some random thoughts

category: musings
=== coming from UP campus, going to Kamias; route: Cubao Kamuning Arayat
three girls got on the jeep, from the campus. my curiosity was immediately piqued. they all carried no less than two bags each: one had a back pack and paper bag, another, a combination of backpack, paper bag plus a big luggage bag, the last also had a small "kili-kili" bag to top everything off. i assumed they were dormers going home to their own houses for the summer or at least for the weekend (this happened on Tuesday by the way, the day before the first day of the summer classes).Throughout the ride they did not speak a single word to each other but i had a clue that they are friends or at least were together. only one got out her purse and paid for three people.. Although even without that particular clue, there were other indicators. They were friends, they just had to be! all three were wearing summery, barely-there sleeveless shirts (one worthy enough to grace the sleepwear section of Victoria Secret because it was so sheer and very lacey). they all wore trendy flip-flops (tsinelas na sipit really, but with a stylish twist), they all had dark glossy lipstick on. they all had that overly-plucked look to their eyebrows, (which suited one of them but not all). and they had this serious, pouty, model-on-a-runway-look about them that they kept to the hilt. they didn't even dare speak, i once again assumed they did this so as not to ruin the look. i stifled a small chuckle from coming out and smiled mentally to myself. nope, i am not a "mapangmata" person who gloats or looks down on others who clashes with my own fashion sense. I have a pretty skewed fashion sense myself. i smiled because it reminded me so much of what my friends and I were when we were their age (as if that was so long ago, actually it is, 10 years! and counting). Of course it wasn't about flip flops and dark lip glosses then. it was something else altogether, but it was the same thing. we were girls forming our own opinion of the world and sharing it with one another, and thinking that that was really the world's truth too. girl A says this is the in thing, girl X says we should be wearing it this way, and girl Y says this is the look everybody's crazy about. we find out about if from magazine spreads, from the so-called fashion authorities, from what favorite actors are wearing. we'd be like sponges soaking up all these information and stocking them in our memory banks to pull from the next time our parents gives us a go signal to go shopping for new stuff. we'd end up wearing all the fashion dos we can cram in one ensemble. and the result would be ... well ... let's go back to those three girls and rest our case.
i got down on Q. Av MRT station.
on my way to powerbooks edsa, as i was crossing the street towards megamall, three young guys ambled in front of me wearing trendy, loud-colored shirts, mile wide hip hop pants, and inverted sun visors worthy of Boracay's sun and sand [even if today was a cloudy day and there's no sign of a beach for miles.. and miles.. and miles...]. that same chuckle started to well up inside me again, so this is the guy version! i exclaimed inwardly. I wish I had the power to introduce them to the three girls i rode with in the jeepney. they'd have tons to talk about! no wait, scrap that, I think they wouldn’t even have to talk, they'd just strike their poses and they'd understand each other.


title: thoughts about death and the past
category: musings
date:04/07/2004
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yoshimoto talked a lot about death, and in one passage she described how a house feels like to her after somebody died.
there were only three deaths in my immediate family, and only one that i remember distinctly. i remembered i was really young when my lola buring (real name:liboria) died. i was probably too young to comprehend the weight of that death, i knew i was sad but not as sad as i think i should be after learning that my lola died. not even sad enough to cry. but when my mother started crying, no, wailing, and pouring her heart out in grief (there's an appropriate tagalog term for this sort of deep anguish: pagtangis) it was only then that i really let out a gush of tears and felt pain, as if my insides were burning. i still probably didn't completely understand my own grief at the loss of my lola, but i understood the pain of my mother in losing her.
i don't know if i can describe my feelings after my lola's wake. one moment the house was full of people, all in a flurry, doing all sorts of things, telling sundry stories: scary ones about "pamahiin", other deaths, or an extended and elaborate retelling of the current one. it was all a mixed in confusion in my young mind.
then the next moment, we were alone again. my cousins and i prowled around the now-empty house and it felt different. even now i can relive how i felt at that moment, but I fail to put it in writing.

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thoughts about my lolo mimoy (real name: maximo):
i can't recall his face clearly now. but i remembered he had a soft voice and he was always kind to me. he had short white hair and he had this favorite black felt tri-cornered hat straight out of the forties that he would always put on before going outside. there was a time when he can still go outside, but on the latter part, he would mostly stay in bed. i remembered feeling sad about this since i sensed that he was someone used to moving around a lot and bustling about. still later, he would slowly lose his eyesight to a bad case of cataract.
i knew that he served as a soldier in the past wars. too bad i was just 4 or 5 yrs old then, i didn't have enough sense yet to ask him about his adventures. just imagine, he was alive in the early 1900s! at the turn of the century! how different a picture of the past would he paint before my eyes? what sort of tales had he been keeping in his heart all these years? i would have wanted this different world to be unfolded before me by someone who experienced it first hand. but soon after his eyesight gave out, the world darkened for him and he died.
the stories died with him.

ramblings

it's been a while now since i've embraced this new lifestyle. i was living each day as it comes. there were no more patterns, no more predictability. sometimes i would wake up late in the day, or very early in the morning. sometimes my day would be full and i would accomplish a lot of things, at some days i would just lounge around, sleep when i feel like it, do some sketches, or practice on my guitar, and at the end of the day feel like i haven't done anything.
for a while now, i've been carrying on this love affair with my computer. i would be at it for hours, reading something, writing something, just tinkering around re-editing some previous work or organizing my mp3 folders.
now i'm all about writing my thoughts. it has been a while since i said anything in writing. it has been advised to me by friends and acquaintances who are relatively as crazy about books as i am that i should be putting my thoughts on paper (or in a virtual journal such as this). so that i won't miss that one chance of pinning down a particular thought that currently grips me.

Kitchen

Category: reviews - books

i'm reading banana yoshimoto's "kitchen". it's the sort of book you can't put down, but at the same time you don't want to finish reading it. it was written in the first person, a young girl unfolding what was currently happening in her life and recounting her memories from the past. it made me think of so many other random things that happened in my own life. it made me want to spill out a particular thought at a particular moment in my life. that was how it was. it was like hearing a friend tell some of her old stories and then she looks at you and it's your turn to tell yours. in my book, that's one of the things that makes a good story-teller. you can gauge that you're a good one if you can get the people listening to your story to tell their own. anyway, i thought, okay, since i'm having all these memories come back to me, i might as well write them all down before they are forgotten again.