cocoro

Weather(ing)

Apparently I can't cross-post from Typepad to Livejournal. Eh. Lately my entries in my livejournal have been of the trivial, random, solipsistic sort, which only friends who've been on my flist forever might parse/remotely appreciate. Where before I used to compose entries, now I just--jot them down. They're effluvia and if my account were--for some cosmically weird reason--suddenly to get suspended, I wouldn't care, except insofar as I'd miss my flist  (in which case I'd just get a dummy account to follow them). This makes me a little sad since there was a time when I treated that livejournal as an erm existential sphere in itself. I think that all these issues with Six Apart might have turned me off the service more than I thought. The attachment to my friends list, as mentioned, is as strong as ever; it's my attachment to the journal which has waned considerably, which is why I've been re-posting some of my old entries in this blog. I will not delete the livejournal--since I use it to post to other communities (which I have no plans of leaving, with a few qualifications)--but I think the time when I stop using it altogether as a--how to put it?--distinct entity is nigh. There are other reasons, of course.

Vern recently posted an interesting entry about the 'life cycle of a blogger,' and her cycle corresponds closely to mine, since we've been friends and bloggers since those halcyon pitas days :) I really enjoyed livejournal during the years that I used it actively (that is to say, until very recently). I went through a very long period where I did not want to blog out in the open, so to speak, and lj suited my purpose admirably.  I mentioned in another conversation with a friend that what distinguishes Livejournal from other blogging services is that it's less a social network or a journaling service than an intra-blog. You can choose to post to an hermetically sealed niche of your own for the rest of your life and need never bother about the rest of the world. And I was very hermetic, the past three or four years, both online and offline. I had an established circle of friends and acquaintances in my livejournal and in social groups RL. My own life was pretty much a closed-circuit dialogue. It wasn't a bad thing. I was thinking about and poring on a great deal of stuff and talking to myself and occasionally a friendly and understanding group of people would reply and/or put in a corrective.

This year I went and am going through several big changes. It's not such a great deal but I did step out of myself and tried to, what, engage some things that are definitely larger than I am and for which I often found myself terribly unprepared.  But I think I'm less of--I don't feel the need to protect myself or be defensive about what I believe in, what I write, or who I am anymore. It sounds overly dramatic though I'd say it's just a particularly troublesome aspect of growing old.

Much has been made of online anonymity. I don't necessarily feel impelled to declare myself to the world but I want to take my place in it. So here we are again. It feels a bit familiar and yet it isn't. There will be less talk of animated pretty boys, for one. XD (Oh, I lie).

Auguste

11/2004

I have just finished watering the plants and spraying the flowers and orchids with my mother's various concoctions. Both my parents are fanatical gardeners, and if something happens to their precious flowers while they're abroad, they'll kill us, insert a cheerful kiss and wave goodbye. I would really hate to have to make them choose between their children and their garden (there's a wonky Old Testament metaphor lurking in there somewhere). It can only end in pain--Though I do think that my mother will pick us over her beautiful laundry when it comes down to it. Oh, she might hesitate, but...

The hibiscus trees are blooming wonderfully. I picked the reddest blossom I could find; it's resting atop the modem as I write this. A not very romantic place to be in, I admit. I should have tucked it behind my ear, traded my jeans for a printed skirt, and sashayed through my morning chores to Jobim's Bonita before I leave, but I'm afraid I'm not a very romantic person at all (nor am I a fey American Idol contestant).  Our gardener has no such qualms, however. I was a little unnerved -- if unsurprised, you'll see why -- to see him perched atop the greenhouse the other day adjusting the netting, wearing very short cutoff shorts, naked from the waist up. A red hibiscus blossom flamed behind his right ear in the high midday sun, a startling contrast to his platinum blond hair. The gardener's name is Auguste. He's unbelievably gay, a veritable scandal. He's also got an amazing way with flowers which is why the entire barrio lines up in his door, begging him to please take care of their gardens. He's very picky about his clients though. For some reason, he and my mother get along famously. She's had him since forever. He comes around to our house three times a week and I don't think I've ever seen him fully clothed in all the time I've known him. Summer, monsoon, in the middle of a rampaging typhoon... all he ever wears are his favorite cutoff shorts and nothing else. It's only his hair color that varies with the seasons. One Valentine's Day, he actually dyed it back to black. The color of a broken heart, Auguste declared dramatically, though his hands were gentle as they smoothed the petals of my mother's favorite roses.

