Hang on a sec, I’m reading.

@Marciano’s

The bestfriend and I went to Greenbelt and dined at Marciano’s for dinner, though our primary purpose is to arrange her debut-party either at Bedspace or at Temple Bar. :P

_{Woody Allen’s Linguine: made of creamy white sauce, obviously linguine, and chicken rolls (like cordon bleu) wrapped in prosciutto. It’s especially heavy for pasta but the creamy sauce separates it from your ordinary carbonara. Really good!}

_{Something like pescatore with seafood on it. I forgot the dish’s name. It has this lemony soup and clams and everything.}

_{Better than Yellowcab’s version: this one’s much more crusty, its tomato sauce Italian-sour, and almost, if not quite, the same with the REAL Manhattan pizza. Almost authentic.}

I want to stash myself away this sembreak

I’m reading Harp by John Gregory Dunne, the one I mentioned during my geek talk about Joan Didion and her husband and the dichotomy whatsoever.

“These clothes are dirty, right?” It’s Dad.
“Yeah.”
“And this one?”
“No. It’s out of the hamper.” It’s obvious.
“Then maybe you should bring it out to the maid at the laundry room.” His tone is suggestive and coercive–an imperative.
I didn’t budge for a while. “Hang on a sec, I’m reading.”

Time passed.

“Do you really think your Mom would call today?” He would always stress your Mom like he wasn’t really the husband of my Mom. It’s normal these days.
“I have no idea.”
“Sure?”
I nodded, an attempt to dismiss his interrogations. All I know, I’m reading John Gregory Dunne’s Harp since August and I’m not even halfway.

I want a terrace branching out of my room. Sure, we have a terrace but it branches out from the sala and the kids play Monopoly and urinate around it the way dogs mark their territories. You wouldn’t dare reading anything in that piss-filled terrace and auction-related shouts. So I want a terrace with wooden planks and plants and a guitar or something, a radio, and the breezy day blowing by, free from piss and naughty kids–a place where I could read solemnly and without laundry-related distractions. (A more brilliant idea: I could just toss my dirty clothes from the terrace below.) I want some place in the house where I could be stashed and segregated away from the affairs of the house.

If not a terrace, I want a signage to be hung at the doorknob that would warn Dad that “contemplative reading inside, fuck off.” That’s too long a word, so maybe the word “is reading” could suffice. It might just do it.

Circle of Friends thing going on

“Goddamn hamburgers,” I said thickly. I always thicken my cuss words–it was more of a figurative add-on than emotional sincerity. “Does she think molds are edible?” She, referring to the maid. I quickly threw the disposable plastic container together with the uncooked hamburger chunks from the fridge, then I marinated Dad’s liempo (his all-time favorite) with teriyaki sauce and calamansi. Our maid brought with her a friend, who happened to be a maid from a neighbor’s house, and reported happily that her friend stealthily went away from their mansion as what I’ve heard. She had “escaped,” and that, I think, is the right term.

“Naglayas po kasi siya, pahihiramin ko lang po ng damit.”
“Sure,” Dad said. I dashed pepper over the liempo. It sounded as if we even helped the maid to escape from the house, but if I would be asked, I wouldn’t mind.

Our maid happened to be in charge of everything from the laundry, housekeeping, groceries up to bill-paying, though at weekends and during semestral breaks I am in charge of the cooking to lessen the oppressive weight of the tasks. Though I could oftentimes see her at the garage sitting on top of a stool talking to someone on her cellphone. She was thirty-something, a widow, a fanatic of pocketbooks (which was interesting, truth be told, despite the fact that the pocketbooks are mostly Esperanza-ish type of novels) and a cellphone freak. She told me they do have this friendship thingy with the rest of the maids in the subdivision, like an Association of Homesick People or something like it. “Good,” I said. “At least you have this Circle-of-Friends type of thing going on–aiding each other during times of escape.”

I’m not the type of a person who would underestimate or degrade maids, but I am not also the type of a person who would have a certain advocacy with Inday jokes which caters to pro-maid stuff. I’m neutral about them. Most of them are dedicated (I stress with most, since some actually abuse the kindness of their superiors) and hardworking, despite their frequent watching of Daisy Siete and other noontime shows like Wowowee–which was definitely one of their top priorities, a fact I can’t help but mind. It may sound defensive but I have nothing against them.

I just really hope her cellphone would stop ringing in one whole day.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on November 8, 2008 at 8:11 pm, filed under Gastrorgasmic, Opinion, Stress ball narratives and tagged Bedspace, Daisy Siete, Greenbelt, Harp, Inday jokes, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Marciano's, Temple Bar, Wowowee. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Infected by the geek bug.

By meeting the prescribed signs and symptoms you are requested to go straight to a sari-sari store, buy a liter of Gran Matador (the usual brandy of college students) and drink until you lapse into an alcoholic stupor.

1) You deviate from your usual diversions like reading books and watching movies.

- Yes, for the last movie I have watched was three weeks ago: Lord of the Rings (it’s the one with Frodo, Sam and SmeagLOL climbing on a hidden staircase on a cliff and the fallen elven bread and some huge fat arachnid envenoming Frodo) and I admittedly think it was geekishly interesting and that I should and would read it as soon as vacation starts this 16th of October.

- Yes, for I have shelved the books I’ve been reading last month (which was Harp by John Gregory Dunne and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami).

- Also, I have been listening to Incubus (including Warning, a song sent by Juice through Yahoo! Messenger a year ago), Maroon 5 and my past inclinations. I haven’t downloaded anything that’s chart-topper new.

2) You tend to forget debuts and birthdays.

