Another Notebook

 When I was in journalism class, my teacher cautioned us against accepting any kind of gift, as this might mar our journalistic integrity. Regardless of whether you actually allow sources to influence your editorial slant by giving you a gift, receiving a gift tells other journalists that you are open to compromise, and that will affect your image as a media practitioner. It's not just money, by the way. Reporters refuse food, drinks, loot bags, etc. at press conferences and other gatherings because they consider these gifts, too.

As a Special Features writer, however, I find that the lines are not so clear-cut. My writing is occasioned not by current events or exciting stories, but by advertising. People pay to place ads in our paper, and I write related articles to go around the ads. The account manager who secures the ad contracts, not an editor, sets the general topic or title. So, if a bunch of car companies are advertising in Special Features next week, I have to write a motoring article.

Often, my editor still sets the more specific topic--"The AM wants an SF on postpaid plans? Okay, you write about existing plans and their perks, you write about loyalty rewards, and you write about the best plans for executives and entrepreneurs." So, we churn out articles in the usual fashion, as one might articles for any other section of the paper. An SF supplement is more like a magazine than a regular newspaper in the sense that each "issue" has a unifying theme.

Occasionally, however, the AM has an especially narrow topic, and the advertisers are the same people who hold the expertise/experience that you need for your article.

Once, we had an SF on successful executives who were alumni of a particular school, printed in time for that school's foundation anniversary. I had to write a profile of the head of a manufacturing company. The catch was, the same company was advertising in the supplement. I went to the man's office to interview him, and he served me tea and gave me product samples on my way out the door.

As I walked away from the company premises to catch a jeepney to my next destination, it occured to me that to a reporter, the tea and product samples would constitute a gift. Did I just damage my journalistic integrity?

Well, I had accepted the tea and samples not just out of common politeness, but also out of the vague worry that a refusal might violate some social convention (my interviewee was Chinese). Second, I had also been assigned to write his company's advertorial, which would be about their various products, so the samples had something to do with what I was about to write. Third, maybe he was just being nice. During the interview, he was careful and guarded with his answers, but he was also honest. There was never a point at which I felt pressured to portray him a certain way.

In fact, I can say that about the nearly six months that I've been flashing this newspaper's employee ID. I can count the occasions in which I interviewed advertisers on one hand, and I never felt influenced by them when writing my articles. My fellow SF writers produce balanced pieces, too. But I can still see how an ethics issue might come about.

I've already explained to you the basic workings of Special Features. To make it clear, I am not a reporter; I am an SF writer. Reporters are under Editorial. Special Features is under Marketing. In effect, advertisers pay my salary. And one day, an advertiser might take this to mean that I should include them in my main article and put a halo over their heads.

For instance, we're about to come out with an SF on "Cosmopolitan Living." On Monday, I will interview someone from a real estate company for an advertorial to appear in this supplement. I will also write the lead article, and because I don't know many bigwigs in real estate (my uncle maybe, but tapping him as a source is an ethics issue, too), I might have to use quotes from the advertorial interview. In fact, the AM's e-mail to the real estate people tells them that the interview is for the lead article, too. This is not the first time he's told advertisers this.

I admire my SF editor for standing up for our immunity from advertisers' influence. She has always told us that we are not obligated to even mention the advertisers in our articles, we can only quote advertisers if they say something relevant to the topic, we are free to pursue whatever angles we want, and we must be balanced. Knowing that she has held this stand consistently (whenever a writer or AM says that an advertiser is complaining about their inclusion/non-inclusion in an article) gives me both confidence and motivation to be fair in my coverage. The ads may determine what I write about, but they don't determine what I write.

That said, it's my call when it comes to accepting so-called gifts. Free swag is sweet (that tea was some of the best I've ever had). It can even be relevant in the case of the advertorials we have to write every now and then (a pizza restaurant once hosted me in a food tasting because I was writing about their holiday menu). And sometimes, people are just being nice.

I know well enough to turn down anything that gives off a bribe vibe. What I want to know is, is all the other stuff okay? A fellow SF writer said, again, that it's my call.

