arthur, you break my heart

A year and a half after first embarking on this journey I finally finished it. Because of the 60s musical Camelot and - my initiation to Richard Gere fandom - First Knight (and probably because I was a hopeless romantic) I've always associated Arthurian stories primarily with Lancelot and Guinevere. It wasn't until Hallmark's Merlin and The Mists of Avalon that I began to see it and appreciate as an epic tale of heroism amid clashing cultures in the making of a nation. Consequently, I found all of that and more in White's version of the Arthurian legend, which also completely subverted a lot of my Lance-Jenny preconceptions.

Arthur's will was built on justice, but his heart was on peace and mercy. I appreciated this conflict most and at times I hated Arthur for not being able to reconcile both. Or perhaps he did in a way, in always upholding justice even if it means war or the breaking of friendships but at the same time urging and hoping that those in the relevant positions would find it in their own hearts to forgive and have mercy.

There were many occasions wherein Arthur seemed helpless to patch up his Round Table, to prevent war from happening or to protect the people whom he loved most. In his moments of greatest despair, the way in which in the end, the long-standing feud between the Orkneys and Uther became Arthur's nation's unraveling, it made it seem like all he had built was for nothing. Yet he regretted none of it, because Merlin gave good advice, which I take now as my mantra.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust and never dream of regretting."

it's about addiction

I was thinking after my last post that as a cynic about romantic love, I read an awful lot of love-themed literature. Well, Choke was the ultimate detour of that trajectory. It showcases the perversion of all manifestations of love: motherly love, platonic love, romantic love and even God's love. While reading it I thought it was painfully ugly and horribly depressing. Yet, I can't deny that I was mesmerized - like watching a car wreck. To his credit, Palahniuk constructed the perfect credible setting for the most incredible antics as Victor Mancini's life rotates around a care facility for mentally deranged women, a live museum of 18th century Colonial America and sexaholic group meetings. And his characters, although worlds away from being redeemable, are fantastic. I particularly loved the image of his housemate/best friend rock collector who came home with a pile of rocks everyday and slowly filled up the house, like they were living in an hourglass.

It's odd that I began this post thinking I would berate the novel and complain about the time I wasted on it. I was going to rant about how far-removed it is from reality and how the whole selling point was merely in the shock value of the things they did for love, acceptance and even sanity. I was going to say I hated it. Yet thinking back on it now, I didn't hate it. I think I have a lot of their insanity in me and I think there are times when the things they did are merely slight exaggerations of what I do everyday to create order out of this chaotic world and its society.

what if i'd gone to the movies

Murukami's Norwegian Wood in the morning, (500) Days of Summer at night. In both works, majority of the plot revolves around what love isn't but both end with the promise that this time could be it. Or not, depending on how you see things I suppose. Neither one takes on the burden of exposing what love looks like, but it does a good job of what pining for it is like. Both capture something very human, no matter how seemingly painful and hopeless the process of falling in and out of love is, all of that fear can be obliterated by the possibility that this next time it's going to work. We're like rats that keep buzzing for that electric shock.

Is it all up to chance? Our dispositions and our situations in life are constantly in flux and it seems like many things need to line up before either party is ready. In the movie, the process is less defined, less systematic, like blindly shooting at a target. In the novel, the decision is made to love but with that decision comes the assiduous task of waiting for hearts and minds to heal, to die, to be born again before love can be fulfilled.

Currently, I'm more cynical and from yesterday's cross-art form immersion to love and all its demons what resonates the most is this:

Just because she likes the same bizzaro crap that you do doesn't mean she's your soulmate. Rachel Hansen, 500 Days of Summer

meditation

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself. But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

- The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran

Love necessitates pain, which makes it easy to say that it's worth foregoing altogether. Put in these words, love is not even a gamble anymore, there's no hope that you'll get lucky and breeze to a blissful existence with your partner. Love will cause pain. Why do it at all? A few lines earlier the Prophet says:

if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure... then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing floor, into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

Fullness of life somehow necessitates love. It is as if giving yourself over willingly to be exposed to pain is a prerequisite to all other emotions, be it joy or sorrow. There is some truth in this. In loving somebody you become privy to the way they see and feel life and as you open yourself up to that you become infected, so to speak. Your heart opens up a little to new feelings, and sources of joy and sorrow. Yet, sometimes it's tempting not to feel anything at all, that it would actually be desirable to hold back on all of one's laughter and not have to shed all of one's tears. Is it really worth it?

flashback 90s

My brother brought this album back home in 1993; I was in third grade. It didn't mean much to me then, except that I felt a kind of superiority over my elementary school friends for being able to sing along to pop-y songs on the radio. Learning them wasn't difficult - all of them told perfectly mundane stories, things that could have happened to me the day before and yes, love and friendship that I looked forward to once I was that age.

