A letter

I once found a letter in our mailbox that was addressed to nobody I knew. The address on the envelope was ours, but the name was a stranger, so short of going house to house in our neighborhood and asking for somebody by that name, I didn't know how else to help the letter find its way.

It sat on a bookshelf for weeks before I decided to open it. Maybe it contains a clue on the person's identity, I reasoned to myself, as I opened the envelope carefully so I could still seal it again.

It didn't. It was an apologetic love letter, from someone who hadn't communicated in a long time, a ghost before ghosting had become a phenomenon people would write and tell stories about.

I haven't forgotten you, the letter said in Filipino, and I am sorry if you think I have. Do you still live in this address? Please let me know. It was signed with love, sent from foreign waters with no specific return address.

For a few seconds, I felt like I had been handed an important mission by the Universe: to bridge a couple's eternal love.

Then a few seconds after that, I put the letter down. If he really loves her, he will have to find his way.

On growing up without water

A few afternoons ago, I struck up a conversation with a woman who was waiting her turn at the couturier. The dogs--the shop was also a home--had gotten bored with me and had left to sleep under the remains of the sun, and since I was there only to keep my mother company, I decided to talk to the woman while my mother and the couturier settled on a design for her mother-of-the-groom gown.

 
It turned out that the woman and I lived in the same subdivision, and after I shared with her some of my concerns about cleanliness and security in our neighborhood, she suggested that I run for our street council.

I smiled and said I would consider it, but to be honest, my first reaction was: Let the adults handle it. 

Then, I remembered that childhood was a million years ago. I have been, for many years now, a person younger people turn to in a room.

***

I've been reminded of my childhood a lot lately. It's almost funny what the triggers are, if they weren't actually tragic. Like the water crisis experienced by some parts of the city recently, for example.

Water shortage was very much part of my growing up years. I think I was already in college when our area finally got reliable water supply--and by reliable, I don't mean 24/7. More like 12/7.

For years, on the days we had any supply at all, water just flowed out of a single faucet in our house, the one outdoors and closest to the main line, because water pressure was that low.

For much of the 1980s, we'd save water in pitchers and jugs for drinking and pails and metal drums for everything else during the hours that it was flowing. Bathing or doing any other business in the bathroom often entailed fetching a pail of water outside.

When we were younger, we had helpers who did that for us, but when we were older, we had to manage by ourselves. Imagine doing that daily, for three children and an adult, before the school bus came to pick us up at six o'clock.

Eventually, my father engineered a makeshift water storage system in our backyard that made it easier to collect water. It still didn't go inside the house, but at least we had sufficient supply, even if sometimes the water wasn't very clean and the metals drums were soon encrusted in rust.

A few years later, we had a booster pump and a proper water tank installed, and finally water ran inside the house again. The first time water flowed through the dry pipes, it came out dark brown with rust and dirt accumulated through the years.

I still remember how the bathroom came alive with this brown water, the toilet bowl's water closet hissing and gurgling and the shower head coming out of early retirement with a spurt and a splatter and finally with a rain of what first looked liked mud and eventually was water, glorious clean water.

To this day, I feel grateful I get to wash the dishes and take a long shower.

***

While looking at recent pictures of people desperately lining up with their buckets for water from different sources, including  a condominium pool, I felt some of the trauma of extended periods what was essentially drought resurfacing.

Where are the adults in the room? I found myself asking, before I remembered childhood was a million years ago.

Adult learning

"The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell." This, I remember from high school biology too many years ago, a sentence that resurfaces every now and then like debris from a long-ago plane crash in the pacific ocean of my brain.

It's a memory that is not entirely useless, and now it is telling me how to live. I held it up closely today, reading about programmed cell death--a healthy and necessary cellular suicide that allows fingers and toes to form themselves, among others, but not cancer. Some cells are supposed to die.

I didn't understand at fourteen that death is programmed in the body in the same place that gives it life. I know this, because if I had, maybe I wouldn't have fought too hard to keep all the things alive long enough for many of them to go bad. I had to learn it the long way: you have to let some things die.

Uncertainty

There is a joke that has Werner Heisenberg, one of the fathers of quantum physics, speeding down the expressway. He is pulled over by a policeman, who sternly asks him, "Sir, do you know how fast you're going?"

"No," Heisenberg replies, "but I know exactly where I am."

***

I'm thinking about this now because last Sunday's writing prompt, carried over from two weeks ago, is "Heisenberg Principle."

