Postcards from the blocky desert

I did say I'd work on some things during the break, but Mon finally got me and Mikko into Minecraft, and we were instantly hooked. We spent a lot of time playing together in a LAN world that Mon set up for us. It was like the LEGO and make-believe games we would play as kids.

I also discovered that Mon has some pretty cool natural architectural ability. He showed me his private Minecraft world, and the design of his various houses and the sculptures he made out of whole mountains just blew my mind. The monkey skull with lava falls coming out between its teeth was my personal favorite. I wish I'd taken screenshots.

He was also very sweet, giving me gifts that he thought I'd find useful in the LAN world: a nearly unbreakable sword, a kevlar vest, a book and quill for noting coordinates, a horse and saddle. When I asked him why, he said it was because I kept dying, which I took to mean that he cared.

He left for school just a few days before I did, and playing was a lot lonelier without his and Mikko's constant joking and trash talk. Here in my grandmother's house in Makati, before my flight to Singapore tomorrow, it's even lonelier without them both. I actually find myself wishing for their pranks, like the time they filled my house with cows. I had to wreck a wall just to push them outdoors, and since I lived in a dense forest, there were cows in the trees for days. I've set up my own private world to explore and build in, and I've built three houses already, but it's almost no fun without my brothers' offers of housewarming gifts (i.e. lava).

I found myself in the desert the other day and thought I'd try going for scale. Maybe a huge arch. I liked the idea of an arch in the middle of the desert, the sign of travel and civilization in the middle of nowhere, now witnessed only by skeleton archers, zombies, and the occasional witch. Designing and building it was both soothing and challenging. Afterward, I flew and walked around it, doing nothing except watching the shadows change as the sun and moon rose and set.

I don't know how he knew, but Mikko seemed to know what I had in mind even before I left home. "What are you going to do now that Mon's gone? Probably build your temples and stuff," he'd said.

I wish he and Mon had been there, even just to laugh at how sad it was, building an arch in the desert — a monument to builders who were no longer there.

(For scale, a player-character is two to three blocks tall.)

thing-a-week 33-36: a month of kirigami drills

I've been itching to make more kirigami models but haven't had any good ideas lately, so I decided to do some exercises with stairs. I still haven't come up with any new ideas for models after this, but I can say I've gotten faster at drafting models to cut. The exercises have also helped me see potential technical missteps I might make if and when I do have something new to work on.

And, of course, kirigami is always therapeutic.

33: I came up with this after staring at some Masahiro Chatani models on the Internet. It was supposed to be more complex, but I was off at the start by a few centimeters, and that affected how much room I had for more layers.

In general, I work in centimeters and half-centimeters; any smaller can get hard to fold.

34: This one was more messing around than an exercise, but the nesting arch trick here helped me figure something out for a card/letter I made for my brother later that week. (I guess I did have a new idea. But since it's personal, I'm not going to post photos of it here.)

35: This was another exercise I set for myself after looking at Masahiro Chatani models.

Folding adjacent stairs like these needs some care; you can see diagonal bumps where the staircase in front pulled on the one in the back.

36: I saw some photos of Chand Baori, which appeared in that really gorgeous Tarsem Singh movie, The Fall, as well as in The Dark Knight Rises. Yes, yes, more stairs.

The difficulty I had with this model was measuring the base. I wanted stairs all the way to the base, but again, I had some measurement problems. You can also see some wrong creases at the base due to those problems.

While it looks nice, I'm not fond of horizontal models that go so far out from the spine; if the paper is soft or becomes soft (e.g. from moisture or from someone sitting on it by accident), it starts to collapse in on itself.

Wake / Sprawl House

My great-aunt Luz Reyes died last week. I wasn't very close to her, so I didn't expect her wake to raise all these questions.

One of her former colleagues from Maryknoll/Miriam was there at the wake last night, asked how old Auntie Lutz was when she died (89), and proclaimed, "She lived a very long time."