Listening to them now I feel nostalgia for a life that back then seemed to be the natural order of things which now seem impossible. There was something comfortably parochial about life in my "city" which has all but disappeared - a curiosity and interest with affection in the lives of neighbors, the possibility of shared futures with people who just happen to live near you. All that seems gone (and I think it is the heart of our national crisis.)

I realize it's unfair to romanticize the past with its future that probably never was to be but it's interesting that all this time I've never quite managed to recreate even a semblance of that dream. Living from city to city among a world of strangers is about as far as I can get from the occasional chance meetings with old acquaintances. Further, with the impermanence of it all there's now an all or nothing approach - be a stranger or a close friend. I am content. I do feel connected - not in the way that is rooted in every sense of the word, that which refers to land and physical space shared with loved ones and strangers. I do not fear that I will lose the ones I have loved. I do fear that I will lose sight of the world is like, made up of loved and unloved.

I think I am yet to break out of the comfort of my psycho-social space.

back to print: Haruki Murakami

It's been a while since I've read a novel. True, I spent a week last summer in solitary confinement (i.e. parents stuck in another country, me alone in the homeland) devouring everything I could get my hands on, averaging one novel a day. But since then I hadn't picked up anything really, except to finish David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day. (And as predicted by Ms. Caswell, I'm currently on Year 2 of T.H. White's The Once and Future King)

It's no surprise then, in the confluence of a quarter-life identity crisis and nostalgia for past certainties, in the land of books and words I've grown up to appreciate (London), I was drawn back to an old love - print. I hardly knew where to begin this journey back and I cannot say that Murakami's Kafka on the Shore was on my top 10. I had picked up Norwegian Wood when I was 15 and while I related to it wholeheartedly for all its melancholy and despair, I've long since thought I was over all of that. Yet the book that I chose for no apparent reason, blasted me back, unawares, to a fervor for words, stories and implicit meanings I had forgotten since I started my professional life. (Although markedly different from Norwegian Wood, after Kafka on the Shore I think the former warrants revisiting)

John Updike may have been on point when he said "it seems more gripping than it has a right to be and less moving, perhaps, than the author wanted it to be" because even now I feel as if there's a flimsiness to it that is covered up by the trance it produced and I continue to be caught up in. With its ghosts, time shifts, deaths and heartbreaking loneliness, Murakami has blurred even my reality. I can't tell if what's elusive is a mystery that ought to be worked out or something that was never there in the first place. Nevertheless, despite it's jagged unity as a whole, there is no denying that discreet pieces of it are truly gripping and moving. Kafka Tamura describes his center of being:

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart. [9]

It evokes a raw pain, wakes up childhood fears and invites old banished objects of anger. Reading it is, for me, going over to the edge. Plodding through it is walking through the labyrinth within and without. Does it soothe? I don't know.

Perhaps as with Norwegian Wood and the 15-year-old me, my current state of mind is beyond objectivity on this piece at this time. I, too, am feeling like a shell without a past or future, the subject or object of what is neither right nor wrong, an outcast, a foreigner in all this land.

typically

I failed. In a typical London manner, it rained; and, in a typical manner in which I go about things I have serious personal apprehensions, I found it as an excuse not to try. Thus, in the typical manner that life imitates art, this rainy day became the backdrop against which an exchange of favors (my introverted self to put on the fangirl mask for the price of an autograph and small - miniscule - talk) failed to take place.