Since January, my friends (Eric and Donna) and I have been challenging each other with these prompts. It's been a fun exercise that has also been helpful in reviving our blogs from the throes of abandonment. But it's also a frustrating exercise because we're people with non-science degrees who agreed to having Heisenberg Principle as a prompt.

To be honest, I hadn't thought of this principle in years, maybe not since freshman or sophomore year in college, until Breaking Bad brought it to the forefront of my consciousness. But I do remember learning about it in my senior year in high school because of something our physics teacher said during that lesson: "The act of observation affects what is being observed."

Of course, it's so me to latch on to that one line and run away with it. I remember going home that day, thinking of how my act of observation would change my horrible teenage life. It was a wild concept: by simply observing, I could turn things into ... well, no longer what they were, at least. What a super power!

It did work, in a way. I stopped escaping my reality and started looking at it closely, hoping it would turn into something different. Sometimes it made me even more miserable, but many times--and this is important to teenage me--it led to deeper understanding, compassion, and acceptance, even.

***

Mulling over the Heisenberg Principle now, my thoughts drift towards trade-offs: how in measuring A, we are forced to lose precision in measuring B. When we try to know A better, we understand B a little less.

I used to find uncertainty upsetting. When you're an anxious child, you want everything spelled out for you, no surprises. But my personality isn't suited for precision planning either, and it took me a while to accept that.

Now, I think I'm okay with knowing A, and leaving B for some other day. And if I never figure out how fast I'm going, I think I can be happy with just knowing I am here.

I take pleasure in your company

The other day, I read this article, "Loitering is Delightful" by Ross Gay, on the Paris Review, where he explores the notion of loitering and writes:

The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”). ... All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day.

I was immediately reminded of college. I was part of a group that called ourselves "the Loafers Club," a variation of the "the Losers Club" from the Stephen King horror novel IT. We'd watched the 1986 movie adaptation together after school, after discovering that we all enjoyed King's writing.

We'd recently joined a school organization for writers, found kindred spirits, and spent a lot of time at the tambayan, initially to fulfill the required "tambay hours," but, soon enough, simply because we liked being around each other.

A typical day in UP would see us and our other org mates spreading a handwoven mat, a picnic blanket, or a re-purposed tarpaulin left over from an event--whatever worked, really--on the grass under a tree in the Faculty Center Grove, then sitting or lying down in the shade, delighting in the often ordinary moment and in each other's company.

Over 20 years later, my favorite people are still people who like to loaf. While I like being organized and working towards a goal, I'm often wary of people who just can't function without a defined purpose--it's as if this need for a reason instantly translates to an evaluation of my company and I suddenly feel pressured to produce.

Going into my 40s, I'm discovering that people who both have time to kill and enjoy doing nothing purposeful are now a rarity. I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing, but I find it unfortunate that we don't get to enjoy each other as much as we ought to, especially without hope or agenda.

Happily, I still have some friends who take their time with me. I hope I never lose them, and that we continue to delight in each other.

And because I think I'll always be the person who lingers simply because I take pleasure in your company, I hope it will be easier and easier for me to let you know.

A throwback Thursday

Last Thursday, I got a message from a former workmate. We used to teach English in an office in Alabang, where I spent a little over two years before transferring to the content development team in Eastwood. I would spend six more years developing blended learning content for the company before leaving in 2015.

The work entailed creating lessons, quizzes, tests, and courses for the company's learning management system (LMS). I mention this because my former workmate was asking me about phonetics, somehow thinking me to be some sort of "expert."

I'm hardly an expert. Phonetics is a subject I had encountered only briefly in Linguistics 101, the only linguistics class I took. And I was only forced to learn a little more about it because I used an old paperback dictionary when I was a newspaper writer. Online dictionaries weren't a big thing yet back then. Besides, I had to share one dial-up internet capable desktop computer with everyone else in our department.

My former workmate told me that she was taking an online test and she couldn't move past the phonetics-related questions because the system wasn't accepting her answers. She'd been at it for hours, she said, and she couldn't figure out why her answers were being marked wrong.

I was on the road when we first messaged in the afternoon. When I was able to reply to her again close to midnight, she was still stuck on the same three questions. Feeling her frustration, I offered to take a look.

Basically, there were sentences written in phonetic alphabet, and you just needed to enter the English words in the provided box. Because I am a nerd, I was instantly curious, despite being exhausted from having just been in an eight-hour car ride.

