Postcards from the blocky desert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

thing-a-week 28, 29, 30, 31, 32: Excuses and My Lumpy Heart

I'm truly sorry that I haven't been able to keep up this series in the past month or so.

I could blame this on several things. It took me a couple of weeks, for instance, to find and then move my things into a new apartment. That was last month, though, and my things still aren't unpacked. I'm not actually living in the place yet because the bolts that hold my bed together got lost in the last move, so I'm still going through hardware stores and looking for right-sized replacements. And in the meantime, I'm still lodging with friends, making a longer commute, and being tired.

I wrote in June that I liked the extra time that my new work hours gave me, but these days, I spend more of that extra time just spacing out, emptying my head from the night before and recovering just enough for the one ahead.

And while I tell myself that I should be glad for the rest, I also know that making things helps me to rest, and I just haven't made enough time to make things.

For week 28, I made two flexagons with abstract designs. I actually worked on them at the office while waiting for each day's editorial meeting, cutting and folding and drawing a little each day.

Unfortunately, they just disappeared from my desk one morning or evening. Either I actually slipped them into a book or notebook to work on elsewhere and then simply lost them, or someone found them interesting and took them, like they took two of my modular hassocks.

As for week 29, sorry to subject you to more of my abysmal drawing skills, but all I have to show for that week is this drawing of a land hermit crab.

Sometimes, Cris and I listen to trivia podcast Good Job Brain in the car together, and one episode explained how land hermit crabs swap shells. We happened to be surrounded by SUVs then, so I started to imagine a not-so-distant future where land hermit crabs are hulking monsters. They use hollowed out cars as shells and trade up as they grow, from VW beetles to hummers and even buses and container vans. For entertainment, people go to arenas to watch the crabs fight for bigger shells.

For this drawing, I used a photo of a crab as a reference but was too lazy to put more work into the SUV. Perhaps once I have a story fleshed out, I can ask a more talented friend to illustrate.

Week 30 was the worst. I was supposed to complete my Processing project that week but ended up resigning the whole course. While I liked my project idea, the course itself no longer held my interest; its objectives were more and more clearly different from my own. So, I decided to just remember the sunk cost fallacy, quit the course, recover from my burnout, and save my project for another day.

All I have to offer for week 30, then, is a screenshot of some of the code I worked on while I was still working on it.

I don't know if you'd count the code, so I don't know if you'd count what I made in week 31, either.

I recently joined a Facebook group of fellow former Glitch players. I thought my stay wouldn't be long, but it turns out that there are many other people who also still feel sad that Glitch is gone, however silly it might seem to have so much feeling for a closed computer game. There's just nothing like it out there.

One day, a game developer invited the group to test a new game, Manyland. While the game wasn't going to be anything like Glitch, the developers had heard about the culture of Glitch players and were hoping we could bring some of that to the game.

So, week 31 saw me testing Manyland when I could. I can best describe it as a two-dimensional LEGO, though Minecraft players say it's like Minecraft. It is lots of fun but kind of lonely; perhaps due to lack of other players and a map, it gets existential fast — where am I? Why am I here? Where does this world end? If I build a platform far enough, will I go all the way around to where I began?

One of the first things I built was this simple brick box house with an underground swimming cavern and tiny wine cellar:

Click to enlarge. Photobucket messes with image URLs as links, so you might have to click on a couple of magnifying glasses to see this at actual size.

You can actually change the color of the sky, and the colors blend as you move across the screen, but when you take screenshots, you get just the color of the sky (and any translucent things, like water) based on your current position. The little gnome-like person in this assembled screenshots is actually me.

If you prefer something more traditional than code or digital building, then week 31 was also when I started work on the craft for week 32:

Week 32 was a nice return to paper. One of the secretaries at work used to spend her free time on complex, three-dimensional paper models of video game and cartoon characters. I wanted to try one of those but didn't want just any model. When I saw the Paper Torso by Horst Kiechle, it felt best for me.

I printed out the template of a human heart; the pieces took up about eight-and-a-half sheets of letter-size paper, and I did the cutting and folding in my spare time. I then glued all the pieces together in about three hours yesterday.

