What's your favorite thing about where you live?

This post is my answer to the above random question on ask.fm. It got too long for the answer box.

My favorite thing about where I live is a stretch of road on the edge of campus. It has residential halls, including the one where I live, and some school buildings on one side and a thick forest on the other. The only other place I've seen trees so tall is in the village where I grew up, and the trees themselves are familiar. There are even spathodeas.

You can't go into the forest because the military use it for things, and there are fences and signs warning you that you may get shot. But I like walking or biking on the path closest to the forest at night, especially when there is fog, because something about the resulting light and chill sparks an impulse to dream like I haven't done in ages.

I recently realized that, sometime in the last couple of years, I'd lost the ability or forgotten how to dream. My head used to be filled with fantastic things: ideas for stories, made-up characters and their worlds and histories, or just simple daydreams about being able to fly or spy or fight or witch myself across oceans and between worlds. While I'm loath to blame a guy or a failed relationship entirely for my problems, I can say for certain that I stopped dreaming like this sometime in the course of that relationship. I felt I wasn't allowed to want even realistic things like moving to a new city or settling down or having kids, so I suppose that put magic even farther out of my reach.

When Cris and I got together, first, I started to feel like I could dream again. Then, cautiously, I started to dream about realistic, reachable things. By that time, I'd thought that was enough. I was still cleaning myself out, healing, and relearning how to do other things, like how to like music again, how to like books again, and how to even think about writing for myself again. At every turn, I've been amazed at how much healing I still need despite how happy love is making me, at how much of what had always made me feel alive had been crushed and buried over time. It's taken this long — three years — for the seed of my own imagination to know where the sun is.

I hadn't expected this to happen here. I hadn't expected it to or known that it could happen at all; like I said, I'd forgotten all about how I used to dream. I had a gnawing feeling that something was still missing, but I didn't know it was that.

And then I came here. It felt like waking up one day in Kalsangi, cradle of so many early dreams, and walking out to see that a city out of science fiction had sprung up among the trees. I'd done what I'd only dreamed about and traveled to another time or dimension, one where real people in labs and studios were doing things I'd only read about. Some bug of magic was going to get me, here, and I was ready.

Or at least, I thought I was. It was a heartbreak that gave me my first new dream of flight.

I've since marshaled every hope against further heartbreak. But, the dreaming has stayed, and it makes me glad. It gives me somewhere to go when I can't go where I want, to be with people I miss. The little tendrils of possible new stories are slowly poking through the dirt.

And to be quite honest, it just might be the best thing I've gotten out of grad school, so far. But, that's for another entry.

"yer heart's desire."

I don't know why, but no matter how sick or sad I feel some days, I can't bring myself to leave work. I don't consider myself a workaholic at all; I'll honestly say that on some days, I just phone it in — figuratively.

There are days when I wake up and don't want to get out of bed, but somehow, I find myself on my feet anyway, making breakfast, getting dressed, and grumbling but, eventually, finding myself on the road and then at my desk. I completely understand the feelings people have when they decide to call in sick when they aren't or drop everything and head on the next bus to the beach. But I just find myself unable to do the same thing, no matter how much I want to.

A few years ago, I saw this interview with Hugh Laurie. Jay Leno asks Mr. Laurie if he had fun hosting Saturday Night Live, and Mr. Laurie says:

Where I was brought up, sort of fairly strict Presbyterian household, fun was viewed with suspicion. Fun was not a good thing. Pleasure was a questionable goal. It stayed with me. I don't see fun as a goal ... I think I may actually be incapable of having fun. So when I went there, and people said, 'Oh, you know, just have fun!', to me, it's like saying, 'Just have a baby!' It's that ridiculous. I'm just sort of not put together that way.

Later in the interview, he goes back to it, when he's asked about people saying he's difficult to work with:

I suppose I have this, somewhere in my head, I have this idea that if a thing is pleasurable, it can't be any good.

The interview is really funny, maybe especially because Mr. Laurie doesn't smile much in it.

In another interview, he says:

I had some pretty bleak times, dark days when it seemed like there was no escape. And having a very Presbyterian work ethic, I was determined never to be late, not to miss a single day's filming. You wouldn't catch me phoning in to say, 'I think I may be coming down with the flu'.

But there were times when I'd think, 'If I were just to have an accident on the way to the studio and win a couple of days off to recover, how brilliant would that be?'


So when I beat myself up about turning down something good because of work, I think of Hugh Laurie, and I wonder about how this kind of thinking got wired into me, too.

And then I think of my dad and those years that he was in that one department where you had to drop everything if the plant needed you. I remember my mom telling me and my brothers that it was Dad's job that let us live in our house and have food on the table, etc. I also remember seeing that other kids' dads got to come home Saturday afternoon, and mine didn't. I remember that one Father's Day I walked out of church and cried in the car because it was time to honor the dads, and he wasn't there for me to honor with the ribbon or the mug or whatever it was the church had come up with for us kids.

But mind you, the whole time I was crying, I was also lecturing myself about being a melodramatic baby. I did used to be a big crybaby, and I think people at school knew this and would make me cry on purpose. So some part of me saw crying not just as an expression of weakness but as an invitation for others to pick on that weakness.

Maybe I deserve to cry, I told myself in the car that day. Maybe crying is for wusses, I also told myself.

My dad showed up, still in his uniform, while I was still in the car. He was smiling when I hugged him. But, I felt extremely embarrassed.

Anyway, enough of the trip down backstory lane; I'm at ~700 words now and still haven't gotten to the good part of this post.

I've been stuck in a no-fun holding pattern for the past eight or nine months, and it's been, well, no fun. I told myself I couldn't have certain things I wanted because it was not a good time. Friends, family, and Cris complained that my job took me away from them. I had to tell myself, it's your job that lets you pay your rent and bills, have food on the table, have something maybe impressive to put on that grad school application, and have bosses who can give you references for said application. I told my loved ones, "Well, it's work."

I tried telling myself not to want things because it would just set me up for the disappointment of having to turn them down. The problem is, I hadn't recognized that telling yourself not to want things doesn't actually stop you from wanting them. You think you're doing the Christian self-denial thing or the Buddhist shunning-desires thing (take your pick). But, it's impossible to drain yourself of your wants. The wants don't go away — you can either act on them or change them; it's denying that they're there that makes them stronger.

You want to know what it gets you, denying your wants because you think you shouldn't have fun right now? Tonight, my family is flying to Europe without me. I could have gone with them, and all I would have spent would have been for personal stuff, like meals and souvenirs. Who turns down a semi-free trip to Europe because of work? This idiot, that's who: the one who didn't ask for leave because she told herself she wasn't allowed to want it.

This great epiphany came at around 1 AM as I cried my eyes out — for the first time in ages, I might add — because my plans with Cris for a consuelo trip to Pinatubo fell through. After months of telling myself I couldn't have what I wanted, I acknowledged that I wanted this little thing, and disappointment had immediately swooped in.

It wasn't just the disappointment, though, it was the disappointment on top of knowing that my family was about to leave, and I would be left behind because of my own quote-unquote work ethic, which nobody in today's world gets a cookie for, really.

I can't live like this (I told myself); I can't not want things. To want is to live, because you act or you change — and, goddammit, you actually have fun sometimes. I'm not having any fun; I'm just becoming sadder and more isolated the more I try to want less.

I'm done. I don't want to wait anymore.

The other day, I got some news that I'd been waiting for. I told my dad, and he offered to loan me the money I'd need, "if this is yer heart's desire."

(Another reason I still value work ethic: it's helped get my dad to where he is, able to fund family trips to Europe and offer to finance heart's desires.)

It's a cheesy phrase, often used at my old church as a euphemism when people pray for someone to make the singles not-single. But, I've taken hold of it. I cup it in my hands like a secret and relish knowing that, yes, I have it, and I'm allowed to have it, a "heart's desire" — something to live for.

Mon

I flew home last weekend to see Mon graduate from high school.

I have so many hopes for my youngest brother as he gets ready for college and so many fears, too.

He never did get grades as high as mine at school, but his social skills are lightyears ahead of mine — he'll be high-fiving the school janitors one day and walking the GM's daughter home another. He's handled a breakup with a maturity I didn't gain until much later. He's witty, which means he's smart; he speaks well, he's learned to cook much sooner than I did, and the girls and the boys all seem to love him. I think this will do more for him and his future than his report cards ever will.