I spent some fifteen minutes figuring out what the sentences were, switching back and forth from Messenger to browser on my phone, only to discover she and I had arrived at practically the same answers. I started feeling frustrated myself, because I was so sure our answers were correct. I had checked and double-checked.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that the problem was most likely an LMS issue, not a human comprehension one. I asked her if she had tried writing the sentences without any punctuation marks or in all lowercase letters. She had tried the former. She then tried the latter. Et voilà! Problem solved.

She thanked me profusely, and I told her it was no big deal. It was, to her, of course. Finally, she could move on to the rest of the test, she said, after hours of being stumped and not knowing what she was doing wrong.

In a way, it was a big deal to me, too. I had handled a lot of frustrations in that job, the least of which was working with limited technical resources on a quirky platform. I had loved the work with a passion, but the job had started to feel like an albatross around my neck in my final few months.

How many hours had I spent testing quizzes to check if they accepted all possible incarnations of a correct answer in the six years I was handling content development? That was tedious labor, but years later, what little I had learned helped me help someone else. It was hilariously simple, but it also felt so... glorious.

Writing this now, a few days later, it seems like such a small thing, so trivial, even inconsequential. But I can still remember how much my old self craved for even a little bit of this lightness, and I can only be thankful that, finally, it is here.

Something about the future

A few years ago, I was in the supermarket wanting to buy some chocolates. For some reason, the Choc Nut was on the top shelf--too high for five-foot (and three-fourths inch) me to reach. I stood on tiptoe and tried to get a pack, just in time for my arm to hit someone else's.

The arm belonged to a man, now faceless in my memory, but I remember noticing he was attractive and well-dressed and a full head taller. He got his Choc Nut with no trouble, while I abruptly suspended all efforts to grab mine. Instead, I simply stood in front of the chocolate shelf and waited for him to leave. I was thinking that I might need to jump a little, with what little grace I had, and I didn't want anyone witnessing that.

But I wasn't as invisible as I was hoping to be, because he turned to me and handed me a pack of Choc Nut with an amused chuckle. I felt the blood rush to my face, and I managed to say, "Oh, wow." He chuckled again. I thanked him and, with growing embarrassment, I left. I could still hear him chuckling as I walked away.

***

I was thinking of you when this memory floated to the surface, and I found myself wondering: Could that have been you?

I could allow myself to believe it, too.

Our paths hadn't crossed yet then, at least not in a way we remembered, obviously, but I can easily imagine that life, with all its side roads and detours, has always been leading us to a future where you smile at me and I think, this is exactly how I wished it would be.

If I could be sweet

As I entered the elevator to go down to the lobby from the 5th floor, a man rushed out. We almost bumped into each other, then we did the dance for a few seconds before we found our way.

A quick glance told me he was handsome; he looked to be in his 40s, going by his hair. But the most striking thing about him--at least for me--was that he was eating a chocolate bar. He held a half-wrapped Meiji milk chocolate bar in his hand, biting into it like a delighted child instead of breaking it into oh-so-proper adult bite-sized pieces.

The doors were closing when he suddenly ran back in the elevator. "I'm sorry," he said, in what I think was a Japanese accent.

I suprised myself by laughing like a girl, then saying, "Oh, you were going down?"

"Yes, yes," he said, with a half-laugh, "I'm sorry."

We stayed silent as the elevator slowly descended to the ground floor. I stared at my feet. It was a small elevator.

When we got to the ground floor, I quickly stepped outside to wait for my Grab car, which was two minutes away. He followed, stood near the steps, glanced around, then saw the vacant seat beside me. He took it. Then he happily continued eating his chocolate bar.

There was a time when I'd wish he had talked to me or I had gathered enough nerve to strike up a conversation with him. Right now, however, I really can't stop thinking about that chocolate bar.

We were both stuck in the rain

We were both stuck in the rain. Me, because I had decided, on a whim, to buy a drink. Her, because she had gone out on her scooter and hadn't thought to bring any cover. There had been no warning of rain, save for a sudden gust of wind immediately followed by a steady spray of water.

We sat on plastic chairs at a table pushed against the frontage of a closed store, thrown together by our need for shelter. I was on my phone; she was on another stick of cigarette.

I had my back to her, not wanting to intrude or be intruded on, but she spoke, her voice thick and raspy from, I could tell, years of nicotine and tar and smoke.