I could try again tomorrow.
---
I was fully prepared for an onslaught of emotionally harrowing plot twists and revelations on the scale of Long Day's Journey into Night but it was surprisingly open to all sorts of hopeful trajectories, if one is optimistic. Many things struck me about it (not the least of which how truly amazing it was to be within meters, sometimes less, of James McAvoy) but what's lingering now is Ned's assertion that life in summary, can be seen as two pillars connected by an arch: what we want and what we get linked by guilt. Since it is a very Catholic/Christian notion - Ned himself confesses to believe in original sin - it is difficult for me to generalize it's significance without worrying what my own background adds to the picture. Yet for me there is a very real sense that between the things we intend to say/have/do and the things we do or don't get/say/do is the burden of responsibility. For what exactly, it is unclear. It could be a sense of responsibility for a small explanation of how things came to be the way they are or for actual missteps and misjudgments. Could we ever free ourselves of this burden?

peeking back in

Emma Bovary's death was both tragic and comic. As with most her life, she imagined everything she did to be romantic, from marrying an unknown gentleman moving into the city and, of course, death by poison. She must have thought her heartbeat and breathing would slow, till she can no longer stand herself, when she would then faint on a soft chaise and let out one final sigh. Except, it was excruciatingly painful and wretched and ugly. I suppose there's romance in that too, as she bore the pain she thought no other human has ever experienced, so that, even in her frantic state, she managed to belt out some verse, true to the scripted life she has led, that was ultimately empty though superficially pretty.

Yet how was she supposed to know any better? She lived a sheltered life peppered by romance novels and gossip from the local ladies. How are any of us supposed to know life's possibilities beyond the exemplars we come across either through fiction or real life? Even then the elements of story, predetermined by the very human way we see the world, taints and limits the expanse of hope without pretense and love without irony.

Cataloguing stupidity

While attempting to make myself some tea, I thought to myself, "I love vanilla tea so much maybe I should've bought two canisters instead of 1. Where is my tea mesh lid? I remember putting the tea mesh inside the saucepot. 11 bucks for 20 bags is pretty expensive. But it's worth it because I just love this tea. Wait. What?!!!!"

I ended up pouring water down my tea bag canister instead of my cup. I threw out the water, laid the bags on layers of paper towel, and blow dried them. Stupid. Me.

Up and down the rabbit hole

It's almost hard to believe that it's been less than a year since my last post. Yet, as with any span of time in between reflections and broadcasts, the events, lessons, revelations are too numerous to recollect. As always, it surprises me how much change we are able to endure.

My first year in Ankara has been an extraordinary experience, mostly for all the unexpected challenges and rewards. I have been lucky. Summer in the Philippines was equally memorable, with its own share of the fantastic and the all too real: reunions and separations, dreams and disappointments, life and death. All in all I feel as if I've jumped into cold water to find that life is both refreshing and uncomfortable, numbing and stimulating, distressing as well as cleansing. In many situations I felt myself afraid and in most of them I've come out surprised at my own capacity to cope, other people's ability to accommodate and the natural and social laws' dynamic way of keeping things just within reach of achievement and understanding.

I'm nearly falling asleep. Lastly, I've also opened up a channel here: restrictedspace.blogspot.com

winter wonderland

It's been a long time, although I did not mean for all those days to pass away without writing. Thoughts like snow fell and settled, sublimed into fog and pfff, gone in the sun. But this is where I am now.

Whoas and woes

Merhaba. Ankara is a very comfortable place to be in. Despite the fact that nobody speaks English outside of our community, it feels a lot like home. Aside from the the heat, the traffic and the staggered development that makes it look a lot like parts of Metro Manila (or perhaps closer to Rizal/Laguna area), the people are really very friendly and helpful. For example, after being told that my bank here will be open on a Saturday and upon finding that it wasn't on the time of my arrival, I tried to ask around if it was going to open that day. Armed with my phrasebook I uttered the syllables that were supposed to mean, "What time does Garanti open?" Sure enough within minutes, I was surrounded by six men trying to understand what I was saying and another sent off to look for someone who spoke English. It's definitely a place I could see myself staying awhile, should alternative plans fall through.

I'm happy too for the openness of the people I work with. I suppose with the constant comings and goings they've acquired a perpetual welcoming attitude. I'm pleased with the church I found and the community there. Most of all, I'm relieved with how well-behaved and motivated my students are, since I spend most of my time with them.

Unexpectedly, I'm transitioning much better that I had initially scared myself into thinking. I'm no social butterfly and I haven't shed all the awkwardness that is in me, but I've found people to talk to and spend time with. Thanks to skype/aim/gtalk, I don't have to feel lonely for my friends everywhere else in the world.

