I work non-mainstream

I feel out of place. Don't you? I blame it on the gentrification of the struggle. But then my friends the real activists will say, Where have you been, anyway? NGOism is on its death throes, there is reason to celebrate. And still they don't want me undead, having survived the dogs.

Dear Mary, don't bye-bye me. When you're gone what will happen to me. What will happen to you.

I'm so sorry, but it's not as though I asked you to assassinate the Governor, did I? (I imagine you looking up, eyes lit up, on the verge of a smile. You will never say, Ye. Only my Father, you Father Slayer.)

Germie, did you see the letters they painted on the wall? Kill the rich, it says. I smell gunpowder, the proles rising. Class war is here again! I'm sorry I am such a leech, putting my weight around, but shame I long put away (Read Alice Walker), I am immune to it. Hubris as female agency (Read Beuwulf, Jesus, know your basics!).

I work with the angry, disaffected and disorganisized youth with worms in their heads a la... what's the name of that Jodie Foster starrer? Ya. Ala Robert de Niro. They're dismally illiterate, below the belt level, and hate the smartass bootlicking pretty girls who speak English and debate with the MILF. Thankfully, most of the time it's just my throat they want to slash.

Satur

During a meeting of the Davao Writers Guild, His Highness El Presidente Ricardo de Ungria at one time paid me an accolade. (Yah, it was a tribute, like Sawi calling me libidinal! only, less, because he is not Sawi.) We were, I recall, voting on something, the removal of Satur Apoyon as president and his (RdeU’s) assuming leadership. Satur,  at the  time of votation was absent, and Tita Lacambra Ayala, the poet, said she should have two votes because she is split personality. RdeU, who probably did not know how to count split votes, ignored the wit, saying How is that, and how about Sheilfa who is multiple personality. I was pinioned in thought, Tita, to make a rejoinder, “Then I should have multiple votes!” because I was thinking of how would Satur take it, he just went out to piss and when he came back, he is no longer president? Can’t we at least give him the chance to say, Okay friends, I am an old dog, I hand over to you the presidency. It’s like murder when one is not looking.

 I am partial to old men over assholes and jerks like RdeU, for as long as they don’t marry me .But it felt nice, like, wow, I out-avatared Tita ,though I know that for Tita I am just one egghead she rather appreciates, not a multi-avatared sleuth as RdeU perceived me.

Men don’t get women’s mind most days. What they get for staying down there when there was little up there.
 

Goodbye Miss Photogenic Smartass Bootlicker

I sometimes feel I am the girl in that Bridge poem. I do a better job than the Gawddamned UN, said she,  doing translation work for every body and nobody doing any translation work for her, all unpaid and deadly! the last four words of course belong to me. And since nobody does translation work for you, that means nobody loves you, uh-huh? 

I think I'm going to cry. Huhuhu.

Weeks back I was talking to a friend now with the Children Fund. I told her, how come I was given work this thick it’s three months worth in consultancy's worth and they only paid me eight pesos. She said be grateful they were able to scrimp eight pesos for you because they don’t have money anymore. (Read: Don't you know that consultants are out of job now?) So don’t complain, said she, if they have lots of money they pay you high, don’t they?

What I think is the state of the nation.

I could not tell her right on that that is not so because I was at her door selling a twenty-cents worth of crap, half of which in a language she cannot read. I could not tell her that when money was easy, I don’t think people needed talent. People don’t like to be around that bitch so difficult to work with. But now that they too lost purchasing power – much of it, anyway, contrary to the millions in funding they used to have while you licked your backsores – they want your best at your cheapest.

Ahaha, gotcha. Bitter. Bitter.

Alright, Mother Theresa. We the ungrateful… led by the unwilling, are doing the impossible for the unknowing.

I'm not really bitter, believe me. I am in fact happier today than I was yesterday. Must be my 50 years. The breadth it gave me, the range. Work posts? Books to my name? You wait, Fan. Just because you dig my stuff it doesn't mean I owe you crap.

Yesterday over dinner

My boardmates, when they like to compliment me, always tell me I don’t look my age. To be 49 and to be around them in an all-girls student dormitory, they must think me  freakish. Or maybe what makes me uniquely freakish is that  I’m pronouncedly  lesbian and I have an organization backing me up, too. So if there’s someone there who thinks I’m some kind of a perv espying on their young lives, their problem. But no. That’s dirty thinking. Most don’t care, really; the few who display some interest in my life and in what I do do forget about ages and sometimes ask: You have someone in Jolo? Because how come I do not show the least interest in the pretty girls in the dorm. It surprises me. Like, Ha? 