Immediately, I saw the ratio of my own age to hers, saw my childhood flash before my eyes, and wondered if I was up to enduring about three more turns of my life so far. Then, I looked at my lola, Auntie Lutz's sister, sitting next to me, and thought of all the things she'd experienced in her own life: childhood, adolescence, war, heartbreak, the academe, marriage, children, more teaching, grandchildren, more teaching, the death of her spouse, and now, a quiet life of reading, solving crossword puzzles and sudoku, and occasionally travelling.

Could I live that long, and that much?

I imagined her at my age, then tried to figure out how old she'd been — how long she'd already lived — the day I was born (63; on the brink of retirement), wondered what she thought of her own life, wondered what she was thinking as she sat before the coffin of a sister who'd been just a year older than she, wondered — I'm just going to say it — when will my lola die?, and tried to remember what she'd once said to me — or was it to Mikko? — about death.

I wish I could remember, did she say that she was ready?

I don't fear death, but I want to know, how can one honestly say that they are ready to die?

And I looked at her white hair and her face and her tiny frame in that silvery gray sweater, and I wondered what it was like to be old.

--

This is a study of a building layout that's sort of possessed me lately. When I first posted the photo on Tumblr, I captioned it, "Small house on the water," but something like "Sprawl House" might be more appropriate.

I don't actually see a house or other structure that itself sprawls. I suppose it could, but really, I'm thinking of the house in great, sprawling environments:

• Stilt house, with a winding wooden dock, over the water of a vast river or the sea;
• Remains of an ancient temple, or Atlantis, or Pompeii;
• Small chapel or shrine set into the rocky red cliffs of a desert, like Sedona or Joshua Tree;
• Lonely shack in the middle of endless woods;
• Little cabin on the green prairies or purple moors that stretch on to forever; or
• Tiny scientific research outpost in the Arctic Circle, during the quarter of the year that the sun doesn't set.

Perhaps my isolated village wasn't isolated enough for me; growing up, I enjoyed stories of people surviving alone in the woods, or of fairy tale heroes finding healing or wisdom in some wizened crone's secret cave / magic hut. I was also a fan of the "Boxcar Children" series, which started out with four orphans making a home for themselves in an abandoned boxcar (also in the woods), as well as "The Little Prince," "The Island of the Blue Dolphins," and the perhaps less grand but no less entertaining "Baby Island." Also, many of the stories and games I made up, whenever I played by myself, involved living on a raft or in a one-room house.

Lately, those tingly, make-believe hermit feelings have come back, and instead of stories, I have this layout, as well as the tantalizing idea of much, much bigger paper.

Cabinets and Street Maps

The [research] suggested that every time we think about the past we are delicately transforming its cellular representation in the brain, changing its underlying neural circuitry. It was a stunning discovery: Memories are not formed and then pristinely maintained, as neuroscientists thought; they are formed and then rebuilt every time they're accessed. "The brain isn't interested in having a perfect set of memories about the past," [neuroscientist Joseph] LeDoux says. "Instead, memory comes with a natural updating mechanism, which is how we make sure that the information taking up valuable space inside our head is still useful. That might make our memories less accurate, but it probably also makes them more relevant to the future" (Lehrer, 2012).

--

I read this just as I'm asking myself why I happen to remember you right now, and why the remembering doesn't feel the way it once did. What anger is left is small and hard, no bigger than a fist. What pain is left is more cerebral; You don't feel angry because he, that person in particular, treated you that way, I tell myself. You feel angry because no one deserves to be treated that way. No one. Definitely not you.

For some reason, though, I can't help remembering now the way you fudged details. Three specific, related incidents stand out in my memory:

1. "I think your friend had a crush on me back then," you once said to me, and we both laughed.
2. "Her friend was in love with me," you once boasted, and your friends laughed.
3. "I was surprised when he started going out with her. I kept getting the feeling he had a crush on me," my friend said, and the two of us shrugged.

Was it your memory, or something else?

