Now/here no/where woman

Words: Mine. Images: Mine.

Someday, I'm going to go parahawking in Nepal .

"Tatang de los Santos, father of the saints, my general. O my father, what have I done unto thee. I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. Or they lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Tatang, Tatang, burning bright. Not yet, Tatang, not yet. Tatang, it is consummated: the Filipino Dream is dreamt. "O the Filipino Dream! To have both life and death together, chaos and order, treason and sainthood, flesh and spirit, penis and vagina, Malacañang and Muntinlupa, me and you all. Because each is lively, dark, and deep. To row one's boat in two rivers. To push back the colliding stone gates of a cave in the mountains. But it's not a question of combining opposites: it's of being one and the other at the same time, loving both, and also fighting them so as to share in their rockiness, and to survive. A trinity, with me as center. I, Jesus, and John; I, the planet and darkly luminous eyes; I, suicide, and exe...

We live on an archipelago and I'd like to experience it better. I wish to someday make a life for myself and The Nuclear Family on another Philippine island; to work, play, run a household, make friends, eat out, explore and go on picnics somewhere other than Luzon, maybe for a year or two.

"The Italian government has given assurances that something will be done to guarantee the autonomy of our country's universities. Italian universities were autonomous in the Middle Ages, and they functioned better than they do today... In Italy, if a scientist discovers that phlogiston doesn't exist he will most likely be able to announce his findings only if he happens to teach a course on the Axiomatics of Phlogiston, because a course title, once it is on the ministry's lists, can be changed only after protracted negotiations among all the institutions of higher learning in the country, along with the Superior Council of Education, the Minister, and some other organizations whose names escape me. "Research goes forward because someone glimpses a path that no one has seen before, and a few other people, with exceptional decisional flexibility, decide to believe in him or her. But if someone wants to move a desk in Vitipeno, a decision must come from Rome, af...

Sent out my first short story and received my first rejection slip. There will be more. The ghost of Ray Bradbury dropped in and said, Write on! I like Bradbury's pambahay outfit. His shorts (but not the tie) remind me of my Lolos.

"In the stories I grew up on there were no spelling-bee winners, no inventors or rich men. Those would have been pale unheroes. The stories were the old Eskimo ones of hardships and hunts, lost dogteams and snowed-in trails, told by travelers spending stormy nights around our stove. "'Yep. Lotta barking and my dogs run away in the night. I had nuthin'. Not even rifle.' Old Stoney Williams would laugh as if it were the funniest thing that could have happened to him. I'd bend close to the kerosene lamp, waiting for more, picturing him on the wide dark tundra and wondering if I'd ever be old enough to have those stories to tell, dreaming of being tough and able to laugh into storms like the old-timers. Stoney called me by my Inupiaq name and talked slow as if it were important that I understand." From Kantner, Seth (1995) 'Burying the Tongue Bone,' in Servid, C. (ed) From the Island's Edge: A Sitka reader . Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywol...

"I have words to spend and sometimes spend them foolishly, of course, squandering verbs and nouns, sending metaphors askew, and using similes like fireworks whose sparks often fail to flame. I also have a weakness for absurd alliterations. "There are certain words I love and use over and over again, words like marvelous and stunning and wonder. I've written before about the ember words -- there's such beauty in words like September and remember. And then there's cellophane. Cellophane, said slowly." From Cormier, Robert (1991) I Have Words to Spend: Reflections of a small-town editor . New York: Bantam Doubleday books for Young Readers. And so begins my very own dabbling, hodgepodge home-schooling program: book-tasting. Picking a paragraph or two from one book a day, one shelf-box at a time. A way for me to get to know better the library I was born to, the library I grew up in, and the library we feed.

© words by Padmapani L. Perez