Happy Old Year, 2023!

This year, progressions are out and about. In my immediate family alone, us siblings have ventured into all sorts of adventures. Kuya progressed his career from PH to DE, Emman shifted his lights and sounds from the land (Okada) to the seas (Norwegian Cruise lines). Kiteh left the hipster career path of a Physicist-Gym instructor-content creator and married the love of her life. Jedi graduated as Cum Laude and now venturing into Corporate gig. And I (finally) became an Associate in #TheBank and uprooted from the family bungalow to my high-rise concrete jungle. 

With all these series of movements and life events, pauses are hard to find and to appreciate because of the ever-changing social climate: inflation, wars, and daily commute. But it is actually the little things that opened my discovery of “Ma” (間). This may mean a negative space if taken literally, but in Zen, this is the pause in between the motions. And there's beauty in this pause.

I still remember the moments in between these life events. And even they may seem bizarre to you, this hits the perfect Ma to me: 

The hugging and crying in Marina Bay Sands;

Tiktok steps of the newlyweds;

Happy sighs from the book discussions;

The perfect sight of Mayon at 7AM;

Pulag tales of the travelling sack of rice; and 

Sanding the gypsum wall of my tiny home.

2023 is also my year of creations, and I was grateful that I write more frequently than the last year. I was also able to read more than a dozen of books, and able to watch feel-good animes. I was able to learn to cook and pay the bills on my own, taking all the life-hacks of #Adulting. 

As I flash my smile in one of my big creations this year (the background is the accent wall I painted last Summer), I wish you all the successes with the moments of pauses, and have the luxury to see and appreciate life's beauty. Let us enjoy the moments of closing this old year and embrace the new. We are too tired of tanking in struggles of the daily, perhaps we need to take a moment and just breathe. #HappyNewYear #Amwriting #CreativeNonfiction 

Read and Hated Book for 2023

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Being a white New Yoker with a passive income and having a huge inheritance and a very detached upbringing and gaining an alienating feeling from a vain mother and a dying father (of cancer) does not give you the privilege to be an ass. Scapegoating your will to live with a cocktail of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medicine, while having a best friend getting tired of your hipster lifestyle does not even give you a pass to weaponize your sickness in how you live your life.

A Mental Health issue is not a badge, you daft.

I believe that a Mental Health problem is a collective symptom, just like my first 2023 read has been themed upon. And the only way for us to address it is to make steps collectively, or even gain connection of oneself through our very human ways (as Laing mentioned, made through art).

This White Anglo-Saxon Protestant is very antithesis of my own psyche. My Year of Rest and Relaxation was supposed to make a full circle trip of New York, since Laing's The Lonely City is my first read this year. And her stark constrast with my very Filipino physique dwelling in a dismal third world nation and continuously tanking inflation feels like a slap to my face, like WALA KANG KARAPATANG MA-DEPRESS KASI MAHIRAP KA, WALA KANG EXTRANG KITA, AT HINDING-HINDI KA PAGMAMANAHAN NG MAGULANG MO. Feels like an outright dismissal of my ugly crying sessions, or how I manage my anxieties and my languishing lifestyle.

I do not recommend reading this book if you have not felt detached first. Or maybe if you are a WASP like this woman, maybe you can really relate. Heck, you might even try those downers and lull you to sleep for two months. Basta huwag mo akong lapitan; ayoko sa lahat ang asal-hayop na kaburgisan.

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4-Year Old Exchange Gift

Love Poems by Editors of Canterbury Classics
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I still remember the first time I had this and I was laughing out loud because of its cover in pink and it was a christmas gift from a lover as we celebrated the Christmas day together.

Little did I know that it was a treasure trove of poetry from the old times. My most favorite piece here was Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breath and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breadth,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

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Completing Mandel's Triad

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ang ganda!!!

I don't know how to fine-tune an essay or a book review about this, but if you have read some of her works — most specially Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel — she made a multiverse of all her compositions in this sci-fi novel.