Photos of the resulting heart are below. It is pretty lumpy for several reasons: I cut next to some of the lines and not on them, and not all of my cuts were straight, so some of the triangles did not fit each other the way they were supposed to. I also used regular bond paper, which absorbed moisture from all the rain we've had lately and thus made the whole thing softer and easier to dent. While assembling the valves, I found I'd inverted a section and so had to push and pull it without tearing the whole thing apart.

But, it's mine, and I am happy to have made it, lumps and all.

Please excuse the awkward hand poses. I needed to keep a hold on the heart, but not too tightly, or I would have crushed it.

This project was lots of fun but also kind of weird. I knew what it was supposed to look like, and I knew that it was taking shape, but only when I had the whole thing in my hands did I think, This is a heart. I stood with it in front of a mirror just to see how big it was, and I somehow felt very small, cradling a white paper heart in my palms against my pink shirt.

I am thinking of doing lungs next, even if I don't even know what to do with the heart now.

The heart template is just one in a set of templates to build a neutered human torso. There are more templates on Mr. Kiechle's Paper Torso website; feel free to share with students, crafty doctors, and anybody else who might like the idea of making human organs out of paper.

Other stuff I feel like sharing: this waterfall cabin I built in Manyland, accessible only by falling into the water and swimming down (water is weird in Manyland) and exit-able only by magic wind. Unless you cheat and build ladders or platforms, any other way brings death.

Click to enlarge.

I also built this temple, but in hindsight, the color of the bricks I used makes the whole thing look like something else; something less, uh, temple-y.

The magic wind from the cabin will actually bring you here; you pop out of the gap on the right, next to the cacti.

Click to enlarge.

I don't actually get to play Manyland that often; I only play it at home, and it depends on how I'm feeling. But it is lots of fun, and as the game is still in its early stages, the developers are quite reachable for help, feedback, and bug reports. If any of you get to play, my username is kalsangikid.

thing-a-week 20, 21, 22: macrame, sketches, Liana's birthday card + bonus origami vandalism

Week 20 saw me really busy, packing and moving out of my apartment. I had to stow my craft supplies for a while, but I managed to hang on to this bit of blue cloth, which I used to make another macrame bracelet.

It looks like any other rag, but it happens to be symbolic to me. The original length of cloth was used to tie up the new mattress I got from an outlet store, just a few weeks after I first moved into the apartment and maybe a month or so into my relationship with Cris. I remember feeling pretty grateful that day, that I could afford a little lifestyle upgrade and that I had someone like Cris to help me, even if he didn't have to. Physically and symbolically, the mattress was a nice step up from the old, sunken one I'd borrowed from my grandmother when I'd first moved into an apartment, now five years ago.

I also used a bit of the cloth in designing the cover of a journal that I completed in the apartment. Consider the fact that I hung on to the cloth for so long as proof of how big a hoarder I am sentimental I can be. (I still have a little more!)

Week 21 was difficult; the apartment I'm moving into next isn't actually finished yet, so I'm staying with friends for now. I made these sketches of kirigami models to illustrate verses from "The Black Riders and Other Lines," by Stephen Crane. But, the longer commute to and from my friends' place means less time to draft, cut, and fold models these days, so the sketches had to do for last week. I also couldn't find my craft knife; I should have set it aside during the move.

Today is my officemate Liana's birthday, so I made her this card. Liana loves dogs, and her family lost their beloved yellow labrador, Charlie, sometime ago. It looks like a lhasa apso puppy will be joining them this year, though.

To make up for the weeks I posted sketches, I learned a new modular origami unit that uses business cards instead of square papers.

I also learned that people in the origami community (!) can be pretty protective of models they claim to have discovered first, and because I learned the folds from Malachi Brown's website, I might be considered an origami vandal. (If you like, you can click on that link, and we can be vandals together.)

In grade school, I first learned origami from older kids who had books and who most definitely did not write to the authors of those books to ask permission to teach other kids how to fold the different models. All this time, I've experienced origami as a fun kind of geometry — everyone can learn geometry; there's no law against teaching each other math that happens to make flapping birds and inflatable paper balloons that inevitably get soaked with saliva at the blowhole.

I can understand how you might want something you've discovered all on your own to stay your own, but I don't see Pythagoras's estate chasing down everyone who wants to calculate the distance between two points, or Einstein's lawyers filing claims against every last t-shirt with E = m * c ** 2 on it.