"You have a nice belt," she said.

"Sorry?" I replied.

"You have a nice belt," she repeated.

I turned around. She was a beautiful mestiza: creamy skin, dark brown eyes, a tiny sharp nose. Makeup-free, as far as I could tell. She was wearing a pink spaghetti top and short denim cutoffs. Her brown hair was put up in a messy high ponytail. She was ten years older than me, she would point out later, past 50.

"Thank you," I replied, and before I could stop myself, I added, "I like it too, because it's made of recycled materials and it's good for the planet ... Earth." I tapped on my phone, an effort to rein in my rambling. Beautiful people, in general, make me nervous.

"It's nice," she said, "you don't need holes on it." She quickly ran a finger on the weave of my belt, an intrusion so swift I didn't have time to flinch.

Is she trying to trick me or something? I found myself thinking. But instead I mumbled, "I hope my underwear isn't showing," and I tugged at my jeans. She assured me it wasn't.

I took note of my belongings, almost immediately feeling bad for thinking with malice. There were other people around us; the people manning the store next door knew her by name. But I turned my back anyway, making a show of being busy on my phone.

It was still raining; I had nowhere to go.

"Have you seen the movie Glorious?" she asked, her voice straining through the silence I was putting between us. "That was some kiss he gave her, with his tongue all out."

Is she trying to pick me up? I found myself wondering. I'm not good at reading sexual cues, and I didn't mean to be assuming, but I'd seen Glorious and how did the subject shift from my belt to a movie about a 51-year-old woman who, after years of fearing she had turned frigid, reignites her sexuality with a young lover?

But I had made a resolution to be generous with my attention, so I decided to give her an audience, at least for as long as the rain would last.

She told me the story of her best friend, a woman in her fifties who had a 21-year-old boyfriend. The boy was crazy about her friend, she said, and he wanted to marry her, but the friend wanted to keep their relationship secret because he was younger than her youngest child.

Besides, they couldn't marry because she had been married before, years ago, to a mason, the construction worker who looked like Panchito whom she had chosen over her rich American journalist boyfriend and another American suitor who was based in Hong Kong and took her to five-star hotels and gave her a package with 24 bottles of different expensive perfumes.

Her best friend and the boyfriend are going to Leyte together soon, to meet her family and make the relationship official.

She also told me the story of her uncle, an engineer who worked in Dubai as an airline mechanic. He was pirated by a competitor once--asked to name his price, he quoted four times the amount he was making, and they gave it to him. The woman said they tried to set him up with her best friend, but she loved her Panchito then, so they ended up setting him up with her best friend's maid.

The uncle fell in love with the maid. He married her and built her a mansion in Pangasinan. He was infertile--everyone knew this--so when he found out that his wife was pregnant, he knew the baby wasn't his, but he accepted it because it was the one thing he couldn't give her.

The second time she got pregnant, she tried to get rid of the baby. She ended up bleeding heavily, non-stop. She almost died. He flew from Dubai to nurse her back to life. The baby didn't make it.

She eventually left him for a policeman from Urdaneta. The uncle came home unannounced and caught the lovers in flagrante delicto. On their bed, in the master bedroom in the mansion he had built for her.

Her uncle had been tempted to kill his wife right then and there, the woman said, but he calmed down and told himself that it was pointless to kill such a terrible person. Let her suffer the consequences of her actions, he said, life will get her back.

She kept the house and everything in it. He left for Dubai. He died a few years later. "Sa kaiisip," the woman said, pointing to her head and twirling her finger. Death by overthinking? I wondered, but I was thinking of myself.

"Do you have children?" she asked. She had two. One was 37, a daughter. She was single.

"No," I replied. "I don't have a husband either." But I have other things I think too much about, I wanted to say, like presbyopia and falling hair, whether I keep misinterpreting sexual cues from men, and even women, and whether I talk too much and say the wrong things. Basically, a slow kind of death by overthinking.

"You want a smoke?" she asked. I shook my head.

In another life, I would have said yes and continued the conversation. I would have made a new friend--a beautiful, chain-smoking, scooter-riding momma with a raspy voice and colorful though sometimes tragic tales.

Also in another life, this would have been a meet cute. She would have been a handsome, single man instead--or our genders would have matched, at least.

In this life, it had stopped raining. "Well," I said, "I have to go home now." I said goodbye, and that was that.

