To my beautiful sister,

It’s still your birthday in other parts of the world! So, I would argue that this isn’t a late birthday greeting. Currently, you are in the other room, watching all of the T.V. episodes while you were away on your trip to Germany and Austria. You were gone a whole of seven weeks, and I think that the entire household was in a bit of a quiet mess, as evidenced by the frequency of our FaceTime buggery, and constant Wall Posts of variations of “Why aren’t you online?”

In that time, I saw from a distance how much you were growing up to be your own beautiful person. I saw how much patience you had been cultivating inside of you, how you dealt with difficult people and with difficult situations. Stuck in a foreign land! I felt like a little baby, with my wussy problems, battling with the Manila heat, while you were bundled up in a padded jacket all the way out in Europe.

Sometimes, you talked to me when you were feeling a little sad. I was happy for the interaction, but I was sad for your sadness, and frustrated at my inability to make things better from where I was. As the weeks wore on, you seemed to be getting on pretty well. You were busy and having fun, and thank goodness—adjusting!—but thank you for tagging me in photographs you thought I would like.

I always thought that, between the two of us, you were the more thoughtful one. (Don’t think I forgot all about your birthday: your present is in transit as I type this.)

Though you are often difficult to be around (heh), I really missed you while you were gone. It’s not an aching, incapacitating sort of missing; rather, a knowing of something just not being there. There were so many things I wanted to have shared with you but couldn’t, so many stories that I would have told you had you been here. I’d taken to sleeping on your side of the bed, but you already knew that.

There are so many things that I could say to you, I’ve known you all twenty-one years of your life. I have yet to learn so many different parts of you, but what I want to do right now is thank you for understanding me, as a person and as a sister, and for loving me despite our constant butting of heads and ideas and opinions, and our arguing, and our constant misunderstandings. I’d like to think that we get along better than we used to, and I’m so grateful for that. You’ve always been one of my favorite people, and even though you don’t say it back as often as I say it: I LOVE YOU.

I pray for nothing but the best for you. You are such a wonderful person, and I’ve always admired how weird and random your personality is. Thank you for making me laugh, and for cheering me up when I’m sad. Thank you for knowing when to leave me alone, and when you need to hug me back. Thank you for letting me be your strange older sister who is, in many ways, less wise than you. Thank you for teaching me the value of not compromising who I am because of what others thought, and for at least pretending to take my advice into consideration.

I hope you know that I am always here for you. God loves you, and I hope you know that he is always watching out for you; especially, for all the times that I can’t. You were always one to look after yourself (Remember that time, when you were really little, and mama and papa hid from you at the mall? How, instead of crying, you put your hands on your hips and surveyed the surrounding area, just knowing that something was up?) but look to him when you feel like you can’t take it. He’ll see you through.

I hope you remember to be brave.
I love you, always.

Love,
Ina

I haven’t been to very many places in the Philippines. I have yet to visit Mindanao, as it stands. However, I am a big fan of a lot of the places in this archipelago, and when I meet one such place, I usually fall in love. Last May, I went to Bohol with my parents and brother, for the first time. I love the beach, but I rarely ever go, and I don’t really like parading around in a bikini when there are a lot of people around. (For obvious reasons.)

The resort we stayed in was located in a more or less untouched and remote part of Panglao Island, however, and I was a big fan of this isolation. I waded in the water, and read my book, free of silly, anxious thoughts about unimportant things. We also went to see Bohol’s famous sites, some of which were the tarsiers and the chocolate hills. One of my favorite places was a man-made mahogany forest. If I were a filmmaker, I would shoot a movie there. If I had money, I would probably build a house in the middle of the forest, away from the road.

We spent only a few days there, so I would really love to come back. It’s rare that I bond with a place, so I’m pretty excited for a possible return. The next time, I hope my sister (who was in Austria at the time of the trip) can see how beautiful it is for herself.

Continue reading I LOVE BOHOL….