And yet, all this is why I'm a little afraid. I mean, you remember being 16 or 17 and feeling bigger and stronger than anything, and you remember the times life proved you wrong afterward. You always look back on them with bittersweet gratitude — thanks to that, I know better, but shit! if that didn't hurt.

I played photographer at the ceremony last Friday, and this is my favorite shot of Mon. He's just received his diploma and is confidently walking forward to take a bow. This is the boy who wants to do both college and culinary school and who says the college thing he looks most forward to is meeting new people. He wears T-shirts with Bible verses on them to church and helps man the sound booth. He loves pizza and video games. His drum skills are killer.

Of course, in entries like these, I'm expected to tell you that this is also the boy whose stroller I used to push, or that I was the first person to see him sit up by himself (it was in his crib, and he was wearing a blue-and-green striped shirt). But I decided to stop addressing him as Momon a year or so ago; today, I'm talking about Mon. I'm long past waxing nostalgic about the little boy he used to be and more interested in the young man he's becoming.

All I want is some kind of assurance — and all I can ever really hope for is — that he'll always have a reason to smile the way he does in this picture.

These days.

These days, I’m just waiting. While everyone around me seems to be getting on with their lives, I’m waiting.

It’s not like I’m waiting for nothing. I applied to a grad school. Results don’t come out until July. If I get in, I’ll get to live in another country for at least a year and study some things I believe a regular job in this country wouldn’t show me. If I don’t, I’ve got a long list of Plan-B things to do.

In the meantime, though, the frustrations pile up. A few weeks ago, Cris and I visited an animal shelter and saw so many dogs in need of a home. We could give one or two a home, but that requires a basic certainty or permanence that our lives don’t really have right now. Dogs, according to our favorite show on Animal Planet, are, at most, a 15-year investment. You can’t take home a dog — previously abandoned, at that — and then give it back after four months because grad school’s come a-callin’ (Cris has applied, too).

My apartment still looks like I just moved in. I put up my shelves and unpacked the books, but I don’t see the point of getting everything set up given the possibility that I might have to leave again. It isn’t like my old apartment, the one with the treetop view that I loved, where I thought I’d live for a few years. I’d planned decor, I was going to get a proper couch, and I was going to replace all the dorm-era bedsheets I was still using. Then, I applied to grad school. And then, I took this job and had to move closer to work.

My dad offered to finance a trip to Europe, particularly so I can go with him and Mon to visit Mikko in Barcelona. The time he set for the trip was the Easter weekend plus two weeks, which is when Mikko is on holiday from school and can tramp around Spain and maybe Paris with us. But because of some changes at work and my fairness thing that other people say I should ignore, I didn’t ask for leave and didn’t apply for a visa.

That fairness thing: Since I went on leave at Christmas while our complement was already understaffed and overworked, I feel someone else should get to go on leave at Easter. This is not actually a rule at work but one of those conscience things. It now looks like nobody is actually going to file for leave, but it’s too late for me to do that now, since visa appointments have to be scheduled months in advance.

Meanwhile, my friends are traveling, or planning to travel, to places nearer than Europe but still some great distance from here. I want to do the same but hold back because I might need the money for school.

I have one more shot to see Barcelona this year, but again, it depends on whether I get into school. My dad says that, if I get in, he’d give me the money that would have gone into my trip to set myself up as a grad student in that other country instead. If I don’t get in, I can go to Spain with my mom, when she visits Mikko in November.

I almost don’t know if I still want to go to school at this point.

If I don’t get in, I get to move to a different place, somewhere with a lower noise level and a pet-friendly landlord. Maybe I can get a new bike, an electric one. Maybe I can look into long-term projects at work. I’ll definitely plan a trip, not just one to Europe, but to all the other places I want to visit.

If I do get in, I get to move to a different place, somewhere with decent public transport and city parks larger than a half-block or a road island. I get to study, feel horribly inferior to my more experienced and more talented classmates, and remind myself that I’m lucky that I even get to be there, learning. Maybe I can get a bike, a second-hand one, handed down by a previous batch of dormers. I’ll bike around the city without fear of getting catcalled or run off the road by jeepney, truck, and cab drivers.

Waiting is the pits. It’s a weird uncertainty where the ifs are a lot sunnier than the but really right nows.

Eh. It’s just a couple more months.

Imelda's House (with attempts at illustration)

I dreamt that Calvin couldn't sleep, so I watched him move from panel to panel, painting on the faded red walls of a room with a black-and-white checkerboard floor.

Calvin looks older here, but in the dream, he was about six or seven years old.

His teacher caught him and set him at a bunch of other activities with the other kids. Calvin had a fun day and was excited about the school sleepover.

But when it was time to sleep, and the other kids had all climbed into their beds, on either side of the teacher's big bed, Calvin felt a panic. So he climbed into the teacher's bed, which woke her. She was angry about it, but when she saw that he was crying, she said, "Don't worry, Calvin, there is something you can do." And she pointed at something off-panel; in my mind, it was a book.

I was adjusting photographs for uploading, and one photo of some kind of evergreen caught my eye. It wasn't a pine — the bark was different — but it had needles. I had planned to crop the photo around the tree, with the house — my house, but not in Kalsangi; someplace between the edges of "Christina's World" and the edge of a forest, of which the evergreen was one tree to say, "You are near a forest" — in the background. But as I zoomed in on the photo, I was drawn closer and closer to the tree, until it filled my screen. The bark was gray-green and had lichens, and the needle-leaves looked feathery, like frost patterns on glass, and almost soft. I saw that no matter how close I zoomed in on the trunk and the leaves, I could still make out the shadow of the house behind them.

There was a man, David. He was not Calvin, but he was like Calvin. I was him, and I also watched him, the way you can in dreams. No more panels here.

In his house, David played with his children, two sons and a melancholy daughter — his youngest. And then his children were gone, and David in his dark brown suit with a white shirt went from his son's room, crossed a sort of red hall with a checkerboard floor and some arches in the walls, and went into his daughter's rom. He was sorry he hadn't spent enough time with them.

The hall in David's house. The pillars at the top are supporting a black or dark brown roof; the space between the pillars is open for air to come in.

Both the children's rooms were a mess. The daughter's room was all papers and paints and books, scattered all over the place. She was collecting these books by a guy whose last name was Funk (first name Paul?). His style was Shaun Tan meets M.C. Escher. One book she didn't have yet — there was a long list, and she had only one or two — was titled, "Imelda's House."

David found a diary where his daughter had scribbled things about him. (David talked aloud.) On one page, the word "Dad" changed before our eyes:

and David realized that his daughter had learned something about him.

On the opposite page, the left-hand page, some pencil writing about her dad had been erased and then covered by other pencil writing about her dad. David erased this, and the old writing reappeared, and he saw that his name was not David [Lastname] but David Davies. Davies was underlined three times.

And then David was in another town, in its tiny, Shaker-style, dimly lit records hall. Afternoon sunlight came in from outside through high slats. He was holding the same book his mother must have held years before — the one that said her name was actually Gwendolyn G[...] and not Gwendolyn [Lastname]. And he was in despair, in a kind of panic, because how many books were there left to go through, and when would he finally find out who he really was?

David went into the next room, the hall in his home, faded red with the checkerboard floor. As he cried, a great clock came down from the ceiling. Its circular face was white, and it had the peaked square top of a lantern. Its body was thin and silver, like a tall designer lamp's, and the clock face bobbed gently at the end of it. The silver shone yet was not smoothed down; it was as if someone had stretched that metal out by hand and then left it like that, covered with the impressions of the insides of his fists.

Above the clock, there was a swirling, tornado-like vortex and some thunder and lightning. The clock said to David to not be afraid; he could find the answers if he sought them.

David went up with the clock into the vortex, and then they were in a great library. It was a messy library; the shelves were out of order, and there were books scattered on the floor. The room David and the clock had entered was rectangular and had three walls, all lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, plus balconies. The two long walls had doorways to other rooms. The center of the room had a wooden staircase that dropped down to more rooms. Past the staircase were reading tables, and past those reading tables, where the fourth wall would have been, was a view that looked a lot like Escher's "Gallery" or "Other World", but with blue and green gardens instead of outer space beyond the arches.