Parang interstellar na marvel multiverse but with the absence of military propaganda and political statements, and more of existential philosophies, rule of singularity, and quantum mechanics!

And to think, I even read her short story, Mr. Thursday, that might be used as one of her references to continue writing about time travel and how to answer the question of our existence: if life itself is a multiple simulation, or a summation of multiple realities.

Ang ganda!!! Nice Christmas read ehe merry christmas!

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Thanks to Thursdays

Mr. Thursday by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a treat.

It was featured in Future Tense, an anthology of sorts and can be accessed via Slate.com
If you are into a break of reading too many romance, or wattpad, or self-help, this is a good antidote and a palate cleanser.

Last weekend, I was telling bookish friends that I am not yet a completist of Emily St. John Mandel, and I was planning to be one, because she writes easy and yet the subtleties move you (as a reader). And I told them that she can be categorized as a millenial writer like Sally Rooney and Jenkins Reid, the women writers who can be shelved separately as "born in the waning years of the old millenium". The time period in their works assures you that you are part of their generation, regardless of their genres.

I was amazed that she keeps on writing and venturing to scifi/ specfic, rather than her old style of Canadian noir (which feels saturated since Noirs existed before we both were born, lol).

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The Big C

It was a night of

c(ult-like) bonding of books,

c(onversations) about life, and

c(ounting) the hoardings we gathered in our bookish escapades. I finally appeared, after months of

c(owering) in my little

c(ave), saving all the

c(urrencies) and

c(oins) I can gather, both online and offline. I

c(ounted) the roster, and I was the only person representing the cunt of this population. I wonder,

c(an) I really down cans of beer and shots of liquor, not minding my mouth zipped by the silence and the lonesome days of surviving and tanking the bills? Or maybe I was lacking the

c(ourage) of appearance; I used to have unhealthy banters and

c(ounter-attacks) with one of the book club members.

I was the only woman in this room and we are

c(ounting) down 6 liters of Sex on the Beach.

C(onversations) traversed from the life updates, to the attendances of the book events, to who were the ever present throughout 2023, or if the members and moderators of the old days are still grinding the questions to the writers and navigating the discussions and for somewhat reason, perhaps the magic of those drinks we are nearly drowning of, a magic c was being asked.

Pre, sa totoo lang, saan ba yang clitoris na yan?

I do not even remember any mention of a porn material, or a smut read, or even a notation of Vagina monologues or Pukiusap by one of our dear member-writers.

This talk is filled with

c(unts) now, I thought to myself. With a

c(onscious) effort to hound at them and saying that this

c(litoris) talk is getting out of hand, I stood up, leaving the bench of the roster just because one

c(annot) find the precious letter 'C'.

I went to the restroom of the women and the men; I saw the men's section with a dozen cubicles as compared with women's - only with four. People are asking, "Why are the women taking so long in the restrooms? Looking in the mirrors,

c(hecking) their getups. Looking at their shorts if it is still intact. If their

c(ondoms) are still there or not. All the while, men are just bustling: going in and out just because they relieve all their stresses or whatever resources they have - work, life, academic, or whatnot.

And then I realized, I also looked for the big letter 'C'; that big

C(ash) that I am indebted with. I am a laughing sixteen thousand amounts of

C(redit card) debt every month, and yet in the big

C(orporate) that I am working with,

c(annot) sustain such.

This year, I never felt so tanked in and even without a

c(ancer) as a recorded ailment, lots of

c(ash) have been flowed out of my accounts. I really need to save up, save more.

C(orporate) and c(ondo) swallowed me whole and I left myself with a little financial and time freedom. Sometimes, the time off is awarded to oneself as a

CHARITY.

I really am tired with all the adulting, and these sorts of conversations with folks is what I needed – clitoris or otherwise.

Read Before Exchange Gift

Ampalaya Monologues by Mark Ghosn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this book to judge the works and I am grateful that I read it way past the highs of spoken word era and hugot hanash. And maybe because I am older (and hopefully have more wisdom), it doesn't evoke strong feelings compared to my younger years.

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