What do you think? Does not being an official reporter exempt me from holding to the same no-gifts-whatsoever standards that some official reporters uphold? Will the fact that I'm in Marketing and not Editorial protect me from whatever image-tarnishing there may be in accepting a gift? What effect would accepting gifts as an SF writer have on my image if I were to become a reporter later on? What standards of journalistic integrity are expected of newspaper writers whose topics are determined by the ads?

I walked out to the ballpark to take some pictures of the yellow trees, and on the way down the street, the wind picked up. "Hello, mother," I said. It's funny, by that's who the wind felt like--not my biological mother, but a mother, and mine. And the way she blew at and around me made me laugh.

The afternoon sun made it feel so much like summer that I said, "Thank you," to no one in particular. The spirit of the place, I guess. And while walking toward the ballpark, I couldn't help but be filled with nostalgia. Everything seemed to have tendrils creeping out, reaching for me: the way to C street, the pine needles forming a new floor beneath the trees, the line of pitcher's mounds, the space in the backyard of our old house where my treehouse tree was supposed to be, etc. All these sights pulled at me.


On my way back up the main road, a breathy "This is my second-to-last day here" rushed through my mind. My heart began to beat faster, and I stopped at the crossroads the road formed with the street where I lived. No, no, no. Clear your head, I thought.

After a while, I walked on home, as if to ignore the voice. The wind picked up again, but I didn't feel it. Instead, I heard it at my back, calling me and calling me away from home. No, I thought. Please.

How can a place with so few people feel so much more alive than where I've spent the past year, and that much more dangerous? Why do I feel so betrayed?

--
As I punctuated the first question and began the next, the wind came briefly through the window as if to nag or intimidate me and jiggle my elbow. Then it drew back, and the room felt as though no wind had been there.

This is not the first time I've written about the weird wind in Kalsangi; one of these days, I should post that old essay.

I couldn't help noticing at our high school reunion the other day that nearly everyone there had decided not to leave home. Most of those present had not gone farther than Davao for college. If they weren't pursuing further studies there now, they were putting down roots. Those who were nurses had applied to or were working at nearby hospitals. Those who had family businesses to sustain (and sustain them) were content. One of them, a longtime crush in high school whose family controls a huge chunk of the city, has such huge dreams for the place, you can almost hear Jay-Z and Alicia Keys singing "Empire State of Mind" in the background. He loves the place.

One thing about this guy, he can make it anywhere. He's got the resources, the looks, and the personality. Not a wonder that mousy me was attracted to him in high school; in a way, he was everything I wanted to be--popular, outgoing, and included, without losing what made him stand out. With what he's got, it doesn't matter what part of the world he chooses as his home; he'll be fine. He chooses GenSan.

It's not a bad place. The diminishing schools of tuna threaten the fishing industry that fueled most of its development, but it looks like GenSan is starting to diversify. In recent years, "civilization" as my mother likes to call it has come to town. Malls have gone up. Stores have renovated and updated their architecture and offerings. Restaurants of a type other than bar'n'grill have set up shop. The local college is now a university. If you lived here or around here, you'd have all the comforts of a bigger city, but little of the traffic, noise, pollution, and--my all-time hate--need to rush. There's no Starbucks yet, though.

Why leave home? my classmates ask--not me, just aloud. Everything you could possibly need is here.

Why indeed?

I usually tell people, I left home because my parents said I should. "There's nothing for you here," "Nothing will happen to you here," or "You'll end up like [an unmarried middle-aged lady in church]," were the usual reasons. The past year has shown me that I don't need to be in Manila to make a decent living--and when I say living, I mean the act, not the pay slip--and find happiness. But I highly doubt that the feeling would be so strong or so pronounced if I hadn't gone to Manila in the first place. This bothers me.

Parallel to this is the long-running story of my not belonging with my high school classmates. I resented them for excluding and at times bullying me when I was fresh from the States in grade school. This impression of them did not improve in high school when I couldn't find more than a handful of people who shared my interests and seemed to like me. Perhaps to make myself feel better about it, I looked down on those who couldn't match my intelligence, creativity, and perspective. If they truly did think of me as a snob and a geek, I probably gave them good reason.

The trouble with high school was, I was all for embracing nonconformity; it was just lonely, having no one else to embrace it with. I did have a barkada who have stuck by me till today, but in high school, I just wasn't content.

