Monthly Favorites: September 2015

I love YouTube. In fact I got a postpaid data plan JUST for YouTube. I don't text that much, I don't call that much, so theoretically I would get by with just a prepaid phone number. But I can't be bothered to watch TV, because the shows are too long. I don't really like listening to the radio, because I can't get through two minutes without fiddling with the channels. So I have to pay for YouTube, for my passive entertainment needs.

And I'm a sucker for monthly favorites videos---YouTubers would just sit in front of the camera showing/telling you about their favorites for the month. Most of them would whip out makeup, wearables, whatnot. So soothing to watch, haha.

And since this month has been nothing but a clusterfuck of fuck yous from the universe, I thought, why not take a page off those YouTubers' books and catalog the things that made the month tolerable? Maybe it would prevent me from whipping out an anvil and smashing my own head in. And so here they are. My favorite things/people/events for the month of September:

1. Nadine from that government office I've been bugging for my thesis---I am working on my Master's thesis, and getting the data has been a source of grief. I've expected the back and forth to take about a week or two. Obviously, it's taking MUCH longer. Apparently, I am requesting data that is sensitive in nature, so there needs to be lots of deliberation before the office can decide on whether they'll give me the data or not. I can angst about this right now, but let's not bring that kind of shit on this blog.

Now Nadine answers the phone for that government office, and she is just SO helpful. She can't give me the data, of course, but I appreciate how she gives me updates on who she's bugged on my behalf, and how (e.g. 'I left so-and-so a note and talked to him when he was here, so he won't forget about your case'). It may not be a guarantee of anything, but it eases my emotional suffering.

2. The movie, 'Heneral Luna'---I doubt I have anything new to say about the movie. The goriness of the movie stressed me out, and perhaps there is merit to what detractors say, i.e., that the movie is simplistic. But it is beautifully made; it is filtered enough to present its thesis to the average moviegoer; and it speaks to the issues of my time. And it is inspiring. It is inspiring that a young person made such a movie, and that the producers (businessmen, generally portrayed as opportunists in the movie) backed it up financially. And now it's an entry to the Oscars. What an exciting time for the arts, indeed.

3. The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf---Always quiet enough to let me study (or pretend to study), and with the friendliest staff. I really should learn the names of these nice people who ask me how my breakfast is going, and leave me notes with my coffee.

4. My trip to Japan, which is materializing at last---Even as a kid, I've always been fascinated by Japan. And this month, a friend and I scored really really cheap tickets. We're going in March next year, and the day-to-day planning (by my friend, because I mostly just toss in requests and say yes to whatever she proposes) is a high point of my day.

I guess that covers it. And now, I guess life isn't any better just because I blogged about my monthly favorites. But I must admit, I am feeling better. Onward to October.

Wishful Thinking, Thesis Data Edition

There were too many days spent buried under the bed, turned away from the sun outside. I had gone pale, gray, a shadow of my former self.

"Come out and play," my friends would say. "It would make you feel so much better."

"No it won't," I would answer. "I have no reason to go outside." And I stayed in bed, festering like a sore. I had no desire to play, to rise, to open my eyes at the start of every morning. I had stopped dreaming at night, and stopped noting the times I would drift off to an empty sleep.

And then you came along. And it was like opening all of the windows. The sun was shining through at last.

Not Just Yet

Make no mistake---it is July, and not April, that is the cruellest month. Sometime in July I looked up my monthly horoscope to find something that I could relate to my own experiences come August. True enough, I became preoccupied with house matters. I had been wanting to get a new shelf put up for a certain wall of our bedroom, and that is actually how most of July was spent. But nowhere in any horoscope did I see that while I was busy with wall measurements, I would lose something precious. For days afterward I  looked at dozens of other horoscopes, looking for something to the effect of: You will want to lie down and not get up. You will spend nights crying, and you will start wondering how people more alone than you are can weather their own disasters.