But, okay, for the sake of attribution, an origami person (folder? craftsperson? artisan? artist?) named Valerie Vann claims to have discovered the base unit for the models I'm showing here. I did this for fun, not for profit.

Here are three hassocks, so called because they're cushion-shaped, and an icosadodecahedron. Oddly enough, I couldn't figure out how to make the pentagon hassock until I'd figured out the icosadodecahedron. There is also an octahedron in the back that uses a unit by Jennifer Campbell, but based on Mr. Brown's website, she doesn't seem as possessive of her discovery.

Perhaps this is a waste of business cards, but you'll have to take it up with the people who make them in such big batches. I didn't give out half of these before they became outdated.

Letter No. 20

I have a striped green, black, and white dress with pockets that I like to wear only occasionally, when it's a particularly special day, when I want a little confidence boost, or when I have a meeting with a client on whom I want to make certain impressions: "I'm professional enough to dress well, but young enough to avoid anything resembling your suit."

I don't have a lot of clothes, so maybe that makes it easy for me to remember which shirt or dress I wore on a particularly memorable day. For instance, I can remember that the shirt I wore yesterday is also the shirt I was wearing when Cris first asked me out. It's also the shirt I was wearing two years ago, when my former boss told me that she was leaving, and I was going to take over (like I said, I don't have a lot of clothes).

I wore my striped dress the other day, on one of the longest working days I've had in a while. Something bad happened at work, it was nobody's fault*, but because I was the one who had to make the required emergency request, I felt burnt down. While heading out to meet Cris and smother my fatigue with Chickenjoy, I remembered that it was also the dress I wore on the day I described in this blog entry, which sounds like whining about Makati rush hour but really came from the middle of being burned down by everything at once.

I wondered idly if my dress could be cursed. But, I quickly remembered that I also wore this dress on my birthday last year, on one of the most magical days I've ever had.

Last year, after the last big fire, I also reacted differently. I wanted to leave my job and possibly even leave the country. This year, I just wanted to get some fried chicken and gravy and then go home.

Maybe it's because I was actually near home, and sitting in my office instead of slogging through torrential rain like last year. But for better or for worse, I've learned to care less.

There is only so much you can do when you're trying to do your job, and only so much you can control when, while you're a boss of some sort, you're not the boss of the unpredictable, unreliable factors and non-coworkers on which your team's final output depends. I've learned to set my jaw and just make sure no one can say we're not doing our job, even as everything around us is, well, on fire. And sure, I've made a few mistakes here and there, but nothing so disastrous as to merit punishment other than the mental beating I give myself. Nobody's perfect, and when you're juggling all kinds of demands, you're bound to drop something.

Maybe it sounds careless, but it's a result of having learned to care less. At some point, getting worked up about what's gone wrong is just beating a dead horse. There's a handy little diagram that I saw floating around the Internet a long time ago, and I printed it out and stuck it on our office door, right under a souvenir from a former colleague:

Over time, I've taken this to heart. You do what you can do about a problem, and then you don't worry about it anymore. It's kept me from losing my shit completely, especially on days like yesterday, which was even worse than the day before.

The people we couldn't blame* kept us at the office, fighting fires, till around 10 at night. I hung around waiting for Cris outside. For the first time, I was the last person on the newspaper staff to leave the building. Even the senior editors had gone home hours before our team did. The guard turned the lights out after I went outside. The wind blew cold and hard, and I played games on my phone. Then, Cris arrived, we got KFC drive-thru, and he drove me home.

It's no use letting some bad juju ruin a favorite shirt, or a perfectly good dress.

--
* It really was somebody's fault, but they got to wear the immunity necklace and could not be voted off the island.

thing-a-week 16: tunnel book

This is my first attempt at a tunnel book. It was my original plan for part of an anniversary gift, but I went with something else instead. :) I'm not going to share photos of that, though, so you get this tunnel book.

The top-view photo is actually older; you can see in the front-view photo that the flaps in the back have been cut off.

Tunnel books can be flattened for storage. Some of them have cover flaps — which I guess is why they're called "books", but I opted to leave this open. You can read more about tunnel books on Wikipedia.

The scene, for those of you who may not be familiar with the place, is inspired by the Kalsangi golf course and its view of Mt. Matutum.

