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I've thought of this for quite a while now, and I guess it's high time that I start it again. I've been away from this blog for too long. As I look back, I realize once again that this is where I took root . This is where I used to hide myself away, where only a handful of people shared my life's circumstances with me, not judging of my failings or of my successes. This is where I need not worry about, nor pander to, people's expectations of me. Beginning today, I will turn to my corner here, and become my unbridled self again. 

ho-hums

There's nothing much to say today, and as usual I've been suffering what one blogger calls a blogorrhea. So off I go with my rumbling. Our director has been around for a couple of days now, spending the whole time in the office, doing important business over phone and net----the whole nine yards---- except make small attempts to talk to us. Sure, we had been privileged to lunch out at hotel mezzanines of late with him, but back at grind time, there are the usual furtive glances, and tiptoeing, a funny stance that all of us, rank and file, are guilty of taking when the big guns are around. I don't remember for the life of me why we do it anyway. I mean, our bosses, considering that they are foreigners, are not really the kind who would give a dope as to how we conduct our business around the office. Outside of it, we are as equal to them as we damn please think we are, except that they foot the bill, and we reciprocate with all-encompassing gratitude. They are as natural as can be, but it seems that we are the ones who balk at the idea of behaving as we do when left among ourselves. And, as if that is not enough, we discuss things behind their back, belaboring on the minutest details of the time they were in our presence.

Are we that of small minds, after all?

Three Six

Was wondering whether I should say something about my birthday that just passed, as a thousand other thoughts swim in my mind like a teeming mass of little dots waiting to burgeon before me in a frenzy. Maybe I should anyway. As per usual, nothing of significance happened that day, except that I finally saw Makati after having been cooped up in the south for so long. I brought my little boy with me, and I am glad that Gabby seemed to flash back the same feeling of delight that I have at having seen some sort of civilization. It’s awesome to see that buildings have scraped the skies much higher than when I was last working there, and with growing curiosity I started taking snapshots, however much to Gabby’s annoyance in the end. People were getting busier and were dressing up much smarter. I felt like Gabby and I were like country mice meeting up with city mice cousins in a big scary place.

We had lunch with the cousin and my brother, they were both on a short break from work, and so it was down to the usual small talk of the urbane, and eating hastily while glancing at their wristwatches every so often, which I excuse them for, as I understand the corporate culture. I had a feeling though that I will never succeed in living in their kind of environment anymore, the hurried and harried life, as I prefer to spend and vacillate my slaving days in a mound of brambles, meaning the not so modern dusty south part of manila.

After saying our goodbyes and blowing kisses in the air, I dragged my son to glorietta. The afternoon heat was dreadful and I needed to down something on my parched throat. Gabby was complaining that he was tired and I had for a few moments needed to carry him to the shade. While in glorietta I was assailed with a tempting itch to buy something for myself, probably a new pair of shoes—fortunately I resisted the urge and remembered that my son has been egging me for a “yellow truck”. I know that a matchbox car would be quite harmless, but what do you know, I wasn’t prepared for the realization that my afternoon with him would lead me to.

We had left glorietta for toy kingdom and were walking around in circles for half an hour inside the store as he could not decide which one to get. We pretty much walked past hotwheels and matchbox cars, and I thought that he might ask for something really big and expensive, and I was gearing up myself up to say NO, just in case he hauls a thousand peso worth of toy from the shelf. He looks from one aisle to another, and this time I didn’t say a word. He took my hand and he led me. And after looking up and down the shelves, he made his verdict: let’s go home. I uttered an almost inaudible yes, but I said wait, are you sure. And the little boy couldn’t have been more resolute: Yes mommy, let’s go home.

I’ve been waiting for many a weary years to avenge myself for some unreasonable habit of spending in the past, and I finally see it coming, to save my life on my thirty-sixth birthday. My son, a little four year old thing, teaches me how to say no and mean no, and never look back.

a stranger one day

By this time I am quite aware that the prevailing theme of this blog I started some three years ago is me, me and me. Me picturing me snapping at myself. C’est moi. It will not come as a surprise that people who saunter into this place think I’m self-absorbed, reveling in the wry pleasure of putting myself down in different ways, making blistering disparagements of my life as a mother who constantly carps about her failure in the home front, a person who nitpicks on her lackluster existence of thirty-five years, and many other imaginary things that are greatly in danger of falling over her, if she just as much as manage a little smile on her face. Hear, hear. I’m sounding like it now.

