And I can't get used to it.

"Lit (or: to the scientist I am not speaking to any more)"
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

Don’t say you didn’t see this coming, Jason.

Don’t say you didn’t realize this would be my reaction
and that you never intended for me to get all worked up,
because if that were true, then you are dumber
than Lenny from Mice and Men, blinder than Oedipus
and Tierus put together and can feel less
than a Dalton Trumbo character.

You put the Dick in Dickens and the Boo in kowski
and are more Coward-ly then Noël.

But you don’t understand any of these references,
Do you, Jason? Because you ‘don’t read’.
You are a geology major and you once told me
That, ‘Scientists don’t read popular literature,
Cristin, we have more important things to do’.

Well, fuck you.

Be glad you don’t read, Jason,
because maybe you won’t understand this
as I scream it to you on your front lawn,
on Christmas Day, brandishing three hypodermic needles,
a ginsu knife and a letter of permission
from Bret Easton Ellis.

Jason, you are more absurd than Ionesco.
You are more abstract than Joyce,
more inconsistent than Agatha Christie
and more Satanic than Rushdie’s verses.

I can’t believe I used to want to Sappho you, Jason.
I used to want to Pablo Neruda you,
to Anais Nin And Henry Miller you. I used to want
to be O for you, to blow for you in ways
that even Odysseus’ sails couldn’t handle.
But self-imposed illiteracy isn’t a turn-on.

You used to make fun of me being a writer,
saying ‘Scientists cure diseases,
what do writers do?’

But of course, you wouldn’t understand, Jason.
I mean, have you ever gotten an inner thirsting
for Zora Neale Hurston?
Or heard angels herald for you
to read F Scott Fitzgerald?
Have you ever had a beat attack for Jack Kerouac?
The only Morrison you know is Jim, and you think
you’re the noble one?

Go Plath yourself.

Your heart is so dark, that even Joseph Conrad
couldn’t see it, and it is so buried under bullshit
that even Poe’s cops couldn’t hear it.

Your mind is as empty as the libraries in Fahrenheit 451.
Your mind is as empty as Silas Marner’s coffers.
Your mind is as empty as Huckleberry Finn’s wallet.

And some people might say that this poem
is just a pretentious exercise
in seeing how many literary references
I can come up with.

And some people might complain that this poem is,
at its core, shallow, expressing the same emotion again,
and again, and again. (I mean, there are only so many times
you can articulate your contempt for Jason,
before people get bored.)

But you know what, Jason? Those people would be wrong.

Because this is not the poem I am writing to express
my hatred for you.

This poem is the poem I am writing because we aren’t speaking,
and it is making my heart hurt so bad, it is all I
can do just to get up off the floor sometimes.

And this is the poem I am writing instead of writing
the ‘I miss having breakfast with you’ poem, instead of
writing the ‘Let’s walk dogs in our old schoolyard
again’ poem.

Instead of the ‘How are you doing?’ poem, the ‘I miss you’ poem,
the ‘I wish I was making fun of how much you like Garth
Brooks while sitting in front of your parents’ house
in your jeep’ poem, instead of the ‘Holidays are coming around
and you know what that means: SUICIDE!’ poem.

I am writing this so that I can stop wanting to write
the ‘I could fall in love with you again so quickly
if only you would say one more word to me’ poem.

But I am tired of loving you, Jason
cause you don’t love me right.

And if some pretentious-ass poem can stop me
From thinking about the way your laugh sounds,
about the way your skin feels in the rain,
about how I would rather be miserable with you,
then happy with anyone else in the world.

If some pretentious-ass poem can do all that?
Then I am gone with the wind, I am on the road,
I have flown over the fucking cuckoo’s nest,
I am gone, I am gone, I am gone.

I am.

The shape of her soul is a square.
She knows this to be the case
because she often feels its corners
pressing sharp against the bone
just under her shoulder blades
and across the wings of her hips.
At one time, when she was younger,
she had hoped that it might be a cube,
but the years have worked to dispel
this illusion of space, so that now
she understands: it is a simple plane,
a shape with surface, but no volume—
a window without a building, an eye
without a mind.
Of course, this square
does not appear on x-rays, and often,
weeks may pass when she forgets
that it exists. When she does think
to consider its purpose in her life,
she can say only that it aches with
a single mystery, for whose answer
she has long ago given up the search—
since its question is a word whose name
can never quite be asked. This yearning,
she has concluded, is the only function
of the square, repeated again and again
in each of its four matching angles,
until, with time, she is persuaded
anew that what it frames has no
interest in ever making her happy.

“She Considers the Dimensions of Her Soul”
Young Smith

I am (un)happy to report to you (line from Alex) that I suck at planning at nasermonan pako. Hahaha. Spontaneity is where I thrive but gad, I think I piss people off because of it, maybe because my life is so "unarranged" right now and my ehem, "lifestyle" if you can call it that just doesn't fit in any planner. I'm sorry I'm like this. I have to grow up one of these days.

In other news, I went out with aphazia, can't seem to upload our pic here! Boo. And I got three NEW books!

All in all, this day makes me cringe but still.

