Now/here no/where woman

I wrote this four years ago. The struggle remains the same, so yes, publish. And god, I so want to be over this dilemma. 2016. Yesterday I was proofreading my manuscript at home when the Little Big Boss came over crying. I had to put my pen down and console her. She didn't want to leave my lap so we compromised. We put her play doh on the table and I tried to work while she played. It went smoothly -- for about five minutes! Haha! The Artist in Residence is familiar with this scene. Starting when she was eight years old, she had to come along with me to academic conferences. She'd stay in her chair reading, or drawing and writing in her notebooks. People praised her and commented on how she was remarkably well-behaved. I had no idea just how remarkable her ability to sit still and focus was, until the Little Big Boss came along. With this one, sitting together quietly for a stretch of time is a much bigger challenge. The things that kept the Artist content at conference...

Alan gave me the print-outs of two poems he read at the I Poetry reading in Block 4 of the Baguio Public Market, held October 26 as part of the Markets of Resistance project. Scintillating words were spoken from atop a kariton in the market that afternoon. A couple of hours later, Frank gave me two books of poetry for Mt Cloud Bookshop. The following day I was handed an envelope from Mimi, who manages the Tala Share and Guesthouse, and in it was a copy of a poem she read at an art exhibit several months ago. I remember that moment very well. Thank you, dear friends! Thank you, Universe. An inspiring, palengke poetry reading and then three different people giving me the gift of poems in the last two days. If there's a message you're trying to deliver, Universe, I'm open and waiting.

I have a love-hate relationship with this weather, but it couldn't care less how I feel. This rain, the oppressive grey sky -- they make me restless. They make me want to run away from home. But the sound of the rain and the wind in the swaying bamboo says, "Stay. Stay. Stay awhile longer." I have a love-hate relationship with this weather, but it couldn't care less how I feel.

At a Women's Month celebration the other day, I was seated with the Little Boss on my lap and her Papa, my Outrigger, stood behind us, ready to take her if needed. A woman I hold much respect for, a senior in academic circles, came up to me and commented on how the Little Boss has grown and I introduced her to the Outrigger. She smiled at him and said in a tone that I heard to be partly scolding, partly teasing,  "You're the one who's keeping her from being an anthropologist!" He and I responded in unison, "Noooo." But she had turned and walked away. I suppose she had said what she wanted to say and didn't need or want to hear an answer. The Outrigger shrugged and said, "Some people just feel they have to say something." And with that shrug, I knew that the Outrigger had already brushed aside that brief encounter and was just minutes away from forgetting the whole incident -- a gift I wish I had too. But I was bothered, and he...

As I write this my Outrigger and I are perched on a balcony. The Outrigger has his nose buried in a law book and I am busy making up strategies in the pursuit of another dream. (Strictly speaking though, I'm procrastinating at the moment.) The Outrigger says I have a knack for making dreams come true. Sometimes this is a scary thought. From where we sit I see pine trees, grey sky and a distant lighting storm. An occasional crow flies across our view. I can almost forgive the cars and jeepneys rattling up and down the road below us. I can almost forgive the loud pop music and the mediocre coffee from the cafe behind us. This morning I took my two daughters, the Artist-in-Residence and the Little Boss, horseback riding. They spent half an hour humming to each other in their own world, on the back of Viper, a pony that the Artist-in-Residence has loved and returned to again and again for the past ten years. Lifetime friendships are made in Wright Park. Halfway through the day w...

I have two daughters. The Artist-in-Residence is now 18 years old. The Little Boss is now 14 months old. The Artist-in-Residence and I are still in the adolescent phase, which can sometimes be more intense than the infancy or toddler phase of parenting. And then I went and decided to start all over again. Several things had to stop: drinking, partying and biking -- among other important matters, of course. I knew all that was coming. After pregnancy and 14-months of breastfeeding (and still breastfeeding) the Little Boss, I have finally been reunited with one of my great loves. Yes, mountain biking. I have two mountain bikes. The First Love is a hard-tail and has been with me for 16 years now. Sexy Sadie is a full-suspension, new addition to my stable. On that first trail ride the other day with Sexy Sadie, I shivered with the realization that it had been a long, long time since I felt I was being true to myself. Being a mother entails a lot of self-sacrifice. I don't co...

