While washing the dishes last night, I thought about the day and realized I didn’t do any work. For the first time since January, I think. I went for a walk, started on and finished a (v slim) book, made dinner, started reading another manuscript. I sent no emails, wrote no (scheduled) posts on Google Classroom,…
Author: Glenn
40
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…
2025
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…
Leg day
I went to the gym at 2 PM today, a Tuesday, like someone who had control over their life. The ten-minute walk was hotter than usual; the air-conditioning inside felt more assertive. There were fewer people at the place, on account of either the weather or people having jobs. Lower body at mobility today, sir,…
Breath
I have regained my ability to sleep. Or, more accurately, sleep has returned to me. On Monday morning, I woke up suspicious. Not only have I appeared to have slept for more than six hours straight, but for the first time in a while I felt so weirdly, truly rested. I closed my eyes, awaited…
2023
A few times last sem the bell would ring to signal the beginning of the period and I’d wait for class to begin only to realize to my horror that I was the teacher. Once, in the middle of an activity in which I was allowed to dissociate, I came to the conclusion, no less…
Moving books
In the course of a recent move, I realized I owned one bed sheet, part of the care/panic package A sent over after I moved to Katips with one backpack three years ago. Also: one pillow. Two blankets (one an inabel, from C). Two towels. One bowl, a favorite, smuggled from the house. Two plates…
37
In the taut days after a family member was rushed to the hospital after a mild stroke, I was shaken by the gulf between the lofty-sounding things (professionally, cultural capital) that I appear to have and how they mean absolutely nothing in the real world. Nothing. Incessant was the refrain, part self-censure, part frustration at…
Five or six notes on Y*
I considered calling it my ‘Palparan novel.’ Handy shortcut, like ‘call center-call center’ for TQO. I remember struggling to describe the then work-in-progress to my cohort at a residency, going straight to capsule–political killings in Arroyo-era Philippines–rather than what the novel is about (although, not to be a social realist on main, isn’t historical context what novels…
Views
In one of the many heart-wrenching images taken in the aftermath of Ulysses, about a dozen people can be seen half-crouched and trying to walk on top of the flimsy-looking GI roofs of shanties, held-up umbrellas impotent in the pouring rain, the wind visibly upending their steps, while behind them in the hazy distance residential…