A list will help

"Please don't underestimate the relief that comes after every small accomplishment"

1. Yesterday, I finished drafting Rear Window and I moved it into an appropriately named folder and out of my desktop. It feels good. 
2. Starting work on a revision of The Hand You Are Dealt 
3. Asked Ace to read Rear Window first. Slowly trying to accept that even writing--the process of completing a story--cannot be accomplished in solitude. Hoping to see her this Saturday.
4. Realized, with a start, that I disliked being around people because I'm so used to withholding restraint that it's difficult to get back into the habit of compromise. 
5. Case in point, dealing with children and shoddy service at restaurants. 
6. Not for the last time, I miss my friends. 
7. I've decided to dedicate May to two things. First: drafting and revisions. Second, not unrelated: my twenty-page paper for last semester's Advanced Film Theory.  

"Revisions for Rear Window"

My Problem with consistency

does not necessarily stem from laziness.

1. Ink on my left shoulder blotted, blurred by movement of restless muscle, now only barely resembles the python Apo Whang-Od designed. I'm chosen to stop worrying and to let it age and defy my expectations. Maybe the ink will turn blue, bright-blue.
2. Since Sunday evening, my mother had been confined in the nearby hospital. It wasn't our first trip to the establishment but familiarity and fair warning didn't deter the inexhaustible paranoia of my fifty-five year-old mother whose steady complaints about a stubborn, stabbing pain in her abdomen she had mistaken for gas. In the emergency room, she said all doctors and nurses complied with her self-made assessment until she told them her father died from a burst appendix that had gone untreated and undiagnosed until, its singular, last, and fatal bid for attention ignored, it simply gave up and gave way. 
3. I always thought my maternal grandfather--whose enduring image in my imagination is of an old man, heavily tattooed, smoking a pipe, dressed in faded slacks, standing in the slow breaking dawn of a yellow summer day six decades ago with a pile of leaves to sweep, and armed only with the walis tinging his fearsome and silent wife pushed into his hands--somehow died at home, stabbed to death. I was wrong. I kept forgetting it was my maternal grandmother whose death had been violent beyond anything I've ever known in my life. 
4. Dearest brother one day I will write you a letter about what it mean to be selfish and how, yes, you were right. I am selfish. Are you happy I owned up to it? But what I mean is I am not terrified the way you are. I want you to shape your expectations, mold them into a manageable totem you can either worship or set afire.
5. Today was more productive than I had anticipated. 
6. I haven't written a word for Rear Window.

     

These are the stories in progress cluttering my desktop.

1. With the exception of A Letter to my Mother on Why I Refuse to Lie, these are all fiction. 
2. I hope I can finish drafting The Hand You Are Dealt, Doomsday, and Rear Window before May ends. 
3. Six should be revised and proofread well before the end of May.
4. I have no idea what happens in Doomsday (even though the story had been floating around in my mind since the better half of last year)
5. I am not a creative nonfiction writer. 
6. Numbers at the end of each title denote story versions instead of draft numbers.

Cocina Juan and Katipunan

Dinner with Jamie at Cocina Juan along Maginhawa was uneventful because, I think, we were both disappointed that Jacyn had been unable to tag along.

After a full week recuperating at home, I was glad to find that journeying--the act of moving through space into an unfamiliar place--needn't require days of planning. The outing to Maginhawa was well-timed. If there were places in which I could meander in my city, I would but I only have Katipunan Avenue at ten on a Friday evening in April.

I was wearing a shirt that hung loose more than it clung to me, despite the humidity. The python on my shoulder ached whenever my skin prickled at each sting of--yes--memory. So as much as I loved the view and the lights and the thrill of discovery, I tried not to look, to watch, or to see (because yes each is different and distinct). Self preservation, first and foremost. Journeying had brought me this far without ever having removed me from a physical place, it had taken me into an entirely different life but the paths my own imagination traveled last night were well-worn.

I felt strong (and it's been the longest time since I've felt so capable, if not a little daunted and unambitious; strength, I realized, didn't come from ambition as much as it came from discipline; I keep finding myself at the beginning of paths and longer roads).

Listening to Jamie with all her new projects, I felt overwhelmed and excited (read: giddy) for her and, as is always the case in the company of my friends, I felt at once drawn out and pushed in (the pull to reveal my own plans as they had formed almost organically and without previous vocalization; the push to retreat and reevaluate the potential and benefits and challenges). For the first time in a long time, I didn't feel inadequate even as I was able to count my own projects in my hands. I only felt the long, slow simmer of the stories in my belly. I have to write them out and write them down but I know the first step is, always, to read more.

The tabletops at Cocina Juan were marble tiles and after Jamie remarked on the quality of their craftsmanship (wala na yung grout), my natural reaction was to look beneath the loose piece. We found four--five?--pieces of paper tucked beneath the tiles and the decision to add to the small collection was unanimous. There's something about the act of contribution. I plan on returning in a few months.

"You should settle down. But, no babies, ha!"

a list will help

1. I very nearly finished reading (and summarzing, for our graphic artists) all twenty-one stories featured in an upcoming anthology. We hope to publish it this later this year (hopefully by June or earlier) and I am spearheading the project.
2. This is where I stop talking about work before I name-drop on a very public platform. 
3. I've been trying to find the correct medium to talk about Buscalan and, armed with the knowledge that Kat is gunning for an extended travel essay, I thought I'd attempt another personal one. 
4. Everytime I shiver, the tattoo aches as my skin contracts. 
5. I will not deny that the past week had been spent trying to recover from a few days of travel. I was displaced so completely I don't think I've rebuilt myself properly. I may have left something vital in the Cordillera. 
6.  Whenever I felt homesick (and yes despite having spent only a few nights away from home, I slept with my feet firmly planted south, the direction that meant home, the way I must travel to return) I looked at my tattoo and felt, if only briefly, the comfort brought on by the assurance of having a home to pine for.
7. Disoriented, I rearrange myself on my bed, tossing and turning once every few minutes to shake off my only bedmate, the suffocating summer heat. 
8. This is the place to which I want to return, now. As much as I want to remember everything, my imagination can only contain two things: the sunlight and the air. 
9. Every night, still, I twist and turn to find the direction to which I need to return. 

"aboard the jeepney from the village"

"you can't imagine the proximity of the mountain range"

A list will help

1. My mother is in the other room doubled over in pain. Kabag when the stomach expands with air and, according to my mother and the folk wisdom to which she subscribes, kabag is detected by lightly tapping the engorged belly. If it sounds like a drum, there is air.
2. And as much as I want to trust the old saying someone will come, just wait, waiting leaves much to be desired.
3. On the only date I ever allowed myself to participate in, I met a wonderful woman. 
4. Been recently reading a lot of Lizzie Bennet/William Darcy fanfiction, the best of which is titled Somewhere Between a Beginning, a Middle, and an End