usaping intellectual intercourse

At kanina, pati si Karlo nang-alaska. Heterosexual ka pa rin yata, aniya. Hindi ako napatawad sa aking kawalang-pitagan na pangdudusta sa kanyang pagkadakilang anak ni Allah, at lalong di ako napatawad nang hindi ako humingi ng tawad sa mga nabitiwang di-namumuri na mga salita.

Excited ako na nagbalita sa kanya na nakatanggap ako ng sulat-pahiwatig mula sa dating kasama.

“Kinikilig ka pa rin o. Hetero ka pa rin yata e.”

Ganun ba yun?

“Hindi. Naghahanap ka lang yata ng intellectual intercourse e. Busy ako e. Gabundok na mga gawain, o.”

Shocked ako. Akala niya yata, dahil galing ako sa isla ng medyo siraulong Bangsamoro, wala akong naka-intellectual intercourse doon, dahil nga sa Manila lang nangyayari ang intellectual intercourse. Pag minsan, gusto kong mag-parrangsabil kay Karlo. Akala niya, intellectually attracted ako sa mga latay-burgis na kauri niya. Pa’no mo kaya i-explain sa mga overeducated na katulad niya na mas intellectually stimulating na kausap kaysa sa kanya si Ridz, si Mherz at si Khumz?

Si Ridz na disinuebe na magsasabi, Babae ang nagi-initiate, hindi kami. Sila ang unang nanghahalik, nangta-touch, tanggap lang kami. Si Mherz na disiotso, bansag na basagulero. Hindi naman sa ayaw namin ng Sama, hindi naman sa nagdi-discriminate kami sa Sama kung kaya puro kami Tausug sa barkada. Kaya lang siyempre pag ka nabubuhay sa kalsada, ang hirap kaya nung may isa sa hanay na ayaw ng gulo, na sa harap ng paparating na kaaway tatakbo.

Oo. Madi-demoralize at matatakot pati iyong lalaban sana, sang-ayon pa ni Ridz.

At Si Khumz na disisiete at Grade Four lang ang natapos at ayaw magkuwento ng tungkol sa buhay at sex life niya, the temerity para lektyuran ako.

Kahit anong gawin mo, babae ka pa rin.
Babae ako, Khumz?
Babae ka pa rin ba.
Hindi lesbian?
Babae. Lesbian.
Naman pala e. E, ikaw babae pa rin ang tingin mo sa sarili mo?
Hindi. Lesbian. Ngising aso.
E, sila Mherz at Sara, babae o lalaki ang tingin nila sa mga sarili nila?
Ewan ko sa kanila. Itanong mo kasi sa kanila.

Sister golden hair surprise

The games that they play. The games that we play!
Looks like I will not survive my first brush with the law of the glop.

And Mags said today, “But you are also playing games with their minds!” The point that I missed, since I didn't know that I really am the one who has the resources to be throwing dices.

"You have a career to look after, Sheilfa, you have so much to lose." When all the while I had been making so much of myself, believing I have only so much to give with none to lose.

You scare me, she said. Told her that I spoke to her girlfriend telling her I’m in love with her girlfriend.

“You have to take into account their emotional maturity in dealing with competition, what they can do to you. My God, you don’t know them!”

“They”, I wanted to tell her, is of my kind. Poor, gutterbred. Therefore, there was not much to know. And there was not much to fear. But of course, that is only my point of view. The “real” gutterbred think nothing of me. The real gutterbred think of me a bourgeois shithead trying to lay a dirty hand on their virgin souls.

“Don’t put yourself in a very vulnerable situation. This isn’t the love of your life, is it? You are just there for the adventure, I suppose?”

Damnshit. Would that I would just call it an itch.
But if they're getting themselves some experience, shouldn't I be glad I am of help?



26 december 2005

Beyond the Ash Rains

When the desert refused my history,
Refused to acknowledge that I had lived
there, with you, among a vanished tribe,

two, three thousand years ago, you parted
the dawn rain, its thicket monsoon curtains,

and beckoned me to the northern canyons.
There, among the red rocks, you lived.
I had still not learned the style of nomads

To walk between the rain drops to keep dry
Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

Without irony. You showed me the relics
of our former life, proof that we’d at last
found each other, but in your arms I felt

singled out for lost. When you lit the fire
and poured the wine, “I am going,” I murmured,
repeatedly, “going where no one has been
and no one will be. Will you come with me?”
You took my hand and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said won’t again be, singled
out for loss in your arms, won’t ever again
be exiled, never again, from your arms.