--

Once you start questioning the reality of memory, things fall apart pretty quickly. So many of our assumptions about the human mind—what it is, why it breaks, and how it can be healed—are rooted in a mistaken belief about how experience is stored in the brain. ... We want the past to persist, because the past gives us permanence. It tells us who we are and where we belong. But what if your most cherished recollections are also the most ephemeral thing in your head?

...

Some changes were innocuous—the stories got tighter and the narratives more coherent—but other adjustments involved a wholesale retrofit. ... Over and over, the act of repeating the narrative seemed to corrupt its content. ... "What's most troubling, of course, is that these people have no idea their memories have changed this much," [psychologist Elizabeth Phelps] says. "The strength of the emotion makes them convinced it's all true, even when it's clearly not" (Lehrer, 2012).

--

All this time, I've been slightly panicked over memory. I have to remember this, I tell myself at important moments. I have to cast this in metal and then store this behind a bulletproof glass cabinet. It must remain intact, for me to view whenever I want, whenever I need it again.

If only I'd known, reviewing only sometimes polishes but also often destroys. Memory can be destroyed by the very act of remembering.

I think of the green of the leaves back home, the sight of my old house from my best friend's backyard, the carpet of yellow petals on the old driveway, the position of a plastic glow-in-the-dark Orion on my cabinet door—if families pack up and move, if buildings get old and fall down, if new buildings are put up in their place, if trees grow taller and bushes grow thinner, if photos fade or get deleted, and not even my own memory can be trusted, then what have I got left? What have I got left when remembering risks a horrible, grossly unintended self-betrayal?

I just want to remember.

--

This is a link to "Paris, at Night," by Sung. J. Woo. It is my favorite story about memory and possibly my favorite short story of all time. I think about it whenever I think about memory.

--

"Memory is like a million little houses" (Woo, 2009).

I don't want my neural neighborhood to change. I want to be able to recognize the streets and the people who live there. I'm only 24; this should be the worry of a 60-year-old lady at risk for Alzheimer's, but it isn't.

--

This is the Natividad Building on Escolta, in old Manila. It used to be green.

This is the Regina Building, also on Escolta. It used to have just three stories, wooden revolving windows, and an open-air corridor on top.

And still, I want them preserved.

###

Lehrer, J. (2012). The forgetting pill erases painful memories forever. Wired Magazine, vol. 20 no. 3. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/1

Woo, S.J. (2009). Paris, at night. Retrieved from http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/PariNigh735.shtml

To Architect a Heart

Two years ago, I was in the middle of what I can now, from a distance, identify as a nervous breakdown.

I had just taken on a new, more challenging job that I wasn't sure I could handle. I had just moved to a new place that I hated. Around the time of my 22nd birthday, I felt myself being pulled apart, by my family telling me not to tie myself down too soon and by Martin asking me to take our still fairly new relationship more seriously.

I also felt that the megacity was swallowing me whole. A cab ride from Martin's house in Parañaque, through C-5, back to Quezon City would freak me out. I was riding on the rim of Metro Manila, and the sight of Parañaque, Taguig, Makati, Mandaluyong, Pasig, and Quezon City all whizzing past within minutes heightened my alienation. Where in all that concrete, steel, and slumland was I supposed to be?

I think that feeling, more than anything, sparked my later interest in real estate, urban planning, and architecture. I wanted to understand how people used and moved in their spaces, how they decided whether to put up walls or to set pathways between one another, and whether the shape of a window changed how one looked out and others looked in. Would how we went from point A to point B, and what we saw, be somehow different through a triangle instead of a square?

Thus, the simplicity and order of moving from point A to point B in Singapore, and the beauty of even the lowest-cost housing, appealed to me when my family and I went this year. Getting from me to you did not have to require a jeepney ride, a train ride, an FX ride, another jeepney ride, and a ten-minute walk. And when I got there, we could have room to move, light to see, and air to breathe.

