It's 2:53 a.m. and still couldn't sleep, so I might as well tell you a story:
Me and my girl were eating at the Krua Thai along Torres St. Right in front of us are a group of Americans and Koreans seated at different tables. All the time, I try to look cool like I eat opulence for breakfast and use luxury to wipe my ass every time I crap.
Though I must admit I got rattled off when I read the menu.
Let me put this in a proper context. I only have P22 on my pockets, my girl had even less than me. We just thought of splurging that night precisely because we had no money. No need for money, we thought, we got Visa!
Our Visa ad would go this way:
1. Green shirt: P30 (from ukay-ukay)
2. blue pants: P800
3. accessories: P67
The look on our faces when reading the menu? Priceless!
Anyway, after finishing up all our food (our bill amounted to nearly P500). The waiter came around and asked my girl, in English, no less:
“Ma’am, are you done?”
I froze. Tucked in my smile and waited. Rarely do you get those moments when you could shot back a witty reply. You’ve seen the funny movies. You play the conversations over and over in your head, hoping that one day you get to use them in real life.
To my mind, there are several answers to this question:
1. “No, I’m not done. I’m (state your name)”
2. “No, I’m not done, but I have a brother by that name.”
3. “Yes, I have a man’s name. And yours?”
There are also several variations to these but they all go with the same theme.
And so there I was, holding my spoon in mid-air. I waited for her answer because basically we share the same sense of humor (you know, the one when nobody else gets it) so I knew it would be good.
She looked at the waiter askance, smiled her sweet smile, and replied:
“Yes.”
The waiter took her plate and that was it. There goes the moment.
I, for one, blame it on the menu. Priceless!
Back in college, in between bouts of clear-headedness and downright being wasted, i came across this masterpiece by Gary Provost's in his 1985 book "100 ways to improve your writing." I love how it teaches writers the importance of varying your paragraph length of your articles, not just to explain, narrate, or to investigate, but also to create music.
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.
Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length.
And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals -- sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear. Don't just write words.
Write music.
A short history of the longest finger
Giving someone "the finger" is one of the basest violations in modern culture, but its origins date back over 2500 years. The first written record of the insult occurred in ancient
It has been argued by anthropologists that the finger is a a variant of a classic "phallic aggressive" gesture used by primates. By jabbing a threatening phallus at your enemy like a wild animal, you aren't just belittling him, but also making him your sexual inferior. Instead of using a real penis, civilized Janes and Platos called upon the substitute wieners within their own hands to mock, threaten, and humiliate opponents.
And boy, did it. When the Romans imported the art, music, and culture of the Greeks, the finger came along, too. Roman Emperor Caligula, a pioneer in perversity, frequently shocked his citizens by forcing them to kiss his middle finger instead of his hand. One of his subjects, Cassius, who Caligula often taunted as being too effeminate, finally had enough humiliation and assassinated him. Clearly, the bird was not to be taken lightly.
During the Middle Ages, the finger went underground. It was still known, but the Catholic Church frowned upon its use, as the middle finger was supposed to be holy in the
for a full version of the history click here
http://www.ooze.com/finger/html/history.html
loved this pun, thought i'd share it...
"Uncle Jim," by Peter Meinke:
What the children remember about Uncle Jim
is that on the train to
so he could marry again
he met another woman and woke up in
It took him seven years to untangle that dream
but a man who could sing like Uncle Jim
was bound to get in scrapes now and then:
he expected it and we expected it.
Mother said, It's because he was the middle child,
And Father said, Yeah, where there's trouble
Jim's in the middle.
When he lost his voice he lost all of it
To the surgeon's knife and refused the voice box
They wanted to insert. In fact he refused
Almost everything. Look, they said,
It's up to you. How many years
Do you want to live? And Uncle Jim
Held up one finger.
The middle one.
A funny thing happened today. I was on the way to the office when somebody tapped my shoulder from behind and called my name. I glanced back and turned out it was an old flame from way back. But for the life of me, I couldn't remember her name.
I have a faint memory of her face and her eyes. She looked plumpier. But i could not really trust my memory to say that she gained weight. Even her smell is not familiar (A new perfume, maybe)? Memory is a funny thing. You think you could never forget a person but each piece of her slowly fades away with time. You forget how her laughter sounded like, how she dressed. Her smile.
