Saccharine High

The Tumult: Obliterate my memory of your poetry. Ravage the thing that dares speak your name. Deafen my ears from the lilting strains of your song. Shield my sight from the trance of your gaze.

The Poetry: All of these don't mean I love you less. I still plan to live my life with you. You mean so much to me. I hope you realize that also. Sorry if you didn't understand me. I want you to know that I truly understand you. Wish I could be there just to hold you tight.

The Tumult: ...................



Then there was just silence. Merely silence...

Touched

I'm catching raindrops in my hands again. In my grasp, I'm never letting it slip.

The biting cold of rain granting me bliss as it soaks every pore as though roughly making love with my being.

I'm alive again. With the touch of rain.

Fissured

At 2 a.m. Oct. 7, while savoring my cup of instant noodles, I was laughing my head off recounting for the nth time our slight brush and getaway with the traffic law. The nagging emptiness inside of me mocking the forced racket I was making at such an ungodly hour. In the light of confused sadness, I laughed the loudest in vain attempts to muffle every strain of sadness.

Half-awake at 7 a.m., I squinted at my mobile phone to know who was responsible for the reveille that morning. It was mom bearing the news that would illuminate all the unexplained emptiness I felt the night before. Lolo (grandfather) bade us all goodbye at 5 a.m. Oct. 7, Sunday.

It was indeed time to visit home and take a respite from the self-imposed reclusion. But it was all too late. For the past 10 months, going home has been my lowest priority for countless reasons and personal issues I can hardly bring myself to come to terms with. In silence, the lament of remorse is so deafening it fissures my sentient being.

Seeing him in a seemingly deep sleep behind the thick glass confirmed the reality I was denying to accept for the past hours. Yet he looked so peaceful that tears are almost a shame. He looked so peaceful that on the third day, I requested to literally feel Lolo's skin. His hands were soft nary a tinge of coldness, it can pass for being alive. The gesture would have truly amused him.

For someone who can never tolerate watching horror flicks, it is unlikely to be able to sleep on someone's deathbed for eight days. Yet sleeping on the very bed where he breathed his last was far from being scary. Not least, the closest I ever was to feeling him again after so many years. Not least, a good confirmation of his reassuring disposition.

Not least, a testimony of how much his absence will be missed.

The Art of Digression

Ha Jin's Waiting still sits gloatingly on my bedside table and I believe it is mocking me. I have been trying to finish it for almost a month now. I am at least 10 or so chapters short of knowing Lin Kong and Manna Wu's fate. What is it about this book that somehow lulls me to sleep even after 3 cups of café noir?

As a workaround to this dilemma, this afternoon I perused the book while walking back and forth in the living room like a human pendulum for a little more than two hours. A definite killing-two-birds-with-one-stone scheme, I must say. One, I get to read without falling into oblivion. Second, my rusted appendages can use this rare stretch. And assuming the role of a human pendulum has placed the older graveyard shift denizen of the household into a blissful hypnotic spell. So, I was actually enjoying a quiet afternoon walking and reading Ha Jin while Corinne Bailey Rae croons Another Rainy Day in the background for the nth rerun.

Listening to Corinne Bailey Rae (CBR) always puts me in a trance. As the overture of her song reaches my ear, it's like being propelled to a different era with a thick gossamer separating me from my world or the world as I know it. But just the other weekend while listening to CBR and anticipating the trance, the youngest household denizen quipped, "Her voice makes me want to eat the entire gallon of ice cream." Then she went on licking the remnants of ice cream on her spoon. Oh God, Oh God I am salivating... For someone who is actually rice and sugar famished, this is a rather disturbing observation. Yes, I admit the mirror reflection stirred me to adapt a healthier ummmm... lifestyle (I hate the d word!). Now, apart from hurling me into a trance, CBR reminds me of a freshly-baked brownie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top! Where did the brownie come from, you wondered. You see, my mind can get carried away at the slightest mention of food.

From Ha Jin to Corinne Bailey Rae to food... this is the art of digression. Before I swerve to another subject and drive you all bonkers, allow my sugar-bereft mind to go on strike.

¡Hola amigo!

I've never been known to stick to one thing for long. Never staying in one place for years. Never enjoying a certain hobby for months. And ever changing my desktop wallpaper faster than you can say "wait". Perhaps the only staples in my desktop are the icons and widgets from Yahoo!.

My wallpaper would reflect whatever catches my fancy at a particular time. But it's mostly places, I've dreamed of visiting. Or a panoramic photograph of windows and staircases. Or paintings of autumn and sunsets.
Or pictures of things that sends me to a nostalgic euphoria be that a field of white roses and tulips.

As of the moment, my eyes are riveted to a Hispanic street in the city of Valencia. The rustic architecture of the establishments along the cobbled street beguiles my eccentric mood.

A shot of tequila to Marni for My Desktop Free View tag. Please allow me to take a peek of your desktop: Lupideloop, Leah, Mia, Lyjunna, and Abaniko.

Here’s a quick instruction:

A. Upon receiving this tag, immediately perform a screen capture of your desktop. It is best that no icons be deleted before the screen capture so as to add to the element of fun.

You can do a screen capture by: [1] Going to your desktop and pressing the Print Scrn key (located on the right side of the F12 key). [2] Open a graphics program (like Picture Manager, Paint, or Photoshop) and do a Paste (CTRL + V). [3] If you wish, you can “edit” the image, before saving it.