Before I learned about buildings, though, back in 2009, I knew that I needed to adjust and change. I had to accept the city if not embrace it, because it was the only place Martin wanted to be, and I wanted to be with Martin. Yet I was terrified at the thought that when it was over, I wouldn't recognize myself anymore.

God, what a wreck I was. Poor Martin, having to carry me through that.

Then, at the start of 2010, his leg broke, literally and figuratively. So I somehow snapped out of my stupid crisis and tried to carry him.

It really was a snap; I remember answering the phone, hearing those two small words ("It broke."), and feeling my gears fly into place because there was someone more important than me and in much more pain. It was time to put the wrench down.

What followed was difficult and painful, to say the least (and I want to say only the least). Everything was put on hold while Martin recovered his strength.

And then, when he could stand again, he walked away.

He walked into a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity, grad school, and life without time or energy for anything else, much less for picking up where we'd left off. I told myself to just wait a little longer, be supportive, work on improving myself, and just be there for him.

So I worked at my job and learned to enjoy it. I never quite got to love the city, but I accepted it, the way one accepts that they must work with an enemy against an even greater enemy.

For me, this enemy was disorder and decay. And because I couldn't set a wrecking ball on the megacity, I set it on the unsound structures I'd built inside me. I gave my emotional squatters more productive outlets and settled them in a tidy high-rise overlooking a lake, which I dredged and cleared of invasive thoughts. I made myself bike paths and got myself new trains, so that getting from problem to solution would be simpler, quieter, and even enjoyable. I restored the park as well as the crumbling theater and museum, the places inside myself that made me feel safe, whole, and progressive. I planted tree seedlings, dreams I hoped we'd get to nurture once Martin was better.

I wanted to be stable, solid, and strong for him. I wanted to be at once his Taliesin West and Fallingwater, Hundertwasserhaus and the Guggenheim de Bilbao, the Manila Met returned to glory and the Parthenon lovely even against all erosion.

I wanted to be the home with the gentle staircase and the treetop view, the quiet study armored with full bookcases, the sunlit kitchen window lined with potted herbs, the bedroom overlooking Central Park--the dream home, in other words.

So, I worked. I can't say I reached the ideal, but God damn it, I worked to become a balanced, loving, lovable, worthy person.

But as the months passed, I doubted that he noticed at all. He talked about work and school all the time. When I asked if we could talk about something else, the conversation died, and when it picked up, it felt forced and hollow. When I asked if we could talk about us, he got defensive. He wouldn't even let me touch him, because it meant more lost energy, more time away from whatever was on his desk.

I told myself to wait for later; he had no time right now. After months of this, though, I finally asked if he could possibly make time, make room, or if he had any room at all.

In a nutshell, he said no.

So until fairly recently, I felt that all I'd done since the breakdown, all I'd built, had been a waste. I was angry, because he'd asked me to make a place for us in all my plans--he'd even gotten mad about it several times--and now he was the one who got to walk away.

And he couldn't even say why. That's why, for the past couple of months, I've been questioning everything I've done in the past near-three years, looking for cracks that I'd missed, and picking up old guilt over the old breakdown.

I think I'm done now. I felt another snap, maybe three. I finally found the gap in the bridge, the loose cables, the one car causing the jam.

It's a little hard to explain, or, at least, it sounds a little stupid. These are things I've been telling myself over the past few months, things I myself would tell other people in the same situation, but I guess these things just didn't sink in until now.

The longer I hang on to my anger, the harder it is to just let Martin keep walking. The more I look for cracks, the harder it is to admire my handiwork and the good it actually, still, has. And the more I question whether I'm ready, the longer I'll wait before I reopen the gates.

I could hide inside myself and chip away at my own foundations until I implode like poor Christine Chubbuck. Or, I could pick up my hammer and build again, better, stronger, higher, until I scrape the sky.

Cut, cut, cut

Some of you might have guessed from this post (not that I was terrifically discreet) that something big was coming for me in the arts and crafts department. Well, yesterday, everything finally came together.

