Nostalgia for sale: 50 pesos lang.

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Needless to say, LP shopping at Cubao X with Kael was a success.

You will forget. Write it down before you do.

So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

i.e., why I love my job

No matter how tired I am by the end of the day, I take heart in the certainty that without fail, a kid is going to make me laugh out loud tomorrow.

To you {yes, you!}, dear reader: I hope today brings you laughter. Or that you will bring laughter to someone.

Oh, and happy friday the 13th. Let’s look forward to the weekend {weekend!} and dance like nobody’s watching, yo.

Above all, silence and gratitude.

From the Point of View of the Google’s GeoEye-1 Satellite {as it zooms in on an unnamed neighborhood in Hyde Park}–

People are counting down to the first second of the new year, and no shots are being fired blindly in the dark.

10, 9, 8

No children clutch sparklers, no brilliant golden showers adorn the skies like fleeting weeping willows. There is no ear-piercing ratatatatat of the Judas belt, and the air smells of dead leaves, not gunpowder.

7, 6, 5

Inside houses, champagne glasses are ready to be clinked in unison, auld acquaintances have found the perfect excuse (i.e. New Year drunkenness) to make out with each other, and fists are being pumped in the air to the beat of Super Bass.

4, 3, 2

One of these houses is empty, save for a pajama-clad, messy haired girl drinking a bottle of oatmeal stout, bundled up in a quilt on the couch. She is– to quote a phrase her father once used to describe her after he tucked her in bed– snug as a bug in a rug. Her toes are toasty and she is gloriously, shamelessly tipsy.

Do not judge her reclusiveness, her seeming misanthropy. If you could read her thoughts, Dear Google Satellite, you would hear these words, brimming with gratitude:

this is how it should be.

this is exactly how it should be.

1 !

Typhoon Sendong has ravaged Northern Mindanao and caused the deaths of more than a thousand people as of press time. Parts of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan are virtual ghost towns; bodies are lined up on the street, homes have been destroyed, and the people now face the impending problems of hunger and disease. This is something that has shaken me to the core, as I know so many people whose lives have  been forever changed by this tragedy.

I would like to invite the few of you who pass by here from time to time to donate to the victims of the typhoon.

Those who wish to send donations in kind , you may send them via air freight addressed to:

CP Nonong B. Palabrica
St. Mary’s School
Mandumol, Macasandig,Cagayan de Oro City
Cellphone:
(SMART) 09208507755
(Globe) 09178512727

For cash donations, please send to this account:
SMS Relief Operations
Account No. 374-034911-2
ChinaBank
CDO Divisoria Branch

:)

Could it be? Yes, it could.
Something’s coming, something good,
If I can wait!
Something’s coming, I don’t know what it is,
But it is
Gonna be great!

Special thanks to the homily of Fr. Jojo Magadia, which inspired this post. 

Reading in Public Places: Post #1

I have realized that seeing people reading books in public places is one of my favorite things in the world, so I’ve decided to document each occurrence.

December 10, 2011 (while waiting for my order at Kenny Roger’s Katipunan):

a fortysomething mother is reading Tall Story by Candy Gourlay—

in between bites of frozen yogurt. Her bespectacled, frizzy haired daughter is solving a Sudoku puzzle. Her husband sits there, checking his phone.

They are all in their own worlds.

I wasn’t struck by their disconnectedness or lack of personal engagement (Mikael’s words, not mine. Because honestly, I found their ability to sit in silence together rather moving ), but by that monstrosity of a book cover.

Srsly.

This was me, many many years ago.

I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.
—Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

Assignment #1: My summer vacation

   A letter from me to Mikael. Click  panels to embiggen, friends.

Confessions of a Not-so-Low-Profile EmoGirl

Kumareng Xenia: Bakit may mga emo posts ka sa blog mo? Whazzup.                me: HUH? Emo ba ako?                                                                                                                      Of course not.

(checks the blog, sees references to The Nestea Plunge as the cure to a bad day, friends with tumors, and lovers being killed in car crashes.)

me: Ah. Chorva lang yan.

***

The truth is, I’ve always been a little too in love with sadness. Pain (real or imagined) is the ink to my quill, yo. The fuel to my meandering train of thought. The Blarney Stone to my sluggish, inarticulate tongue. I admit it. It’s no big secret that I’ve been known to indulge in Public Displays of Sadness– heck, just check out  the latest post in my tumblr blog ( Which is, as of press time, a quote from C. Milosz: “I have read many books but I don’t believe them. When it hurts, we return to the banks of certain rivers.”) or, I don’t know, the insides of my high school notebooks, riddled with lines from my favorite Depressed Peepz–

Thom Yorke: I want to be someone else or I’ll explode 

(unpunctuated, and in distressed letters, for greater effect)

Kurt Cobain: I think I’m dumb. Maybe just happy.

