The thing with using film to take photos is that you have to be patient and diligent, and I am neither of those things. These photos were taken with a disposable black & white camera (Rollei Retro400) on March 9th this year. Cat and Macky spun~ at Future in Cubao X. I don’t actually know what made me go to this thing, because aside from being a hermit, I am also kind of wary of new and unfamiliar social situations. Alas, I went and I am glad I did!

Here are some photos. So much has changed since then, but I’d like to think that the switch in velocity was a good one.

About the camera: it’s OK! Some photos looked a bit washed out, but it’s good for what it is. I ordered it from the Lomography online store, which ships to pretty much anywhere. It was easy to use, but there was not a great range of things you can do with it. It really is just a fuss-free, point-and-shoot, black & white camera that you can forget about after you’ve used it. I would get another one if I manage to get another chance to.

More photos under the cut! Continue reading BLAST FROM THE PAST: CUNNING LINGUISTS….

Illustration by Kris Atomic.

I’ve been told that my default face is actually a bitchface. I’ve spent most of my formative years being told by good friends that they didn’t think I would be as nice as I was because I “looked scary.” Imagine what wonders that did to my self-esteem. Imagine how many potential friends I might have lost because of my face!

To illustrate, here is the most recent picture of my default face. It is by no means attractive (I mean, clearly), but it shows my point fairly well: my point being that I tend to look pretty menacing, even without meaning to. I did you a favor and resized it to a fraction of its original size.

Does it help that I am also not really naturally friendly? Nope. Does it help that I am also kind of socially awkward? Nope. Do I try to be more genial? Oh, do I ever. At some point, I even practiced my smile in the mirror. How lame is that? Very. Although, I do get complimented on said smile, so I suppose the cost of lame-ness yielded favorable results anyway. I don’t know if it is a good smile in itself, or if it just a welcome change, much like a breath of fresh air after being underwater for some time. Who even knows anymore.

Stranger or friend, please take note of this: if you run into me on some random street or at some event, and I look like this—please don’t think that I will eat you. I can assure you that I won’t. And I am posting this just because I related to this illustration. I do feel like birds are tying my bows, but I apologize in advance if ever I look like I am about to kick a tiny puppy.

That’s really just how my face looks.

However: if you tell me to cheer up, even if I have a song in my heart, and visions of sugarplums dancing in my head, I just might find a puppy I can kick.

Just kidding.

Petra & I “spun” (I inwardly cringe when I use this word because it makes me feel like such a poser) at Future in X Thursday night—more on this later, thank you everyone who went, sorry I didn’t get to talk or whatever but I am really, really shy even though it doesn’t really seem like it sometimes—and after recuperating from a horrible hangover, I wormed my way into breakfast plans with Cat, Karen, Liana, and Sarie.

Fun Fact: I met Sarie and Liana maybe a week and a half ago. Another fun fact: I get along with them quite swimmingly. (Or so I’d like to think. HEH.)

Karen.

Me & Liana.

Joyce Jimenez Cat.

Karen & Sarie.

Waffle!

What used to be chicken.

Cath… Hehe joke lang.

This is the mysterious extra Php 100 bill that no one would claim, and everyone kept insisting that I contributed to the bill out of the goodness of my obviously generous heart.

If you can guess whose footwear is whose correctly, you get a free opportunity to mock us for taking such a cheesefest picture. (I quite like shoe-shots, though, so I guess I’ll add that to my list of guilty pleasures. WHATEVER, I still think they are super cute.)

 
I left at around noon because my cousin was getting married in the afternoon. (Yay! :) Hee. More on that later, too.) The rest of their day without me does not exist, because there are no pictures and I was not there. The End.

The best part about trying not to be sad is that I always find pockets of happy in places I least expected to. Sometimes, I feel like all that’s left for me to do is to try.

 
P.S. Marb linked me to a video of Frank O’Hara reading my favorite poem, “Having a Coke With You.” A comment implied that it was used in the Vanessa Hudgens classic, Beastly, so if you are reading this, Karen Ramos, I feel like it’s a sign that we must see this movie immediately.

I’m not really one to believe in destiny or serendipity or the stars aligning in my favor. On the rare occasion that I do allow myself the thought, it almost always bites me in the ass. However: I mostly enjoy the idea of it. I’d like to think that sometimes, synchronicity does occur, and whether the cause is fate or coincidence, or simply good timing, I don’t really care much for.