What happened was, the creative director of our newspaper's luxury magazine saw one of my popup buildings and asked me if I could make some for the Christmas issue, which would feature some really, really, really pricey fountain pens. In a moment of hubris, I said yes.

After the meeting with the photographer, I spent most of my spare time drawing buildings and cutting models. I also sat through three howtoarchitect playlists (1, 2, and 3) in one day for tips and ideas.

I also spent a day with Highlife's production assistant, Nina, going to stores and picking out pens to feature. It is a little ridiculous to walk into one of those stores, ask for the most expensive thing they have, and be taken seriously.

There are more photos from the shoot here, and I'll be posting the actual shots in a week or so. It depends on whether I can sit on them till the magazine actually comes out.

I am trying to play it cool at the office, but inside, I am kind of panicky about the whole thing. None of the work is as great as I'd like it to be. On the other hand, it was nice to be asked to spend a day on something that I really, really love to do.

Baby steps, I guess.

In this picture, you can see the backs of Kathy Chua, photographer, and her assistant Eric. They are cool people, and Adphoto is a cool agency.

O, Papierbaum! (peek)

Here's a little preview of a project I'll be working on this month.

I went to a meeting with a photographer and some magazine people this afternoon and felt sicker and more panicky every minute. The potential for screwing up feels horribly high.

Let's hope I don't crack—blades are involved, after all.

Whiteout-popup Quality of Life Report

Two months ago, I saw this post by Adam David (possibly NSFW) calling for blackout poem / "visual erasure" contributions. I thought it might be a good exercise for my popup buildings, as well as to maybe work out my love-hate relationship with the city while telling a story.

I missed the "Erase Erase" deadline, though, so I decided to just post the work here. Click on each thumbnail to enlarge (they're arranged in order from left to right, like a regular book; filenames are numbered if you're confused).

Just some notes, which you don't have to read.

It was harder than I thought, to pick something that was inexpensive even for Booksale (P45), had the right title, at first glance held the kinds of words I was seeking, and, most importantly, wouldn't feel like a huge loss once I started cutting out pages. Meghan Daum's "The Quality of Life Report" fit the bill more than anything else I saw (I ended up buying more than one book that day) because the blurb on the back made it sound like the kind of sweetly cheesy, "I'm Reed Fish"-type of story that I'd probably catch on Star Movies during off seasons.

This is probably blasphemy to any book-lover, but I didn't even read the book before cutting into it. The deadline was pretty close, and I haven't had a lot of time to read; the last thing I read, I finished last week but bought in late February. I did end up reading the cut pages, though, and I felt bad afterward. It did sound like an interesting and well-written story after all. So, if you ever read this, Ms. Daum, please accept my sincerest apologies, as well as a promise to buy your book if I ever see another copy in a local store. Your other book sounds interesting as well.

How I made it: I chose the words first, sliced out those pages, and sketched the buildings and skylines I wanted to put over/under them. The buildings themselves didn't take more than two or three hours to plot and cut for each spread, if you don't count the spreads discarded for wrong measurements or cuts. I used black crayon on the parts of the book page that would show up behind the buildings, then glued the pages onto the back while trying to get the words to line up with the windows before the glue* dried.

In the end, though, work and other things took up my time, and I finished the last spread just on Sunday. The photos and layout (if you can call it that) were done this morning after I woke up. I desaturated everything on my computer because my camera's white balance was acting funny.

The whole project was fun but also tiring in that I kept coming up against my own lack of imagination for these buildings. Now that I'm aware of it, though, I'll keep trying to come up with more interesting things in the future.

--
*Boring notes about glue: Elmer's white glue comes in the easiest bottle to work with, but God help you if your paper's not perfectly aligned when you stick it on; this stuff dries fast. Elmer's "school" blue glue gives you time to push the paper into place before it dries, but if you use too much, some parts of the paper will look permanently wet and dark. Locally made Sti-Kee (?) glue works the same way without the wet look, but the bottle is a pain to work with because some idiot thought a glue "spreader" next to the nozzle was a good idea, when really, it just gets in the way of everything. The glue's also so thick that it comes out of the bottle in globs instead of a neat line.

