Today, my favorite day of the year, I took a 400-peso Grab ride to a sterile building on a sterile street to a tiny sterile room where someone took my biometric information. The thing was blessedly brisk–thank god for antiseptic ISO modernity–though at one point I was instructed by the person behind the computer to look to the CCTV behind them and recite my name and date of birth. Truly dystopian. Maybe growing old means swearing off more and more things, w/ more and more certainty: needlessly crossing the Pasig, traveling to countries that required a visa, vexatious bureaucracy, etc etc, all of w/c this errand ticked. And on December 26, the beginning of The Void, when I can read for leisure again. Halfway through Magda Szabó’s The Door, on the strange relationship between a writer and her old, ungovernable, foul-mouthed, impossibly robust housekeeper Emerence. In a chapter titled, sheepishly, Politics, we are told that Emerence during the war hid a bunch of people in the basement of an empty building: a German, a Russian, a Jewish neighbor, a member of the secret police who was ‘a decent man, someone [she] knew.’ Intones the judgy narrator: ‘St Emerence of Csabadul, the madwoman of mercy, who asks no question but rescues all alike, since whoever is being pursued must be saved … not just oblivious to her country [but] everything.’ The intense physicality of this character, the no non-sense rejection of frivolity–that was my grandmother, I thought, her long life of vigorous, eager labor, w/c made possible the kind of life my father had, w/c made possible the kind of life I have and often battle w/. She was a diehard Erap fan, didn’t look kindly upon Kapampangan people (like Gloria), but whatever ‘politics’ her life held, it was certainly over and beyond sino ang ibinoto mo, before w/c any diligent theorizing feels vapid and ill-equipped. A life of exertion as politics, exertion as love, sans Grab and ISO certification. It was an exhausting year. Illness in the early parts, sporadic reminders of aging throughout, the elections in May and Frankfurt in October, and toward the end, in the last quarter, an absolutely ridiculous amount of reading (on top of the teaching, itself also always fatiguing). Been thinking a lot about that: elements of what one once imagined as a full life–reading, literature, writing–somehow rid of their original vitality. Wonderful drafts by students are a thing of course, and reading for a paper or presentation is by itself pleasurable, but situated in and entangled w/ a life of broad exhaustion and precarity–what remains / is allowed to remain? Growing old means placating a primal restlessness, w/c often resembles composure, w/c I take to mean something deeper: a sense of self cultivated simply from the countless iterations of I’ve-been-through-this. Grief? I’ve been through this. Shame? I’ve been through this. Inconvenience? Failure? Unhappiness? What intensified the fatigue, too, were the relentless failures. I couldn’t catch a break, couldn’t keep track of the rejections, how many times I came so close. The last one was a doozy, but what saved my recently fragile nervous system was the trite conviction that the particular failure does not, and will never, mean less love. Because despite myself I have a built a life in w/c love was not only possible but profuse. A love w/ a jagged history, not the Pluribus love of treacherous containment (newish sci-fi show, recently finished). This break I have this weary optimism; a thesis, a poetry manuscript, and the rest of the Szabó to read; and mild excitement over turning 40 and the international editions of Y, one of w/c is the reason for the aforesaid vexing errand. Also the overwhelming reports of a great year for Aquariuses from an assortment of nonbinary astrology accounts on Instagram. Planets please pay attention. Pay attention planets. Please.