M said I’m entitled to fragility on this day:
- I think of trespasses, of awful things done to me, as first and foremost gifts of clarity.
- This may explain the ambiguity of my primal unhappiness.
- Movies finished this weekend: 5 (Sentimental Value, A Quiet Place, A Quiet Place Part II, Charisma, Hamnet)
- Books finished: 1 (Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood–mesmerizing, the gaps more interesting than what’s there, and plot is accumulation and depth rather than propulsion)
- It will be five years next year since my last novel came out, and the third is still whimpering, unformed.
- I’ve run out of narrators. I’ve run out of lives.
- The theory, I fear, is outrunning the text.
- Our favorite cafe at our favorite boutique hotel in Baguio has been thoroughly gentrified (says the tourist).
- Every now and then, whenever I see photos of a friend and his boyfriend, I remember how he v nearly entered my life in the early months of the pandemic, a chance ruined by curfew and logistics, forever foreclosed.
- I’m v close to figuring out, I think, the things and circumstances that I delight in as a person. The terror comes from the possibility that these things are bad for me.
- This includes being on my own. Being inside. Sameness.
- The character on the receiving end of the gutting but austere ‘Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner!!’ monologue in Anatomy of a Fall is 40.
- The oldest cast member on the just-ended season of The Boyfriend is 40.
- ‘How poorly I wear this life.’ – Libby (41, mercifully) on Fleishman Is in Trouble
- If you google ‘what of it,’ the sample sentence is ‘I’m forty-one. What of it?’
- When I want to make myself cry, I watch the audition of Lyca Gairanod on The Voice on YouTube.
- I sometimes fantasize about writing a novel about Pinoys and singing, but I’m scared it might reach self-exoticizing Mandy Mango territory.
- My acquaintance w/ what frays my nervous system is relatively recent, out of necessity, w/c means I had been winging it nearly all my life. Sluggish evolution.
- Please don’t psychoanalyze my ‘ellipsis era’–a broad emotional tentativeness? A paradoxical refusal to punctuate? The half-pleasure of controlled and disciplined key smash?
- Want to give myself permission to be excited at the publication of Y elsewhere this year while reminding myself it is already out where it matters. A ‘debut’ at 40? ‘Emerging’ at 40?
- ‘So you don’t want to be yourself?’ – the historian sister in Sentimental Value
- ‘I love myself, but I don’t like the way I am.’ – Trixie Mattel
- Most days all I need to be immeasurably happy is a small table at a reasonably quiet cafe.
- But this also means (the camera zooms out) the kind of reasonably comfortable, blessedly uneventful life for w/c this is both possible and enough.
- A point of relief in reaching 40–the body can now reasonably begin to falter–is of course also a wish for body parts not to falter
- Is this pain new? as inaugural, unalloyed thought
- Early this year I toyed w/ the idea of ‘being good at Instagram.’ I also thought about locking my account so it can be less uptight ala Lisa Robertson.
- At some point the loneliness transforms from sporadic and acute to white noise.
- Of course I’m a hypocrite.
- ‘Nervous was Papa’s word for terror.’ – from Good Behavior by Molly Keane
- A lesson from realism / Flaubert: a sense of reality comes from the entwining of everydayness with the deeply, existentially tragic, e.g., realizing one’s profound unhappiness while folding laundry (example not mine; my laundry arrives folded)
- Despair via withdrawal–the modus operandi of the protagonist in Stone Yard Devotional–is interestingly also a key impulse in novel-in-progress, but the social reality of being Filipino circa the pandemic limits the extent to which this can be depicted realistically (not in love with how reading this way reduces the experience of text into an approximation of value)
- Maybe I value composure so much because of how shame is so foundational to my sense of self except the two are far from antonymous.
- I need to calm down. To fucking relax.
- I arrived last night to two delivery riders bearing food. Acts of love and calories made possible by casualized labor, the apportioning of people’s days and time into piecemeal ‘orders’ (Tadiar).
- There is a moment, right, when you’ve been waiting long and company arrives and the jolt of being known feels almost violent, an uprooting of some kind. Been thinking about how I am able to feel like myself when around people who know me. Is this history or co-dependency (or being a person)?
- If the chronology is right, the work-in-progress covers the near-incommunicable downslope from 2019 onwards. Maybe the end–the affective and historical horizon–has to be within view for the project to clarify itself, like magic or therapy.
- The other explanation is I have run out of meaningful things to say.
- I’ve run out of grief cannot be right, except when fatigue has outrun grief.
- Of course I will always fall short. Always. Not an emergency.