June: Cutting and Folding

I just reread this entire entry several hours after posting it and thought, Wow, I am a boring, repetitive person. That explains everything. Thanks for sticking with me, people whom I can count on one hand.

--
The start of a new month seems as good a time as any to get a solid life update on the blog, so here we go.

I'll start with work because it seems to have had the biggest ripple effect on my life so far. I recently got promoted to assistant editor. I had my proverbial baptism of fire last week.

The last week of the month is when everything seems to pile up at work, and it just so happened that our boss had to fly out of the country for two-and-a-half days, leaving me more or less in charge. I get tired just thinking about it, so I'll spare you the details. I'll leave you instead with a mental picture of me reading until two or three in the morning of Saturday, a few hours before I had to wake up again and get ready to go back to the office, because the energy drink I'd taken to get me through a late night of working from home hadn't worn off by the time I was actually done.

I don't plan on doing that again anytime soon.

All things considered, however, last week actually made me pretty happy. It was the most productive and fulfilled I'd been in a long time--possibly the most I'd ever been in my brief career so far.

It's a pity and an irony, then, that there are some changes coming at work that mean I probably won't have a week like that again. I won't complain, though; as enjoyable as it was, it was also mentally and physically draining. I get tired just remembering it. I guess I'll just be glad that I have a better idea now of what I can do and what the future might be like.

This brings me to the change in the plan I'd made earlier this year, when I'd just returned to Manila wracked with homesickness and city sickness (related but not identical). The plan had been to leave again before Christmas if nothing--whether some changes at work, a new job elsewhere, or just something big with significant repercussions on everything else--had happened before then. I wanted to spend time with my family and get away from the city before I had to confront again the idea of settling down here for good.

Inside, I had really believed that nothing would happen. I would really go home.

The promotion definitely counts as something, though. So, I'm staying here for at least two or three more years to see what happens next.

I'm not too sad about it, actually. Let me get back to you when I start feeling directionless and depressed again.

What happens next is, my brother might soon take his turn at getting a job and seeking his fortune in the big, bad world of Metro Manila. When that happens, I'll have someone to share a decent apartment with as well as a chance to catch up with the family I've been away from for so long.

With my brother around, I'll see what being a sister means now that we're both out of school and old enough to pay taxes. To some extent, I'll see what being a daughter means, too, as my parents will have more reason than ever to keep an eye on our lives in Manila.

I expect this will cramp my and Martin's style a bit. My parents have cut back on asking me if I've gotten home yet after (or during) a late night out since I moved, and I've been pretty free to go where I want without worrying about what they'll think, but I understand Martin's apprehensions that me living with Mikko will rejuvenate their wayward-offspring sense.

It's not like I go out clubbing or drinking; it's more likely that I'm with Martin at some out-of-budget restaurant, chatting while he plays his computer games, or falling asleep in front of his TV. But once one of my parents gets the sneaking suspicion that it's getting late and I haven't even thought of catching a ride back to my own rat's nest yet, they'll start with the "Where are you?" and "Are you home na?" messages. Now, even without the GPS tracking (which I'm not entirely sure they've stopped using), my parents will probably improve their fingerspitzengfuhl of these comings and goings through my brother.

This picture frustrates Martin quite a bit because we get little time together as it is. With him living in Paranaque and me in Cubao, it's practically a long-distance thing, and we see each other only on weekends. That situation won't soon change with his impending move to Katipunan; given my brother's likely line of work, I'll probably move soon to Ortigas or Makati. On top of that, Martin's started studying for his master's, so his Saturday classes will leave us just one day together a week.

At this point, our liberal acquaintances may ask why we don't just move in together; how old is Kat, again; what do you care what her parents think; and similar variants of those questions.

