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.

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.

Moving House

By tomorrow, if not this evening, my family will have moved out of the house where I grew up. My folks were given a week to get everything out and over to a different house on a different street. The news came one week ago and was short notice for everyone—too short for me and my brother to fly home suddenly, help with the move, and say goodbye to our old house.

That's the mixed blessing of living in company housing, I guess. My family will still be living in Kalsangi, but when I next go home, it'll be to a different house.

I wish we'd known at Christmas; I would have taken more pictures. In recent years, I didn't take so many pictures of the house, because I'd always believed it was the same house I'd always return to; all my family's trails led back to one place. Now, I'm making do with what I can dig up from my computer and my old Multiply account.

If I had to pick just three photos to share, it would be these.

The front door, of course, and the beginning and end of everything (sorry about the light).

My brothers in the sala, before dinner. This space was the most alive part of the house. After I started working, I spent more and more time here than in my own room whenever I was home.

Half of the view from my bedroom window in the morning. It never failed to make me feel glad to be where I was.

When I next go home (I don't know when that will be), someone else will have this view, and I'll have something else to wake up to. I feel a little sick thinking about it.

I had always believed that we would live in our house, and my mom had once told me that we would likely turn down any offer to move to a nicer house. As far as we were concerned, we already had the nicest house in the neighborhood. I'm having trouble understanding now the reasons we have to move.

To me, the house was a physical space that contained my past. While I knew we wouldn't have that space forever, I'd always believed that I'd have time to go back and be the one to empty it. I knew where everything was, waiting for me, and I knew how I'd carry it away. But, I don't get to do that right now. Next time I go home, everything will be in mysterious boxes, or in the wrong box, or on the wrong shelf, and it will feel like visiting a museum of myself that someone else has curated.

When my brother and I got the news, we both told our parents the same thing.

"Don't throw anything away."

Heaven for the Devil in Me

I don't talk often about music because there isn't a lot that I like. During my pre-Internet childhood, the music that found its way to local radio stations was not as varied and, shall we say, "cool" as the music my capital-based peers have in their libraries. Let's just say that Nine Days and Enya were about as far out of the mainstream as you could get, and nobody had a clue how great Bjork really was (But, could you blame us? The "Hunter" video had us all scratching our heads).

So whenever I heard something that I liked, cool or uncool, I latched onto it and, given my music landscape, only it—as an angry teenager, "The Madding Crowd" was the only album I ever played at full blast behind my locked door. The music I loved, I loved fiercely, perhaps because it felt like it had made such a long journey to present itself to me.

I don't know whether it's just the way I am, just my age (the other day, some high schooler on the radio didn't know the words to "Don't Speak"), or actually the way many people really are, but this is still how I acquire music today. Having access now to the immense volume of music out in the world actually makes it even harder for me to find a musician or band that strikes that magic chord inside my tiny little body.

The good music, I've found, tells me a story, and the better music makes me feel like the hero, whether that story's happy or sad. I guess that's kind of escapist, but whose daydreams aren't?

The best music, however, makes me feel capable of anything, right here, right now.

And all that's just to say that I can't get enough of "Ceremonials" by Florence + the Machine.

Sometime last year, I heard "What the Water Gave Me." I had just wrapped myself around Flo's first album, "Lungs," and I was a little afraid of what she was going to do next. The new song took me back to all the afternoons I spent holding my breath under the water, training myself to dive 15 feet without a tank. It felt like my dreams of flying—and when I dream of flying, I feel and move like I'm swimming.

Then, the day before I went home for the All Souls holiday, about two months after my breakup, I heard "Shake It Out," and I just knew that this whole album would be everything I needed to hear.

I finally bought it—bought it!—on Monday, and I haven't been able to stop listening to it. Every damn song makes me feel like I could win a war, even if that war's just with myself.

Heartlines


[image source]

I wish I could go on, but I have to dash off now to meet my dad and brother; we're hiking around Taal Volcano tomorrow. \m/

Life feels awesome right now.

--

Like the new layout? I do. The old one was a little painful to look at. Have a good weekend, everybody.

Back from Mars

On my last day home, I took a walk around Kalsangi by myself.

I ended up somewhere on the golf course between the 9th and 2nd fairways, and as I looked at all the trees and the space and listened to the birds and insects, I was overwhelmed with heartache and loneliness.