- I skipped someone’s debut by a last-minute refusal due to my organization-related duties. Worse, I forgot to tell someone to come over our house get my gift and give it to her as a way of saying thanks for the invite. I’m probably the biggest disappointment in the debut, though I’m not in a position to assume that I’m one of the VIPs there.

3) You rarely think of your girlfriend / ex-girlfriend.

- No bitterness in my side, I’m quite sure we have been seeing a lot during classes but that’s just it.

4) You won something in an academic contest.

- I recently won a trophy, my first trophy in my life (medals aside), on a Macroeconomics (Econ101) quiz contest. I ranked second out of the twenty-eight geeks who deliberately joined the contest to show off their intellectual assets and liabilities.

5) You play DoTA less frequently.

- This symptom is not true for all people. Ironically, the tons of papers to accomplish and the tons of things to review, the more chance that we would play DoTA (so there’s this positive relationship between academics and DoTA, seriously).

6) You drink coffee more often.

- NO WAY. This semester I’ve only drank a single warm cup of coffee! As of the moment (since I am very much aware that I would turn into a full-fledged coffee drinker like Dad), caffeine’s not in my system. And I don’t have a gas range or at least a thermos to boil water for coffee. That’s why last Monday night I bitterly spoon-fed myself those three-in-one packets college students buy. Yes, without water. The bitterness stayed in my mouth the entire night, but I still slept.

7) You’re too busy to even jot notes and reminders on your planner.

- I’m actually thinking of burning my planner on some bonfire since it has proved itself obsolete. Why would I waste my precious time organizing everything on its pages when I could do the planning mentally?

8) Lastly, you blog less often.

- Back then I fear that one day, I would apologize to my blog for being such a reckless, reckless slacker. This had to be it.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on September 30, 2008 at 12:36 pm, filed under Books, books, books, IRLs, Last song syndromes, Life at UPLB and tagged debuts, DoTA, Frodo, geek, Harp, Haruki Murakami, Incubus, John Gregory Dunne, Kafka on the Shore, Lord of the Rings, Macroeconomics, Maroon 5, planners, Sam, Smeagol, Yahoo! Messenger. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I’m not scared of dying, I just don’t want to.

Things I need to happily rejoice about in life for I fucking-know-right that it has been a mess for the past few years.

• My laptop because everybody wants one.
• My camera because everybody wants one.
• My cute, cute face because everybody wants one.
• My optimistic approach in life because, well, everybody wants one.

And there’s also things shelved for improvement:

• A Macbook because everybody wants one.
• A kickass DSLR/Leica whatever-model because everybody wants one.
• A slimmer body trimmed from fats and overly-exposed… fats.
• A much more optimistic approach in life without any other expectations because, I want one.

But above all:

• To be with my both my parents and my sisters in New York and eat as many platefuls of pesto I wanted.

A while ago I was listening to I’m Still Here by Vertical Horizon and I remembered my first year in High School (since it’s always played on FM radio). I could exactly remember my servicemates and how fun life is back then–probably the usual rants of someone who miss being High School. Though when I was that young, I half-wished to be older, to have freedom, to go to College and do what I really want to do. Well, I thought, I wanted to just break free of all the reprimands and the demands of being a High School student from some religious school.

“We will never be able to feel entire satisfaction unless we would let go all of our dreams and aspirations in life. But then, that flaw of dreaming actually makes us better; makes us whole. That actually makes us a man.”

Maybe, just maybe, things would go my way.

I’m actually waiting for a turning point in my life. Not that I’m wishing that somebody would die; turning points doesn’t have to be that brutal and that miserable. Just anything from disguised motivators to winning the lottery (how would I even win if I’m not even buying tickets).

Whenever I watch the news and hear college students or even three year-olds dying just because of millions of reasons, I feel pity. I’m thinking, what happened in their life? Have they even attained any degree of satisfaction from their life? Have they even accomplished anything they wanted? I don’t know, and there’s no point of knowing anyway.

There’s this excerpt from my past blog which says “I’m not scared of dying, I just don’t want to“. That’s when I’ve been very much glued to Joan Didion’s nonfiction, “The Year of Magical Thinking“, which is about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

And I’m now reading John Gregory Dunne’s book, “Harp”, published in 1989.

It’s creepy to know that you’ve read both books from a happily married couple. It forms this irresistible dichotomy that binds them both into an entire book. It’s as if they rhyme, as if they fit together. The way Didion wrote about her husband’s death was really chilling to the bones, and the way Dunne wrote about his brother’s suicide was even more chilling. But the very thing that chillingly thrilled me the most is the fact that John Gregory Dunne, the one who wrote the book I’m reading, was long dead.

Not just dead like, say, Ernest Hemingway.

Dead, the way Didion wrote it; the way Didion knocked me out of my mind for sometime and just stared on the skies and there I entered a moment of magical thinking.

It’s just hard for me reading a book whom the author’s death I somehow knew. That’s probably it. I knew how he died so sudden. And I’m on my way excavating his life and where he lost his virginity, why he wanted to be a Yank, and how he didn’t mind Katharine Hepburn as his neighbor, while reading the book. Excavating someone’s memories, someone that’s dead. Not just historically dead like, say, Cleopatra.

I can’t explain.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on September 23, 2008 at 2:37 pm, filed under Books, books, books, Pensive shits and tagged Cleopatra, DSLR, Ernest Hemingway, FM Radio, Harp, Holga, I'm Still Here, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Katharine Hepburn, Leica, Lomo, MacBook, The Year of Magical Thinking, Vertical Horizon, Yank. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.