Her smell that clung heavily to your clothes lightens and evaporates, but the memory is still there, however faint. It's almost like the smell of durian, lingering in the air long after the solids are thrown away; or the smell of sweaty feet in the room.
I thought we had something then but now I couldn’t even remember her name.
Our conversation went like this:
Her: So, musta na?
Me: Okay lang, kaw?
Her: Okay lang din. Saan ka na ngayon?
Me: Wala, tambay tambay lang.
Her: Atik ka man oi. Ingon ni Michael, nagtrabaho ka daw sa ______?
Me: Ah, oo. Sometimes.
Awkward silence. She looked away. I looked at her.
Me: So, asa ka karun?
Her: (smiling) wala, magpatahi uniform diha sa ____ (points to a boutique nearby).
Me: ah ok. asa diay ka work?
Her: Sa ______. Isa sa mga sales agents didto.
Me: ah ok.
Her: Asawa ka naman daw?
Me: Tsismis lang na. hehehe. Kaw, minyo ka na?
Her: Wala pa pud. Wa pa nakita. Basi ginahulat ko nimo? (laughs)
Me: Mao. Hehehe
Another silence. Longer this time. I took the chance to try to remember her name and failed.
Me: So, adto nako. Balik pa ko work.
Her: Sige. Ako pud, magpatahi pa pud ko uniform. Naa ka number?
Me: Naa.
Her: Hatagi ko beh. Save nako.
Me: Sige. Unsa man imo number kay save nako tapos miscol taka later.
Her: Ok. (gives her number) Tawagi ko ha or text?
Me: Ok
Her: Promise ha? Bantay ka lang, atikon bya ka.
Me: Nanira pa jud. Lagi. Text taka.
I didn’t. It would be pointless.
Speaking of Tawi-tawi… I think the beaches there are comparable to the best in the world. With powdery white sand that stretches on end, clear turquoise water, and the wind swinging freely. There are no resorts there, maybe because of its image as the preferred vacation spot for the Abu Sayyaf group or its proximity to Sulu, another hotbed for skirmishes, which isn't true of course, but that's another story.
The one good thing about that is you have the beach to yourself. And so, Susan (my companion for the project) and I vowed to wake up early for a swim.
Daybreak came.
The sun started to rise behind the open sea, tinting the coastline with a carroty blush. I started to strip while Susan was busy capturing the moment with her digital camera.
Off to my peripheral vision, I saw an old woman draped in malong emerge from one of the many houses lining the shore. We watched her languidly walked towards the shore, each step purposeful, catlike almost. She stopped at the wet mark where the waves left an imprint in the sand. She burrowed the sand with her bare hands. We continued watching her, mesmerized.
Then, she unloosened the malong draped on her waist, faced the ocean, and sat on the tunnel she just made. That’s when we realized that she was relieving herself using the malong as cover. The term catlike suddenly took a whole different meaning.
We never got to swim, that just killed it off for us right there.
Digging into my pockets yesterday, I realized I only have P85.00 and change left. How much P85.00 would buy?
I remember when I was in Tawi-tawi island, writing about one of the projects of a company known for promoting corporate social responsibility.
We arrived there about 2:00 p.m. and so we went off to the market for our dinner that night. Their public market was anything but orderly. The sheer volume of the crowd made it almost necessary to walk shoulder to shoulder with a stranger. To my left was an old woman, a turban on her head and a cigar on her mouth, almost a caricature of herself.
The smoke from her cigar burned my nostrils and I couldn’t look away because the guy to my right looked like he could skin me alive without breaking a sweat.
There we were, in single file. My hands on the shoulders of the local contact in front of me, my companion’s hands were on my shoulders. Like three-year olds, treading an imaginary line. To this day, I couldn’t remember how we made it out of there with vegetables, imbao (shellfish), and kuracha (sea centipede) and fresh isda sa bato in hand.
Our expenses for the feast? A mere P85.00 and change.
Words intimidate me. That may seem paradoxical since I write for a living but it’s true --words intimidate me.
Consider, for example, this seven-syllable word craspedomorphology: defined as a branch of photography, which deals with the sharpness of images, clarity of detail and the resolving power of camera lenses.
