun.


It turned out to be quite the opposite. He had to rush to be with his district manager, who was already waiting in a car outside the arrivals area, so he armed me with leaflets for hotels and inns that we picked up from the airport concierge, and put me in a decent-looking cab, with an assignment: to find a nice hotel where we can stay till Friday morning. I was excited! I've never checked myself into a hotel before; it has always been him who checks us in. Trouble is, most of the hotels I called were fully booked, so I was relegated to the smaller ones.

The first hotel I checked into, The Manor Hotel, had dark, narrow hallways and dark, narrow rooms, and was along a street lined with hardware stores and junk shops so that should have made me suspicious. However, I felt it was a nice change from the large major hotels we usually stay in, and after all, I get to choose the hotel, and this was my choice.

This what when the horror really started. They put me in a room at the fifth floor, and the building did not have an elevator. Furthermore, the room had two twin beds and not the double bed I requested. I had to wait ten minutes before I could get transferred to another room with the right bed, but then the phone wasn't working so I couldn't order room service. Hungry as I was, I called the hotel front desk from my mobile phone to tell them about this, and was told to go downstairs instead.

When I got downstairs, an old man was standing by the counter in a shirt that has been slept in, his hair uncombed, and he was wearing slippers. He looked like he had just woken up! So I said, in Filipino: "Can I order here?"

"Yes," he answered in Filipino. He did not budge, though, not even to get a pen and paper to list down my order.

I looked through the menu and said, "I'll have the Bistek Tagalog."

"We don't have that."

"What do you have?"

"We have what's in the menu."

"But your menu has Bistek Tagalog."

"We don't have Bistek Tagalog."

"Okay, I'll have the Pork Adobo on the menu."

"We don't have the Pork Adobo."

"What do you have?"

"We have what's in the menu."

At that point I was starting to suspect that he was some sort of robot assembled in one of the nearby junk stores, so I thought I might shake him up a little. Maybe he was still half asleep.

Really annoyed, I asked him, "Can you cook an eggplant?"

He turned around, went to the small refrigerator nearby, and started rummaging through the contents. I tried to take a peek and all I could see were a bunch of plastic bags and some string beans. Unbelievable.


Of course I ran straight out of there, into the street, and almost tripped on a cog that was lying around near a small ditch. I felt like a character out of The Twilight Zone. I called my man, and he told me to get out of there quick!

So I half-ran back, told the front desk I simply had to find another hotel. I did not even dare to climb back up the narrow stairway to get my things (luckily, I had not yet unpacked), for fear that an axe murderer was waiting up there for me. I had them bring down our luggage, I took a cab and went to the next hotel on the list. Humberto's Hotel, advertised on the leaflet as "the charming little hotel," was even smaller than The Manor Hotel. It was too small that two people could not pass alongside each other between the two double-sized beds in their "Executive Suite." The carpets and drapes were also marked with too much cigarette burns that at first I thought it was a pattern in the fabric. Davao is a non-smoking city by law, so I suppose this room was where the entire population regularly converge to break that law, and in further rebellion, they refuse to use and ashtrays and use the drapes and rugs to put out their stinking, smoking cigarettes.

Finally, after a few calls to friends -- one of who informed me that The Manor Hotel was the site of a huge fire a few years back, and that a lot of people died in the fire -- I was able to reach the Royal Mandaya Hotel, which was a huge relief They had a sudden cancellation and could accommodate us for one night and one night only. I said that was fine because we were going to General Santos the next day anyway. Turns out the Royal Mandaya stay was the most pleasant one of the entire trip. The food was good, service was good, and the room was large and pretty and comfortable and quiet. The next day, however, we were back to some sort of quasi-nightmare.


My man and his district manager decided they will not be doing any work in General Santos anymore and will continue work in Davao instead, so we had to change our flight details. Again, I was the one tasked with that. I was to call the Philippine Airlines reservations hotline and get us seats on the 5 am Friday flight from Davao to Manila. I was put on hold for over twenty minutes. I was able to watch an entire episode of MythBusters while on hold! And then the Royal Mandaya could not accommodate us anymore for another night because they were already fully-booked, so I had to transfer to the Apo View Hotel nearby, which could now accommodate us for just one night.

The room was clean and quiet, the staff was helpful and quick, and I went to bed, turned on the TV and ordered food from room service. But then after a few minutes the strong smell of turpentine came seeping in. I turned down the airconditioning and opened the windows but the smell just got worse, and by them I already had a headache, so I called the front desk. Three managers came in (and behind them was the waiter bringing my food) and explained that the room next to mine was being repainted, and that they could transfer me to another room on the same floor but which did not have any fumes.

After everything was arranged, I was finally able to sit down and enjoy my lunch at 1pm. It was Bistek Tagalog.

But just like all other stories of disaster, this one did not seem keen to end that quickly. My man and I went to SM Davao in the evening to get dinner. We were planning to buy some stuff at the mall and have an early night because our flight was very early the next morning. But pople from his office started calling him, and he had to go online to send and receive several files, and there was a short unnatural period of us rummaging through our luggage looking for something he needed right away, and then my copy of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises ended up destroyed, and then finally when we went to bed it was already 2am.

And then we had to change our flight details again because there was no way we could make it to the airport in time for the first flight out because of what we have just been through together, and I was put on hold again for twenty minutes while I flipped through the remains of The Sun Also Rises, feeling sad at the carnage but also happy that the nightmare was almost over, and then finally we got confirmation for the 1pm flight, with the assurance that we can have our tickets rerouted directly at the check-in counters.

But oh no, it was not over yet. When we got to the check-in counters an hour before our scheduled flight, we were told that we could not get our tickets rerouted at the check-in counters. We had to go to the Philippine Airlines ticket office outside of the Departures area for this. So my man had to run out, stand in line at the ticket office, make the payment and get the new tickets, run back to Departures, stand in line again -- and take off his shoes again -- and then run to the check-in counters with me. Needless to say, we did not get the window seats, but we were still seated together. Thank goodness for small mercies.


By the time our plane touched down on the tarmac in the hot and sooty air of Metro Manila, we were hungry and exhausted, and we were never happier to be home. We took our luggage, he rushed to the parking lot to take the car and fetch me and the luggage at the main exit at Departures, but then he had to walk back to me because we have both forgotten that the parking stub was inside my bag (another "inconvenience" that already felt natural to us by then), and then finally, finally, we were home.

And it felt so good to be home. We turned on the lamps, had a heavy late lunch, turned off the lamps and went to sleep at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Sometimes we just have to be shaken up in order to have the right kind of order in our lives. This is our home. This is what we will always come back to, and there are no horrors here.



[Photo credits 1, 2, 3.]

French press

Coffee grounds swirl in the water as I plunge in the press. The swill looks good: dark and holds much promise, like you who still lie in my bed, swimming in the limpid pond of love that has been brought to a boil the night before.


[Photo credit]