Someday I would be able to type up a proper goodbye to Letty. But not today; when attempting to post a send-off via Instagram can still send me crying in the middle of a coffee shop, not caring about the concerned looks of the baristas. I had caused more scenes at the end of July than I ever believed I was capable of: I cried in buses, in restaurants, in a fire exit, in earshot of my roommates in Quezon City as they were watching their soap operas. One of these days I would look back to this time, and find what the universe is trying to teach me. Just not yet. Right now my grief is in puddles all over the place. My Gmail is full of unfinished goodbyes, written during the three nights I couldn't sleep at all. A notebook under my pillow is full of disjoint words that came to mind the first weekend I was going to go home to Cavite and Letty would not be there. The words are in two columns and here are some: Flood. Weight. Well. Shrink. Disappear.

So July has taken off, leaving cleanup of the ransacked house to August. I don't think I have ever hated anything more in my entire life than the past month. I hated last year, but last year I didn't want to just pick up anything jagged off the side of the road and smash it against all the glass I can find, or watch everything be swallowed up by water.

I hate July. I want to bludgeon it, or weigh it down with chains and watch it sink to the bottom of the ocean. I hate it so much. And I don't care if in all the other months, people lose bigger things than I have. I know people lose jobs, houses, or other people. I know that all I lost is a small animal, but I loved that animal as much as my heart would allow.

A few days ago I was thinking, please God, just let me see Letty in a dream. I tried to recall every single detail, from the way he would leap up, to the expression of his face. And I was able to do it. I dreamed briefly that he was sleeping, and I could see it. I don't think I'll manage to do it again. But it's something I have fished out of this murky, misty time. I hold it to myself day in and day out, until I can finally say goodbye to Letty. But not just yet.

I Don't Have Nightmares Anymore

When I was a kid I was too afraid of ghosts and evil spirits. I couldn't look directly at the TV during the annual All Souls' Day feature of Magandang Gabi, Bayan. The white face looking out at passersby from the darkened window of an abandoned house, the noiseless woman that climbs onto passenger seat one moment then disappears the next, the unknown child that looks at the unsuspecting human from under the bed: I couldn't look at them, despite my full awareness that they were actors. And as a kid I really believed that ghosts were everywhere, and all waiting to get me alone. I couldn't enter rooms whose lights were off; I couldn't stay too long by myself in rooms that were fully lit. I  was always half-expecting an old woman with long white hair to hover outside the window at night, grinning at me trapped inside, so I couldn't look out the windows at night either. (But now that I'm older, I follow on Twitter the old, long-haired, white-haired woman that seemed to play every lost, evil spirit on TV come November.)

It did not help that I had too-intense dreams. We had an old woman as a neighbor. I rarely spoke two words to her, but every day at 5am, she would be outside, sweeping her front yard. She died when I was in elementary school, and I cannot remember why. But I never forgot her face, or the rhythm of her sweeping, many years later. And If you asked me to close my eyes and visualize the lines on her forehead, I can do it, in an instant, without thinking hard. Because soon after she died, I dreamed that I was washing dishes facing a window, and there she was, outside, staring at me, inching closer and closer. Finally her face was touching the window, and for an agonizingly long time, I stared back at her, because I couldn't wake up.

There was another time, when I had a fever for a good three days. I was a small kid, and when I was sick the adults would have me lie on a wooden sofa, its back just high enough to reach the bottom of our front window. At some point during my three-day fever, I was sleeping on the wooden sofa, and I dreamed of the window above me. In my dream there was a young Chinese woman playing with the jalousie window, opening and closing it, peering at me all the while, teeth bared in a smile.

And for a time I believed that these dreams were actual visits. My sisters used to agree, and we would recount these dreams, over and over. To some extent maybe I still believe in visitations. But one day, the fear just disappeared.

I think it was because I read a story somewhere about an abandoned cottage, where a husband and wife died horrible deaths. Years later their orphan comes to live in their cottage. Her friend tells her: "People died here." And she replies, "People die everywhere." And she moved in, and the story didn't go a supernatural route. Something in me clicked; my fear went out as if by a switch.

And now, here I am, remembering my childhood terrors, seeing in my imagination every white detail of our old neighbor's face. The lights are off, I am alone in bed. Yet I type sleepily away, feeling absently for other nightmares I haven't thought about in years. Generally, I hate sleeping beside anybody now that I'm grown. I hate it when something mars the perfect quiet at night, and in Cavite, I sleep in the darkest room in the house, often alone. Occassionally I leave the window open so my cat can walk in and out without fuss. The fear has disappeared.