Leavings: :D

thing-a-week 15: Eush and Vikki's birthday cards

There sure have been a lot of birthdays around here.

These amateurish thaumatropes were my cards for former co-workers Eush and Vikki. I was supposed to see them Monday for a reunion/birthday dinner, but work kept me late at the office. Oh, well.

I will probably redo Vikki's, because thaumatropes are supposed to have the same background on both sides.

Letter No. 19: Moonscapes and Postcards

My camera's pictures tend to look foggy or gray, no matter how I fiddle with the settings, so I usually fix the colors on a computer before uploading.

While working on my photos from the Easter weekend, I found myself pushing the saturation sliders farther than l usually do. Yes, it's a simple trick; similar effects are so used in apps like instagram that it can be cooler to scoff at them than to even think of using them. But when you like something, you like something.

So I like how a little desaturation can make descending through the clouds look a little lonelier, & a lot can make a swimming pool disappear, or a tree seem it's on the moon.

Oversaturation, on the other hand, can set quiet grass on fire.

And of course, there's the vintage effect, where desaturation makes a photo look older and overSaturation recalls the travel posters of the early 20th century.

Technology is a big help, of course; it gives me the benefits of techniques that older photographers had to learn with film cameras and darkrooms. But while software, whether smartphone app or desktop program, has been this big equalizer, it's also given me better appreciation for both amateur and professional photographers who choose unique subjects and angles.

Online photo essay feeds such as the excellent TIME Lightbox also gift me with access to photographers and photos I might never have seen otherwise. And when these lensmen and women are quoted about their work, I understand it a little better and, in turn, start to ask myself what I'm looking for within the frame of my own humble point-and-shoot.

Returning to saturation, I've also come to appreciate black-and-white better. Silence replaces fussing over correct hues when they are gone altogether, leaving only the subject as it was and how you decided to look at, frame, and remember it that day. By removing color, you see light, movement, & texture better and thus experience the image — interact with the subject — more intimately.

Perhaps because black-and-white is associated with age, it brings temporality to the fore of a photo. The lack of color makes me see the way my father's skin rests on his cheekbones; what that means can't be far behind.

In black-and-white, landscapes are starker but also more alien, more removed from you in time as well as space. Without color or caption, this Sebastião Salgado photo might as well be of something on Mars, and there's no real telling when it might have been taken.

It's an obvious conclusion, and others have arrived at it before: photos are images of past people and places; postcards to yourself from a previous point in time. The moment after you take a photo of a hillside, the hillside is already different; blades of grass, the branches, and the farmer have all moved on, into the future. How much more different will it be if you get to go back a year, five years, decades from now?

I don't always get to go back. In my case, desaturating, de-coloring my photos heightens the sadness I feel over leaving; it drives in deeper the idea that the images and their contents are forever behind me. I will never see the sea, the sky, these trees, or my brothers this way again.

It's a mood thing. My usual pre-upload process actually includes increasing the saturation of my photos, making them brighter and more alive, filling in the gap between fog and inaccurate white balance on one side and memory and reality on the other. I miss my family.

thing-a-week 2: Postcard and photo wallhanging

I've collected a bunch of neat postcards and old photos, and I wanted to put them up on my wall somehow.

Featured here are:

• four big black-and-white postcards from Beijing
• one colored postcard depicting rickshaw drivers, also from Beijing
• photos of India and Tokyo by Isagani Campo
• a mysterious photo of the Luneta Grandstand
• tiger and palm postcards from the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, plus the brown envelope
• a postcard depicting the German moped, the NSU Quickly

The bar is part of a defective shower curtain rod that I covered in paper and then painted with blue poster paint.

I'm not entirely happy with how the whole thing turned out, though. I like the sleeves, but I'd like some alternative to the rod and the string.

Till next week, then.

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.

Hi/Hay, Mom

I know June is the month of Father's Day, but it's also the month of my parents' wedding anniversary, and after spending the day with both of them yesterday, I find myself thinking of my mom.

The morning of my parents' anniversary last week, I was scanning some of my paternal grandmother's old photos. Among the albums, I found this photo of Mom and Dad outside my maternal grandparents' house in Dumaguete. On the back of the photo, my lola's loopy cursive let me know that this was taken in April 1987, just two months before my parents' first wedding anniversary and about halfway through Mom's pregnancy with me.