If you don’t consult the dictionary and rely only on the phonetics, it would evoke a different meaning. If I had to guess, based on the sound of the word and by literally considering each syllable, I would craft a totally different definition. And it has nothing to do with photography. I would come up something like: cras = uncouth; pedo = child; morph = change; and ology = study of. So my own definition would be: the study of changing an uncouth child.
I told you it has nothing to do with photography.
Fortunately or unfortunately, much as I am threatened with them, I’m also enamored with words. The way letters make love to form syllables and syllables merge to form words, words turn to sentences, and on it goes.
I imagine I must have slobbered graffiti on my mother’s thigh the day I got out just to have the pleasure of admiring what I just scrawled. Doctors must have been surprised to find the bloodied words “I was here” on the side of my mother’s thigh running through her leg.
My love affair with graffiti continued to high school, with a trusty ballpen, or if I’m lucky, pentel pen in hand. I’d scrawl anywhere, from wet cement (your name and the date below just to be sure the owner remembers the day you vandalized his pavement), the comfort room (girls or boys), my bedroom, school, lampposts, walls. A nail cutter also comes in handy when you have to carve your name on the teacher’s desk or your own chair. It was only later I learned that carving your real name would have dire consequences. ah, the lessons of youth!
I was lucky to have been surrounded by books. From those illustrated Jesus books peddled by Christian bookstores to Disney‘s Wonderful World of Knowledge, to Winnie the Pooh classics, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales; and even our local askal Tagpi with the immortal phrase “run Tagpi, run!” (see, it’s not Forrest Gump who ran first).
Over the years, I graduated to books without illustrations. I used to raid the room of my aunt. There’s no rhythm and rhyme to her bookshelf. Side by side with management and economics books, there are also rows and rows of mills and boons, silhouettes, and other romance novels.
Naturally, between economics and a book with a cover where the hero, naked from the waist up, scoops up the girl with prominent breasts, her blouse off-kilted, waiting for that eternal kiss, I chose the latter.
There are also surprises in reading these romance novels for a young kid with growing loins. In between pages, there’s sure to be two to three pages of hot, searing, and passionate, well, lovemaking.
Then I was introduced to Harold Robbins, WHAM! It was not only my impressionable young mind that exploded (and exploded, hehehe)... I didn’t know words could do that to your loins. Good thing, my aunt only had two titles of Harold Robbins in her shelf but I devoured them both. She must have found out about my “growing” interest from the dog-eared pages where the steamy scenes were for one day, the books were just gone.
It was books that instinctively taught me sentence construction, idioms, and creating images through words, for I never did memorize the parts of the speech even if my ass depended on it. And in some cases, it did. When I was spanked on the butt for failing the English subject.
Mostly, when I write I played by ear. If it sounded awkward, it must be grammatically wrong. You could hear purists on the background screaming, “Your rules suck!” what can I say? I’ve got years of experience sucking.
If words intimidate me, the alternative downright terrifies me. Just how do you say hello to a blank space?
Funny…
But when I saw
A man pick up
The burger meat
That fell
From his buns,
Replaced it and
Ate the goddamn
Thing,
My stomach turned up.
When just yesterday,
I saw on a tabloid
The mangled
Body of
A child of three,
Naked from
The waist down
And a
Broken bottle
Thrust up
Her vagina,
...And I felt nothing at all.
Finally, im blogging.
I guess I have to explain myself. you see, i always have this thing for pablo neruda. i saw the movie Il Postino twice (and maybe more, if i could get hold of a copy and no it's not a biography but it's beautiful nonetheless), and had gotten lost in his words more often than i care to remember.
You know the feeling when you're about to sleep, stretching your arms way above your head, let out a long sigh of relief after a hard day's work,and just let go.Somewhere along the way, you get lost but it's not fear that sets in, rather it's more like tranquility. the calmness of home.
I love the man. I'm a little embarassed to admit it, but I love the guy. and I hope one day, I could rein in the words like he did, a cigar on my hand, bind my other hand to the saddle with a rope, hold on for dear life, and ride that raging bull for eight seconds.
For cowboys, that's all it takes to gain self-respect.