We're all supposed to have grown up now, but whenever my classmates invite me to hang out, I remember that feeling of not-belonging and don't want to go. "We're all supposed to have grown up now" is the reason I go anyway. And when I go, I still sit on the fringes of the conversation, quiet until I can throw in a short comment or until someone asks me something. At least it's no longer painful to be just on the fringes.

What becomes clearer and clearer to me is that I willfully put myself there. Somehow, I equated not being like them with not being with them, and that has taken its toll.

We held our little reunion at the Tans' resort in Gumasa, Glan, Sarangani. After taking us tubing, Van, the aforementioned former crush, had the speedboat drop us off with a raft a little way out to sea and let the current take us back to shore while we snorkelled. I knew as soon as we hit the water that we'd have to fight the current a bit to avoid hitting the rocks instead of the sand. I eventually took off my life jacket because keeping it on actually made it easier for the current to take me away; I just used it as a floater whenever my arms and legs got tired. Those of my classmates who stuck to the raft ended up on the rocks and needed the speedboat to rescue them. Those of us who swam away from the raft made it safely onto the shore.

Nobody seemed to want to go swimming again after that. Instead, they started taking pictures of themselves, posing by the rock wall and in the shallows. But I went back into the water, because I wanted to see the reef; I'd been too busy fighting the current to enjoy it the first time. And while I was frog-kicking over the coral--magnificently massive, if not very colorful--it occured to me that once again, I had set myself apart.

Swimming far out to the reef, into the deep water, instead of staying on the shore--some people would call that a metaphor for my life. Flying out to Manila instead of staying in Socsksargen, leaving the raft to fight the current in open water, diving into a new world instead of sticking with the safe and familiar, taking the bull by the horns and seizing the day and all that carpe diem shit--that makes me the more adventurous one, the one willing to take bigger risks, right? Does that make me better than my classmates?

Honestly, every time I came up for air and looked back at them on the shore with these thoughts in my head, I didn't know. I don't know. I don't know who took the bigger risk, at least as far as career is concerned--are employment opportunities harder to come by in Manila, with the whole world jostling for the slots, or in the province, where you don't even know whether the slots exist?--but it does feel like I took the bigger risk with regard to the rest of life in general. And it doesn't feel good. They all seem pretty settled, they're close to home and family, and they're living life at the pace I've craved since I left. I have no idea what's going to happen to me in the coming year. Why can't I just be like them?

I know that I never could be like them, because I didn't want to be like them. What I want to know is what keeps pulling me into the water. I know now that "My parents said I should" is no longer the reason I've stayed in Manila. If at any time in the past two years, I said, "I can't do this anymore. Let me come home," I would have been able to go home. But I stayed, because I wanted to prove, more to myself than to anyone else, really, that I could figure things out for myself.

I'm tired, though. I don't even know why I'm trying so hard anymore. I don't know what else there is to prove.

When you swim in the sea, you're supposed to know enough to keep the distance between you and the shore swimmable. If all you've got are your arms and legs and a borrowed pair of goggles, you're supposed to ignore the urge to see just how big the reef is and to see how far and deep you can go. You shouldn't let the powerful feeling that swimming like this is how flying must be take over, not when the current makes swimming back twice as hard as swimming away.

This feeling I've got, that I can't stay home even if I want to, is like an undertow.

I've done a lot of moving around in the past couple of months, so travelling here yesterday didn't feel as big a deal as it usually does. I walked into my room and felt completely blank. Tossed my stuff onto the bed and plugged my laptop in as if I'd always done that at the end of the day, in this house.

But maybe that's the sign I'm home--the blankness. I always feel a little sad when I go to my room at the boarding house at the end of a day in the city, or anxious, or a little angry. Here, it's as if everything is as it should be.

The only other place I feel that way these days is at Martin's house in Paranaque.

There are other, more prominent signs than a blankness, of course. In the car, Mikko pointed out that the last time our whole family was complete was at Christmas last year. "So, we haven't been together in a year," he said. Man.