There was also this photo of her sitting in the shade outside Silliman Church. I think her belly is a little more visible here, but then again, it could just be the dress; Mom was pretty skinny until much, much later.

I guess this is the earliest known photo of us together.

People often tell me that I look like my mom in miniature. On more than one occasion, I've stood in front of her old classmates and received a look of both recognition and bewilderment, perhaps as though they're being visited by the Linda of their Silliman days.

Christmas, two years ago.

But, I've always had mixed feelings about the fact that our physical resemblance is pretty much where our similarities end.

Mom likes pop ballads, romantic comedies, shopping (especially for bags and shoes), bright floral prints, Piolo Pascual, Martha Stewart-y things, and keeping up a busy social and civic life.

I like alternative music, action movies and dramas (and cartoons, which are really both), not shopping, subdued colors, not being a big fan of celebrities in general, TheMarySue/Boingboing things, and holing up in my room with a book.

I like who I am and what I like, but I have this weird guilt knowing that my mom had only one daughter, and that daughter wasn't very interested in the things she liked. I sometimes wish my sister had been born, just so my mom could have had a girl who appreciated kikay-ness better.

When I was growing up, my mom and I didn't get along very well. It wasn't just that we had different interests; I also wasn't a very agreeable child.

That's the face of a rebel right there.

I was satisfied with my grades and my relatively high rank, so I resented Mom for nagging me to study more. I had few friends and wasn't interested in making more, so I resented Mom for telling me to go out and join my classmates at parties, where I just sat in a corner and spaced out, wishing I were home with my books.

I grumbled whenever I had to wear makeup for anything, I could never keep my room clean enough for her standards, and I cringed at some of the things she got me to wear to church on Sundays. I guess it's a classic case of mother and daughter butting heads over her telling me what to do, but we just clashed so much over the years that it was hard for me to be grateful for the things she "got right."

For instance, she picked most of my Christmas gifts "from Mom and Dad" over the years, and some of the books she got me are still favorites today. She was there when we got every pair of sneakers I've ever liked, including the ones I've been wearing for the past two years. In fact, every birthday and Christmas gift she's gotten me, though I may not have liked every one, was clearly chosen with love.

She also baked me a chocolate cake from scratch for one particularly special birthday. Today, I can no longer remember why I thought it was a special birthday, but I still remember the fact that she made me that delicious cake.

When I ended up being the only girl without a date to the junior prom, I think she was partly responsible for finding me one among Gensan's rich sons. That prom night was horrible, but, looking back now, I appreciated her help.

She also helped plan my sweet 16, which was one traditionally girly thing that I wanted because going away to college meant I wouldn't be home for a debut. When I did turn 18, she flew to Manila to spend that birthday with me, even if it was a weekday and I had an accounting exam the next day.

Compared with a lot of moms, she was actually pretty liberal with me. She let me cover one wall of my room with all my teenage ranting. When I asked her in one of our bigger fights to just leave me alone, she actually did for a few months. She let my first boyfriend come over all the time, and she didn't set me a curfew on that last night I saw him, before I left for Manila.

I know from schoolmates that parents have ways of trying to control their children even from far away, so even the fact that I've been independent for the past couple of years is sort of her and Dad's doing (or not-doing) as well as mine.

She's also there for me whenever I do want to hear her opinion, even if only through emails and phone calls. She was the one to tell me that that first boyfriend was cheating on me. She's shared stories of her own college years and 20s, and those stories have helped me feel both more normal and more unique, if that makes any sense.

So really, I'm disappointed in myself because until now, my knee-jerk reaction whenever she suggests something is to be cranky and defensive. My answers to, "You should get this dress," "Why don't you put the cabinet over there?" and even, "You should pick out a good table [which I will pay for] for your new apartment," are unnecessarily terse. Somewhere deep down, there's a 15-year-old girl who still thinks, "Mom doesn't understand me," or, "Mom doesn't know what I like."

Too late, I remind myself, "Mom loves me," "Mom wants to bond with me," and, "Mom just wants to make sure I'm okay," — and that sometimes, "okay" just means I have a rice cooker, some nice kitchen towels, and a good boyfriend who may or may not look like Piolo Pascual.

I love you, Mom. I'm really glad I'm your daughter, too.

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.