Synchronicity (or part of it), this past week, came in the form of some of the books I’ve finished reading, namely: Light Boxes by Shane Jones and Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert. These aren’t reviews; they’re just tiny ruminations on what I’ve been reading and the unexpected weight they bore on recent events.

(I realize I should post this on my book blog, but it seems as though it became more of a burden than a motivation for me to post, so I’m probably shutting it down and relegating all future book posts over here, under a tag. Also, this is kind of long, so it’s mostly for my sake more than for yours. But you are very welcome to read & comment & share your thoughts. I know it’s wordy, but I hope you read it.)

I brought Jones’ novel on my trip because it was short enough to read on the plane. I had always been curious about it, and although it was difficult to get into at first (atypical format, especially since it’s classified as a novel), I quickly drew parallels to my life. It tells the story about a town that has been forced to endure hundreds of days of February. Funnily enough, my February had started out pretty horribly. Reading it, I feel, instigated a sort of Existential Standoff, where I found that I could choose from many different ways of looking at my then decidedly crappy situation. In Light Boxes, February meant a lot of things, but it stood for a bleakness, a desolation and unending sadness that could be fought relentlessly against, but was hard to escape from. Not to give too much away, but Jones, in his last few pages, allowed me to see that there is a way out of February, but that I would have to make my own light boxes, to invent ways to see myself out of the dark. The final pages do not depict a soaring victory, but a resolute finality—a sigh of relief instead of masses of loud cheering.

This tiny book gave me hope that things will definitely get better, that even though the shortest month sometimes feels like the longest, it will come to an end.

It is in reading Gilbert’s collection of poetry, though, that I began to understand what it meant to make peace with loss, and that it was possible. I had been on the look-out for Gilbert’s collections (any, really) for months, and I found two in Kinokuniya. I started with his earlier one—out of respect for chronology than anything else—and found, quite serendipitously, that it brought me to a place where I needed to be.

Line after line came blow after blow. Gilbert was telling me about the temporariness of things, that the state of things is always going to be uncertain and precarious—but also, that it was OK. Not to speak of every poem in the collection, but I came to the understanding that some things were meant to come to an end. This used to terrify me and in some ways, it still does, but Gilbert reminded me that endings also mark new beginnings. And that endings don’t negate the things that came before it. “Thinking love is not refuted because it comes to an end,” he ends “Elegy for Bob (Jean McLean).”

I know it’s not the central, all-encompassing theme of this surprisingly dense (90 pages!) collection, but it really helped me get through a lot of stuff, and let go of a lot of attachments. I have been welcoming the idea of momentary things, and being at peace with the reality that they might go. I know it sounds kind of bad and dismissive and defeatist, but this idea comes from a good place. For example, in “The Lost Hotels of Paris,” he writes: “But it’s the having not the keeping that is the treasure.” There is an awareness of the fleetingness of things, and I think I’m slowly understanding what it means to be OK with that. He puts it brilliantly in “The Manger of Incidentals“:

We are blessed
with powerful love and it goes away. We can mourn.
We live the strangeness of being momentary,
and still we are exalted by being temporary.
The grand Italy of meanwhile. It is the fact of being brief,
being small and slight that is the source of out beauty.
We are a singularity that makes music out of noise
because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness
and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

And also in “Burma”:

Used, misled, cheated. Our time is always shortening.
What we cherish is always temporary. What we love
is, sooner or later, changed. But for a while we can
visit our other life. Can rejoice in its being there
in its absence. Giving thanks for what we are allowed
to think about it, grateful for it for even as it wanes.
For knowing it is there.

He talks about the endurance of the human spirit, despite everything, and that is comforting to me. (“Until all the world is overcome / by what goes up and up in us, singing and dancing / and throwing down flowers nevertheless.” — A Kind of Courage; “Our spirit persists like a man struggling / through the frozen valley / who suddenly smells flowers / and realizes the snow is melting / out of sight on top of the mountain, / knows that spring has begun.” — Horses at Midnight Without a Moon; “We must admit there will be music despite everything.” — A Brief for the Defense; “But the air stills, the heat comes back / and I think I am all right again.” — A Close Call )

One of my favorite Gilbert poems is “Failing and Flying,” which I read way before I got the book. I was glad that it was part of Refusing Heaven, because I got to “own” it—whatever that means.

“Failing and Flying” by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.