Wankers

I should have been born British. Considering that most of the things I’ve obsessed over hail from way, way, way across the pond, I was highly likely a soot-stained Victorian urchin in a past life, begging for tuppence, thinking of pies. Every point in my development as a human bean involved British culture one way or another. Most of what I’ve read as a kid were by British authors or at least set in Britain — The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, every Roald Dahl story in existence. British bands were my music of choice — Oasis, Portishead, Blur, Suede, Massive Attack, Elastica, Radiohead, Pulp. Even my preferred TV drivel was British — Absolutely Fabulous,The Crystal Maze, Brittas Empire and, later on, Little Britain. I guess Mr. Belvedere counts too. I like my culture gloomy and twee, I like to appreciate things that are thickly glazed with an accent, I like that British people are such a lovely, perverse people.

So when I heard that MTV is currently developing an American version of Skins, I really wanted to punch somebody. Skins is the most awesome TV show about delinquent teenagers EVER. And it’s incredibly British in a heather-tinged, Topshop-clad, I-love-Hard-Fi kind of way. I’ve watched all three completed seasons on DVD over and over and over and am immensely impatient for the upcoming season. I am emotionally involved with 2/3 of all the characters to have ever appeared on the show. I cried like a bitch over Sid and Cassie, and Chris and Jal, and Effy and Cook. I don’t care if I’m not giving substantial background on the show right now; it’s best that you grab your own copy from your friendly (or ornery) neighborhood pirate.You can thank me after you’ve stopped convulsing from the first season’s finale. Skins is a delight and MTV’s plan to appropriate  it for a place that is not grey, nippy Bristol is — if I may borrow from the Brits’ sumptuous terminology — bollocks. Bollocks bollocks bollocks. Hairy, gritty, ungainly bollocks.

It was a miracle of the highest order that the Stateside version of The Office got it right. And that project was helmed by Steve Carell, who is a legitimate creative person. But MTV? The channel that got more and more tawdry the more it shed its beautiful, unorthodox past (Liquid Television! Alternative Nation! Aeon Flux! 90% of  airtime dedicated to full music videos!), emerging tanned, toned and like so totally set for Spring Break? They’ll just make something like The Hills, only poorer and exploitative of real social agendas. Granted the original Skins tackled chestnuts such as homosexuality and drug abuse, but there is a wry humor, or a quaintness, or yes, an actual intelligence to the rendering of these issues, and I highly doubt MTV can match the quality with a cast likely to compose of at least one wannabe rapper and at least one dude who still hangs on to Dashboard Confessional. God save the Queen.

Terrible Twos

There’s a toddler in the office today. Not a baby, mind. A baby is a small, bundled, poop-filled thing that is generally harmless, whereas a toddler is slightly larger, far more mobile, and much more able in the ways of deception. She was adorable the first few hours, looking at the hospital’s brochures over and over and babbling numbers to herself like Rain Man, but now she is a hissy fit made flesh, and has been brought over to the elevator hall where buttons may be pressed to appease her roiling spirit.

She hasn’t paid any attention to me at all today, but then again, I haven’t been going out of my way to amuse her either, unlike my officemates who have waved either Hershey’s Miniatures or hundred-peso bills in her face. This dynamic, or lack thereof, reminds me of the one between myself and some of my co-workers. I have no qualms with them, but it’s just that I’m no good at this casual office interaction thing. In fact, I”m no good at interaction, period. I tire of interface far more rapidly than most people, I think, feeling like whole blocks of concrete are setting around my shoulders and ankles whenever I make small-talk, or go through other niceties such as saying hi and goodbye.

This is why I’d make a horrendous mother. I can’t even look at a kid without thinking, “Wow. I am, like, so socially inept.”

WATDAFAAAAKKKK

So there was a fire at our apartment building today. It was 6:30 in the morning: D and I were dressed for work, and I was just about to partake of a nutricious and delicious bowl of oatmeal, when we suddenly heard all this hullaballoo from upstairs. Lots of screeching and bellowing and heavy objects crashing to the floor. We thought it was just some old married couple getting all pissed and married at each other, so we rushed outside because we’re so, like, usisero y’know.