I spoke too bloody soon. Too much unfinished business. I am still juggling three jobs and Motherhood, not to mention The Partner Ship. It looks like I dropped a few things. I'm somewhere down there, among those shards around my feet. "Shards." That's such a weak word for what I'm feeling right now. Insert photo here of something big and fierce and red and hurting. Something that stinks. Something that will make your mother say, "Don't go near that thing!"

Insomnia, Listening Three times in one night a small animal crosses the length of the ceiling. Each time it goes all the way one way, all the way back, without hesitation or pause. Envy that sureness. It is like being cut-flowers, between the field and the vase. from Seventeen Pebbles by Jane Hirshfield For the longest time I thought the title of this poem was Envy. Because I've always looked with wonder at people who project the fullest confidence in their capabilities, their skills and talents, their beliefs. People who talk big, walk tall and live even bigger. This poem -- and the way it fits in my life -- could just as well be called Conviction, which I sorely lack... which brings me back to Envy. I have conviction-envy. It's like penis envy, only worse.

There seems to be a lot of "more than my usual self-indulgence" going on here. I used to do this on facebook. But nowadays I feel more like choosing what I want to make public to whatever public finds its way here, over choosing the public I want from a list of "friends." Public is public. Whatever thoughts or words I cannot make public here, I will keep to myself or leave to the old-fashioned grape vine. And this is where I first made the online world a repository for my crap, personal or otherwise. So I'm back home, blog. I'm back home. But I digress. What I really wanted to say was, Oi. You. Have you nothing else to write about besides yourself? To which the answer is, Yes. But I'm scared.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change; the courage to change the things I can... And the wisdom to know the difference between grabbing opportunity by the balls and biting off more than I can chew.

Well this is ridiculous. For the second time in a month, I left home without my pen and without my notebook. These are the signs of a busy monkey mind on the road, on the go, juggling. I begin to let slip even the important things. I feel like a circus act. But it's the closest I'll ever get to being in the circus. The imaginary crowd roars and cheers me on as I bow in the center ring

Everywhere I look I see people with a purpose being busy, doing something bigger than themselves, making a difference. What am I by comparison? Directionless as melted butter sliding off the top of a pancake. But not the pancake. Not the real deal. A sponge? Just barely. A camera lens that just needs a little cleaning to make things clear? A centipede with all one hundred feet stuck in too many different places? A caterpillar with an uncertain future? And no, I do not want to be a butterfly, lovely as butterflies may be, flitting from one thing to another. No. Give me instead the focus of a cobra, ready to strike where it matters most.

What does it mean? I mean, to be a good person. The un-put-down-able kind of good person. The other  day, a stranger stopped me on Session Road and tied my shoelace for me. I was walking with the Baby in a sling, a bundle of papers in one hand, and an umbrella in the other. This woman looked to be in her twenties. She called me Ate, tapped me on my shoulder, and pointed out that the laces on my right shoe had come loose. I thanked her but it was impossible for me to bend down and tie them. I shrugged and walked on ahead of her. A few paces later, she tapped me on my shoulder again and said, "Ako na." I'll do it. Then she bent down and tied my shoelace for me. If she knew me to be the kind of person I am, my foibles, the sorts of trouble I've gotten myself into, the things I've said to and of people, would she still have given me this small act of kindness?  I thanked her again and again and she just shrugged and walked on ahead of me. 

... are flat. They barely fill the bikinis I like to wear. And if you came to this post hoping to find something titillating, you are about to be disappointed further. Another fact about me and my breasts is that I try, as much as possible, to keep them free from bra-bondage. Given that there's nothing much there needing support, I don't really see the point. I wonder about our skewed notions of immodesty. Is going au naturel beneath the shirt and not wearing a bra more immodest than faking larger breast size and forcing the cleavage issue with underwiring and padded bras? (Unfortunately, the only kind of bra you can find in this country that doesn't have painful underwiring or extra padding is the trainer or the sports bra. What does that tell you?) This question of im/modesty reminds me of the legendary Laurie Anderson's Smoke Rings, in which she asks, Que es mas macho? Pineapple o knife?... Que es mas macho? Lightbulb o schoolbus?... Que es mas macho? Iceb...