(CRINGE.)

Angela Chase: School is a battlefield for the heart. 

(DOUBLE CRINGE.)

Eddie Vedder:  I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life, I know you’ll be a star, in somebody else’s sky, but why.

Why,

why

can’t it be,

why can’t it be mine? 

(CRINGE TO THE INFINITE POWER. Truth be told, I think this was written in the margins of my Ph103 binder  I.E. when I was SENIOR –NAY, SUPER-SENIOR!–IN COLLEGE. Possibly during my Paolo Fabregas phase. No kidding, Bree Sharp’s David Duchovny (Why won’t you love me?) would automatically play in my mind when I saw him on campus. With all the references to D.D. being substituted with “Paolo Fabregas”, of course.

{Although yeahhhh. David Duchovny. That is one fine man.})

Now, if you think my online journals and my school notebooks are somewhat (to use that exceedingly anti-feminist but oh-so-descriptive word) histrionic,  then I don’t even know how you’d respond to the SuperDuperSecret Diaries of Mary Margaret Louise, aged- 9-present,  (aka The Chronicles of a Girl Convinced of her own Misery aka The Ultimate Goldmine of Overblown Drama aka You’d think Judy Ann’s Mara had nothing on Me ). I swear, if you were to  pick up any of my tattered diaries and open up to a arbitrary page, chances are you’d read melodramatic nuggets like these:

EXHIBIT A. Me, age 9, depressed by my premature menarche:

This is what Anne Frank had to say about menstruation:

“I think what is happening to me is so wonderful, and not only what can be seen on my body, but all that is taking place inside. I never discuss myself or any of these things with anybody; that is why I have to talk to myself about them.

Each time I have a period-and that had only been three times-I have the feling that in spite of all the pain, unpleasantness, and nastiness, I have a sweet secret, and that is why, although it is nothing but a nuisance to me in a way, I always long for the time that I shall feel that secret within me again.”

I have no idea what Anne is talking about. THIS HURTS, I hate being a girl and I certainly don’t feel like I have  “sweet secret.”

EXHIBIT B.  Me, age 12, prohibited by my dad to go to the mall to watch The Lion King with my fellow brace faced, messy-haired tweens:

ANYONE STILL WONDERING IF HITLER FATHERED A SON? MYSTERY SOLVED! HIS PROGENY IS ALIVE AND WELL IN CAGAYAN DE ORO!           

(Underneath this: a sketch of my father sporting a Hitlerstache, an SS uniform and a swastika arm band)

EXHIBIT C. Me, age 14, having just discovered that the word “awning” was a synonym for “canopy” or “shelter”–

 There is an invisible awning of sadness that hovers over the three of us tonight. Its the only thing that gives us shelter at this point.

(and in the margins, some words written when I was in college.: YAAAAAAAAK. Why am I such a pretentious little twerp?)

EXHIBIT D. Me, age 16, after a string of deaths in the family:

A Personal response to Emily Dickinson’s After a Great Pain, A Formal Feeling comes–

Dear Emily:

Fuck it. There’s no metaphor for grief.

Maggie

EXHIBIT E. Me, age 19, after a fight with a friend who refused to take sides, “for purposes of Objectivity.”

 Dear ___________,

You have two feet. MAKE A MOTHERFUCKING STAND, GIRL FRIEND.

 

Two days later after I wrote this, she picked a side.

It wasn’t mine.

EXHIBIT F. Me, having just bought into the Myth of the Quarter Life Crisis:

In a parallel world, maybe there’s a stronger version of myself who’s writing about  the resilience of the human heart. But this is Maggie: Version 1.0. This glitchy model has a penchant for breaking down. Today I can only think of that part in “Closer” where those two beautiful assholes (Jude Law and Clive Owen) are in the middle of a verbal battle to the death over the affections of another beautiful asshole (Julia Roberts).

At one point Jude Law says accusingly, ” You think the heart is like a diagram.”

To which Clive Owen replies (no, shouts): Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood!”

So yeah, no, I’m not going to doodle rainbows that magically appear after the rain or say that I’ll get by…with a smaaaaayeeeel, as Ely Buendia whines in that overrated song. I’m not going spout statements that affirm the strength of my heart, not when its battered and bruised and spent and hollowed and its ventricles are frayed and torn. Pass me the cans of lycopene rich tomato juice, please. Isn’t that supposed to be good for the heart? Hello, world. Watch me as I  drown myself in bloody Marys just to make this all go away. 

(HEADLINE: Twentysomething Maggie Discards 90s Angst for 21^st century Emoness)

***

By now, dear reader, I’m sure your eyes have rolled out of their sockets and quite possibly, you’ve thrown up a little bit in your mouths. For this, I sincerely apologize. It’s just that hyperbole always has been and always will be my favorite Figure of Speech.

In short: CHORVA LANG YAN.