There was a time when Erson and Mayo and I were almost inseparable. We saw each other everyday. At that time, it never crossed my mind that we will eventually break away from it all.



Looking back, I wasn't too interested in looking at the future.There was a kind of a standstill then. Nothing else mattered but the thesis we were writing and Zuma, I guess. The simplicity of it all is almost unreal.

Photos stolen from: http://bubudynasty.multiply.com.

from now on.

I wanted to write about how queer it is to reach this age and to be single. I browse my love tag: of love and other demons and see how many posts I've tagged it with and it was almost always the reason why I write things down to begin with.

Now there is nothing to write, nothing to be pained or happy about and the words don't burst forth as when I know I am about to contemplate or complain about it.

There is a sudden lull. Something halted to an abrupt dead end and all the eloquence or poetry, no matter how morbid or splendid, died with it.

One thing is for certain though: I am now weary of the chase. As in the poem, these things happen only once. I feel terribly old and choosy and no pick-up line will ever work on me again - I've heard everything.

So here's to being single for a long time.

Went to the embassy today and this time they actually took the mound of papers I photocopied for them but they still didn't keep my passport and I went home with only the reassurance that they will mail me a notice re: the status of my application. I went home drunk with coffee after the embassy thing.

Went out yesterday night with cousins and my long missed siblings and we got here past two in the morning. I really cannot quit smoking. I can't. I used to think that smoking was a rebellious whatever everyone goes through but I was wrong. It's not easy to quit and it's not a phase. And, it's addictive.

I no longer had any hangover on the second time this week that I got home past two the following morning. My belly is now showing signs of becoming a beer belly.

I want to get a haircut today, and a real boyfriend -- someone tangible.

It's not fun to be always sober. 

I am drunk and you are insane
tell me, who will lead us home?
How many times have I asked you not to drink so much
for I see no sober soul in town.
Come to the tavern my dearest and taste the wine of love
for the soul is joyous only in the company of lovers.
The tavern of love is your livelihood
your income and expenses, the wine.
Be careful, not to trust a sober soul
with even one drop of this wine.
Go on playing your lute, my drunken gypsy but tell me,
between the two of us, who is more drunk?
As I left my house a Sufi approached me,
in his glance I saw a hundred gardens.
He swayed from side to side like a ship without an anchor,
while a hundred reasonable men watched on enviously.
Where are you from? I asked him.
He replied, "Half from Turkistan and half from Farghaneh,
half from water and clay and half from soul and heart,
half from the edge of the sea and half from the depths of the coean."

-- Ghazal (Ode) 2398
Translated by Azima Melita Kolin
and Maryam Mafi

I have never been totally drunk  in which I couldn't walk anymore. (And I'm already twenty four. How pathetic is that.) When intoxicated, I still know what it is that's happening and I can still think straight. What the hell. Where's the fun in that? I've never puked infront of anyone, never emabarrased myself in any drinking spree. When I couldn't take the alchohol anymore, I fall asleep and then again, where's the fun in that? 

I'd like to be stupendously drunk one of these days. 

Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl
Dorianne Laux


Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip.
Barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible, she tells me,
not like you think: all darkness and silence.

There are wind chimes and the scent of lemons.
Some days it rains. But more often the air
is dry and sweet. We sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living.

I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair.
Especially when they fight, and when they sing.

"Abschieds Symphony"
Dorianne Laux

Someone I love is dying, which is why,
when I turn the key in the ignition
and back the car out of the parking space
in the underground garage, and the radio
comes on, sudden and loud, something
by Haydn, a diminishing fugue, and maneuver
the car through the dimly lit tunnels
with their low ceilings, following the yellow arrows
stenciled at intervals on the gray cement walls,
I think of him, moving slowly through the last
hard days of his life and I can't stop crying.
When I arrive at the toll gate I have to make myself
stop thinking as I dig in my pockets for the last
of my coins, turn to the attendant, indifferent
in his blue smock, his white hair curling like smoke
around his weathered neck, and say Thank you,
like an idiot, and drive into the blinding midday light.
Everything is hideously symbolic,
and everything reminds me of cancer:
the Chevron truck, its rounded underbelly
spattered with road grit and the sweat
of last night's rain, the dumpster
behind the flower shop, its sprung lid
pressing down on dead wedding bouquets--
even the smell of something simple, coffee drifting
from the open door of a cafe and my eyes
glaze over, ache in their sockets.
For months now all I've wanted is the blessing
of inattention, to move carefully from room to room
in my small house, numb with forgetfulness.
To eat a bowl of cereal and not imagine him,
scrubbed thin and pale, unable to swallow.
How not to imagine the tumors
ripening beneath his skin, flesh
I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips,
pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights
so hard I thought I could enter him, open
his back at the spine like a door or a curtain
and slip in like a small fish between his ribs,
nudge the coral of his brain with my lips,
brushing over the blue coils of his bowels
with the fluted silk of my tail.
Death is not romantic. He is dying,
no matter how I see it, no matter
what I believe, that fact is stark
and one dimensional, atonal,
a black note on an empty staff.
My feet are cold, but not as cold as his,
and I hate this music that floods
the cramped insides of my car, my head,
slowing the world down with its
lurid majesty, transforming everything I see
into some sort of memorial to life,
no matter how ugly or senseless--
even the old Ford in front of me,
its battered rear end thinning to scallops of rust,
pumping black classical clouds of exhaust
into the shimmering air-- even the tenacious
nasturtiums clinging to a fence, vine and bloom
of the insignificant, music spilling
from their open faces, spooling upward, past
the last rim of blue and into the still pool
of another galaxy, as if all that emptiness
were a place of benevolence, a destination,
a peace we could rise to.