Dramatic, maybe, but those are still the best words for the feeling.

I kept thinking of the Martian Manhunter.

Image source: Comics Alliance

I haven't read any of the comics he's appeared in, but in the cartoons, J'onn J'onzz is the last surviving member of his race and now lives on Earth as a superhero.

"Kind of like Superman?" you might ask. Well, yes, and no.

Superman was sent to Earth as a child and grew up more or less an American boy. While he has his own angsty, "I'm too different; no one understands me," moments, to me, they're kind of on the level of the identity crises every young adult goes through.

Martian Manhunter, on the other hand, escaped a horrible plague as an adult. Upon his arrival on Earth, his Martian identity was more or less fully formed.

That's why I think he feels the loss of Mars more keenly than Clark/Kal-El would for a Krypton escaped in infancy, and the alienation, no pun intended, that J'onn experiences among his adopted people must also be much, much higher than Clark's. More than any other superhero, Martian Manhunter is separate from the people he has chosen to live with and protect.

I hope this explains why, as I stood where I took the 360-degree panorama below, three thoughts kept repeating themselves in succession:

1. the magical, fearful, reverent, "I am in a place that is unique in all the world."
2. the slightly more self-centered, "Because I grew up in this place, I am also unique in all the world."
3. the similar, "No matter how long or far I live away from this place, I'll always be like Martian Manhunter."

Click to enlarge.

Hear me out. I know I'm not the only person who grew up in Kalsangi nor the only person who had an idyllic childhood. I'm also deeply aware of the other truths about Kalsangi: it's a middle-upper-middle-class village for a multinational company's senior management, and it has all the comforts of a Manila executive's provincial summer home, year-round. The only thing I really lacked was consistent and prolonged exposure to the larger world outside.

But, that's precisely the reason I'm writing this now, and why I wrote this post last year. That's why I feel like J'onn J'onzz or John (the) Savage, even if on a much smaller scale. No matter how easily I've come to function outside of Kalsangi, I've never felt like "one of the people." I may be thriving and even happy in Metro Manila, but it never feels like home.

Maybe the best way to explain the feeling is not to see myself as a born Martian, like J'onn J'onzz, but a made Martian, like the children of "The Million Year Picnic."

Imagine that Martian Manhunter helped a bunch of Earth scientists set up a colony on his wasted home planet. That environment would be both manmade and wild, reachable and isolated, comfortable and spare—all the things I knew Kalsangi to be, at least before Internet access, better cable TV, and Gensan's current economic boom. Imagine that human families had children and raised them in that colony. Barring books and a few field trips every now and then, that would be all the world to those children.

Then, imagine that some of those children were told to leave, to go "home" to Earth and make a new life for themselves there. Imagine the taunts and the funny looks they'd get because of their diction, their cultural clumsiness, and their general lack of fashion sense. They would be expected to do and talk and live as their fellow Earthlings—it should be easy, as Earthlings!

Except, inside, they would also be Martians, always and forever.

I can see my house from here.

Swing Seven

This photo I took of my youngest cousin Paolo at his seventh birthday party last Saturday has me near tears, for reasons I can't openly share.

Oh, little man, always swinging between tearful brooding and deafening exuberance. May your childhood be awesome. May you often, if not always, be this happy. May there always be someone to catch you regardless. It will be okay.

30 Days of Books: Honorable Mentions

After a while, I started to get tired of that 30 Days of Books meme. I kept mentioning the same books and authors over and over because they seemed the best fit for those categories, but that meant not writing about a lot of other books that I've also enjoyed. It also seemed really limited to YA books or books I'd read growing up, because those still have the strongest memories.

So, here's a list of some books I've read in the last two or three years, plus the categories I'd invent just for them.