My nightmares aren't as otherworldly as they used to be, either. The last one I remember was during my undergrad days. Quite some time after my grandfather died, I thought I saw him. I was sleeping on the top bunk of my appointed bed, in my college boarding house. I was hovering towards wakefulness, and I half-looked at the empty space beside my narrow bed. I thought I saw him with his hand holding the bar that kept me from falling off the top bunk. He was watching me, and he was dressed in the barong we buried him in. I shot awake and screamed, fully waking up. My roommate nearest the bed turned on the lights, and I found my bedside empty.

Maybe the nightmares stopped because I couldn't be bothered with them anymore as soon as I was fully awake. Was my grandfather really looking at me from beside the bed? Maybe. But what did it matter? I couldn't see him looking anymore under the flourescent lights. In fact, after his little visit, I climbed out of bed, and wrote a somewhat unflattering essay about him, which I passed in class.

Now, when I have nightmares, they are most often about rats. (Sometimes about being the victim of a crime, but more often about rats.) Less interesting, but infinitely more plausible. And more horrible, considering that a pattern I notice about my own nightmares is they start off with me lying in the actual bed I am sleeping in. And they always go like this: I would find myself in bed, in the middle of the night, in the dark, and a rat would crawl across my blanket. It's infinitely more horrible, because I'm never sure if I'm dreaming. I woke up from such a nightmare once, while I was staying in a house in Pasig. I woke up, and jumped to my roommate's bed. In my haste I think I kneed him in the liver. And I insisted that he scour the house for the rat. Of course he couldn't find one, but by then fear had taken over and I couldn't go back to my own bed. Since my roommate was gay, there really was no happy ending for this one episode.

Believe it or not, sometimes I worry because I don't have fanciful nightmares anymore. It must be a failure of the imagination, I think. Now, I am so earthbound that I can only be afraid of the things I know for sure are real. Oh I don't want another dream about the dead, of course. But I wonder what it says about my state of mind, now that my subconscious no longer surfaces the possibility that people that may be right beside you without you knowing, when you're by yourself in the dark.

And I know it's a stupid worry. Logically, I should probably worry more about my waking fears. But they don't even make for fun storytelling, and they feel pointless to think about. So last Sunday, I watched a YouTube video about an antique haunted doll. After it scared me sufficiently, I put down my phone and closed my eyes. I slept peacefully.

How Deep Do Ferns Grow?

There was a fern that wanted to attach itself to a tree, the way an orchid hangs off driftwood. But ferns (such a goofy thing to be called) are supposed to sprout out of dirt, unkempt, like a full head of curly hair. The tree told the fern so. And anyway, there wasn't anything that the fern could do; it was not a vine that could creep along and wrap itself around the tree. It was staying where it was.

The fern dug its roots deep, long tendrils of root snaking their way deeper and deeper into the ground. Maybe the tendrils snaking underground could wind a path to the roots of the tree, and meander up, around the bark, latch on, and not let go. The fern had no idea that its roots can only dig down, and not all the way across another part of a garden. Maybe the tree had roots deep deep underground that the fern's roots could tangle with eventually. But how could the fern be sure? Do fern roots go that far?

The pain of the whole thing is that the tree was just there—had the fern been a weed, it would take only a week or so to cover the ground and join the tree's base. Had the fern been a vine, it would have been a matter of nothing to crawl over branches of the one or two plants between them, and say hello. (Or would it? The fern really wasn't sure; it was a fern and not a vine.) Best yet, if the fern had been a sunflower, it would have faced towards the sun, period. No more orienting itself towards a tree, perhaps. Needless to say, if only the fern had been a whole host of things that it wasn't, things would have been different. And needless to say, amidst all of this, the tree was just there.

The fern didn't even know what was so important about growing on the tree. It had never wanted—does not want to be—an orchid or any other aerial plant. A fern it is, and a fern it intends to stay. Just growing on a tree.

And so the fern digs its roots down, knowing that it is digging down, and not across to where the tree was (just there). Someday, the fern would learn that some things grow in pots, some things grow in water, and not everything grows on trees.