... Afterwards, I sat down in a small bench under the mango tree to have coffee. I took it with the cats, as is fast becoming a ritual ever since Mom left. They're very fat cats and they're actually getting fatter, if it's at all possible. My brother feeds them overmuch, I think. I often see him with them after dinner. They don't exactly belong to us; not that it matters. They sure act like we belong to them. The cats sleep on the roof (I don't know how they can actually go up seeing how big they are -- maybe that's why the drainpipes seem a little bent out of shape), they play in the grass (well, they loll), but most of the time, they sleep under the mango tree. When I drink coffee in the morning, they sit up and stare at me. I wonder why. It's even more unnerving than looking up at the sky and finding my vision blocked by a half-naked gardener with a hibiscus blossom in his hair.

Prometheus

In great fires of joy in the sky of your steps
You are dance.
And the false gods burn beneath your vertical flame.
You are the face of the initiate
Sacrificing madness beside the guardian tree
You are the idea of All and the voice of the Ancient
Gravely launched to attack chimeras
You are the Word that explodes
In miraculous spray on the shores of oblivion.

family and psyche

After marathoning "Stairway To Heaven," a cousin who casually watches dramas remarked idly on how amnesia seemed to be a major plot factor in Korean soaps. I remember Bae Young-jun (the immensely popular male lead of the hit drama “Winter Sonata”) commenting in a TIME Asia interview about how much he liked the story of “Winter Sonata” because it was about having a love one could come back to, something pure that one would never lose even though one has forgotten it. Less about fate and predestination, more about an indestructible moment in time within the dimensions of one’s heart.

By way of contrast, Filipino soaps are almost always about a protagonist confronting her life-long enemy after years of oppression and suffering, only to find out that the person she hates most and who has caused her superhuman amounts of pain is, in fact, her mother (or father, brother, sister, anything, as long as they're intimately blood-related; usually it's the mother, though). Dramatic tension reaches its peak in that moment of horrified recognition, followed by a series of anti-climactic episodes in which the mother crawls on her knees for forgiveness and the daughter -- eventually -- learns to forgive.

Perhaps it’s a sort of cultural nightmare we’re tapping here -- that there's nothing more hurtful or terrifying than being faced with the realization that the people you're supposed to count on whatever happens, who, theoretically, ought to kill for you, are the very same people who have betrayed you, trod on your heart and crushed it to boot, deprived you of your rightful inheritance, and so on. Naturally, in the universe of the soap opera, redemption always follows knowledge of truth since once the relationship is exposed, the rules governing such a relationship have to revert to default. Once you know you're a mother and you have hurt your child, you better crawl on your knees before the status quo adjusts itself to normal (or, since we're talking about soap operas, the ideal). And because you're a child, you absolutely must forgive your mother, how can you not, you are just a child and she is your mother (no matter that she tried to bomb every single one of your birthday parties), though you are excused your circumlocutions and prolonged bouts of avoidant resentment.

Traveling

Eve asked me for my Top 5 list of countries/cities visited. I've got a somewhat fucked-up idea of what traveling means so this should really be qualified (next time, as... hot noodles!):

1. Nairobi, Kenya (Twilight. Memorable, too, for the fact that we were served zebra meat for supper one night. For some reason, I kept thinking like the idiot I was that the meat would also have black and white stripes. It didn't. I was obscurely disappointed.)

2. Colombo, Sri Lanka (Ice cream by the Indian Ocean and trying to eavesdrop on hot Tamil boys conversing for M's edification. When I watched the tsunami coverage several months later, I couldn't help but think of that afternoon.)

3. Paris, France (... where to start, honestly. Paris was inexhaustible.)

4. Mexico City, Mexico (Bought several facsimiles of Council of the Indies documents and... that was really some tequila. Plus, glorious Mexican telenovelas on a Mexican TV.)

5. Tokyo, Japan (I was half-dead most of the time and so had firsthand experience of what it meant to, how to say it, experience a Japanese hospital. You would have to develop or evolve a distinct state of mind, seriously. Mine still niggles at the back of my head, like a curse waiting to be sprung. Also, I saw Gackt in Tokyo Tower. My father dumped me there and told me to 'enjoy' myself since I was still wobbly on my feet and would probably fall off a crosstown bus if I tried to go around Tokyo on my own. While I was being miserable over my coffee, suddenly, there he was. He was so much younger and was wearing... there were definitely leopard spots. Don't laugh, I love Gackt.)

One missed call

(7/25/2007)

Routine apartment whining: This building just gets crazier and crazier. Though if I mysteriously disappear or something, it'll be my fault since I'm too lazy to actually move out even if I end up being sacrificed by some weird religious cult in the 22nd floor (and you never know, with this place). Also I can't seem to tear myself away. You just sort of want to wait and see what crazy shit the other residents are gonna pull even if it's, like, lethal.