There were other people in the library. They scrambled frantically from shelf to shelf, grabbing books, poring through the pages, filling their arms, and looking for their answers. Men, women, and children, young people, old people — all kinds of people rushed this way and that with their stacks. David quickly joined them, and suddenly, I was outside David. I wasn't on a quest like him and the others; I was just a visitor. I looked at an old man with a long white beard at one of the reading tables, and I wondered how long any of these people would be here, knowing that there could be any number of rooms and staircases and books.

The room was faded red, with a checkerboard floor. In front of the shelves were decorative white metal trellises. I approached one of the shelves on the opposite wall. I saw that all the books were fictional, and there were volumes and volumes and series and series by so many different authors from so many thousands of years. I saw two series, one red and one green, but both with a picture of a man in a Martin Luther getup on the cover. I wondered how long it would take someone to piece together all the clues in all these books and what sort of answer they'd get in the end.

One of the books I saw.

I saw a shelf full of those books by Funk, that author David's daughter had liked, and since I had liked the illustrations, I decided that I'd read the books. I wonder if there was anyone else there who was just reading for fun and not looking for answers. I reached for Funk book No. 1 and saw that the first illustration was of a place like this library, with a checkerboard floor, people looking at shelves and books, and an arched garden in the background. Among the people in the illustration, there was a man who looked like David and a girl in a red dress that I had seen when we'd entered the library.

I tried to read the first paragraph and immediately found it difficult, the way you sometimes read the same paragraph several times over without anything in it sinking in.

So, I showed the book to the clock, which was going around with a ring-bound book shaped like a red ribbon or arrow. The clock was putting the shelves back in order. I asked it, "Why can't I read this book?" And it took the book from me and flipped through the pages of its red book — which was strange, because the clock didn't have hands, except for the clock hands on its face, and I can't even remember what time it showed. After finding the right page, the clock said, "Today is September. It is not the time for F. You'll have to try another time. Here, try [...]." And he left me by another shelf to put the Funk book back where I'd found it.

The clock's "book". I'd forgotten to draw it, so I made this drawing in GIMP. Now that I think about it, the pages look like the hands of a clock.

On that shelf, I saw another Funk book, possibly misplaced. It wasn't like a regular book, but when I saw it, the word that came to mind was "book". It was called "Imelda's House." It was shaped like a cake tower, like something out of a Giorgio de Chirico painting, and instead of pages or a cover, it had little doors in the sides that you could open, to see dioramas of things inside the building. I don't remember any of the scenes I saw except the one behind the biggest door: a library with decorative white trellises in front of the shelves, faded red walls, and a checkerboard floor, and with the clock standing over a pile of books on the floor and with the gray cotton vortex above its head.

"Imelda's House," by Paul(?) Funk

After this, I woke up.

--

I guess I should lay off the surrealists for a while.

Jane at the University

Cris and I spent Saturday night playing board games with his friends. One game I really enjoyed was Betrayal at House on the Hill, which — along with the book I'm currently reading on American First Ladies — probably gets most of the credit for this dream I had the other night.

--
It was the 1800s. Jane Pierce (not the actual Jane Pierce) was a young woman who had come to the University to study chemistry, or something like that.

The University had a charred, half-collapsed old faculty and laboratory building that people said was haunted and/or cursed. Many years before, the University president at the time, Gunther Godfrey, had gone mad, claiming that he had been attacked by a mutant crocodile, and fled the campus, never to be seen or heard from again. Two days after Mr. Godfrey's disappearance, the Croc attacked another beloved teacher, Sarah Pullman (possibly Polk, but not the actual Sarah Polk), as well as two other faculty members in the lab. A portion of the lab was burned, and the bodies of Ms. Pullman and the other two faculty members were never found.

At the time of Jane's arrival at the University, campus legend had it that the lab was haunted by the spirits of the lost faculty members, unable to rest because their bodies had never been buried, and the Croc was still loose. Jane was fascinated by the building and, as an orphan, sometimes fantasized that the two other faculty members (never named in the dream) had been her parents. It's strange that no one at the University had been able to confirm this for her, but by the time of Jane's senior year, these mysteries remained unsolved.

Sometimes, Jane imagined that she had seen the Croc in the tall grass.

One day, an animal trainer came to the University to give some sort of demonstration, and afterward, she let the students play with the animals for a while. Jane played with some of the dogs and chased a long-haired, grumpy-looking orange cat toward the trophy case. While trying to get the cat to come out of the odd hole it had wedged itself into, Jane discovered a secret passage to some underground offices.

The first office looked like someone had left it in a hurry; things had been knocked over, and papers were strewn about. Jane discovered that the office had belonged to Gunther Godfrey. Among the papers, Jane found that someone had been threatening Mr. Godfrey. He had found out something about the Croc's origins, and this someone had threatened to sic the Croc on him if he didn't leave. There were claw marks on the walls and on the desk.

I guess Jane left because she heard a noise, but she went back to explore the underground offices the next day. This time, she found a person, the long-missing Sarah Pullman.

Fiercely bitter, Ms. Pullman confessed to Jane that she had created the Croc. She had been more popular than Mr. Godfrey and so had wanted the University presidency for herself. But after Mr. Godfrey's disappearance, the Croc had turned on her in the lab. In the middle of the struggle, the fire started, the other faculty members were lost, and one of them became the vengeful spirit that indeed haunted the old lab. The spirit had also cursed Ms. Pullman to live underground, unable to venture above for food without being able to feel as though acid was melting her flesh away.

Jane left her there and went to the old lab. Sensing her presence, the spirit was agitated and began collapsing the whole building, which also started to glow green and purple. The collapse extended to the underground offices, and, presumably, Sarah Pullman died there. It also pushed Jane into a narrow, tightly fenced yard behind the building, and at the dead end, she curled up into a ball and prepared to die as the building fell.

At the last second, however, Jane spotted a gap in the fence and a path in the tall grass, and she ran for it, not stopping as it took her away from the disaster.

It was morning by the time Jane found where the path ended: at a lonely wooden house, far out of the campus's sight. On the porch, in a rocking chair with a straw hat and a banjo, was a man with a crocodile's head. In that moment, Jane knew that this was her father.

The Croc had been one of the two unnamed faculty members and had been forced to become the Croc against his will. The vengeful spirit in the lab was the other one and Jane's mother, at rest now that Jane knew the truth. Her body was buried in a small plot beside the wooden house.

One year later, the Croc, Jane, and Jane's mustachioed gentleman were sitting around a table in the wooden house, watching with wonder and waiting for her eggs to hatch.

Letter No. 10

The other day, I realized that this is the longest I've been home in about two years. For the last two visits, I was here for just three to five days. This time, I'm home for ten.

I thought the fact that I took the briefness so well before meant that I'd adjusted to life away. But it turns out that the longer you stay, the longer you want to stay, and the more painful it is to think about leaving again.

Maybe it's just as well. It's a test of the heart, and it's been a while since I've thought seriously about what I want to do. I thought I'd been doing just that toward the end of the year, but somehow, sitting on top of the monkey bars and listening to the birds and the wind and the bugs sort of stretches out your vision, so you see more paths, and more branches to those paths, than you thought you had.

I can't help rethinking my childhood dreams whenever I'm here. More than ever, I see that I had no clue what getting those dreams entailed.

For some reason, I've been thinking about one of my classmates who seems to have settled here. I imagine her driving her truck to work past the pine trees, working in the same little hospital where we had our school physicals as kids, and maybe having dinner with her boyfriend (who works at the plant? in the next town?) before driving home to her family in the house where she grew up.

I know other classmates who've also stayed home and who also say that this makes them happy. And really, I can see why. It wasn't really that long ago that I wanted the same kind of life for myself, and the jungle gym alone is enough to remind me that some part of me never really stopped wanting.

Last year, one of my friends said something on Twitter about deciding what to leave behind and what to take with them into 2012. I actually thought it was silly; this person had a great life. But here, I can see that even a great life needs re-evaluation. That scares me.

I wrote the above two days ago, and it's now just 45 minutes into the new year. This year's celebrations are even more low-key than the last. At midnight, I kissed my parents and my lola to greet them Happy New Year, and then Cris called to greet me, too. All of my friends are gone for the holidays, so, with no one else to hang out with after the fireworks at the neighborhood party, I decided to go home.