Agha Shahid Ali

The Peace Zone

"The The Peace Zones comprise barely barren ground. While it may be simplistic to mock the concept as offering no more than a future in which the archipelago might resemble a jigsaw of sanctuaries and withdrawal areas, the proposal can nonetheless appear static and unimaginative in the broader context of Philippine politics.

"But there is a far more sinister problem: The Peace Zones represent the antithesis of political debate and threaten to depower the very people they aim to protect."

Peter Sales (1992, p. 32)

Ending up in Istanbul on a train off for Siberia

"Over a number of years spent ruminating on the distinctive characteristics of the Celts, I began to wonder if their legendary nomadic ways arose from an inner need. An involuntary response, rather than a pragmatic one; a restlessness that had its roots in an insatiable curiosity.

"I suspect it was my growing awareness of my own wanderlust and curiosity that made me aware of the real sense of connection I felt to the Celtic lineage, as part of that New World extension of a people who ranged so astonishingly far and wide. And the more I learned of Pan-Celtic culture and its unexpected turns and twists, the more I was drawn to learn about the Celts’ contemporaries, which in turn set me off on tangents which might have little or no connection to the Celts themselves.

"In casting your inspirational net as an artist, you become familiar with the humility that comes with watching your best-laid plans veer sideways, and recordings becoming something other than what you expected. So, you set out to travel to Rome and end up in Istanbul. You set off for Japan and you end up on a train across Siberia. The journey, not the destination, becomes a source of wonder.

"In the end, I wonder if one of the most important steps on our journey is the one in which we throw the map. In jettisoning the grids and brambles of our own preconceptions, perhaps we are better able to find the real secrets of each place; to remember that we are all extensions of our collective history."

William Butler Yeats

dead men walking and feasible joys

A diary entry, March 11, 2009:

Gwenola, poor rebel bitch. No University post in Paris and so she flew herself in. Every other minute she bewails, What am I doing here? Fuckinggodforsaken country.

....

Distance. Something I am comfortable with. But I don’t think of you anymore. Or maybe it’s just that you were never there to be thought of and you wanted it that way.

So this is how it is. To stand in the desert Unstormed

....

Kerima Polotan:

The world moves because there are enough of us who willingly face the doom of being common and ordinary and humdrum, struggling within the hedges to achieve not the bliss of the Gods but something humbler, a more feasible joy.

A cop-out haha.

I only want to be the odd paragraph and write before I die the single essay.

....

Jules has taken to the lectern. Doesn't think of herself as famous. Like Christine Delphy or some of those she calls racist feminists. Lesbianism not as sexual preference or alternative lifestyle but as a fundamental critique of the dominant order and as an organizing principle for women, she said. Wait. Did Jules say that or Adrienne Rich said that? Maybe the both of them. Jules should be an improvement from the last tribe. What's the craziest she said? She dreams of a lesbian-led revolution.

Germi doesn't think much of lesbianism. Her circumstances do not warrant it, got no uses for it. Daphne says she doesn't want to be any of that, that LBGTQI frak-frak. Who wants to be an L or an I or Q. Who wants to be a frac-frac.

But what can anyone who wants to succeed in at least anything do? Downplay the old constructs, throw away all analysis, and to insist on entering, rough and tumble, the games that men are playing? The suffragists won the vote by capitalizing on women’s supposed greater nobility of spirit. I think I will puke.

But Audre Lorde now sounds like a dead man, using words like feminism and oppression and liberation and genuine change the old tools indeed.

Advocating tolerance, says she, is the grossest form of reformism. There ought to be community. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.

“Pray Miss, write no more!”

Mary Wollstonecraft said that, in 1789, not I.

Paminsan-minsan

Paminsanminsan, nami-miss ko rin naman ang buhay ko. Noong akoy isa pang dakilang lumpen proletaryo ng Green Meadows, halimbawa. Magbabike pakanto para bumili ng shampoo at sampung pisong ulam, dadaan sa panaderya para bumili ng limang pisong pan de coco? Cool kaya yun. Tapos, haharangin ka ng mga batang kanto. Kol, pabolkit kas bike mo, Kol? Kahit di mo kelangan ng bolkit, sasabihin mo, O. At sa halagang sampu hanggang dalawampu, parang natahing muli ang butas mong puso. Uuwi kang parang saranggola sa saya, makikipagharutan sa mga pokpok girls na mapapagkatuwaan kang banggain, harangin sa daan huwag lang na di mo sila masayaran ng nagnanasang tingin.