There would be days when

There would be days when I feel heathen, friendless, like Cain driven out of Eden to the edge of the earth, eschewed from the company of men, and I feel an utter shame. Shame, that social thing again. I am a bad strategist. Too many bridges cut before I could cross them. But maybe that is really what I wanted all along. To be an island unto myself. To be cut out from it all. All social relations artifice -- to survive in an artificial world. 

I will make no noise! I will do no harm! Said Plath. I will be quiet, I will be courteous and resolute, said Susan. Too late for that now. Such graciousness is not useful to me. Long have I been dragging my entrails behind me. I should be glad I did not have distended uterus.

Technically speaking I should be dead. Politically speaking I should be long dead. When friends see me,  they ask how come I am still alive. I cannot tell them that even to me it is a miracle without sounding like God was with me all along. But a miracle it is that I still manage to thieve along the precipices of the sewers like that stinky rat of Patrick Chamoiseau in that Granta edition Germie ceveted so much. The rat. The child. Who grew up obsessed with catching that rat and ended up crying for the rat when he was an adult, having grown old and shrunken, the rat not the child, stealing a life that never became his.

Broomstick sister

Of course I feel schizophrenic. My body here my heart there. Always craving, craving hungering for a life you cannot call forth and hold in your hand by sheer desire. Maybe Momo feels this way in the US of A, her gifts stifled, subverted, driven underground all because she needed to survive. So she goes from one no-brainer job to another like the catatonic that she is. In a way that’s how I feel down here. Except that I am a more dysfunctional catatonic than she is. You cannot be dysfunctional any in the US of A without losing your job or your hair.

What am I doing here watching people watching spiderfights when I should be in Jolo or Zamboanga taking things up with people I’m supposed to take things up with. So I take on work I don’t have the least love for to get the measly pay I need just so I can keep on. Rather Sisyphusian, is it not. My Mother gave up beaten, cervical Ca for a reward. My Aunt arthritis. But it was a  knife in the heart that released her from it all. How ironic.

So the work suffers, suffers and waits, and the friends who gave me the work suffer, or are inconvenienced having to put up with me, with the terrible weight I seem to carry when I do the things they ask me to do. I suffer, too.  I shriek in my head, furious that at my age, with my gifts, I am still everyone’s slave, no command over anyone or anything. But maybe I am mistaken.

Sometimes I wish I will get compensated for doing the work I love, like my more competent consultant-friends. I am amazed. They like doing child rights lectures like they really believe in it, not because they’re doing it for the salaried job. But when I look at the best of them, I am utterly repulsed, I don’t want to be an inch like them. Maybe they are not as happy or contented with themselves as they seem. Maybe they are just getting by, bearing it all, gritting their teeth. Or maybe their happiness has been simplified into being able to pay for the tuition of the college son or daughter, buy them a tab, whatever they want, on installment if needed be. The way they look at me, I am sometimes glad they do not have the language of hate, being thoroughly programmed to be post-conflict oriented, so we need not savage each other.  Maybe they don't want to hurt me either. Maybe if they had their way they long flew to the moon to get away from it all, too. Maybe I am not as stuck as they are. I have out-traveled them.  I am their broomstick sister colleague and I am already on the moon, they are not. Maybe that’s what their look means.

If I am as well paid and competently on schedule as they are, if I were as smart and articulate,  I wouldn’t be as acute, not as cut-throat sharp.  If I damn asked for good pay and became a fucking consultant like them, I wouldn’t be where I am and won’t see the world as I do. Maybe I will have a fat thick hide like Vanrusell or be fucking adored as EQ. Or be Big Daddy like Pancho. Maybe never. Maybe I became their wife or their secretary girlfriend doubling us research assistant and therapist and baking mango cake in their kitchen.   Fucked up beyond recall that I am, I am forever on the road and in that island  without hope. Maybe if I ever  did so much as  became a fucking gender lady consultant, a gentleman gender consultant with the Unicef or the World Bank would have fucked me and I would be limping up and down the steps of ADDU, wearing clic-a-toc heels, announcing my sex appeal if nothing else. Then I wouldn’t be consorting with dishrags and doormats and trading crisp Tausug cusswords with Mherz and our ilk.

I would have not known what I know, would have not touched what I touched.

Maybe I will I feel less about myself and about my work.

Maybe I will have nothing to write about, too.  

I perhaps should thank my stars, dirty slob  as I am, I at least can still say truthfully that I have not separated my life from my study: my life is my study, my study is my life, and I am doubly educated for it. To live what one knows.  Isn’t that something? Maybe I am like that person in Lia’s poem, the one who lives in the heat, never burned, never charred. But then I am charred. To the bone.  My Mother and my Aunt and my Lola will cry, wouldn’t recognize me as the daughter they loved and raised to be good. Or maybe not. Maybe they knew all along, maybe I did them proud and they brag about my achievements to God and the angels all day long until God and the angles dropped.

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.