But the guy hurtling down the stairs was screaming ‘fire,’ and we saw the rest of our neighbors running out of their apartments with all their stuff. I was scared, but it was more of an unnerved, weak-kneed kind of fright since we still couldn’t see anything ablaze.

D and I rushed back in to grab our prized possessions. We first scuttled around plucking out what was most crucial to us. That hypothetical question/ice breaker “If your house was on fire, what would you save?” just hung over my head the whole time, and I couldn’t believe it was being asked of me for real. I more or less grabbed what I always thought I would:

1) laptop, iPod, cellphone

2) wallet, passport, other official documents

3) my copy of Perks of Being a Wallflower

4) my signed copy of Circles of Life, Imelda Marcos’s batshit-crazy guidebook on how to live your life batshit-crazy (ibebenta ko kasi ito sa eBay pag desperado na)

We then got as much of our other stuff once the valuables were out of the way: the DVD player, the TV, clothes and shoes. This stuff ended up dumped on the sidewalk facing our building, and we spent the next hour or so with the rest of our neighbors in our little compound, all of us pacing the street with that same sullen, watdafaaakkk look.

We found out that the fire started in the apartment directly above ours. A short-circuit or something. The room was cooking bad — windows popping  to pieces, bright orange flames shooting out. We lucked out by living on the first floor since we got to evacuate fairly easily, but the downside was that, once all the firetrucks came, all the water used seeped into our apartment, ruining some of our books (D is very much in mourning as I type) and basically turning our place into a kiddie pool. Kinarma kami sa Ondoy.

We’re fine now. It’ll take about a week ’til we can move back; the electricity’s kaput and much of the upper floors need fixing. But we’re fine. And I guess we won’t be too much of a stranger to our neighbors anymore, even though we’ve only started living there 2 months ago. They’ve seen D fling a plastic bag of my underwear to the side of the road. They’ve seen me slumped by the road against a pile of books, hair still wet from the bath, weepy.

Just last night, we were sitting in bed, eating dinner with our brand-new set of pretty plates and bowls c/o Shopwise, watching E! News and formally acknowledging our happiness. I mean, I  know we still are, but hot-damn, Powers that Be, your sense of humor is WHACK.

Mandatory Post-Party with Workshop Co-Fellows Blog Entry Which Nobody Else Will Give A Fuck About But Us

Reasons Why I Love My Dumaguete Workshop Co-Fellows:

1) They are funny.

2) They will eat anything you put in front of them.

3) They will stretch a party out to 12 straight hours and, at around 4 in the morning, will skip out to the street outside your apartment, ignoring an entire barkada of hiphop poker boys and, later on, a tranvestite fresh from a night in (it’s a good neighborhood), choreograph a dance number, rehearse it, film it on cameraphone, and put it up on FaceBook (incriminating link to follow). Special mention must be given to Ms. Carmela Tolentino who, with no narcotics and a bare minimum of sweet, duhat wine in her system, orchestrated the damn thing.

Trannies

Back in 2006, horror pimp Karl de Mesa and transgressive fic overlord Iwa Wilwayco sent out a call for contributions for Wasak! Stories of Pinoy Trangression and Deliverance, a trangressive fiction anthology they were building which, alas, was postponed for an eternity and three quarters.

Finally finally finally, through the sheer stubbornness shared between Karl, Iwa and yours truly, it has been resurrected in blog form as a continuous online antho. The basic concept of Pinoy Transgressive is to provide folks with fresh, transgressive fic stories for their pleasure or, for those with their own stories up their hoo-hahs, a venue to send in their works for publication. If approved, stories’ll be posted in the next batch of blog entry uploads and, thus, will always provide something new and depraved to read, yehey.

