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...

Undone. Come.

He stood for a moment rigid before the door of the dead room. Elaine had said to him when he first moved in and before they got married: “There’s just one thing, Peter. Promise me youwill never, EVER, go into the dead room.” Elaine with her candles, crystals, decks of tarot cards, and different-colored clothes for each day of the week, all in accordance with the alignment of the planets. Red on Monday, purple on Tuesday, blue on Wednesday, green on Thursday, orange on Friday, white on Saturday, yellow on Sunday. Never anything random on any given day. For Elaine, everything had meaning and purpose. This suited Peter, who was happy to be a seaweed, swaying back and forth in the ebb and flow of her quiet ocean. At least, and at last, he was rooted some place. Yes, for her he could do that. He could stay out of “the dead room.” He couldn’t help but think of it between quotation marks. The door of the dead room stood solidly in its frame. No knob to turn, no latch to lift. No locks...

Towards the end of the first day of Mt Cloud Bookshop's Children's Creative Writing Workshop, I told our 9 participants: There is no such thing as something that you can't write about. You can write about anything, and you can write anything you want about it. Nobody can tell you, "You can't write about that," not your parents, not your teachers, not your grandmother. That's why you have your own notebook that nobody can touch. I saw the glint in their eyes, these writers aged 8 to 14. They bent down over their notebooks and began scribbling. Kids like dangerous ideas. This is a good thing. We jaded grownups shouldn't mess with that. Dangerous ideas should be encouraged in children. We don't want them to turn into docile sheep or cattle following the herd. We want them to make a difference when it's their turn to run the world, or at least to write it. And I think these kids will.

Semester, done. Students' grades, done. Consultancy, done. It's time to get dirtysweatysunburnedwindburnedsalty! And now, I can write for myself again. Just typing that feels good.

Stop right there for a moment and know that today is VDAY . The day of one billion rising. While women, children and V-men  in my city and in places around the world strike, dance and rise today, I will be at my keyboard typing away at an overdue case study on indigenous peoples' education in northern Luzon. But I will be typing to the rhythm of one billion rising.

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.

A fish tail addresses my favorite Tito, who loves to cook: “I see you have fine knives here. Quite a kitchen you’ve got, sir, quite a kitchen. And those scissors – so strong! If I were you, I’d use them to cut off that ponytail. Doesn’t it bother you, the way it swings around while you move from pot to pot, seasoning, stirring, and tasting? A ponytail is not like a fish tail, sir. A man or a woman is perfectly fine without one but a fish without a tail is a dead fish and I don’t say that just because I wound up here with a dead fish – my dead fish, that is to say. Sniff. “Imagine a fish swimming in the sea without its tail. It wouldn’t even be swimming. It would be flapping about gracelessly, towards a slow and painful death. Can’t imagine what that’s like? Well I can tell you sir, it’s a far uglier sight than a splintered sailboat in rough waters. And to fish, a sailboat is an ugly thing to begin with, but not as ugly as boats with engines. Not only are boats with engines monstrous...