The stars were out, and the wind was a little chilly, but I was warmed by thoughts of my family, friends, and Cris, even if they weren't with me. I walked under the trees and past the playground, and as if on cue, I looked up and saw a shooting star. When I got home, I let the dog in, made myself some hot chocolate, and knew that the feelings of the past several days were what I wanted to take into the new year.

I want to stay conscious of the way I relate to my family. I see them less and less every year, so every moment counts. I want less twinges of regret over something I said, however small, or the tone of my voice, and more certainty that I'm treating them the way they deserve.

I want the mixed rush and relaxation that comes from being outside — from spacing out on the monkey bars, taking a long walk around my tree-filled neighborhood, hiking across the pineapple fields and up and down gullies with my family, watching the clouds drift over the swaying trees as the sun sets, and finding that weird balance between calm and inspired twitchiness under the open sky. This is something that might be really hard to recreate in the city, but I'd really like to try.

I want more openness to doing things for other people, just because.

I'd like Cris to be able to share more of these things. Things have been going at a pretty comfortable pace, and for the most part, it feels like we're still getting to know each other. For the past few days, I've been getting back in touch with parts of myself that he's just begun to see, and I can't wait to bring him back with me later this year.

There's more, but it's now 2 in the morning, and I should get some sleep. For now, here's all hope for a happy new year.

Letter No. 8

I joined Glitch, and it was love at first play. Now, I have just a little over two weeks left to have my fill of milking butterflies, cooking Awesome Stew, and exploring the magical world of Ur, because the best MMOG I've ever played is about to close.

I had just volunteered to organize an in-game community event when the news broke, and the forums went up in a collective wail as the players realized, Our world is actually ending.

I'd recently watched "Wreck-It Ralph" twice and felt a jolt in my gut; the fantastic predicament for the glitch in that movie was now very real for us; who knew what would happen to us as the plug was pulled on our own little universe?

The event I was to run was immediately cancelled, to allow participants to say their goodbyes, draw up their bucket lists, and spend their last days as glitchen however they pleased. There was a virtual filing out of the room.

Left alone, it wasn't hard for me to see the precious value of the time I had left. I had only played for about two months. I had just started piecing together the in-game clues to the real story behind the 11 giants. I had only just reached that level of skill and self-sufficiency in the game where I could really do what I wanted. My ultimate project, to build a travelers' rest with cheap food, trip tickets, and free reading material, had just begun to gain momentum.

Now, I had to decide whether to go on with glitchy life as usual, or hang the plans, close my doors, and take that metaphorical cruise around the world.

My brother, perhaps in going about his own end-of-the-world business, generously finished building for me. Partly so his efforts wouldn't go to waste, and partly to avoid disappointing whatever visitors I'd get before the end, I put up the sign, got some furniture, decorated the place, and stocked the vending boxes with whatever I could make out of the ingredients I had at the time. Then, I splurged on some new clothes and set off for both unexplored and beloved corners of Ur.

I trekked through every last one of the savanna-like Ancestral Lands, bounced on the fungi trampolines of Haoma and Kloro, went salmon fishing in Jal, scaled the last rocky ledges of Ormonos, bid goodbye to the bureaucrocs at the Department of Administrative Affairs in the Ministry of Departments, hung out with the bartender of Hell, got lost in a bunch of abandoned basements, attended a party on the moon, and even looked down at Ur from orbit.

The asteroids had become shrines to the game; they were covered with heartfelt letters, favorite foods, keys, toys, old tools, and other everyday-items-turned-mementoes of our glitchy existence. I left my own letter and a bowl of stew before heading out again.

In the ancestral lands. Trees in Ur talk after you interact with them. The paper trees speak in haiku.

The frozen lake in Nottis, Ur's snowy northern region.

Somewhere in Ormonos.

"A mixologist of the underworld, no one knows the true story of Hell's Bartender, but assume he was either really good at pouring bad drinks, or really bad at pouring good drinks in a previous life." — The Glitch Encyclopedia

Partying with Mikko on the moon.

The asteroids.

When I was done travelling, I came home to my own firebog treehouse in the highlands and saw that my time wasn't up just yet. I restlessly wandered some more, casting about for something fulfilling to do in the weeks I had left, and finally thought again of my travelers' rest. There was no way I could end the game without at least attempting to make my humble pit stop as wonderful as I'd imagined. So, I bookmarked some good poems, came up with a menu of my favorite dishes in the game, and found myself creating spreadsheets on the ingredients I needed.

I decided to cook 61 of everything; I wanted a two-digit prime number because the game creators liked prime numbers, and the digits add up to 7, my own favorite (also prime) number. I set to work, gathering, growing, harvesting, and buying as much as I can.

That's how I spend most of my free time now. I know it sounds like a waste of time, but that's how attached I've become to Glitch in the short time I've played it. Even if I never cook 61 of all 12 dishes I've chosen and spend the rest of my time in the game gathering 4,758 cherries, even if I have to give up because the countdown to the end of the world is about to begin, I'll at least be able to say that I spent my last days doing what it took to reach my little dream.

I'll admit, it's more than I can say about my life offline. Yet that's also a big part of why I love Glitch. The spirit of the game inspires me even when I'm not playing, and its impending end is as much a good thing as a sad one. I know that I can't depend solely on a fantasy world to make me feel powerful, creative, and generous. I know that my actual life should have its own projects. As I work through the last days of Ur, I remind myself that when it's all over, the next quest will be to find something I can actually create, work toward, and be happy about.

The timing is pretty good. The new year is coming. I'll head back to Chinese classes then, and I want to learn about other things, too: the stock market, drawing, flexagons, Asian literature, Asian history, and so on. There won't be any fungi trampolines, but there will be travelling; I want Cris to see Kalsangi, and I hope to take more trips with him and with my family.

And though it isn't over yet, it's been a truly lovely year. Even with the weird blue funk I've been in for the past couple of months, I am happier than I thought I'd be now, and I am in a very good place. I'm excited about what's next.

But first, 4,758 cherries, 488 bottles of butterfly milk, 1,830 allspice corns, 1,281 bubbles, 610 tomatoes, ....

Letter No. 6

The last time I travelled abroad, I fell in love with a country. I hadn’t expected to; I’d only expected to have some fun with my family and explore a new place. But Singapore floored me, and it became the backdrop to my daydreams, a vision of the kind of life I wanted for myself.

This time, I went to China, and the love I felt was for another person, and the dream was for a life that could be lived and shared anywhere, hesitant though I am about such dreams.

Sometime ago, Cris told me that he’d follow me anywhere. Instead of feeling happy about this, I wanted to run away. Someone had made me that promise before, but when I’d finally found a place I actually wanted to go, I learned that “anywhere” really just meant “anywhere around here, because he never, ever wants to leave.” It was just one of several fundamental differences that, when I think about it, led to our breakup. But I don’t want to think about that; that’s in the past.

Today, looking back on the near-week I just spent with Cris in Beijing, I’m starting to entertain the idea of grand declarations and impassioned promises again. Maybe we really can go anywhere now, together.

I had a fantastic time. We saw the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, the Bird’s Nest, a handful of manmade lakes, the schools Cris attended, the 798 art district, and a load of intimidating architecture and impressive infrastructure. I had dumplings and lamb chuànr almost every day, and the autumn cold was as thrilling as it was, well, chilling.

Yet to be honest, I’m not entirely sure I would have liked it as much if Cris hadn’t been with me. Don’t get me wrong; all the things I’ve mentioned are well worth the RMB. I’d highly recommend Beijing to anyone looking for a great culture and history trip.

It’s just that whatever enjoyment I got out of poking around the palaces and climbing up and down Badaling was heightened by the underlying idea that they were parts of a place that Cris loved, and he was sharing them now with me. Even simple bus rides, brief campus walks, stomping through bustling shopping streets, and ducking into dumpling shops not wide enough to spread your arms felt like secret privileges, little peeks into the life he had as a student there, little chances to try and understand him better. I don’t know if I succeeded, only that the need to feel close(r) to him feels stronger now than ever.