The current batch of works uploaded are:

Imports, a short story by Carljoe Javier

Panalong Regalo ng Sistema, a short story by Iwa Wilwayco

Cleanser and A New Demise, a short story and an essay, respectively, by Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon

Penitence, a short story by Jonathan Jimena Siason

Faith in Poison and Sophistichaos, a novella and an essay, respectively, by Karl de Mesa

You can email your works for consideration (English or Filipino, no length restrictions, labeled “Pinoy Transgressive Submission”) to weepy.devotchka@gmail.com, or tzaddi.salazar@gmail.com.

sent out a call for contributions for

Mandatory Post-Cataclysm Blog Entry

I think D and I win the Philippines’ Biggest Morons award for our total unawareness of last Saturday’s horrors. We had acknowledged that it had been raining  scary-hard nonstop, so much so that no daylight was coming in our windows, and decided we would just have to stay indoors, diminishing supply of food and DVDs be damned. But we still had no idea apocalypse was on-going most everywhere else.

Our ignorance stemmed from a few things: our apartment has incredibly shitty signal on any given day, we had not applied for internet yet, we didn’t watch TV once, and we just plain lucked out choosing to live in a place that was calamity-free then. Thus, the people who were trying to contact us couldn’t, we remained oblivious to images of Hell on Earth, and we ended up just bumbling around in acts of lazy assholery. To make us even more naive of Ondoy’s actual wrath, we even managed to have dinner at a nearby resto complex which, save for a couple of closed establishments, catered to the usual rowdy barkadas and familias. We thought it was a particularly wet and only potentially dangerous day.

The reality check commenced first thing Sunday morning, when terribly delayed text messages started trickling in — friends and family asking where we were, if we were okay, if our apartment had gotten trashed, if we had managed to stay safe somewhere somehow. Getting more and more shaken by this eerily belated stream of panic, we turned the tube on and got hit by the very harrowing realization that whole chunks of cities were completely underwater, so many people’s lives had been wrecked, and that our own friends and family could have gone through Very Bad Shit too. Our families, fortunately, are fine, but some of our friends didn’t fare as well, with stories of floating refrigerators, all-night hunger, practically swimming down Commonwealth (and being verbally molested and pickpocketed by tambays in the process [I heard some cops have even raped stranded women they'd brought to motels for 'shelter']), but we are immensely relieved to know that they’re safe and dry now, that their ordeals were a fraction of what so many people are still going through now.

Since then, it’s been totally Twilight Zone in Manila. For instance, supermarkets are crammed with folks cramming their carts, as if post-nuclear fallout, cleaning out shelves of basic edibles both for donations and themselves. The woman in front of me yesterday bought two carts-full of Lily’s Peanut Butter, while the guy in the opposite aisle filled his cart to bursting with Lemon Square’s Cheese Cakes (useless aside: Lemon Square doesn’t sell lemon squares, and those are technically cheese cupcakes). Other people were stocking up on candles, instant noodles, towels, and other oh-my-god-we’re-gonna-die goods.

And amidst all this post-traumatic stress, I feel perturbed not only by the actual chaos that occurred, but by the fact that I knew squat about it until afterwards. I’ve been bound to the TV since Sunday, staring in dismay at blurred corpses, wrecked homes, lives that had been dragged all the way back to zero, forced to start anew. Something abominable had slipped right past me, and it was sheer luck that the worst hadn’t befallen me or the people I cared about.

To the people who dropped a line, I really, really appreciate it. And for the Powers That Be that bestowed upon me the title of  Complete Dumbass in the Face of Calamity, I totally deserve it, thanks. Here’s to getting wiser.

Writing Exorcise

I have uploaded 13 short stories I’d written over the past five years. They are there to the right of your screen, all lined up and primed for your perusal in my little Fiction sidebar. They say hi.

There used to be a time when writing fiction was not this source of grief for me. That was about 14 years ago, when I was still in grade school and wrote chapters of “novels” about friends and family and doled them out week per week for them to read. And I did it because it felt good that someone was reading shit that I liked making, and nothing more. I wrote and printed and distributed and wrote again, and it was all good.