But the truth of the matter is, I never feel more free than when I expatiate about those feelings and ambiguities in this little space. Discomfiting as it may seem for others. I’m sure they must have muttered something under their breath about the unhelpfulness of my glum and pessimistic thoughts, and God knows how tedious it can get, but yeah, what can I say? Sometimes I just want to write. Of something that didn’t or doesn’t happen. Of nothing. Of nada. Nada y pues nada y pues nada, crap that hemingway suckers like me devour hungrily like aphrodisiac.

We live in an intolerable uncertainty, of what’s to come tomorrow, or five minutes from now. Maybe we will succeed, or fail, as we try to struggle in our chores as wife, mother, lover, worker? Or maybe we will go on whirring about, like machines. No heart, no soul, but nonetheless functional and useful in man’s end result. Our end result. We make the hero or antagonist of our own life story. I am both, to myself. And understandably so.

So, as a favor to my other world, where I am a envisaged to be nice and companionable, let’s not split hairs over pointless semantics, I will remain to be what they see me. And I’ll reserve my desultory grumblings to myself alone. Or to a random stranger maybe, who by the same token, will one day shake me out from my lifeless stupor, and scream--By golly, how you bore the living hell out of me!

far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife

(title borrowed from thomas gray)

These last few days, I have been in a state that I hardly recognize myself when I look in the mirror. The woman I see is tired of everything, but she seems to deliberately inflict it upon herself, because really, stress is just a state of mind, and it's nothing like a good dose of sex or movies and shopping can't cure----or better yet, drowning in a sea of cuervo, or walking naked in public. Imagine how that would be like, a nanosecond of adrenaline rush, and voila! adios to self-recriminations...

But seriously, I have no inclination to do any of the above, save perhaps for some ocassional carnal remedy, which I am not really prone to gloss over any further in my blog. And so I blame myself solely in the process. I know that people around me think I am a little difficult to deal with, although often mellow and proper. But I am a self-declared loner, and I give no horseshit to anyone, so sometimes it's a feeling of me and me, against the world. That spark of hostility is almost always latent, but I can sometimes sense how they frown upon my being an oddball. But being who I am, I guess that they would not have seen it otherwise.

I mean motherhood and marriage and all, puts you in the mainstream. There are certain mores and expectations you have to flow with. You are doomed to wear that mask all your life, and it's your choice so no one else can be faulted on it. But inside you, deep where your soul is, not as a mother or wife or officemate, or neighbor, just the person you are--you want to be hip or cool or crazy or renegade or wanton---but you can't bring about the audacity to show it to anyone, not at this stage of your life, and in scenarios you create to realize your secret dreams. Suffice it to say that eventhough there are many people outside your circle who claim to empathize, or psychoanalyze your every move, not all of them are wont to understand you or NOT judge you. Society dictates that we fit a certain mold, and try we must if we want to have a quiet, albeit boring semetertian, life. Lest you wish to be called childish or irresponsible. In the face of all these, you just got to have faith in the fact that behind your back, yourself is as true to you as you are to her.

My life in this age, it gravitates me to do what is good and beneficial. But in spite of the unrealistically high and questionable lengths I sometimes go through to become a perfect stepford spouse, I detest being goody two-shoes and proper. What is it that I really want? I think most of us unwittingly go through life trying to ignore our true calling or at least that which will make us happy. We sacrifice our characters, and even kill our souls for what is perceived to be a more noble and meaningful cause. We equate being a docile wife, and having healthy children and comfortable lives with satisfaction. And yet, there's a diminutive lot of us, the madding crowd, who aren't even half as happy, and think we can only find our sense of belonging in the dank compartments of our minds, which are by the way, already festered with our own psychotic maggots.