Having my own place, though is a huge adjustment. It feels daunting to be responsible for all the rooms of this small apartment. Tidying up has to be done everyday, else everything piles up and I've got no floor to walk on or bed to sleep in. Buying groceries is turning out to be a chore. I think I have to do a bit more planning on that. So far I've thrown out at least three bags of produce which I didn't have time to cook. Just tonight, I thought I'd salvage my meat by throwing out the doubtful parts and cooking the rest, only to end up chucking the whole dish after cooking it because the doubt stuck with me.

I do think I'm slowly making my way to being more responsible, although I'm at a place where I'm resenting having to grow up, which I probably should have done six or so years ago.

(Double) Geronimo!

This weekend we went to Water Country in Portsmouth, NH. Geronimo is a 58-foot almost straight down speed slide. I was free falling. Twice.

Breaking up is hard to do

In two days I have to say goodbye to some of the best people I know, some students and some co-workers. It hasn't quite hit me with the finality it deserves. I've always avoided saying goodbye by convincing myself that these relationships are merely making a turn, away from constant physical presence to long-distance attentiveness. To a certain extent, I had been rightly persuaded. This time, it is different. Between my students being too young and my relationships with my co-workers a little premature, I see no avenue for continuity. Alas, this goodbye might just be a final farewell.

I never want to forget how I fell in love twenty-five times over, five days a week. There were days I almost cried, trying so hard to contain my anger, only to be softened by one apologetic look. I would revel in the quiet of the holidays, only to find myself emptied and ready to be filled again by their presence.

Twelve months ago I was so uncertain of the future. I had no idea God had such great love in store for me.

To where did May runaway?

I've been meaning to write but all my days seem to meld together until I can no longer distinguish yesterday from the day before or from the week that passed. More agonizingly, I have no clear idea on how all my time was spent. Interestingly, even as the school year winds down, and we go from project to project, there's still more work to be done - in addition to all the summer school business and moving to Ankara.

I shall try to come back and write again this weekend. In the meantime, I have to flip my calendar once again. I can already see the day I graduated last year. At least the tulips are much improved.

Keeping in touch

It's harder than it seems and easier at the same time. It's hard to remember to keep in touch these days, but it's not as hard to track people down and a line to them. Spring makes me nostalgic. Undoubtedly 70 degrees is incomparable to the summers in the Philippines, but the heat, the thaw, the sun makes me think of home - of things I'd done in days like these or people I'd been with. Some days there are moments that bring me way back to my Miriam days - green knolls, ceiling fans, makopa trees. Some days I'm brought back to IS, middle school, Mr. Errington's room and S.A.V.E. meetings after school. Or sitting on the corridors waiting by the wall for homeroom to start, across from the seventh grader who had hair like Pocahontas.

Where are all those people now?

Watching things grow

I have 10 potted plants: aloe, palm, purple shamrock, cactus, african violets, two types of foliage and two types of vine, not to mention a dormant cyclamen. Aside from the aloe, violets and cyclamen, I've had these plants for two years now. Most of them I got as a bulb from a lady I work with, or cuts from places I've worked at. Two years ago I had beakers and water bottles full of liquid fertilizer stuffed with plants. Everyday I would wait for them to grow new roots; and if I had a free Saturday I would go to Dickson's, buy a new pot and get my hands dirty moving them to a new home.

They're all flourishing quite nicely and now that spring is upon us, I even have a few flowers to greet me every morning.

There are few pleasures that can compare to watching things grow: looking back at how these plants were when I first got them to how they are now. I used to have to arrange the leaves so that the pot didn't look so empty, but now they are all full and soon in need of repotting.
In between all of that there's also the experience of watching them go to sleep, slowly drying up and losing its leaves, until there's nothing.

I wish I had the heart of a gardener, in all the things that I do.

finally

I took down the tree below after two and a half months. Our living room looks like it did before. February break is winding down and it will be back to school very soon. I miss my kids.

it's a tree

Jen and KX helped me build it.

I remember when I used to watch my grandfather build ours. I used to help out by washing the leaves, one pine needle at a time.

one is never thankful enough

photo courtesy of Suratha

photo courtesy of Nicole


It's been the busiest past two weeks - from hosting my roommates for Harvard-Yale to cooking and cleaning for college students homeless for the holidays, not to mention the Christmas shopping that still has to be done. But it's been fun.

However, I don't want to be too busy to say this. To all of my friends and family, this past year and a half has been a really trying time for me (although no time is without trial) in ways I've never known to express. I thank you for being there for me, for forgiving me and for pushing me out of my rut.