No thanks

There's this guy who works in the finance-lending office near my apartment building, and I was buying some stuff in the convenience store next door.

"Hi," he says.

I look behind me to make sure I'm the one he's talking to. No one else is there. "Hey," I say out of politeness.

"You're really cute."

This immediately makes me uncomfortable. I choke out a hesitant thanks.

"Do you wanna go out?"

"No, I'm busy, and I don't know you."

"I'm K**."

"Right."

"I have a car outside."

I look outside and see his Toyota Avanza. I roll my eyes in my head and force out a smile.

"Do you go out often?"

Please go away already and let me buy my fucking chips.

"Sometimes."

"Where?"

"Anywhere nice."

"Do you go to IT Park?"

Do I look like I live an Amish existence?

"Of course."

"Have you been to Figola?"

"A couple of times, yes."

"Well, I'm one of the owners."

I guess that was supposed to be impressive.

"Do you have a boyfriend?"

"No."

"Can I have your number?"

This about does it for me. I couldn't hide the irritation from my face anymore. He stops, startled by the acidic reaction that resulted from his question, but he brings back that smug look on his face. "Can I have your number? We can hang out sometime."

Please fuck off and annoy someone else. I roll my eyes, this time for real. "No thanks."

I run out the store, annoyed that I didn't even get to buy my chips. I guess in this day and age, if a guy has a car, owns a club, and has fortunate looks, every girl is entitled to go out with him. But fuck you, jock, who think you can get every girl you think is "cute" because you have abs under your shirt. Fuck you, business owner, who think you can take out any girl in your newly washed SUV because you have ten digits in your back account. Not every girl wants you.

 I definitely don't want you.

Sketches

I haven't sketched in a long time, let alone actually paint. I have long forgotten the principles of chiaroscuro, the dynamics of mixing and creating colors, the rudiments of drawing out meticulous detail that the human face demands on art. What is left of me is just this chaos, these aimless curves and lines that collide and collapse over each other to find, on good days when the light is pleasant, a recognizable form. 

I don't even know what made me draw that. I think I did this after watching a random romance on TV. (I'm still only just a girl—no matter how disgusting romantic clichés get, they will always pierce through my reason and make me swoon.)

This I made after devouring a book of erotic Filipino poetry and art. Let's just say this is the more decent option of dealing with the literary catharsis.

Of this I am particularly proud because it turned out rather well—I didn't expect I'd get her cheekbones right and the way her facial lines cast shadows on her jaw. It's not very good by academic artistic standards I'm sure, but compared to my other drawings, this is easily one of my best. Hannah Arednt is one of my most favorite female philosophers, and when I saw that poster of her biopic I knew I just had to have a piece of her myself. I couldn't quite capture how she holds her cigarette though, so I just settled for that darkly shaded mess of a hand. 

I only ever draw when I can't write, when words fail to describe the temporary fever that I find overwhelming when I see a face that makes me stop. The way a smile painfully curves, the way skin sinks into facial recesses, the melancholy twinkle in the eye, the robust contour of a nose— sometimes there aren't enough valleys and flowers to turn them into poetry. They have to take shape through my hands, no matter how flagrantly I disregard artistic conventions of shadows and light and proportion. 

I guess there are just some benefits of chaos.

On the Sand

Sometimes, you gotta take your book places.

“One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”

― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

French Lessons

I had better start opening my French books again. It feels horrible to not be able to construct a decent sentence anymore. Thinking about it now, I wonder why I stopped in the first place. Maybe because I've given up hope of being accepted into a comparative literature program in a US university. And it somehow scares me that I'm not even bothered anymore, that I'm starting to entertain the idea of not leaving for postgraduate studies altogether. I guess I'm slowly losing sight of the point of needing to pay outrageous sums of money to study about things I can read about at home (I can't believe I'm saying this). And the way things are at universities today—the mechanization of the humanities, the academic approach of study that I now find superficial—it takes away the original beauty of literature and makes of it a mere specimen to be clinically taken apart and analyzed.

Poetry supplies beauty in my life, and reading saves me from falling into the traps of boredom and nihilism that postmodern mentality elaborately but surreptitiously orchestrates. Do I really need a degree from a fancy university to prove to myself that I can understand and appreciate literature? Of course I don't. A child can read Peter Pan or Robinson Crusoe and appreciate the beauty of its language and reality without needing to associate it with pompous and complicated ideologies.

Marxism, feminism, structuralism—there was a time when I genuinely found joy in studying them. I felt pride whenever I read something and could immediately identify the theories with which I could approach their text. I loved how well I could use words like bildungsroman or iambic pentameter or factive heteronomy and reveled how people seemed to be so impressed whenever I did. But after a while, I found that I was slowly losing the joy from reading because I was always consumed by a priori thinking. I approached everything I read as if they were frogs I needed to dissect in a laboratory. I hated it. So I stopped reading altogether.

What resuscitated my heart for literature was philosophy and theology. Through it I rediscovered the depth and meaning I guess I've always looked for in poetry and prose. I read Shakespeare, Austen, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Orwell, Camus with newborn eyes and felt a deeper kind of appreciation for the humanity with which they informed their works and admiration for the beautiful poetry through which they fashioned their language.

Alors, est-ce que tu parlez français? 

Petit un peu. 

Do I still want to learn French? Bien sûr!

But not anymore so I could arrogantly splash "I speak French" in university applications. Not even so I could brag to anyone that I can articulate rolled r's. But just because I genuinely want to. It's such a beautiful language. And besides, I've already started reading Camus's L'Etranger in French (although this was over a year ago when I still can read past two sentences without consulting a dictionary), why not just finish it? 

So yes, this summer, I will start opening my French books again.