Why can't we be like the rest of them, outside and more so inside? How does one go back in time when only your selfish ideas mattered? I wish it were that simple, like clicking the Undo button. But hey, whoever said life is bunchful of lollies to loll with....And so, sometimes I am convinced that tagore or gibran are a bunch of liars with a lot of senseless shit to say and it's about time I embrace the pessism of a schopenhauer. At least when you don't expect, you don't get disappointed.

again....

It has been many months that I have itched to write something down on my blog. Heck, I do visit my spot everyday and hit Blog This! But once the empty page confronts me, my thoughts all get into a big jumble. And I grumble about having nothing to write. It's like having a very good dream at night, and being awaken by a loud thud in the morning, you open one eye and out your dreams go flying off the windows, like specks of dust......you just don't have the power to bring them back as a lucid whole. It frustrates me no end. The trouble with me is I am not always inclined to talk about the everyday things, which is what I'm exactly supposed to be doing. I mean, where do you get the inspiration to write anyway? Isn't it the inconsequential stuff around you that make up a structure of thoughts that push you into blogging? Yes, I agree....but it's me. Sometimes I want to talk about this and that, I am pretty sure I've had it in my mind......but the moment I sit down to write, all is gone into thin air. Am I in trouble? I guess, definitely. Dawdling dawdling dawdling.....

Anyway, so I say to myself, bear with my self....and she nods silently. Today, I feel terribly frustrated that I am in limbo....just incredibly staying afloat and waiting for life to take shape. It scares me to not have the courage to decide on something---where I am going, what I want, what I plan for tomorrow.... My thoughts wander, but something grounds me to where I am now. Is it my family? I don't know. I'm pretty much rotting in my comfort zone, and it's not comfort I am getting at all. I don't know my worth right now. Something must happen, I must get going. But where do I start? Hearing myself think this I am reminded of a virginia woolf and a sylvia plath, who thought so much of the world and life--but reduced to bare bones, they found life meaningless, thus the suicides.

People like van gogh, plath, hemingway--were they driven mad by the harshness of reality? But isn't it the same harsh reality that drove them to be mad and great? What makes one take his life anyway? Is it the too much-ness, or the nothing-ness? I remain clueless because I am not mad, nor great. I am just an everyday mother who has no cold weather or frigid husband or literary rejections to bleat about, and yet now I find life meaningless, and suicidal.

An Attempt at Recollections of Childhood

I grew up in a close-knit neighborhood in Bacolod. It was a custom to call our place “compound” because we lived in an enclosure of about seven houses owned by the families my maternal grandma and her siblings. We belonged to the third generation of a big clan. My mother alone had 14 other siblings, and my first cousins were running close to 60, until the youngest was born in the late 90’s. My mother’s cousins were plentiful as well. We practically grew up next door with our first and second cousins, hence the impression of being close-knit.

But the truth is, each of the siblings had tacit rivalries and secretly considered their neighbor inferior to themselves. In our family, my grandma took pride in the fact that hers are the only grandchildren who regularly go to mass, clean up before bed, say the rosary everyday, and who have our respective chores in the house. She blindly believed that we grandchildren were of pure Catholic morals and should not often be in the company of our brash cousins. For us however, the years growing up under our grandparents’ despotic noses were the loneliest and most oppressive. We sometimes wished we belonged to the other families, who seemed happier.

Ours is the archetype of the extended family. We were about five families crammed inside my grandma’s 4-bedroom house, although we later had a house of our own. My parents had a tiny humble house erected at the back end of the compound when the second baby was born. My father and mother both went to work in the city and left us to the care of my grandparents in the daytime, only to fetch us at nighttime.

It was like that for a long time. Until my mother passed away, and we had to move in to my grandparent’s house. Without our father. He went home alone to our little house to avoid the spitefulness of my grandparents. And because we counted on our old folks' mercy, my brothers and I had to endure the cruelty of some of my aunts and the other nasty goings-on in that house. We were like the little orphans in lemony snickett's book. Until my father decided to take us someplace else. It was many years however that my brothers and I would finally reunite.

I wanted to write about happy days and warm memories of my childhood, but all too often losing someone in your life as important as your Mother shifts the way you look at things and how they took place. This first endeavor is terribly futile in that it paints a picture of me as being the saddest act in the world. I just had to stop.

I hope to have a second take one of these days….