Because most days I feel like a shriveled old woman, a carton character straight out of Dickens, picking malunggay leaves from the roadside fence for the fish broth I like so much, chasing after the taho vendor, using up cans and cans of Alpine evaporated milk boiling egg, boiling water for a mealie, usually Quaker’s oats dipped in hot milk. The whole point is, I don’t eat what they eat, and don’t watch what they watch. The soaps on TV, for instance, and the advice columns on the radio. At 49 going on 50 who needs advice who needs anyone?

Yesterday Norma took me to dinner and bought copies of my Roadmap and talking about her daughter approaching mid-30s and looking every ounce it,  she asked, Are you 40 now? She looked genuinely surprised. Really? You will turn 50??? You look good!!!

I wanted to tell her she should have seen me last month, how toned I was, when I was doing weights daily, and on a green diet every morning;  when I was going crazy with carpentry work repairing the badly built bunkhouse I was renting at Baliwasan Chico, the backyard teeming with greens, camote tops and malunggays and tomatoes growing I felt like I could beat seven dykes in seven seconds, including Mherz. These past weeks I have not been feeling tops, the caretaker’s husband cut down the lone malunggay standing in the yard and the caretaker lied to me, saying someone else, the neighbor, who actually planted it, cut it. Wives lie to your face and they think they’re good for it I would like to slap them smack in the face.

I told Norma I am to vacate the house I am staying in, that’s why I am hauling all my books to Nico’s office where I hope they will be better kept. I did not tell her I offended the girls for saying I want my black pail back, if it were a man I am missing I would look for another man to go with it, but it’s a pail, I need it everyday, so the house full of mean girls turned cold on me. Not that I cannot live with the meanness and the cold, I don’t mind that. It’s the economic costs of coldness that beat me. On top of cutting the malunggay tree, I lost my only pair of dyke pants courtesy of my nephew the school drop-out who left school because there was no one to speak to there, he said, not even his teachers. I felt most privileged he took to talking to me. Now I lost all the good shirts he gave me and my Warren brief and my Triumph panty and someone turned my stove on to exhaust the gas I just paid for and so goodbye good broth, goodbye Kitchen, goodbye Boarding House it was just time to go.

So I started hauling the books to Nico’s office. Now Nico warned  Ryan and Germie might take  a book or two home and as he was speaking Germie was taking home my Mark Twains, which she did not really liked as much as she thought she would, and the Juaniyo Arcellana Sundial poems. Because those are the terms Nico spelled out. Books are bound to be lost or be borrowed and not returned, and if a book got lost, there should only be Germie or Ryan who stole them, no one else.

Home is the road. Maybe I should spend more time traveling, rather than arriving. Maybe I should stop buying discounted plane tickets. Now look I found time to talk to the dead. A plane ride doesn’t allow you that.

So many things crying out to be done, other people's accomplishment reports the least of them. I do not know what to do with the bunkhouse at Baliwasan Chico. Clean is all its claim to fame, Mary laughing all the time, liking it and not liking it. At a moment's notice they all want to come, and even the uninvited like to invite themselves in.  A space to be lesbian in, a room to smoke in, to sleep all day if they like, the air clean, the food good if people get up to cook. No TV; no crap, and they think even loud music is not allowed. Crazy old dyke is what I am to them.

World peace at our doors

They have time to rack up an incest rape case they once slept with and claim this is the scandal, not peace money. As though there are no sex shows, no boobs shows in peace shows. 

How do they settle sexual harassment cases in Calgary? Like they settle gang rapes in Congo? Elders with slimy hands alhamdulillahing, admonishing the erring girls not to wear this or that, you are peace advocates, not sluts, don’t go motor-riding with Muslim boys,                don’t sit alone with them in a room. 

But this is the 21^st century, and that outside your window is the pavement, that the mall. What idiot can you con with tribal or Islamic law? 

And suppose all a curious lesbian engaged in interfaith dialogue wants to know is if her Muslim friend is circumcised, should she call a party? Should she be raped?

World peace must be at our doors if lawyers and shamans who ordinarily blink at incest in their own houses are now crossing class, culture, and geographical divide to help one party to a post-coital conflict. What I look forward to is for the MILF to get Feminist Solidarity nominations. My own candidate is the rapist’s daughter. 

They sell soaps at the UN, and the consultants are making a killing.