"A Visit From the Goon Squad," by Jennifer Egan
A trendy book I liked more than I thought I would (I loved it)

"The Martian Chronicles," by Ray Bradbury
Favorite short story anthology

"The Lathe of Heaven," by Ursula K. Le Guin
Sci-fi novel I wish I could emulate

"White Oleander," by Janet Fitch
Realistic novel I wish I could emulate / A book that reminds me of a place from my childhood (California)

"Persepolis," by Marjane Satrapi
A book that makes me homesick

"Einstein's Dreams," by Alan Lightman
Framework I wish I could pull off

"Shopgirl," by Steve Martin
A book that exceeded my expectations / Favorite melancholy book

"The Napoleon of Notting Hill," by GK Chesterton
Favorite old fantasy

"The Lady or the Tiger, and Other Short Stories," by Frank R. Stockton
A book I'm saving for my children (one of many, really)

"Good Omens," by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Favorite religion-related book / A book that reminds me of childhood

"The Little Prince," by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A book that helps keep me in check

"The Know-It-All" and "The Year of Living Biblically," both by AJ Jacobs
Favorite contemporary autobiographies / Books in the style I'd probably use if I ever got around to writing an autobiography

"Stargirl," by Jerry Spinelli
Protagonist I wished I was more like as a teenager

"Shabanu" and "Haveli," both by Suzanne Fisher Staples
Favorite YA realistic fiction

"Brief Lives," by Neil Gaiman
Favorite graphic novel in a series of graphic novels

"Ang Mundo ni Andong Agimat," by Arnold Arre
Graphic novel I wish I could emulate

"The Graveyard Book," by Neil Gaiman
Favorite YA book that I first read after I'd already turned 20

30 Days of Books: Days 24-30

This is the last post in my 30 Days of Books meme. Earlier posts: Days 1-7, Days 8-14, Days 15-21, and Day 23.

30 Days of Books: Day 23 - Why Bookstores Hurt

The entry for Day 23 got so long that I decided it should get this post all to itself.

Earlier posts in this meme: Days 1-7, Days 8-14, and Days 15-21. See you tomorrow.

--

Day 23 – A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t

(28 July 2011) I'm between yearnings at the moment. I've either read or lost interest in unread books that interested me, and I haven't been interested in anything else lately.

I think I'm going through what Martin calls book fatigue, though my definition is probably different. I hear about something interesting--a series, comics, "serious" "literature," "fluff," science nonfiction--maybe see it on a bookstore shelf, read the blurb, think of the books that are like it, think of the books I already have, think of the books people will probably write in a similar vein, and then ask myself, "Well, what's the point of getting this one, then?"

I'm a bit worn down, too, by the feeling that I have to catch up with what everyone else is reading--ridiculous and bad for the self-esteem, but there it is--especially when film adaptations are forthcoming. It's similar to the feeling that I'm missing out by not having read all the "important" books that my language teachers' language teachers insisted one had to read to be considered cultured.

It's wonderful having access to all Manila's well-stocked bookstores today, and it's nice having a salary that would afford me several new books a month if I wanted. That's the thing, though; I don't want any, and that makes me sad. It's been about a year, I think, since I simply wandered into a bookstore, saw something interesting, and knew I just had to have it--that book was "The Arrival," by Shaun Tan--and I really miss that kind of obsession.

Part of me wants to go back to that point in my life when there were no decent stores for miles around. I would save my allowance for the occasional trip to Davao, where we would go into the only National Bookstore outlet in three or five surrounding provinces--how tiny that place looks now--and I would squat in front of the YA shelf for hours, agonizing over which would be the one book I'd get to take home. It often happened that I hadn't saved enough, so I'd have to wait until the next trip to Davao, during which I'd be hoping against hope that no one else had wanted that book while I was away.

If I couldn't buy books, I depended on rereading what I already had; on the school library, which was really good for a place so isolated; on friends like Mariel, who somehow always managed (and still does) to get her hands on good stuff--it was thanks to her that I read about Claidi and Harry Potter; and on birthday and Christmas gifts from people who knew how much I loved to read. I don't think my parents or grandparents know how much their gifts meant to me; I don't think I really did, either, until I was older.

Having grown up that way, that hungry, I felt a great rage, like a terrible injustice had been done to me as a child, when I walked into the new Fully Booked in my birthplace last year.

And knowing that I was once so starved for good things to read makes my current aversion to acquiring new books even more disturbing. Maybe I can make the highly dubious claim that today's books aren't as great. Maybe I've been letting others' literary chatter get to me, and I can no longer pick something without wondering whether people are talking about it on Twitter. Maybe I just got so stingy growing up that having thousands more choices today makes buying a new book even more difficult.

Yeah, I bet that's it. Books have entailed such huge personal (and not entirely financial) investment for so long that I'm afraid of making the wrong choice out of all possible choices--that's why the giant Fully Booked in Fort Bonifacio terrifies me. Even if my wallet can now afford it, my twelve-year-old heart still can't.