Change

This is the nth time I’ve changed my blog template. For want of something new perhaps. But because I am a total ignoramus in html, I have no choice but to make do with pre-designed templates. Good thing Blogger has a lot better to offer now. One hit and I get a new look on my blog, only to change it after a few weeks or months.

Which brings me to consider... It is inherent in my personality to be always moving and changing things around the house, in my workspace or, in this case, around my blog. Change is nothing I cringe about, especially if it is to satiate my labourious idleness and whet my visual appetite. I always like nice things around my space, never mind if they're not the real mc coy. If I had my way in fact, my house would be like a display window where I have a new color and design theme for every season. Not for posterity though. My husband doesn't give a damn anyway.

Sadly I carry this mind-set even in what I wear. I have a become a clotheshorse since I started earning enough to buy what I want. And then the flea came into existence. When I learned to indefatigably rummage my way through piles and piles of gorgeous clothes that could be had for a trifling, my mind was buried in the mound as well. Who could resist buying an original armani for less than a hundred pesos, or a pedro garcia pumps for 50 bucks, all in mint condition, as compared to run-of-the-mill tops which sells at no less than 700 pesos in malls, and which you would later realize are total rip-offs? I have mastered the art of sifting through racks of clothes and spotting a signature from a mile away. I never miss.

It's no surprise how I have amassed overwhelming amount of clothes. It has become in fact a dilemma as to how to fit them all at once in the closet I share with my husband. We have an enormous closet which houses most of my clothes, and a teeny bit of his. I have clothes in boxes and paper bags. It is almost embarassing to think that I have so much and always complain about not having anything to wear. I am an office girl, and it is a necessity for me to wear the "corporate look" everyday. Or so I contend.

As a result, I give some of these clothes away. It is almost always a cursory decision, but what the heck, I would think. I can always buy a new one anyway. When I was a kid my wardrobe consisted mostly of hand-me-downs from older cousins. Contrary to feeling a little sorry, I thought there was always something quaint and charming about old clothes. They're like heirloom pieces that you succeed into, but you take extra care in wearing them so you can pass them on to the one next in line. The clothes age, but the importance you give it, the gesture of generosity, are values that form inside you, if only inadvertently.

I am sometimes convinced that my inclination to bring change into my life, be it in the home, my personal circumstances, or as mundane a matter as to my choice of templates, are for reasons leaning on the little act of benevolence towards myself---to taste what life can give me, to ascertain my boundaries and what's beyond, and to learn to do away with excesses, for the benefit of others.

Too Much Too Soon

The middle of the week finds me with an empty mind. There are so many things I'd like to speak of, but I don't know where and how to begin to write down my convoluted thoughts about mostly nothing. The more apt words for me now are Angst-ridden, apprehensive, uneasy, fretful, angry. Gee, I think I've seen too much of people's grumblings, inscrutable though their identities may be over the blogging world, that their miseries seemed to have rubbed off on me. A case of my voracious appetite for peeping into others' business.

Maybe a time off blogging will do some remedy....

Today is tuesday. I just came back from a two-day sojourn to the netherworld. I got sick after soaking in the rain at the cemetery where my father-in-law lies. It's funny that when you're in a place like that, it's inevitable to think about your own mortality. What would happen if I die today, or tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow? Really, no one can predict his end, can he? I'd like to think that I'm not afraid of death, it being just a trangression to another life form, maybe a flower, an animal, an insect. I remember reading once that death is just a beginning of an immortal life...so it should not be something humans should cower from...But when I think about Gabby, how my eventual death would change his whole being, his whole future, it makes me want to seek solace from Someone to let me know I won't be taken over until my little son is ready to be on his own, or that someone with best intentions like his mother would be able to look after him when I'm gone. It's so tragic that mother left us at a time when we most needed her. But would she have had a choice? A gnawing truth like cancer is something somebody can't elude, especially if Death is knocking on her doorstep. It should not be such a unusual experience, everyone we know from time past has died....but sadly their departure shapes the way we think, we feel, we regard each other who are left behind in this mortal world. And it seems the sadness never really dissipates. Until we ourselves, die and join our great Creator.

I don't know if I'm still really sick, or is it the first day back to the office that's doing the works.