So I passed by the TV last night and saw Angel Locsin and this woman talking about food and emotions.

This woman explained that the flavours we taste today are different from the flavours we will taste tomorrow and that the sadness that tore us apart yesterday will not be the same sorrow we will feel today.

It is sadness or happiness, yes, but triggered by a different circumstance, and would always be a different kind of pain or joy from the other pains or joys we have felt; nothing is the same.

And for inspiration: Her Photostream (I'm officially inlove again).  

I want to get away from here. This place is getting sadder and sadder everyday.

The German workbook is twice as much as I thought it would cost.
Oh well papel. You win some, you lose some.

If that's the only thing I'm losing this year, I'll be happy.

Someone broke my heart yesterday. Or something -- a book. And someone -- because in the story, he died. His name was Ambrose Zephyr.

Despite the heartbreak, I feel the book was meant to be found. By me. This was for me.

And why? Because. This was about my favorite things: travel -- from A(msterdam) to Z(anzibar), fonts, living and dying and settling down.

It is only 139 pages, in my favorite typeface and designed as if Zipper just finished writing her journal. The book is really her journal.

When I read the last words in the last page, I almost wished I didn't read it too quickly. Because he wouldn't have died as quickly.

This is my good night quote for today:

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.

- Arundhati Roy

Good night, stars. See you again tomorrow.

Why the necessary tragedies?
To toughen us up?
To balance the distribution of good and evil?
To channel us to look at the brighter side?
(What brighter side?)
Why?

The answer: No reason at all.

The answer came in the form of a blueberry pie movie that was a flop, before I even asked, "Why the necessary tragedies?"

Because they're necessary. Just that: necessary and nothing else.

This one is for Bebe Goo:


Out the Window : How to deal with a (neo) angst attack
http://news.inq7.net/lifestyle/index.php?index=2&story_id=42869&col=122
Inq7 (this link is not working!)
9 July 2005 | 4:33 AM
by Tals Diaz

Editor's Note: Published on page D2 of the July 9, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

I SHOULD have heeded all the signs.

First, it was the sudden urge to strangle a bunny when I encountered a peppy, wide-eyed girl with nary a dead hair strand in sight, who attempted to be cerebral by quoting words of "wisdom" from Paolo Coelho. Then came my unheralded, snappish comments to my eternal sunshiny crew who was innocently enough discussing the whole Tom-Katie affair. Then came the week-long whim of locking myself indoors, digging up old Morrissey and Dead Can Dance records to provide the right audio peg for my mood, as I dusted off my journal to complain about everything from the lunacy of local politics, to Tom Cruise's nauseating publicity stunts, to the alarming increase of Kris Aquino billboards on Edsa. When I started trading in my usual bright threads for anything within the color chart of black, it then hit me-dear God, I'm having an angst attack! Now hand me that cup of black coffee!

How very early nineties retro, this whole concept of meaninglessness and self-loathing that I thought only happened to turtleneck-wearing beatniks, philosophy majors, fading rock stars, acid washed-out lifestyle journalists and the whole cast of "Reality Bites." To be technical about it, "angst" is a German word that cross breeds anxiety and anguish. Not surprisingly, it's a term used in Existentialism that expresses the dread reality that the future is an unknown void. It's an acute but unspecific feeling of distress; usually reserved for an anxiety about the world or about personal freedom. To oversimplify it in my terms, angst is an allergic reaction to anything cute. (Tim Burton marathon, anyone?)

"Unspecific feeling" could not be more specific. The worst part about all this is that I had nothing concrete to blame. Not any planet being in retrograde nor Saturn returning into some orbit in the universe as my constellation-watching, neo-hippie friends would be quick to assume. Then again, I had everything to blame. The government? The blah weather? Hormones? The unacceptable amount of time being away from the ocean? Sam Oh? Nothing? Okay, nothing, then. So after a brief period of self-chiding for being so silly (and so 1990s-melodramatic), I decided to self-medicate by facing this new weird order head on and, well, dwelling in it. Yes, mucking in the melodrama. Hopefully, the sheer exaggeration would turn me off and I'd be back to normal vibrating frequencies in no time. Lo and behold, what did I discover? That all this could actually be... fun. Could this be a neo-angst of some sort? A kind that's so silly that it's actually a caricature of itself?

( on surviving neo-angst )

I hope this one helped and cheered you up a bit. :P I get neo-angst attacks when I see ugly people and that means all the time, and when I see myself in the mirror during PMS. Hahaha.