Whenever I go to bed here for the first night back in Kalsangi, I feel a bit of dissonance. Just last night, I was sleeping in Ortigas/QC/Merville. Suddenly I'm here. My mind tries to recover, I think, after stepping so abruptly from one world into another. I didn't get that feeling last night--maybe it hasn't sunk in yet that I'm back, or maybe, like I said, it's because I've done so much moving around. But I got another sign and a little dissonance when I woke up and saw a childhood painting on the wall. The wind came into my room and opened the door--kind of freaky, if you don't remember physics for a moment and see an inward-opening door being pried open by wind from across the room.

Waking up and writing something first thing, that isn't strange; I do that in the city, too. But I'm hearing the footsteps of my dad going to the bathroom before he heads for work. I'm smelling a hint of whatever is on the breakfast table today. I'm a little afraid to look out my window and see the view I've always had from my bedroom.

Holy shit, the last time I slept in my own bed was in February.

Okay, it's coming down on me now. Dad, breakfast tables, unkempt bougainvillea, sitting on my bed in my effing room. I think my mind's chosen to take it piece by piece, rather than hitting me with it all at once. Slowly, slowly, I'm coming home.

--
It's Christmas Eve here. Merry Christmas to you and yours. :)

Well, look at that. Not only did I manage to beat a deadline (I'm not proud of how I did it, though, but when sources don't reply, you have to figure things out on the fly. Hey, that rhymes.), but I seem to have enough time left over in my workday to put up a blog entry.

After last week's entry, Martin and I had this long talk where he asked a lot of questions about career and direction and stuff. It seems that the idea of watching me put myself through the cycle of quit, find new job, find out new job isn't all that great, and want to quit again doesn't appeal to him. He knows how much I value stability; he's seen me cry over my struggle to keep up with the demands of my new job, and he's seen me cry over feeling homeless (the last time I was here, I said I was afraid because the time I intended to quit would coincide with the time I'd need to renew my boarding house contract). So he asked me if I was willing to put myself through more heartbreak by sacrificing stability for the sake of continuing my fingers-crossed search for the best-fit job. It's not that he doesn't support me--no one else was so vocally supportive when I wanted to quit my old job--I think it's more that he doesn't want to see me get hurt and thinks that I ought to avoid pain by staying put for a while and trying to just enjoy the challenges, if not the work.

I said that if I enjoyed the work in the first place, then I would enjoy the challenge; the reason I'm so quick to whine about challenge is that it's brought about by something that I don't want to do anyway. Don't get me wrong; I do like the feeling I get after beating a deadline and finishing an article about a topic I couldn't care less about. It's the feeling I have now, knowing that there's another entry in my Sent Mail register. But I will always be nagged by the thought that in some other place, I could be writing about things that I do care for and care for deeply (Credit cards? Remittance banking? Phooey). And as long as that thought persists, then any pain and heartbreak I experience in pursuit of the right job should be worth it.

That said, talking with Martin made me realize that I'd just had my best week at work since I started. There wasn't as much floundering and cramming. I made contact with sources, made deadlines, and even managed to write some worthy stuff, if I may say so myself. Hey, I was even happy for a couple moments. For the first time since I started here, I found a rhythm that worked for me, and it meant less stress and more security. It meant that things here don't have to be so bad if I quit whining for a second and get over the challenge like a good little soldier. So while I haven't forgotten how much I want to look elsewhere for work, I am more willing to give my current job a chance. Instead of looking at March as my ETD now, I'm looking at it as the next time to evaluate things. By then things should be clearer.

I guess that's all for now. I have to get ready for monthaversary stuff. Ten today. :)

Over the weekend, I was listening to my whole music library on shuffle and singing along while playing game after game of solitaire. (I discovered that there were over 80 variations of solitaire bundled with Ubuntu, apart from Freecell and Klondike. I've taken to Backbone because, like Freecell, it requires strategy--according to my favorite math teacher, no Freecell game is unsolvable, because you can see all the cards--but like Klondike, it can fall apart because of luck. Now that I think about it, my life is turning into a game of Backbone.) I was caught off guard and found myself crying over "Unwritten," by Natasha Bedingfield. No amount of thinking, Come on, they used this in Judy Ann's Pantene commercial, and that makes it officially uncool, and, Didn't they use this as the theme song for "The Hills"? could stem the flood that came with every chorus:

Staring at the blank page before you / open up the dirty window / let the sun illuminate the words that you cannot write / Reaching for something in the distance / so close you can almost taste it / release your inhibitions / feel the rain on your skin / No one else can feel it for you / only you can let it in / No one else, no one else / can speak the words on your lips / Drench yourself in words unspoken / life your life with arms wide open / Today is where your book begins / the rest is still unwritten //

Some part of me has been sunk in the despair that this is all my life is going to be. Yes, things are going great, perhaps better than they have ever been; the things I wrote to my family and shared with you still hold true. But I cannot deny that underneath remains the fear that this is as good as it will ever get, and the fullness of life that I'm positively starved for will forever remain out of reach.

And Ms. Bedingfield here was belting out to me--and in my singing along, I found myself belting out to me, too--that I am wrong; it's not yet over, and there is still time for my dreams to come true. So I cried and cried and cried out of relief and gratitude.

But I also cried for my own weakness and lack of courage. On the one hand is, you're only young once; you only live once, and on the other, there's still time. On one, if you've found the people who make it all worth it, spend every minute you can at their side, and on the other, stand on your own two legs. I feel paralyzed. How do you do it? Where's the balance? Where do you get the courage to act on all you have to say?

I know what I want to do with my life, and one of the first things that will get me closer to doing that is quitting my job, because as much as I have learned in the short span of three and a half months, I have just as quickly seen that my heart's not in this work. I intend to do that in March, so that I will have completed at least six months (my life since I left home last year has been measured in six-month milestones), and I will be free to fly home for my brother's graduation and my dad's 50th birthday.

Quitting will entail eating some humble pie, because when I left CCF in September, I told a lot of people that I was getting something better. I've come to see that it is better in terms of benefits and salary, but it doesn't truly compensate for the way I feel at the desk. When I told people what I told them, I had no idea what I was talking about.

But the idea of quitting also makes me seize with fear (fear, fear, fear; when will it go away?), because March is also when my contract at the boarding house needs renewing. I will probably renew it, because as much as I want to live in an apartment of my own again, I cannot afford the rent and deposit without emptying my savings account, and I am saving up for something more important, something that's not just for me. But to stay in the boarding house, I need to make rent, and to make rent, I need to make money, and to make money, I will need to find a job that pays as well as the one I want to leave.

Financial security, the bare bones of it that I need to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach, with a little left over for laundry and commuting, is a bitch. And I am afraid (look, more fear) that I won't ever find a well-paying job that I love, because the world tells me that good pay and great-job-ness are only for geniuses and the really lucky, and I am neither of those things.

If I asked, I know that my parents would help me out, and my aunt and uncle would probably let me move back in with them. But I'm too proud to use the lifelines they'd throw me, because I've spent the past couple of months trying to prove to the world that I ain't no trustafarian.

*strangled cry of frustration, complete with fist-shaking*

When, God, when?

Yesterday morning, the lady who lives downstairs tried to talk to me, and my inner snob was revealed. How? I only half-listened to her at first because she looked like a maid. I thought that she was the yaya of a relatively well-off freshman and had been sent here to cook for and clean up after her ward, who played bad music early in the morning. I was so close, yet so far from the truth. When I swam out of the part of my brain that was blocking this lady out, this is what I heard:

Do you want to buy this lpg tank? And the stove, too. We barely used them, but we have to leave. We have to go home to the province. My husband had a heart attack, and he wants me and my daughter--she goes to the community college down the road--to come home. My daughter will have to stop school.

"Sayang," I managed to say, after gargling and spitting out toothpaste.

"Oo nga, sayang," she replied. Anyway, would you mind asking the girls upstairs if they want to buy the tank? It's barely used.

Finally, I saw how tired and sad she looked. But her back was already turned to me; she was already shuffling back into their room.

This morning, I realized that I didn't hear music coming from there anymore.

While staring at the sky above the trees behind the Miriam College fence, lining Katipunan Avenue; while watching the smoke of V's cigarette flow over C's fisherman hat like a silk handkerchief being pulled over a pocket watch, it occured to me that entering his world is like reading the poems he likes and sends me.