On missing The National:

For those of you who didn’t know, I was supposed to fly out to Singapore with my brother to watch The National play in Esplanade for the Mosaic Festival. The show was supposed to be on tonight, but due to circumstances concerning the recent tsunami in Japan, the Asian leg of the tour had to be canceled. My brother and I have been dragging around heavy hearts since Saturday afternoon, and we decided not to fly out anymore. (We were just there last month. It seemed redundant and unnecessary.)

The fact that this is the thing that I am most upset about says a lot about how blessed I am. But that I am here blogging about how sad I am instead of singing my throat raw really, really breaks my heart. It’s not a secret that I have been having a rough year, and while it’s been rewarding in a few aspects, it’s mostly shit. Every time some new nightmare presents itself to me, I console myself and say, It’s OK—you’re going to see The National in March, and I honestly feel tons better about my situation.

My brother and I have been watching the livestreams of their shows in the last year, and while those are rousing, experiences, it doesn’t change the fact that we are still separated by screens and pixels. Very few things compare to that feeling of being there, with your lungs on fire, along with hundreds, maybe thousands, of other screaming people whose hearts have been touched and whose lives have been changed by the same things that touched and changed you.

One of my friends from LiveJournal once Tweeted: “Matt Berninger’s voice is a hug around my heavy heart,” and that is precisely why I love it so much. It’s all-at-once elegiac and optimistic, and it cuts through your bones—not violently, but earnestly. It’s funny how a lot of people are turned off by them because of it, but that it exactly one of the reasons why I keep coming back to their music. It’s a brilliant example of only being able to appreciate something when you find yourself looking at it up close.

I didn’t like The National when I first heard them, and now I can’t stop listening.

I am really grieving on the inside. Today, I woke up and went about my day as usual. I walked to the drugstore with my brother—“This should have been a walk to Esplanade!”—ate a little bit of cake, felt guilty for not buying flowers from a starving child even though I probably could have spared some change. I read and understood a bit of the Book of Job.

I tried to think about other things, because I refuse to concede to that nagging little thought in my head that this might have been the only chance that I could have seen them. I choose to be optimistic. I choose to believe that there are going to be a lot more different opportunities, not just for this one letdown, but for other things in the future. I choose to be happy despite this enormous disappointment, because I honestly feel like it’s the better option.

The running trend for my 2011, so far, is being faced with that option to be happy. I think that’s partly why I started Maybe Very Happy. There are so many things to grieve for, but I feel like there is also a lot of space for happiness. I choose to be happy, even though it’s so much easier to be sad. Wallowing in sadness and feeling like the world hates me are things that are easy to do, because there are so many things that can make me believe in that. But I have been realizing that the possibility of happiness is always there. I just need to learn how to see it amidst the rest of the muck.

P.S. This is what we did instead. Hahaha sobrang lugi:

Today (January 20) was my lolo’s birthday. He turned 83. We had a nice family dinner. I’ll post photos from other people later. Maybe. (Pictured here are my dad & his dad; my cousin Marc; my nephew Jaime; my cousins’ dog Shino.)

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time with family, both biological and non-biological. What I mean to say is that I’ve been spending time with people who are so close to my heart that they could very well be blood relatives. I’ve been going through messy things right now, and I guess that an upside to these dealings is that I’ve been able to take a step back and really re-evaluate just how good of a friend I have been to other people.

I’m not the best kind of person to be friends with, to be honest. Because as much as I can be warm and kind, I can also be spiteful and vindictive, especially when I feel like I’m entitled to those feelings. I don’t really do things that are mean, but more often than I’d like to admit, I have let go of hurtful words about people I really care about.

If you remember, I didn’t really have a set of resolutions for this year, and I’m not going to be listing them right now. But what I would like to work on from now on is to really work on how I deal with people. Because I just realized how powerful words can be—both in bringing down and encouraging people. I’ve come to realize how poisonous talking is sometimes, and I really would like to not thrive in that kind of backstabby drama. My room is messy enough; I would like to keep life as mess-free as possible.

I suppose it’s also a lesson on pride, but that’s another story.