Beijing itself, of course, was a great place for this to happen. All over the city, there are banners and posters for a campaign called “Beijing Spirit”, which the posters say is composed of patriotism, innovation, inclusiveness, and virtue. To one longtime expat, the campaign smells of subtle propaganda. But to this tourist, it underscores the awe one feels from that first ride from the airport through modern Beijing, jaw-dropping even in the dead of night after a budget flight, to the end of an eight-hour walk through Qianmen and the Forbidden City with all its bronze dragons, marble staircases, and tantalizing echoes of the emperors’ lives. Beijing smells both of historical greatness and of the promise of great change, and it can get hard to figure out where wanting your life to be part of that promise ends, and where wanting that promise in your life begins.


It’s been a little jarring, maybe sobering, to be back and to go about life as before, to remember to tell the cashier “Thank you,” and not, “Xièxiè,” to swap my thick RFID-equipped yīkǎtōng for the bendy, magnetic LRT cards, and to look out at a skyline not dotted with hipped palace roofs as well as high-rises. I say sobering because, now that the vacation and the subsequent long weekend are over, I’ve had to think hard about what I’m doing and what I need to do next to stay happy where I am. Then, I think of Cris, and I feel worry fade away, and see promise within my reach.

Letter No. 3

The other day, I dreamt about a sort of family court, in the middle of a ruin in the jungle. It was brown and crumbling, sort of Mesoamerican-civilization-meets-Beaux-Arts, with lush trees, grass, and vines growing inside. Families — dads in their tucked-in polos and city shorts, moms in jeans and sundresses, little kids — came to the ruin to just hang out and picnic under the indoor trees.

In one part of the ruin, there was a large pool or pond. Its water was still clear, and though most of the walls were gone, the ceiling of that room was still intact. It was tiled with something like capiz shells, near transparent.

On one side of the pool sat a couple at retirement age. Their family was quite wealthy, with multiple businesses, houses, yachts, and cars. On the other side was my own grama. They all sat in folding canvas and metal chairs, as if in the park or at the beach, but they were definitely authorities about something. The sun was about to set.

The son of the wealthy couple stood at their side with his back to the wall, which had a hole big enough to see the jungle in the next room and a family picnicking there, and a kid swinging from a tree branch. Grama's granddaughter, who was not me or any of my cousins (weird, yes), stood a little apart from Grama, her back to a less damaged wall, with some steps and a dark doorway to some other part of the ruin.

The son and the granddaughter wanted to get married, and I think they'd come to the ruin to declare their intentions to their elders. None of the elders approved, though. It wasn't for the huge disparity in wealth; each family liked and respected the other well enough. But Grama and the couple agreed that their children were "too young" at 28. Grama told my mystery cousin to wait till she was 30, take her master's, and focus on her career. The young man's parents said something similar, and that it was important to wait.

I was watching from Grama's side, because, I guess, it was my family's side. But while the young man fumbled for words and the granddaughter started to stamp her feet and rant about how unfair the decision was, I got into the pool and started swimming.

The water was perfect. I moved easily, even though I was wearing a work shirt and pants. I floated on my back and kicked slowly across the length of the pool. Above me, the sky was rippling across the shell tiles in different shades of blue and gold; reflected in the water, they looked like jewels or stars. I forgot about the families and just looked up at the sky, and I thought, "Oh, how beautiful."

I think I dreamt this because just before I went to sleep, I'd finished some Archie comics, which had an excerpt from the "Married Life" series. Archie is married to Veronica and faces an important business and personal decision: should he satisfy his father-in-law and employer, yet pull the rug out from under his oldest friends?

Yet I've also been thinking about my own career for a while now.

I realized yesterday, I've done a 180. Since I was a teenager, my dream life involved settling down and having kids as soon as possible. While one tita asked me if I wasn't just conforming to society's expectations, I was actually an odd one out; most of my friends have all said that they'd rather pursue their careers and/or see the world before starting a family — if they start families at all. I, on the other hand, not only pre-selected my future children's names according to birth order and number (if my firstborn was a girl, she'd be L; if a boy, Z; if twin girls, P and F; if twin boys, B and L; etc.), but I'd also decided what kind of toys they'd play with, books they'd read, and schools they'd attend.

What's changed in the past year? It wasn't just that I was single again, though maybe that gave me more time to pay attention to what was going on around me. I cared more than ever about the economy, and whether the country could sustain all this optimism. I started to care more about where my money went, and not least because rent on a better apartment sucked up so much of it.

I also became interested in the kind of life people my age and background had in different countries, particularly around Asia. I compared their worries and aspirations with mine, and I started to imagine more clearly the decisions I'd have to make if I wanted a certain quality of life by the time I was raising kids, not just having them.

Perhaps as a result, my own aspirations changed, too. Gone is the Kat who wanted to be a stay-at-home mom in the province; in her place is some other lady who thinks being a busy, if not working mom is the way to go. And in the process, I thought about the things I wanted to keep me busy, besides family: the kind of work I'd like to do, the kind of organization I'd like to work for, and the kind of interests I'd like to be able to pursue on the side.

It occurs to me, of course, that I now sound a lot like the suited, hooked-on-career yuppies that I disdained as a wannabe bohemian. I am not, as I fantasized four years ago, writing novels and travelogues and shacking up with a painter in a charmingly old apartment near art galleries, pan-Asian furniture stores, and hip little restaurants, where the other characters from RENT meet to celebrate starving for their art. I live in a middle-class neighborhood across an upper-middle-class university and edit advertising-occasioned supplements for a business newspaper, and my boyfriend and I like to talk about China, urban planning, and a friend's tips on the stock market.

I'd like to think that the dream of swimming in an in-between pool of pixellated Van Gogh is my subconscious telling me to take a good look at my direction and decisions, before I make any more. I think of a TV spot for Suits (which I don't watch), where a biker sipping coffee sees the suited protagonist go by and tells his fellow biker, "If I ever look like that, shoot me." I think of "La Vie Boheme" from RENT, of course, with Mark celebrating "riding your bike midday past the three-piece suits" — and thinking now, "But Benny's Cyberland idea doesn't sound half bad."

Then, there's the latest Subnormality comic, where a down-on-her-luck Ethel sets up a meeting with her selves from parallel universes to see how different her own life is from theirs.

© 2012 Winston Rowntree

So I'm asking myself, if I had a meeting like that within the next five years, would I have more or less regret than the other me's who decided differently along the way? I'm already living much differently from how I'd wanted — should I be happy, knowing I have things to be happy about, or disappointed that I let go of some of my dreams along the way?

The comic (go on, read it) touched a particularly sensitive, insecure nerve, because writing is a big part of the conversation. Ethel-in-red-sweater, in the ninth-to-last panel ("You think you're never gonna succeed at writing?") says something about where I am as a writer; that is, not even close to where I once dreamed I'd be. Then there's Ethel-in-glasses ("writing: also a muscle"); some part of me still doesn't want to sound like her, but I know I'm on my way to being her, if I'm not already.

And so, the Ethels' meeting has forced me to ask a question I've been avoiding for the past couple of years.

Do I still want to write?

And if I'm honest with myself, in my bones, I know, yes, I still do — and I want to be good at it.

It's scary to say. For one thing, it doesn't seem to fit into the Ethel-in-glasses-plus-kids life I've been seeking. And for another thing, writing's a muscle I've let atrophy, at least where creative writing is concerned. I've been making all these excuses: I don't have enough experience; my voice is too middle-class and navel-gazing; every other 20-something is writing something like that; I don't know enough about Philippine culture, popular or otherwise; and I'm not as good and/or popular as X, so I don't think I should bother, anyway. But really, I've just shuffled into the vicious circle of not practicing and then being intimidated by the amount of practice I need to be "good".

Perhaps the dream ended with me still in the pool so that I could decide, in real life, at which side I'd get out. I don't think the plight of the young couple was of any real concern to me; I imagine that getting out at either family's side would have only distracted and annoyed everyone. But at the ends of the pool, there were other dark doorways leading to other parts of the ruin. I think at some point, I would have gotten out of the water and picked one.

--
Like last week's letter, this one has a couple of theme songs. I picked them in college to remind me of what I didn't want to be like, but now, I have doubts about the messages they send.

I want to say that the people in the boxes might actually be pursuing dreams of their own — mostly because, if I should find myself in one of those boxes, I want to be right.