I am not good with poetry, so my mind feels timidly for handholds: words that sound important. Or, words that sound unimportant and ordinary, because maybe they'll be important and magical after all, at the end of the poem.

In the first few lines, he tells me what he thinks about something or someone: L is like this. O is like that. What annoys me about people like T is this. I wish A would be less like that. I nod, and I think I've filed this information away.

Then, in the next part (stanza, quatrain, couplet, whatever), he talks about something or someone else: I find that writing is very X. Relationships are too often distilled down to Y. We should go to Z; it will be very interesting and Q for us. This, too, I gum like a baby and then file away.

Then, I get lost, because in the next part, things jumble together. He actually takes me where I can find O and T and A; where I can discover X and Y and Z, with very Q-ness, for myself. And I scrabble for the handholds and the note cards I thought I had: what exactly did he say, again, about L and X and how Y she -- no, Q and Y at Z -- no, it was about O in Z with T and A for Y -- no, wait, it's -- !

...

(?)

...

And I think, well, it feels like, I guess. It's a metaphor for N (?), or an eerie parallelism with B (?), or heck, some kind of recursion (?) with a play of words on G (?), but I can't be sure. I can't be sure, because while I'm watching the words smoke and laugh and shout, out of the corner of my eye, seeing them for myself, trying to put the lines together (God, what does this poem mean?) so they make some kind of sense to me,

he hands me another one.

"Well," he says, standing over me, clutching the paper in my little hands, "tell me what you think." And he smiles.

"Do you like it?"

Among other people.

I woke up with Martin, and he held me close and whispered some quiet and important things before he pushed off to work. I went to help my family move into a new condo. I didn't like the condo, and I didn't want to unpack because I knew I'd be moving out again, by myself, in a month. Meg and her family had moved in next door, and she was busy unpacking with her mom.

I went to hang out with Pol and Petra and I think Camille was there also. Pol handed me a crumpled sheet of pad paper and challenged me to make up a story using his characters. He liked the story so much and asked me if I wanted to take a walk or grab some coffee or something. I said, Sure, I'm walking to [garbled, but definitely a part of the city, somewhere in old Manila or Quiapo] for my class, anyway. Beats me what class it was, exactly. Spanish, I think.

So Pol and I walked down some street. Above us looped and crisscrossed different highways (we were walking through somewhere that looked a lot like that park underneath the flyover, near Magallanes Station). Also above was a rope and wire bridge, and people were crowding on it, in line for the MRT. Gella was in that line; she leaned over the rope and called out to us and gave me a very shocked look, and I said, I'm walking with Pol to my class! See you!

Then Pol ducked into a shop or a shanty or some other old building and asked, Can you give me a hand with these cows? I'm supposed to bring them. He was pulling on the lead around the neck of one cow, and there were two others. All of them were white with short horns and baggy skin and sleepy eyes. I got one, and we walked while dragging them (they were very slow and heavy and stubborn) behind us and laughing and joking.

At one point, one of my shoes fell off (it was blue), and I kicked it around, and my cow sniffed after it like a droopy dog. They like feet, Pol said about the cows. He told me about a restaurant nearby where I should take Martin sometime.

We were pulling those cows down some Quiapo-looking street, with vendors on all sides and old round lanterns and fishy smells and dried mud on the streets and tricycles going by. It was very pretty to look at.

We had fun that afternoon, but it took so long to get the cows to where Pol had to get them that I missed my class. I didn't mind. I said goodbye to Pol and the cows and went home to my family's new condo.

When I got there, I saw how nice the closet in my room was (it had bright red doors, newly painted), and I realized it had been a while since I'd had a closet that big, so I decided to unpack everything. Then I went to the sala where my family was watching cartoons and eating popcorn. And Martin came over and watched with us. Everyone was happy and laughing.

The End.

Maybe you know your life has changed when the news actually scares you. Really scares you. Sure, you don't understand it as a kid, but even when you do understand it, it doesn't bother you. Up until this year, actually, it doesn't bother you.

And then you're sitting alone in your shoebox apartment, watching the local news while chewing on leftover liempo and wondering what your loved ones far away are up to, and the anchor tells you that bombs are going off in Mindanao, and you're scared.