I've thought about it myself quite a bit, and coming home to Martin at the end of every day sounds better than coming home to a dimly-lit boarding house full of strangers or to my brother (sorry, Mikko). But while I've given up certain beliefs, I'm not yet ready to give up the idea that marriage should come before you start picking out furniture.

"It's a societal construct," you say,

or "You don't need some ceremony to legitimize your relationship,"

or "Lots of couples live together for years before sharing a long and happy marriage, or a long and happy life together without marriage,"

or "If it came down to it, which would sound worse, a breakup or a divorce?"

or even "Do you really doubt Martin's commitment that much?"

Pardon my eschewing these rational reasons while I'm still just plain afraid. This is precisely why the concept of cohabiting as some kind of test drive strikes me as ridiculous. I don't want to open myself to that kind of vulnerability. I don't want to give someone an all-access pass without some kind of assurance that they don't still have one foot out the door. Yes, even if I know that it's Martin, who wouldn't do anything like that to me.

Maybe one day, I'll see that marriage isn't any different, that solemnized or no, relationships don't always last, and breakups can be amicable or ugly regardless of whether rings were exchanged first. Even then, I think I'll take comfort in knowing that I gave it my all without fear.

As for caring about what my parents think, well. I am 23, more than old enough to make decisions for myself, including whether it's okay for me to stay out with Martin well past the curfew I outgrew when I moved into my first apartment. Yes, you people who think I should have a mind of my own, I know that. The thing is, that mind cares what its family thinks.

It's not to say that I'm completely under my parents' GPS-tracking thumbs. I've butted heads with my mother over the years, and there will always be something over which we'll disagree. I've accepted that, and to some extent, I think she has, too. We are Facebook friends, for goodness's sake, which is more than many children can say about their relationships with their parents. More importantly, I'm able to live without guilt with decisions I know my mother wouldn't quite approve (my dad has generally let me be and voices his support whenever I seek it).

My grandmother, however, is another story, precisely because we've disagreed only once. Nearly all my memories of Lola are happy: letters in her curly script, gifts of Reader's Digest books, my first journalism lessons, her general pride in all my achievements, small as they may seem now. The happiest I was about my promotion was when I got to tell her in person and see the look on her face. The last thing I want to do is anything that would get the reverse.

The one time we disagreed, the one time she lectured/berated/scolded me for anything, was when I was 16 and I closed my bedroom door so that my then-boyfriend and I could have a little privacy from my youngest brother, who was six and kept following us everywhere. I was mad because we weren't doing anything, we just wanted to talk, and she seemed to immediately assume the worst. I know her reaction then was and her reaction today would be out of a concern both loving and old-fashioned (just like my mom's). I kind of want to spare her from that kind of hurt.

And while I did say that living with my brother might tighten the influence my family has on my decisions, I kind of welcome the challenge, too. I've been living more or less outside of their presence for the past couple of years. All the consequences I've imagined my decisions to have on my relationship with my family have been just that--imagined. It's well past time for me to see what happens for real.

Of course, that depends how uptight my brother might be and whether he'll tattle--but see, I wouldn't know. Even though he's also been in Manila for the past couple years, I haven't had a lot of time with him since he lived on campus and was tied up with school. I've only just started to see how he's been now that college is done with him, and I already beat myself up about not being there for our younger brother Mon. I don't want to pass up on this chance to touch base with my family beyond calls, texts, and e-mails, especially since there's no telling when and how things might change again.

What else is new? I've developed an interest in architecture. That's not really new, but I haven't really talked about it much. I still haven't figured out where it comes from.

It might have started two years ago, when one of my first assignments at BW was on the ten tallest buildings in the country, and I read that G.T. International Tower had a "fin." It might have come from all those commutes to interviews around the city, all the time I spent staring at the buildings while waiting for it to be time to go inside one of them. It might have come from looking at all that PR material for new condos and projecting, asking myself if I wanted to live in a building that looked like that. It might have come from when we wrote about different Filipino architects (these articles never got published) and I got lost in the Palafox Associates portfolio.