1. Little Boxes, by Malvina Reynolds
And the people / In the houses / All went to the university / Where they were put in boxes / And they came out all the same / And there's doctors / And lawyers / And business executives / And they're all made out of ticky-tacky / And they all look just the same // ... // And they all have pretty children / And the children go to school / And the children go to summer camp / And then to the university / Where they are put in boxes / And they come out all the same

2. Baobabs, by Regina Spektor
And I wouldn't raise my child inside the city anyway / They grow up too savvy / And they grow up too fast / And they know about buying shit / And they know about sex / And they know about investment banking / And also about brokerage firms / And they know about the numbers / And they know about the words / And they know about bottom lines / And also about stones / And they know about careers / And about the real deals / And they all grow up to become people's people with people skills

--
Ethel is just one of many characters in the world of Subnormality. Her previous appearances:
A
B

Letter No. 1

On her 88th birthday, a few weeks ago, my lola told me, "Being old is fun."

I think I knew this from watching her eat ice cream at a recent family dinner. I could hear it in her voice, too, as she shared her travel plans for that week over the phone. But, actually hearing her say those words was an affirmation — you can live so much and so long and (still) be happy.

Tomorrow morning, I will have completed another trip around the sun. I won't be as old as my lola just yet, but I look forward to this new year as much as I look forward to my 88th. This feels like a kickoff to top off all the kickoffs I've made in the past year:

- got over a grown-up breakup
- biked around Metro Manila and didn't die
- learned Mandarin
- saw my kirigami featured in a magazine
- made new friends
- opened my heart again, with the help of someone wonderful
- made peace with the city
- realized how much I (still) love and miss my family
- moved to an apartment
- gained weight
- survived my first year as supplements editor
- saw my own faith staring me in the face

With blogging and other fun online things recently re-banned at work, the days leading up to my birthday have been as good a time as ever to be more thoughtful about a lot of stuff: what I post here, how I think, how I relate to other people, and what I want to do next.

- finally go to Beijing
- go home for Christmas
- make and write more things for myself, and make them well
- stop worrying about the future
- invest in the stock market
- read more books
- buy that box of plain Lego bricks
- turn the added weight into abs
- be less disconnected
- be less afraid
- be grateful
- get old
- have fun

Here we go.

Memoranda

1. The company party at Hotel H2O means I have a pretty good time spacing out watching three rays, a shark, and a couple of eels make the rounds of a humongous aquarium.

2. Class getting cancelled allows me to work on a new paper building, the first original piece I've liked in a long time.

3. Cris and I take a nice, long, quiet drive in the rain from Quezon City to Manila, with stops at Dunkin Donuts and Bee Cheng Hiang.

4. My family gets together for my grandmother's 80th birthday party.
a. Cris helps with the party, dances, makes conversation, and generally becomes my most-liked boyfriend ever.
b. My youngest brother Mon says more to me in two minutes about the TDKR shooting than he has about anything else in the past year, and I am pleasantly surprised at how articulate he can be.
c. Later, he shares his plot to make Cris uncomfortable all night.
— "Yeah, and I'm going to stand next to him and say, 'I can smell your fear.'"
d. Mikko and Paolo are the best dancers.
e. My family figures out how those party popper cylinders work (one-time use, my ass) and proceeds to make a mess of the Aristocrat function room.
— Dad (52) and Paolo (7) chase each other around the room with loaded cylinders, using flower foam and parts of centerpieces as ammunition.
— "If we were a Westerosi house, our words would probably have 'projectiles' in them."

5. My parents, brothers, and I get Sunday all to ourselves.
a. We suspect Sakae Sushi stops putting out "that red plate yellow caviar fish" after we take it all off the belt.
b. Drum Tao makes me want to dedicate my life to music, martial arts, and having ridiculously gorgeous abs, arms, and back muscles.
c. Dad buys a table for me in Gensan, takes it apart, brings it to Manila, and reassembles it in my apartment. <3
d. After they leave, I go to bed feeling both happy and lonely.

--

Last night, I dreamt possibly my best dream ever. I can't remember any previous dream like this where I wasn't on some kind of quest; the most I felt I had to do in this dream was to land a raft to reinflate it a bit. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

My cousins, brothers, and I, plus I think my dad and/or a boatman, took a boat out on a sunny day.

That's it. That's all. No strange baroque hotels with ghost parties, no inability to keep my eyes open while a magical swivel chair took me on a tour of an Aztec temple hotel, no orphan children to shepherd across a purple strait, no Ed Westwick in smoking jacket sneering at me while a horizontal elevator took me through a hotel full of girls, no naked mummy-god-prince to escort past a motorcycle gang, no taxi rides past a hotel that looked like a cross between an Indian temple and a Mattias Adolfsson drawing.

(Yeah, I dream a lot about hotels.)

We just went out on a boat for a swim. We dropped anchor where we felt like it, near some isolated, tiny islands, and just swam around and had fun. I think there was a picnic on the boat. I didn't feel stressed or dissatisfied, just happy to be out and enjoying the beautiful blue water, pale sky, and lovely islands. I only wished Cris had been there. The water felt perfect, by the way, and the sun was just right.

A little later, a semi-submerged inflatable yellow raft came to me, and I recognized it as an ex-boyfriend's, for some reason. This didn't bother me; I just got on and paddled around the sea. I enjoyed myself and the fact that it was okay to have fun with this raft, despite knowing that it had belonged to that ex, as if the raft had been a gift that had literally floated toward me, out of the blue. As it was only half-submerged, I just needed to take a quick break to add more air to the raft, so I paddled to the shore and pulled the raft onto the sand. In the background, I could hear my brothers and cousins splashing and having fun.

I don't think I've ever had such an easy dream before.

Enjoying the View

The view from my new apartment, which I moved into on Saturday, overlooks a nearby subdivision where I can see kids playing basketball, people walking their dogs, and trees, trees, trees, trees, trees. And in the distance, behind a layer of smog, is the Ortigas skyline and a bit of Greenhills.

In the past two days, I have drunk in the view and felt myself in other places, particularly gorgeous green Singapore or just somewhere like home. I think it's because it's a little hard to believe that I am right here in Quezon City, that this view is mine, and that this life is my life.

The dark cloud over everything in the past month or so has been my own fear that all this amazing stuff — my wonderful dream of a boyfriend Cris; my move-enabling, actually enjoyable job; and now this fantastic apartment — will be taken away, just as so many other things were taken away or I was pushed from them. So, I half don't want to believe in them to make the impending pain of losing them easier to bear.

My friends (rightly) say I'm being ridiculous, being afraid of things that haven't happened and may never happen. Cris would say that people don't know they can choose to be happy; "We're going to be happy, Kat," he likes to remind me.

I know, really, because in the past few years, I told myself to choose happiness and work on whatever would get it for me. I wanted career fulfillment, some nice (if only rented) real estate, more family time, and more love. But really, I wanted to be at home in myself, to learn to be my own anchorage, and to architect my heart into the haven I longed for amid all the changes, disappointments, and adjustments.

The thing is, I did that because of the disappointments; I did that while telling myself, "Life is not entirely the wonderful thing you've dreamed about; just roll with the punches and find something to smile about regardless." I guess it was really just another way of saying, "Life will get better, but not by much, so don't ask for much; be content with what you get."

And then, life got better by a ton.

And quickly, I realized that while I was good at living like happiness was a light at the end of a long, long, long tunnel, I wasn't prepared for when I found myself standing outside with the sun in my face and the sea at my feet.

Or inside a new apartment with the lease in my name.

It was just so much easier to be self-confident when I had nothing to lose and nothing to miss. That's it, I think. In a weird way, the lack of fulfillment was armor. I'm so much more vulnerable now that I'm where I always wanted to be, with the kind of people I always wanted to be with, and doing the kinds of things I always wanted to do.

For the past couple of years, I lived believing happiness depended on strength in the face of difficulty; now I find it depends on openness and vulnerability in the face of fulfillment, especially fulfillment you never thought was possible.

This post features photos by Cris.

Prayers these days are alternately, "Thank you, God," and "Oh, God, what happens next?"

More of this, I hope with all my heart. Please let there be more of this, and help me to enjoy it.

The Zombie Magic Word

It's probably because I signed up for Outbreak Manila and probably because I've been reading the "Hunger Games" series, but last night, I dreamt that there was a war against zombies. I was part of a team with weapons and robots, and we were doing pretty well when one of the team members (I later found out that we were a couple) got captured while in his robot.