It's silly. You grew up in Mindanao. You heard these things all the time, scoffed at them, even. Hey, you even had a few brushes with them. The malls in your own city were bombed. Your junior prom had to change venues at the last minute because of a bomb-slash-kidnap threat. Ooh, one summer, foreigners in your village were airlifted to a safer place (a helicopter in the ballpark!), your family had duffel bags of clothes in the hall ready to grab, and the neighborhood installed a siren and ran evacuation drills. When nothing happened to you afterward, you laughed about it and remembered only the scrumptious arrozcaldo they served at the end of the drills.

But in Manila, watching it on the news, you get scared. Does that make you as detached and misinformed about the real situation in Mindanao as you thought Manileños were? Or is it because your own city forms a triangle with Davao and Cotabato Cities, both recently bombed? Is it because your mom drives to that city almost every day, and the rest of your family every week? Is it because you can actually see them in the car, with Dad at the wheel, and Mom putting on her shades, and Lola looking out the window, and Mon adjusting his earphones with his unclipped fingernails -- as if you were right beside them? Is it because, before you can finish a sentence that starts with, "What if -- " you hear the echo of a kaboom in the back of your mind?

(Hey, two of your best friends go to school in Davao.)

And then the papers this morning tell you, the military thinks Manila will be next. You're more inclined to believe that all this is just, as the President put it, "pre-SONA noises;" noises that perhaps her own men set off to lend her a flimsy film of credibility before she gives that big speech at the end of the month. But you can't help but wonder, what if -- (kaboom) -- they're right? What if they -- terrorists or our own military -- strike here?

And here is a business district. Here is a local megachurch. Here is sandwiched between two malls and on top of a tiangge. Here is your apartment, across one mall, close to a busy EDSA intersection, and between two other churches. Here is where you and the love of your life meet almost every single day, to steal an hour or two from desks, deadlines, and the scary news. I mean, what if -- (kaboom)?

You realize your life has changed because you suddenly care about other people. And suddenly, even if they're just a handful of people, they are quite the handful to care about. And apparently, with this kind of maturity comes a matching kind of paranoia.

You kind of can't help it. What if -- (kaboom)?

Work
I am regular now. I enjoy it half the time but would gladly take a better one. What's a better one? One where I write more stuff and stuff that I like writing about. One where they train you to become better at what you do. (What I do is a little editing and a little web development, both things that I enjoy but only enjoy half as much when it's done at this desk.)

Friends
I had dinner with my Eliazo roommates last Friday, and it was really great. Gella suggests we do it once a month. Friends of 313 Eliazo are welcome to crash.

Edwin and I have been not-friends for about two-and-a-half months now. I still miss him.

One of my friends might be involved in a shady organization. Her mom says she won't come home and her reasoning's gotten weird. She's always been hard to contact, but now we're worried about her.

Family
Mikko's a junior now. Momon is in the seventh grade, and Mikko is only barely a head taller than him. Why I got the short genes, I'd like to know.

People are getting old or growing up, and it's kinda sad. But so far, no one's stopped loving anyone, so I guess it's all good. I miss them.

Boyfriend
Martin and I recently passed the three-month mark. I miss him, too, even if I'm going to see him in just another half hour. I miss him as soon as I hug him goodbye, even if I know I'm going to see him again for the rest of my life. We are serious. We are happy.

Look at that, only six minutes to go.

Apartment
I need a new mattress and more bookshelves. Trouble is, I'm strapped for cash, and the place is the size of a shoebox. :))

Writing
I have two short stories that want revision, about four that want writing down, and maybe two that want translating into scripts for comics. I'm also working on a long nonfiction thingy that I might self-release as a pdf with doodles. Finding time is the trouble.

Other creating stuff
I'm assembling my first handbound book, but it's still just on the floor of my apartment, and only half the pages have been cut and folded. I'm trying to think of a good redesign for the website I built for my thesis, because if I want to keep it on my resume, it has to look less embarrassing. I'm also supposed to make a short Father's Day AVP for the dads in the community back home. Again, finding time is the trouble.

In General
Chance of rain, but I have a nice and colorful umbrella. Being corny helps.