Tuesday, February 27, 2007
9:11 PM
Say hello to my new friend!
This is the midget snowman Ben and I built outside our house yesterday afternoon, with red kidney beans for eyes, a green pepper for a nose, four red chili peppers for a mouth, my maroon scarf wrapped around its head and neck, and Maita's fluffy green gloves on sticks for hands. We've baptized him Bobby. Look at Bobby lounging on the plastic lawn chair. Notice that he's naked where it matters. See him snicker while giving the world the finger. That's our Bobby.
* * *
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Labels: house, poetry, winter
Friday, February 16, 2007
3:07 PM
"I am not being trivial. Your separateness could kill you unless I take it from you as a sickness. What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by silence. Can you punctuate yourself into silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world of another kind—back into real emptiness, some would say. Well, we are objects in a wind that stopped, is my view. There are regular towns and irregular towns, there are wounded towns and sober towns and fiercely remembered towns, there are useless but passionate towns that battle on, there are towns where the snow slides from the roofs of the houses with such force that the victims are killed, but there are no empty towns (just empty scholars) and there is no regret. Now move along."* * *
My dad had a stroke last Wednesday night, Valentine's Day. He was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, with skyrocketing blood pressure levels and a clot in his cerebellum. He's still in the ICU, but is lucid and getting better and wondering when/if he can still drink beer. Prayers and positive thoughts for a full and speedy recovery would be greatly appreciated.Labels: family, poetry, winter
Monday, February 05, 2007
2:19 PM
The Windchill Factor
I'm pretty sure I posted this poem in one of my blogs years ago (with so many under my belt, it's hard to remember which blog and which February) -- but it's only this year that I've come to REALLY understand it's less about Valentine-less moping and more about wintry despair and sluggishness. This year, I've learned about windchill, how the strength and speed of winds blowing from the lake turn the already awful chill (today at -15 Celsius) into something more frigid (-24). I've learned that "flurries" are not delicious, "cold feet" are not something to be taken lightly, and that "ice-breakers" aren't fun songs or games you do to "warm up" a group. That ice is not my element, that I can't skate and glide across the ice to save my life. That wearing powder blush on my cheeks is unnecessary, as my entire face gets red anyway every time I step outside. I've been fighting this almost instinctive urge to store heat by eating (and getting) fat. I've had to deal with territory wars in the kitchen, over the freezer and Ziploc containers and utensils (one housemate and her ever-present boyfriend have taken to hiding her pans and knives in her third-floor room). I've started apartment-searching again, and today had to walk out into a snowy world -- I felt like I was a character in a TV with really bad reception, bad white static. I miss my black fur sausage sleeping on a pillow beside me.February
Margaret Atwood
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
he’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
Labels: house, poetry, winter
Monday, January 29, 2007
8:45 PM
I Get a Shiver in My Bones Just Thinking about...
Ok, so the weather's been on my mind a lot. I check the online weather site every day to see how cold it'll be and how many layers I have to wear (for this entire week, it'll be between -4 to -15 degrees Celsius, which means: 3 layers on top + hat + scarf + gloves + tights + thick socks + jeans + sneakers = waddling like a penguin in the snow). So don't snap at me if you happen to catch me online and I go on about slipping on icy sidewalks or how this is almost 40 degrees colder than what I've been used to my entire life. Yesterday, Elmo reminded me, "kamusta means how are you?, not what's the weather like?" Oo nga naman... Well by the force of will my lungs are filled and so I breathe... * * *
Funny how winter's affected my in-class persona. I've been a lot less hesitant to speak my mind, reciting 2-4 times in a 2-hour session. I think, tangina, I walked for fifteen minutes in the fucking snow, and will walk back home again, I'd better make this worth my while. I've gotten the hang of this grad school discussion thingy (where I don't let words like "thingy" slip), of asking open-ended questions, of not colliding with someone else's voice at the last minute.
As for my appetite... let's just say that today I baked some sole fillets (with lemon pepper and olives) roasted some potatoes (with butter and parsley and rosemary), tossed a salad (with roasted red pepper and parmesan vinaigrette), and snacked on turones de kasoy. In the fridge, I have leftover chicken tikka masala, basmati rice spiced with cumin and turmeric, a bowl of mixed berries, and copious amounts of orange juice. I'm eating better (look, Ma, a well-balanced meal! and Irish oatmeal and fruit for breakfast!) than I was months ago, when I kept having meat cravings and never had fruit, but I think I'm also eating a lot more. I'm such a fan of my own cooking, haha. My new specialty, thanks to cousin Summer, is creamy orange chicken (with cremini mushrooms, peas, carrots, and white wine). Hala. Well, as Maita always says, It's winter. Time to get fat.
* * *
V. S. Naipaul's A Way in the World has been a joy to read. Compared to the previous novels (Achebe's Arrow of God and Soyinka's Isara) I've had to read for my Postcolonial Lit class, this one held my attention from the very first paragraph -- probably because the narrator, a wannabe novelist who always feels like a stranger/tourist even in a place he used to call home, seems very familiar to me. Every few pages, I have to stop and let an idea sink in (which is probably why I'm still only halfway done), or underline a passage that resonates with stuff I'm beginning to think more about. Like the question of race and identity in this city with its surface multiculturalism. Sometimes I feel this internalized pressure to not forget where I've come from, to not give the impression when I'm interacting with people that I'm at home in this city... because I'm not, and I'm aware of being a racialized/ exoticized/ sexualized other even in the classroom... But at the same time it's been pointed out to me I may be insisting on this difference, even when I don't have to. This is murky stuff I have to deal with in my mind, in my own time. I wonder though how this experience is changing me, has changed me, and what it'll be like when I do go home to Manila, whenever that'll be. Naipaul's narrator says:
"To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of glasses I had, looking at a world now sharp and small and not quite real, now standard size and real but blurred; the way I played with my first pair of dark glasses, moving between the dazzle and the coolness; or the way, on this first return, when I was introduced to air-conditioning, I liked to move from the coolness of an air-conditioned room to the warmth outside, and back again. I was in time, over the years, and over many returns, to get used to what was new; but that shifting about of reality never really stopped. I could call it up whenever I wished. Up to about twenty years ago whenever I went back I could persuade myself from time to time that I was in a half-dream, knowing and not knowing."
But despite this half-knowing, he also says, at the end of the first chapter:
"With learning now I can tell you more or less how we all came to be where we were.... I can give you that historical bird's eye view. But I cannot explain the mystery of Leonard Side's inheritance. Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we all of us go back to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings. I might say that an ancestor of Leonard Side's came from the dancing groups of Lucknow, the lewd men who painted their faces and tried to live like women. But that would only be a fragment of his inheritance, a fragment of the truth. We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves."
Labels: books, food, winter