Speaking of rooms, though, my lazy ass is in the process of cleaning up the room that I share with my sister. I suppose she’s tired of my junk but is too polite to ask me to do something about it. I like how this cleaning up has coincided with this eye-opener. That there are things that are worth the cost and the trouble, and there are things that aren’t. A semi-related excerpt from a short story by Jonathan Safran Foer:

My father has suffered twenty-two heart attacks—more than the rest of us combined. Once, in a moment of frankness after his nineteenth, he told me that his marriage to my mother had been successful because he had become a yes-man early on.

“We’ve only had one fight,” he said. “It was in our first week of marriage. I realized that it’s never, ever worth it.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately. About fighting, revenge, cleaning up messes. Trying to figure out which things are worth the the hurt and the bruised egos, and which things I can just make peace with and let go of without stirring up insane drama.

And I realize that this is a really sad and pathetic metaphor—my life is my room and my room is my life—but with both being messy and with me starting to figure out how to deal with these messes, and both happening at the same time, well. It kind of makes me think a little bit of synchronicity.

The thing is, I have been so swamped—with work and with other deadlines—and I have been preoccupied with other things that I haven’t found the time to write a proper review. I just am disappointed by two things that they glossed over, because those parts really were important to me, but I generally found it such a great adaptation. More later.

Now, about the title. It’s not a big secret that I am easily excited about things, but here are a few that have made the past few days pretty bearable, despite the stewing holiday stress and busy-ness. Obviously, Harry Freakin’ Potter is one of them. From the last post, you could say that I was conducting an experiment. Here’s what came of it:

More photos under the cut, way down in the post.

I’ve also been making other book-destroying (please forgive me) experiments. Tonight, I started on this one:

I think it’s pretty obvious what I am trying to do. Broke 3 blades so far, but I’m on page 157 now.
If this were a horcrux and I was the hero, we would all likely be dead by now. As I am slow.

And then, books! Excellent poetry collection by Katrina Vandenberg called Atlas. It was published in 2004 and is absolutely beautiful. Will post my favorites sometime soon, maybe? Also in the middle of “Till We Have Faces” by C.S. Lewis. And in the mail, I have finally gotten some chapbooks from Mr. Steve Roggenbuck. It’s a collection of short poetry, and I’ve got a few copies I will be giving away, so if you see me in the next few days, holler! I will hand you one. :)

And here is my brother painting during a Liz Lemon party.

We saw a lizard. :)

I actually really do have a lot more to say about these things, but I can’t seem to find the time to really think about what to say and what to write about them. I keep thinking, “Oh, I would love to tell everybody about how this is so-and-so,” but every time I sit down, there are a million other things I have to attend to, and my brain flits around too much and I end up not saying or doing very much.

I think that’s an indication of something; I’m just not sure exactly what that something is.

P.S. I think I will change the font size of this blog. Is the text too small? I’m kind of thinking that it is.

Continue reading Accio Excitement….

Something like a process post. I had been working on a painting… for a couple of months. I’m sure you’ve heard about it, since I don’t really stop talking about it. But in case you were interested, here is what it looks like now:

It’s a little more than a half of me, which is 3′, on all sides. I just need to fix the shading on the deer on the left, and then add some furry details and I’m going to be done. :)

Anyway, there’s going to be a group exhibit in December, so I’m trying my hand on this new painting. It’s kind of difficult, since I really haven’t been acquainted with the medium. Or drawing, in general, I guess. But it’s a good kind of difficult. Here is what it looks like right now:

‘Tis a photo of an x-ray, and it’s really frakking hard to render, okay. It’s 3 a.m. and I started this after I logged off work (ends at 12 m.n.). I did the grid—my mom showed me how to make images of them on Illustrator—drew the bones (!!!) and then started painting… I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to pull this off, but if/when I do, I’m going to be so happy.

There aren’t very many things worse than my posture.

My mom’s! She finished the one on the left tonight, and is starting on the one on the right.

Detail of a pretty large painting she is in the middle of making.

My dad’s. I think he finished this one tonight as well.

And that’s it! My brother is in the middle of one, also, but he was holed up in his room the entire night working on it.