Sunday rest for the restless

I love Sundays, especially if I've spent Saturday out. It's still a day of rest for me, though rest now takes on different appearances, such as doing the dishes or folding my clothes or trying out a new recipe.

I learned recently that the rest I need after a busy week doesn't necessarily mean resting the body. It's more of resting my mind, and that can happen when I labor on other things I don't think about on the other days of the week.

I also learned recently that I actually enjoy making things, no matter how little talent--and patience--I have for crafting.

My mother and I (but mostly my mother) made a princess skirt for Kiara to play with last December. I took some scraps and made a matching skirt for her Minnie Mouse toy. The stitches were messy, the fabric was crooked, but you can bet I was proud of that little thing!

Emboldened by the relative success of my little project, I decided to finally make the prototype of that infinity scarf with a secret pocket I'd always wanted to make. It took me perhaps a total of twelve hours, including not just one instance of taking my creation apart because I'd made a mistake, but I was satisfied with my latest endeavour.

Take a look! I'm not so crazy about the print, but I'm happy with the outcome.

That strip in the middle is the secret pocket.

Basically, a few years ago, I bought a few meters of the cheapest stretch fabric I could find so I could learn to work with it on a sewing machine. It was a pretty advanced plan, as I had never used a sewing machine in my entire life.

I still haven't learned to use a sewing machine. I made this scarf by hand, using the only two stitches I remember from Home Economics class: the running stitch and the back stitch. Then I sewed on the secret pocket with a zipper using, well, my common sense. Somehow it worked.

I think I'm going to make more scarves on more Sundays of this year. I'll probably want to get my own sewing machine, if I learn how to use the tiny portable one that we have. At the very least, I'm definitely going to improve my running stitch and back stitch.

My theme for 2019: good intentions

To be clear, it's living intentionally, but I wanted to use a noun, or noun phrase, as has been the tradition.

This theme snuck up on me when we got home after Christmas Eve dinner with my brother-in-law's family, as I was tidying up in the living room before going to bed.

I'd noticed that the Christmas lights were still on the table, and the branch my mother and our helper had painstakingly cut off from our podocarpus tree--which had, incidentally, borne fruit for the first time ever in 2018--was looking forlorn in its dark corner in our tiny patio.

That was our Christmas tree, still unfinished. It had to wait until Christmas morning to be completed, and it would have only one Christmas night to sparkle in its full glory.

We'd had a good night with family, and in the spirit of the season, I switched on the lights. I watched them twinkle on the table, many of them still coiled, and thought to myself: here lies our good intentions.

But what we had really intended was to have a light, happy evening. We had intended to not be so tired from unnecessary preparations that we'd be cranky or exhausted before midnight. And that's what we got.

So, here's to living out all my good intentions this 2019!

***

It took a while to come up with this theme. I'd been thinking of making lifestyle changes, like simplifying my life further, speeding up my pursuit of minimalism, and going for zero waste as much as possible.

I was on a jeepney a few days before Christmas, and I noticed this boy in front of me. He was dressed in casual clothes--t-shirt, shorts, sneakers, no socks--and he was probably a university student. He had an arm up and on his wrist was a phrase tattoo: "mise en place" in cursive.

Mise en place is a French term associated with the culinary arts. It means "set up" or "putting everything in its proper place" to make cooking easier, especially for professional chefs.

But it's also a philosophy that extends beyond the kitchen. Here's a nice short article on it.

It almost became my theme for the new year--my life, after all, is a complete mess--until I felt the need to go bigger. I mean, did I really just want to put the elements of my life in order? Or did I also want to start creating new things as well, even as worked on having mise en place?

***

Speaking of mise en place, I was reminded of the term yet again when I met up with my old friends Eric and Donna for our annual Christmas meet-up.

Eric, me, and Donna

We were talking about our shared lack of desire to have our own children, and the conversation zoomed in on the whys: some sort of fear, some form of laziness, and perhaps what others would misconstrue as selfishness, but what, I think, is really a question of readiness.

"Do you make your own bed when you wake up in the morning?" Eric asked. If even that takes too much effort, what more the work of parenthood?

Maybe I'll still be a mother. Or maybe not; time is no longer on my side. Or maybe I'll be a step mom. Or perhaps an adoptive mom.

I don't know.

But what I do know is that that's another level of mise en place. I wouldn't mind putting on the work, really.

Good intentions, 2019!