But somehow, something went very awry, and I found myself a few weeks ago staring at the latest story I was working on and seeing every bit of it as a goddamned chore. Not a challenge. A chore. Writing had become something I was forcing myself to do, and for reasons that are not good for me at all. These reasons have been sapping any actual joy out of writing. I started writing because it felt good. And hunching over my laptop and letting a fucking Word file goad me into questioning my worth as a person does not feel good, yo.

The act of writing is not supposed to sadden me the way it has recently. And neither am I supposed to build my life around this endless and exponentially burdensome hunt for approval that I, until recently, had made myself believe was this necessary evil. Someone had asked me last year why I didn’t just put my stuff up online, and I didn’t really have a valid answer for that. Whatever tripe I had managed to guise as a reply was a lie, and I knew it was bull even then.

But I’ve had enough. Thus, I will write, and I will upload — an updated version of my xeroxed and stapled and passed around projects of yore.

WE HAVE THE APARTMENT

Oh my god, I could cry.

This is seriously one of the hardest things I’ve ever worked for thus far. Had to do major overhaul on my life just to get it, and the 5 months it took to do so was such a bout of willpower, I look back on that time with this morbid awe. 5 months’ worth of closing my eyes and taking deep breaths and telling myself only X months/weeks/days/minutes to go beeyotch, though of course there’d been countless times when I’d just go apeshit. I know I’m a year shy of my quarter-life crisis, but then I always try to get my more stressful endeavors done ahead of schedule. So there: nearly half a year-long crisis = FREEDOM. I believe that is a decent deal. I FEEL SO MUCH BETTER.

My Official Statement as Ex-Enormous Oasis Fan Re: Official Split

I was a huge Oasis fan. HUGE. I had a day of the year dedicated to them (Margie’s Annual Oasis Day, April 13); my youngest brother is named Liam on my insistence and, via headphones, was subject to their discography from the womb; I would gaud myself to become emotionally invested in boys with at least two full Oasis albums to their name or could list non-singles down by memory; and the world would end for me whenever the Brothers Gallagher would announce a split, which was fairly often. I was a tubby, upper-middle-class Asian girl who was never let out on the street and I loved their proletarian Britrock to pieces.

Years later, however, I found myself not giving a shit about them anymore, to the point that this year’s Margie’s Annual Oasis Day, which would have been the 14^th time I would celebrate it, had been forgotten. It was just any other day of early summer—hot and boring and useless. And when it hit me days later that I had broken my oldest and most staunch tradition, the best I could feel was a single ant-pinch of regret, and that was that. And it was just too bad; I was such a big fan. I thought I’d wear my ratty band shirt to the grave.

So I heard that Oasis has fallen apart for good. Thing is, and I’m pretty sure most everyone would agree, that the band had actually caved in on itself far, far earlier, likely when the original line-up went kaput and their music started getting…pansy-ish. And thus, I am not shocked or sad about the split in particular. They had overstayed their welcome, and I’m just a tad remorseful that I will not be as rabid a fan of any other band, because I have reached that point in my life when getting worked up over things beyond your personal affairs seems taxing and pointless. I will continue to love particular albums, of course, but that’s as far as I will go.

+++

And R.I.P., Alexis Tioseco. It’s horrible. He was a passionate guy.

And the Hacking Scene was Awesome

*hold breath and…GO*

I was supposed to write about Kinatay but am currently in a state unfavorable for blogging at length I had the outline in my head since last night when D and I were at a special screening so just to get it out of the way the basic structure was a) I had very low expectations of the film ‘low’ meaning I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be as mortified as those Cannes people were and that instead I would find the film dull or underwhelming b) I actually liked the film ‘like’ meaning even though the film was still not offensive to me in any way I thought it was in contrast a watchable and meaningful enough piece of cinema and c) Brillante Mendoza should not answer director’s Q&As he really comes off like a total moron and the film however haphazardly its excellence was derived judging from its auteur’s Really Stupid Answers does not deserve to be cheapened.

*hinga*