The zombies, rather than eating him right away, threw him into a cell. Maybe they mistook him for one of their own; his robot had shape-changing capabilities, so he could pass for a zombie. They even started including him in their training sessions. I don't know why, with such a fancy robot, he didn't just escape, but maybe they would have suspected him and attacked, and he wouldn't have been able to fend them all off.

The zombies had a shape-changing power, too. At will, they could change into the people they used to be, but they'd still be zombies inside. It was a clever disguise.

To pass this part of training, our hero simply changed into himself. During one session, however, he wasn't able to change back into a zombie quickly enough, and the others began to have their suspicions. He knew that he had to escape within a day.

That night, the guy had a dream (inside my dream, yes). In the dream, we were both being chased by zombies, and we jumped onto a small boat in a river with a green glass bed. It floated over the park where the zombies were based, and one of the zombie lieutenants was talking to a little boy who looked like a younger version of our hero. The lieutenant was in his normal person form, one of those tall, blond, well-built guys who make great soldiers. He told the little boy that if he just said the magic word, which sounded like, "Sgoobitysgoobitysgoo," the zombies would turn into friendly people and leave you alone. But, the zombie captain was immune to the magic word.

So, the dreaming guy, who was apparently my boyfriend, said that when he woke, he would try to escape using the magic word. I was going to be there to help him in case anything went wrong, particularly with the captain.

He came out of his cell for a military training session as usual, but he had been right about the zombies' suspicions; they began closing in on him as soon as they saw him. The zombie lieutenant reached into the robot's mouth to get our hero, and at once, the hero yelled, "Sgoobitysgoobitysgoo!"

All of the zombies turned into harmless people. The captain turned into a beautiful woman, sort of a cross between Camille Sullivan and Tina Majorino. But she still wanted to kill us, so we began chasing each other across the park and the outdoor mall and trying to kill each other with whatever weapons we could get our hands on. Somehow, she got into a helicopter just as I ran up to a second story, but it was out of ammo, so she just chased me down some rooftops and tarp lean-tos on foot.

I got to the ground where my boyfriend was waiting, and we started running, but the zombie captain cut us off. She slowly advanced on me and started giving a villain's monologue about how weak and stupid we were, to try and stop her and the horde. I grabbed the nearest sharp objects, which were a mechanical pencil and a fork, and kept stabbing her in the chest while she talked and I said the magic word again. She seemed to falter once, and I knew the magic word would have some effect after all, but for some reason, I didn't say it again.

I needed help, though; where was my boyfriend? This was the part in the movie where the hero would have barrelled in to give his girl a hand. But, he was sitting in his robot just to one side, watching me try to make the most of my mechanical pencil. Judging by the expression on his face, he didn't really care.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the blond zombie lieutenant approaching with some pink pills in his hand. Somehow, I knew that they would make the captain immune to the effects of the magic word, so I asked the lieutenant why he was doing this. I think I shouted, "You're supposed to be good now!"

To keep him from reaching the captain, I jumped on him, but that meant I was exposed to the captain, who fell on me.

I woke up with my arms and fists still locked, as if I was still clutching the fork and pencil and bracing myself.

The boyfriend was nobody I know in real life, but I know what kind of guy to avoid now, hahaha.

Suburban Scrawl

My schoolmate Vittorio wrote this post earlier this week to imagine, what if his family had pushed through with plans to move to the US?

Immediately, it had me imagining a similar scenario—what if my family had never returned to the Philippines?

What if, instead of growing up here:

Kalsangi, aerial view (Google Maps)

I'd grown up here?

Our old neighborhood, Fresno, CA (Google Maps)

I'd have gone on to the fifth grade and stayed on the spelling team. Maybe I'd have made it to nationals and been on ESPN (come on, who knows?).

It was in the fifth grade, here in the Philippines, that a teacher first singled me out for good writing. It was only then that I really thought I could be good at something in particular (well, aside from spelling). Until that day, my life had been about playing with my friends and wearing out my library card. Only after that teacher—and the teachers who followed—praised my writing did I begin enthusiastically writing stories and making up characters and worlds. Only after that did I join the school paper and make it my goal to be EIC in my senior year.

Would a teacher in my American schools have done the same thing? In the US, I was one of those Asian kids in advanced math and reading classes; I seemed to be good at everything. What if my teachers had pushed me toward the sciences instead, especially after visits to the Monterey Bay and Chicago aquariums introduced me to the idea of marine biology?

I still had good piano teachers then. In the third grade, I told my homeroom teacher that I wanted to be a pianist when I grew up. What if I'd run with that and tried to become a musician instead?

And speaking of running, I used to be on the track team. I have no idea if I had any real potential, but what if I did?

When I think about going on the middle and high schools there, I immediately think of the friends and crushes I left behind:

• The best friend in advanced class who was the lead in the school play and is now working happily for a Hollywood tabloid
• The other friend in advanced class who explained what virginity was and is now a food server
• The choir member best friend who treated me to my first slumber party and is now in a theater company, I think
• The blue-eyed spelling team crush who wrote me a sweet goodbye letter and is now—?
• The next-block neighbor crush who invited me to a pizza party and is now a missionary
• The two Joshuas: the now-married one who teased me in the lunch line and first called me Cat (when I wasn't Midget); and the redheaded, trouble-making one who is now—?

I could go on, but what I really think when I think of them is, would we still have been friends? Would I have been torn, in the style of teen movies, between my popular cheerleader / student council – material friends and my laid-back, average good friends? Keeping the high grades and not getting called a geek? Getting a boyfriend and not? Losing my virginity and not? What kind of choices would make what kind of friends, and vice versa?

Would I still have become a Christian? That's a really interesting question. My family had always gone to church, and I'd always gone to Sunday School. But it wasn't until my senior year in high school, here in the Philippines, that I started taking my faith seriously and trying to understand what being Christian meant. Would I have found myself asking to be saved? And if I did, would I still have left the church after years of asking other things?

Would I care as much about whether I was "Filipino enough"? As a third culture kid back in the Philippines, I've never been able to shake off the feeling that I don't quite belong in this or that country. In the States, though, I was part of a community with other kids growing up Fil-Am. What kind of ethnic identity would I have had as a result?

I don't know where I would've gone to college. The only college I knew of at the time was the local one, Fresno State. I'm sure in high school, a teacher would have put me on to UC Berkeley, NYU, Yale, or Columbia. Would I have cared about getting into an Ivy League School?

I think I would definitely have benefited from the US system in which college students don't declare a major until they know what they want. When I applied to colleges here, I thought I was charting the course for my future, but really, I was throwing darts. I applied to mass comm. or its variants at other schools, partly because I liked the idea of becoming a powerful editor, and partly because it seemed expected of me, school journalist whiz that I was.

I really wanted to put down creative writing, but my parents convinced me that I'd starve. At the Ateneo, I landed in a management course that was nothing I'd hoped it would be. I got depressed and stopped studying for a whole semester, but I managed to shift into communication before my grades fell below the requirement.

If I could go back now, I'd tell myself to take up humanities, computer science, or, yes, creative writing. Would I have been able to discern this, in the US? Or would I have found something else, like marine biology, architecture, urban planning, social work, or cultural studies?

I'm pretty sure I'd have been fascinated by the subcultures of the early 2000s. Would I have been emo? A hipster? Or would they have been too intimidating, like all these cool city kids were intimidating, when I went to college? I'd have been a city kid, too, though (or as city as someone from Fresno could get, anyway). Maybe I'd have been more confident than I was fresh out of high school.

Where would I have gone after college? Career-wise, if I'd still gone into journalism or the humanities, probably at a newspaper, ad agency, or art gallery. If I'd studied a science, then probably grad school, the academe, and a corporate research facility.

Other answers to where I would have gone include LA, San Francisco, Monterey, Chicago, and New York. Or just Fresno, still Fresno, because it wasn't a bad place to live.

It probably wouldn't matter once the recession happened, though. Then, really, who knows.

Would I still have had that mental breakdown? Again, who knows?

In some alternate world is a Katrina who is the answer to all these questions. At this point, I can't really imagine how life will go for her, because right now, I can barely imagine how life will go for me.

In the end, though, I don't really mind not being her. I just hope she's happy.