Maybe it started before I came to BW, when I was still at CCF and Ortigas was my stomping ground. Or, maybe the seed was planted in high school, when I tried to make sense of "The Fountainhead," or even earlier, when I was ten and reading about Fallingwater in a Core Knowledge textbook.

However it started, all of a sudden, buildings were awesome, and my respect and admiration for the people who know how to design great ones is such that I'm afraid of looking stupid by continuing this paragraph.

Anyway, once the initial amazement died down, I stopped regretting that I hadn't been exposed to more of it as a child and developed an early ambition to supersede the two Franks (Become a writer? Pah!), Now I'm content to read articles, play with paper, and keep looking at buildings. Maybe this will turn into more than an interest at some point, but I'm not in any hurry to get there.

Beyond being possibly the most practical artistic pursuit ever, architecture has also given me one more reason to like life in the city. The rest are Martin, Washington SyCip Park, trains, bookstores, and--wouldn't you know it?--my job.

I guess that's it so far. I'll leave you here with a preview of something I've been working on.

Here's hoping for the best, as always.

Priorities 2

The reason I'm not so anxious to go home now is that over that weekend, for the first time, I wasn't sure if I could see myself being with my family again. I mean, I could imagine it well enough, but I wasn't sure anymore if that was where I had to be, and if it was right for all of us. For all I've said about wanting to be there with them, I haven't actually, really thought about what that would be like, or I hadn't until that weekend. Going to the grocery, helping around the house, prying my teenage brother off the computer the nights my parents are out, contributing to the pantry, talking more to Lola, being a daughter and sister--what would happen if these little, everyday things which gave me such a thrill during vacations became just everyday things?

I know I won't find out unless I actually go, but I'm a little afraid now. So, I'll stay here and take things a day at a time, hear what time will tell.

Last week, I had dinner with Mikko. He is just bumming around in these free weeks before graduation. He seems one step ahead of where I was when I was that age (as if it was so long ago). When I say that, I mean that he seems to feel now what I didn't feel until six months after my own graduation: a mild yet mounting panic at the thought of being jobless, dependent, and stuck in someone else's house without a ride or key to anywhere else.

I think it's just one of the signs that my brother and I are different people, with different priorities. After graduation, I just wanted to go home and soak up all Kalsangi's summer magic and my family's warmth and laughter, before I had to very reluctantly get on a plane back to Manila, to find my 20-something self somewhere in a career, apartment, and/or breezy strut between CBD skyscrapers.

Mikko's not really interested in going home, or at least not for long--maybe just long enough to soothe my mom's emptying nest aches and catch his breath before seeking his fortune in the style of plucky fairytale youths. That's really how I see him; "Very well, Father. I shall take my leave of you and bring with me this sword/advice/gold/magic chicken that you have given me and see the world."

I don't judge him; in fact, I kind of think that this path is right for him. He's always been the more independent, ambitious of us two, and I really believe he'll go far and that people will like him wherever he goes. It just gets me every time I remember/realize how different we are.

In other news, if you haven't visited my craft challenge blog lately, I've taken up origamic architecture. This sounds to me like a highfalutin way to say kirigami popup buildings, but that requires more explanation than just saying origamic architecture. Anyway, it feels perfect for me right now. I've always enjoyed origami and three-dimensional crafts but haven't made too many; there's no place to store them in my little shoebox of a rented room. This lets me make 3D things and then fold them neatly away for safekeeping.

I'm taking a break from my attempts to model the Manila Met to just make practice buildings and teach myself how certain forms should be cut. Here are some of the exercises I did while hanging out at Martin's yesterday:

I wanted to see how to make a staircase that went around a corner. Here I followed what I've seen in other forms on the Internet, but I'd like to see if I can work out how both parts of the staircase stick out, instead of one sitting in or looking like it's on the inside of the building.

Here I wanted to try making a rough dome shape for rooftops and put a "statue" on top for the heck of it.

Just more playing around. The fat building was supposed to be a cathedral or a government building, but I got lazy.