I guess until I get over that, I'll wait for something to seize me the way "The Arrival" did, piercing through all those layers of fear and getting to the little twerp who read because reading itself was awesome, and stories were just plain good.

--

All that said, I recently started reading George R. R. Martin's "A Game of Thrones," and I like it so far. That counts as something interesting I haven't read yet, right?

Toy Stories

We caught "Toy Story 3" last Friday, and while I enjoyed it, I have to say that I still like the previous two movies better. I think it's the months of hype that pushed my expectations so high. I should sit down and watch it again when it all dies down--that's always how I best enjoyed the previous two movies, anyway: on the living room floor with my brothers, surrounded by their toys.

The movie did get me thinking about my own toys, though; the ones that are still stashed somewhere in my room at home and waiting for me to have kids so they can come out again. This is a list of the ones that stand out in my memory. (I wish I had pictures, but I'm not home right now to take them.)

Faded pink teddy bear. I stubbornly held on to this one, not because I actually had any strong attachment to it--I didn't even play with it that much--but because something in the back of my mind told me, "You have to have something that you've had since nursery school. All the life stories you've heard have someone holding onto something they've had since nursery school."

Sparkly purple teddy bear. Kind of itchy and not even that soft. I remember this because it was one of the first toys my parents got me when we'd first moved to the States. We were still living in the San Joaquin Hotel and our stuff hadn't arrived yet, so my brother and I picked out a few toys from the Salvation Army.

Big box of Lego. My brother Mikko and I shared this toy, also since our San Joaquin days. The space in front of the TV where we watched Nick Jr. (I still know the words to that "Red, red, red ball" song) was littered with these pieces. He liked to build his own stuff while I liked to copy the models on the box's cover. It became kind of a tradition between the two of us to play with these Legos on Christmas mornings while waiting for our parents to wake up. Over the years, though, the bricks were assimilated into the rest of my brothers' Lego collection.

Polly Pocket. I collected a lot of these, getting some of them as gifts and buying the rest with my weekly $1 allowance. My favorites were a small purple horse trailer with a saddled chocolate-colored horse that Polly could ride, the babysitting playset, the school, the mansion, and the ice cream parlor. A recurring storyline involved the floppy brown-haired one turning evil, taking over the town, stealing Polly's boyfriend--the only male figurine in my entire collection--and making everyone wear cement clothes.

Barbie. No girl's toy list is complete without this chick. I had several of the older model, before they adjusted her vital statistics to make her body more realistic. I also had the flat-chested, Skipper who didn't smile. To be honest, I didn't care how small her waistline or how big her boobs were; I just liked giving Barbie things to do in the wooden dollhouse my parents gave me. She had mostly G-rated adventures, until an older playmate took things to soap opera proportions one afternoon by introducing a teen pregnancy storyline for Babysitter Skipper. I feel somewhat traumatized on my dolls' behalf because of this.

Not really a toy: four ballerina figurines. Because they looked alike, they were sisters in my stories. The protagonist was a sitting ballerina (explained by a crippling injury), the least maarte-looking of the four. She was in love with a yellow yarn marionette I'd made. I later made a red one to play the part of lecherous antagonist.

Paradisa Lego sets (the girl-oriented Lego). I'd steal some of my brothers' bricks and male minifigs to stage pirate raids on the Paradisa resort. I had a heroine on a jetski. I was always annoyed with my youngest brother for messing up my playspace, so when I got older, I let him have the Paradisa pieces. I kind of regret this whenever I go home, go to his room, and see them gathering dust on his bookshelf.

Brown stuffed rabbit. My favorite stuffed toy to hug. Mom got him from the thrift store and was supposed to donate him along with a bunch of other toys, but I "borrowed" him from the pile and never gave him back. When I left for college, he and many other toys were hidden in the cupboard above my closet so my mom wouldn't give him away.

a Bratz Jade doll. Jade was the last doll I ever got. I was already in high school, so this cool-looking teen doll with a gang of equally cool friends appealed to me. With her sneakers and casual outfit, I made Jade out to be the athletic girl-next-door and got one of the male Bratz, Dylan, to play her fun boyfriend. But I lost all interest when the Bratz makers put out all those outrageous themed outfits and ditzy movies where Jade was a fashionista, her friends were all screeching caricatures, and Dylan was a useless goofball.