Heat Under the Rocks

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Sometime last month, my brother signed up for a church-organized hike-slash-one-day-retreat on Taal Volcano. I wanted to hike, too, but was apprehensive about signing up; in general, I'm wary of Christian strangers asking me questions about my faith. I'd rather avoid situations that open me up to judgment or even condemnation just for being honest about my doubt. I'd also like to avoid situations where I seem to be something I'm not, which is a full-blown believer, and then be accused later of deceit.

Besides, I had Mandarin class the morning the hike group was supposed to head out.

Then, my mom told me that my dad was flying in, not on business, but just to join the hike and spend some time with Mikko and me. This seemed like a lot of trouble on Dad's part, as he takes vacation leaves sparingly, so, I decided to use one of my allowed absences from class and bond with my family.

My goals that day were to just enjoy the time with my dad and brother, enjoy the time outdoors and away from Manila, stay in the background during whatever retreat activity they had planned, and keep quiet when it came time to share. At the very least, the organizer-church—the same church I've been attending with Mikko since late August—seemed to be led by the kind of people who respect other people's quiet.

There were lots of beautiful views (some of which I'm sharing on Tumblr and Facebook).


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We went up to the summit and then went back and forth along this long ridge. It was still fairly early in the morning, the sun was not too hot, and there was some cloud cover. Despite the number of tourists going up and down, it was a quiet day.

After some time, we gathered at the rest huts to listen to the retreat master. And funnily enough, the theme of the retreat was goal-meeting (and right off the bat, the master said, "You don't all have to share").

While he didn't say anything or quote any passages I hadn't heard or read before, he did get me to think about questions that almost everyone asks each other and themselves:

What are your goals for today? What are your goals for the future? How are you going to accomplish them?

Is it bad to say, acknowledge, or admit—is it a crime?—that I haven't had a grand life goal since the breakup?

I don't blame Martin for my apparent purposelessness; I believe it was ultimately a good thing for me to arrive where I am now, in the condition I'm in now. But see, back then, so many of my goals depended on him. Today, I haven't stopped wanting the things I wanted; but they've become kind of abstract considering they aren't immediately feasible.

So, all I've wanted to accomplish in the meantime is to learn to be happy with myself, be reconciled with my flawed parts, and stay productive. I don't know when I'll have what I want(ed) or if it will ever arrive, so I just want to be happy catching as catch can.

One warning the retreat master gave everyone last Saturday was that taking things into one's own hands may only muck things up for ourselves, when God has his own designs on our lives. There are plenty of contentious ideas to do with human goal-setting and divine designs, but that day, I didn't want my objections to ruin a lovely day out with my family. I laid most of these objections aside and allowed myself to agree with this one thing: because I don't know what's next, I'm just going to stay reasonably busy, keep the door of my heart open, and hope for the best.

It was, all in all, an awesome day to be out with my family. I felt renewed gratitude for them, especially my parents and all they'd done for me and my brothers. I know my life wouldn't be as good as it is now if it hadn't been for my family and their love.

The love really is the greatest thing, the best thing that helps me keep my faith. On some days, it's not so hard to lay off my doubt and see the beaten track again, the clear path of belief and the relative ease with which it would meet my feet. On those days, I know how easy it is to "just" believe.

I am afraid of rejection there, too. Why would God welcome someone so willful and self-absorbed?

And yet, the love of my family, despite how physically and emotionally distant I've become in the past few years, is what allows me to reach for if not grasp the kind of love that they talk about in church. It is that kind of love that would lead me back to the fervent kind of faith I used to have. And like I said, I'm keeping my door open.


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Letter to My Unborn Firstborn

Dear L.,


According to the timeline of my high school daydreams, you would have been born about two years ago. Of course, that depended on marrying the high school sweetheart I didn't have then (someday, you can ask me about the one I had instead), and the man I'd hoped would be your father left the picture last year.

So I guess it's safe to say that I haven't found your dad yet. In the meantime, I'm trying to be a good example for you, for when you get to my age. I'm trying to show you as well as myself that your happiness mustn't depend on having another person around, because people leave. And even if they don't, they sometimes fail. We all do, little love.

I'm trying to prove that spending too much time pining for a great love and a faceless man can be a waste of energy. You should be working to be at peace with the only person you'll be with at the end, yourself, and you should stay productive. Do a good job at your job; volunteer; find a hobby, craft, or art you enjoy; travel; and make friends.

I am not going to be one of those people who will tell you that if you do all these things, the right man will arrive in good time and find you attractive. Nor will I tell you that God will reward you for your efforts, as God is no respecter of persons. You must learn to be happy regardless.

I am sorry to report, however, that I seem to be failing us both, mostly because of the above paragraph and the possibility that this letter may never get sent. I get through a week pumped/psyched enough for work, I read, I work on my crafts, I go out in search of adventures, and I enjoy time with family and friends. But when I go back to my one-room walkup at the end of a weekend, I still find myself wishing I had someone there waiting for me, to make dinner with, chat with, watch Sunday night HBO with, and fall asleep holding.

I don't know, baby. Maybe your mom got too used to having someone like that around, or maybe she's seen too many bad movies. But mostly, your mom is scared of being always alone and never learning to deal with that empty Sunday night feeling. She wants to be a strong, independent young woman, so she's scared that admitting she's lonely will make her seem weak or desperate. Your mom feels stuck right now, my darling.

In my daydreams, when you get to my age, you are terrific and self-sufficient. You handle life and the world much better than I ever did, your outlook is both pragmatic and positive, and your heart is practically indestructible. You take difficulty in good stride. I won't take too much credit for raising you so well, because I believe you'll take yourself in hand, too.

So I hope that when you get to my age, you'll find this letter absurd. "Poor, less enlightened Mom," you'll say. "If only she knew, life is _____________."

But if not, if you feel just as restless and clueless as I right now, I hope you'll give me a call. I'll tell you, I don't know how things are going to be, but I believe in you. Even if you don't find the answers, I believe you'll get closer than I ever did. And if you still don't, tomorrow is another day, and I'm still going to cheer you on.

See you.


Love,

--
Mom


P.S. - Give your grandmother a call, too. She's been my own personal cheerleader for a while.
P.P.S. - I'm assuming you're a girl or a gay boy. If you're my straight son, give me a minute; I have other things to write you.

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.

Do What Pray Tell

A well-meaning friend suggested that, now that I'm single again, I should spend more time with God and ask myself if I was going to be with him in heaven after I died.

The thing is, she and I have different ideas of God. I don't think she'd really dig mine, much less how I spend time with who I believe is God. There's also no paper trail--no Bible study group signup forms, no outreach ministry membership brochures--to prove to her that I spend any time with God at all.

Ever since I left my church job, talking about God to the people--especially the professing Christian people--who have known me since childhood runs the risk of opening a can of worms that never seems safe to open. So, all I could do was sidestep my friend's suggestion and address some of the other points she'd raised during our conversation about whether I'm ready to date anyone.

I do wish, though, that there was someone I could talk to about my faith. The next-closest person to me who has any clue about its state is my younger brother, but out of pride, I avoid talking to him about it. I say next-closest, because Martin knew a little more than my brother does, but his viewpoint is Catholic, so he didn't quite get everything.

I once dropped in on a Filipino Freethinkers meeting and would have liked to talk to the Episcopalian guy, but I don't feel like going back.

I guess I would just like to talk to someone who understands Protestant, particularly evangelical church culture, is familiar with evangelical teachings, would listen to what I had to say, wouldn't judge me, and would maybe even walk away without worrying unnecessarily over the fate of my immortal soul. Basically, I would like to talk to someone who would listen, not preach or fret, and just leave me in the hands of whatever God they believed in, just as I place myself in the hands of mine.

Preferably not someone I work with, because just knowing they follow me on Twitter makes things soooo awkward already.

Is it too early for New Year's resolutions? I'm looking forward to the new year. These are more plans than resolutions:

1. Reread the Bible, this time a KJV.
2. Continue studying Mandarin.
3. Bike more.
4. Move out of Cubao.
5. Keep a planner.
6. Make more complicated popup buildings.
7. Invest some more.
8. Study more economics.
9. Get a pet. If where I live doesn't allow pets, get a small pet that doesn't make noise. A turtle, maybe.
10. Be happy.

And as for whether I'm ready to date anyone, I don't think I want to just yet. So far, no one who's expressed interest has really grabbed my attention, either. I guess we'll see how the new year goes.