2009 rode roughshod over a lot of people. I had a miscarriage in January 2009 and with that baby, who waved at me in the ultrasound with ten fingers and ten toes and a face I could almost recognize, I buried a dream. Even so, I had imagined a seed was planted in that grave and that it would sprout from the earth, grow into a towering tree of love, and spread it's shade above us. Months later I was desperately drowning my sorrow in all the wrong waters. I found myself at the dead-end of a wonderful relationship that had lasted eight and a half years. Hundreds of people were left reeling from the aftermath of Ondoy and Pepeng. I didn't get the giant tree of love I wanted but in it's place a beautiful, lush, disorderly garden was thriving and teeming with untamed life, and death, and life. I only had to see it for what it was. Also last year, my family mourned the death of a grand aunt whose love for all of us was greater than the sum of all parts of the clan, and whose partin...

It's so cold this morning my fingers feel stiff and clumsy as I type and my penmanship sucks more than usual. This is one of those mornings that brims with scintillating dreams that ripple up against the dam of frustrations of a peripatetic who is only here, still. So I retreat into a decade-old memory of sitting on a platform in Canterbury on a bright winter morning, waiting for the train to London to come in, shivering and writing an old-fashioned pen-on-paper letter to some one I love(d) and telling him how strange it was to struggle to move the pen across the page. It was important to me, in that white sunshine, to understand this cold, to feel it completely without giving into it. So I wrote to him about it with my fingers freezing inside my gloves. Looking at the scrawled lines I wondered whether he would be able to read what I had written, and also what I had not written -- of the lasting warmth and moments of heat I wished to pass between us. Now I understand that the lette...

Tito Krip arranged for the both of us to visit Mom E. before his flight back to Manila on Sunday. It was mother's day. I wasn't sure whether she would remember me. The beginning was awkward. I told her that I was in the writer's workshop in 1993. Tito Krip told her I was my father's daughter. She turned to me and said kindly, "Your father I know." We made small talk and eventually (inevitably) the conversation led to poetry. Mom E said, "It's harder to write short poems, because you have to be precise." Feeling emboldened by this (most of my poems are short), I hesitantly asked her whether I could show her a poem. Mom E's eyes lit up and she said "Yes, of course!" I was so happy. Now we both knew why I had come. I showed her my draft of Invisible Light , on which I had crossed out words and scribbled changes and crossed them out again. "Oh good," she said. "It's a short one. Good." She nodded approvingly. She...

Wheeee! This blog turns two today! I didn't bother to announce our first anniversary because I don't believe in celebrating personal anniversaries. There are better milestones to celebrate, such as personal victories. (Although admittedly, for some, two people staying together for a long period of time could be a personal victory of sorts. Ok, I concede that much.) Also, I didn't know where this was headed, which now strikes me as silly. Why should that have mattered to a self-professed now/here no/where woman? Pff! And for the record, I still don't know where this is going. But since keeping a blog alive is a personal victory for little ole scatter-brained, undisciplined, "this-takes-too-much-effort", but "let's-spread-ourselves-a-little-more-thinly" Me), I've decided to symbolically gift my blog with two, lovely carabaos. (Because I love carabaos. I also just love the sound of their scientific name: Bobalus bobalis . It has a nice ring to i...

What I am about to say will probably look like excuse for procrastination #247, but it's not. I have decided that since writing is my first love, my vocation, my calling, my pain, my joy, my craft, and my work, I shall no longer mentally beat myself over the head or kneel on a pile of mongo beans and punish myself when I am writing other things besides the diss. So there. I write, therefore I survive this mad world.

The Champion raced in full battle gear: pancake make-up and jolens-sized pearl earrings. So who says kikays can't kick ass on mountain bikes? She sure did! But does that mean I should start wearing make-up when I ride? Eeeeeewww. I'll leave that to those who can carry... MEEEOWWRRR! Photo by FGSLP. Thanky!