For MAC users: Press  [ Shift ] and [ 3 ]

B. Post the picture in your blog. You can also give a short explanation on the look of your desktop just below it if you want. You can explain why you preferred such look or why is it full of icons. Things like that.

C. Tag five or more of your friends and ask them to give you a Free View of their desktop as well.

D. Add your name to this list of Free Viewers with a link pointing directly to your Desktop Free View post to promote it to succeeding participants.

People who have already revealed their desktops are:
iRonnie - I Set No Corner | Thess - Thesserie | Rebecca - Skippy Heart | Knoizki - A Dialogue With K | Dicey - Dice Six | Pao - Lifelog | Beng Hafner - Kauderwelsch | Bluepanjeet - OTWOMD | Melai - Manilenya | Kofi - 3 Shots Of Espresso | Marni - Midori-X | Nika - Clay Pots and Wooden Spoons | Marie - Vanidosa | Girlie - Hip n Cool Momma | KK - My Good Finds | Francine - Chez Francine | Sardonicnell - Tales of A Melodramatic Moron | Issa - Snippets of A QuaintQuill

Scratch that itch

How can something so sacred as marriage be reduced to being a mere time-share arrangement?

Has society become too advanced to believe in a love that lasts? Have the Muses caved in and submit themselves to the ruins and fall from glory?

In a world that has become obsessed with what's nouveau, have human emotions morphed into androids that subsist based on its battery life?

Have we grown too cynical to seal relationships with a business contract?

To live life mechanically and forge relationships dispassionately, is this the slogan of the digital age?

It would be hypocrisy to say that I'd rather backtrack to the age where g-strings made of leaves were a fashion but if we have become the kind of race that succumbs too easily to "itches", then all these claimed innovative breakthroughs are the only things that define us. Nothing more.

Gone Haywire

Thursday, 3pm

For an hour, I watched... Allow me to rephrase that appropriately.. I actually enjoyed watching the UAAP basketball match between UST and FEU. The most recent memory I have of a basketball match was the championship game between Phoenix Suns and Chicago Bulls. Not that I was a basketball fanatic then but the men-dominated household was glued to that particular game and changing the channel just for the sheer fun of it could perhaps endanger dear life (I didn't have the gall to test their avowed adulation to Michael Jordan but I wish I did. Darn.)

Friday, 9pm

For the past three weeks, Ha Jin's Waiting has been collecting dust on my bedside table (along with two other books) and I couldn't seem to manage to finish more than two chapters without getting the soporific spell. So, I started rereading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being which, as always, reduced me into smithereens (in a great literary way, though). To be fair with Ha Jin, I must say that things started to pick up when Manna Wu, the protagonist's paramour, possessed by a passionate rush made a risque proposal and an arbitrarily wanton decision amidst the puritanical setting of the depicted era. It's a relief to find someone doing sillier things than you do -- be it real or fictional.

Saturday, 2 am

My schedule planner has been filled out once again after a few months of being guiltily empty. Oh well, I allowed it a short respite after a hectic (a breath short of being a suicidal) schedule of activities of a corporate slave.

For the past two days being disconnected from the web felt like being hurled into the black hole. But now that I'm back online, those two days weren't so bad after all. But that is not to say I can live being unwired. ☺

Tricked

I've been fighting this soporific spell otiosely for the past three hours. My head slowly droops into the pit of slumber then little voices in my head start to gibber and jerk me awake. This is something that a caffeinated brew can easily mend. Except that a cup of coffee right now can also easily make my blood-pumping organ thump faster than normal.

My head bullied my body into taking a walk. But walking feels like dragging two massive boulders. Any slight movement seems to make my head spin. No, I haven't been to a drinking binge. After a year or so, I finally labored a 30-minute exercise this afternoon and now, I feel like an arthritic septuagenarian. To add insult to injury, my mind flashes reruns of an older version of myself aided by a mobility walker.

How can the body be tricked by youth's ephemeral invincibility into thinking that it can just jumped into whatever activity it fancies?

Lexical Affair with CdQ

"...it is the poet more than any other human being on Earth who strains himself to break any fetter to human expression, be it physical or verbal, be it the barbed wire or the barbed tongue. Tyranny spawns a literature of protest as naturally as dark clouds spawn rain, and more than the armies that are raised in the hills to fight oppression, it is the fashioning, forging, or fomenting of righteous anger that ends it."

The pen is (still) mightier than the sword
by Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
28 August 2007

Before getting to the gist of her lesson, my sophomore Social Studies teacher would read snippets of Conrado de Quiros' (CdQ) column in PDI (Philippine Daily Inquirer). It was from her that I learned to appreciate and have grown to love CdQ. It is not just the sheer audacity and acerbity of his words that roused my daily perusal liaison with CdQ. My fixation is more on how he strings his thoughts into words creating lexical fireworks. The kind that gives you an orgasmic (read that as literary) high. The kind that makes you grab a pen and write feverishly until words unmask your soul.

At times, reading CdQ can be like wading in murky waters especially if at one point in time you have wiped drool off your face after a brief sopor in your Philippine History class. Reading him makes you flip through the yellowed pages of your history book or scour for remnants of history underneath your wig.

Being in awe isn't tantamount to absolute agreement. From time to time, my thoughts on certain issues differ from his views but after every CdQ fix, I find myself struggling not to waver to his stance.

Inebriated

a familiar scent drifted
waking the silent senses
into a deprived territory once tread

it lingered in the air
refusing the mighty wind's call
and holding me captive like once before

I breathe in deeply
feeling you drench my very soul
once again