That’s where I’ll be staying when I land on The Strip, many many hours from now. I am packed and ready to see casinos, drink up a storm, and generally take in the Vegas view. Wait, before I lose my cool and actually believe that this is an outing planned solely for my amusement, lemme say it’s a work trip. Hours probably spent indoors, on nerd duty.

Nevertheless, I trust that Vegas will hold surprises for me in the wee hours. Sistah will meet up with me on the weekend for some catching up and most certainly an exploratory traipse through town. Who knows what will unfold for us, then. “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

Whooopee.

Some day I’ll send everyone a card
with nothing in it, only
the calligraphy
of a river, and on the back
with invisible ink I will say:
Forgive my happiness,
I have betrayed you all.

 

As a rediscovered pleasure, Eric Gamalinda’s poems never fail to transport one’s thoughts from the mundane to a more transcendent realm. Invisible ink, calligraphy, and the full intent to go on with one’s happiness. He makes it sound so easy, so graceful.

I wish for such power, such will.

I don’t believe in an interventionist god.

A killer first line, don’t you think? It’s a deft hook, one that pulls you in somewhat lazily, dreamily into the song. It opens with a few calm piano bars, then swoops right into that line. I downloaded this Nick Cave song as part of a slew of LimeWire searches months ago. I barely gave it much attention (as compared to those other swiped songs with a more compelling tempo), until a quiet lull at work allowed me to hear the words clearly.

The drawl got to me. This is how men are supposed to sing, with a deep, resonant voice soaked in years of good quality scotch. Not the screechy caterwauling and falsettoing you hear so often nowadays. The song is reminiscent of church music and conjures (at least to me) religious imagery with its vague references to biblical lines and the summoning of angels. The soothing piano underpinnings and the even cutting of verse do not belie the disbelief. Nick takes G/god aside and gives him marching orders. Love trumps religion, you gotta root for that one. To pull off all this in what boils down to a love song, seems very witty, doesn’t it?

And any guy who rocks a piano so nonchalantly is fine by me. I’m even going as far as forgiving the hair.

Just when you think you have Cave pegged as a crooner, it turns out he also spews forth songs the likes of this one.

Just as I closed the taxi door and settled in for the ride, the taxi driver asked me, “Weren’t you afraid, being the only girl waiting there in the long line of men?” I was taken aback, a little, by the question. I did notice that I was the only XX chromosome in the rather dark waiting area, but I didn’t think much about it, and didn’t feel even just a little bit scared.

I mumbled something about, “Oh, they were mostly construction crew from my building…” and the driver nodded, but felt impelled to add, “You can never be too careful, these days.”

Come to think of it, was I ever careless? I pondered that for a while. Despite all that’s happened to me in the past few years, the dire circumstances that have shaped life as I know it now, I still do not fear men. I had to Google that—androphobia—the fear of men. In my former job all my bosses were male, I worked with mostly male counterparts, would walk into a meeting with a roomful of men as the only female, and I liked it when they all scrambled to give me a chair. Men are often intimidated by me, as I am not a fragile looking woman, nor am I in any way, reticent. I have a marked tendency to say what’s on my mind, gender be damned. I’ve had relationships where men resented me because I was “bossy.” Or, my personal favorite, “too strong.”

I have male friends that I’ve known for years who treat me not as one of the guys, but as a girl, who is a friend. There are men I admire and would like to emulate, men who amuse me, men who I can be frank with, flirt openly with, or just quietly sit and have a beer with. They’re males of all kinds—old and young, single, married, or in some sort of relationship, old friends and newer ones—who treat me with respect, and I dare say, some measure of fondness. So, no, I am not afraid of men in general.

But hey wait, should I be?

While racing to catch my bus tonight, I pass by this man on the sidewalk. He is eating fish balls. I make a slight swerve in a vain attempt to avoid the smell of sweat and soy sauce.

By angling left, I glimpse his profile. I see that he has a defective left eye, the eyeball protruding lopsidedly from its socket. I can see the white arc of it palely glistening— lachrymose. The man scoops up a fish ball and tosses it skillfully towards his chewing mouth. The two orbs in close proximity stun me. It looks as though he is devouring eyeballs as fast as he’s popping them out. Bon appetit.

My stomach flip-flops, and I quicken my steps to escape. It’s only 9PM on a Friday night, and already, this city’s strange creatures are out in the streets.

—————————— 

Hope it finds its way into your hearts tonight.

——————————-

 

This year, my peripatetic little household celebrates Christmas in a new home, a new place, under new circumstances. For the first time ever, we’ll have our very own tree, and get to begin our own little traditions.

Small wonder then, that I went just a wee bit overboard with shopping for decorations. I think I got blinded by tinsel and the sentiment of the season. Yes, very unlike me. Living with kids changes everything.

I lugged home a 7-foot tree (any taller and we’ll be raising the ceiling), boxes of trimmings, a profusion of glitter. It took me several days to finish setting up the Christmas decors for the house. I created my own wreath, I hung window garlands, I painstakingly connected strand upon strand of lights, I armed myself with a glue gun–all day long and late into the night.

Our theme this year is blue and gold. It took me weeks of casing stores, prowling through the web for color schemes, cursing Martha’s lack of specifics, to finally decide on colors. I stayed up nights glue gunning and ribbon twirling and wire twisting. I went through two shopping carts full of decor, and still had to go back to the great gaping maw of the mall to shop for more. Obviously, I don’t believe in doing things halfheartedly.

I was in a decorating frenzy, and it was hard to stop. My boys picked up the fever, and dipped their little hands into the glittery stuff. My littlest one was so excited he wrapped his stubby arms around the finished tree, hugging it tight and almost toppling it over. That night, when everyone else had gone to bed, I sat in the living room and gazed up at our tree for a long time. Bathed in the glow of Christmas lights, I dared, just a little bit, to be happy, to remember all the happy Christmas feelings. It wasn’t that hard, remembering.

When I got into bed, my son Jeremy turned in his sleep and hugged me, burrowing into my tummy, like he always does. His face was smeared with gold dust, as were my hands. We have been marked by the season, primed for new beginnings even as we take our place in the long tradition of welcoming Christmas into homes and hearts.

However you celebrate, Happy Holidays to you.

 

Alright, so I am a repeat offender—falling off the face of blogging when I specifically made plans to post with some semblance of regularity.

Lately the gods have been trifling with me, and my days have become a horror B-movie, campy and bizarre but not always in a good way. Tending to days that have hopelessly unraveled seems to be all that I have been doing for weeks now. I feel old, tired, beaten, depressed, disillusioned—all the negative things that we Prozac ourselves against. No explanations, no more discourses. I am sick of words, of lies, of lawyers, of rumor mongers. Mostly I am just so tired, tired, tired of it all.

Family and friends have been kind and loving throughout this ordeal, and this dependable fallback makes the days, gradually, less and less unbearable. Two days ago I actually felt a little bit lighter while crossing the street, flitting in and out of reach of buses. Light enough to step away from instead of into oncoming traffic. This week, I vow to enable myself to smile and mean it.

The simple act of blogging means I am just starting to feel like myself again. Whoever that person is.

One of the nicer things about living with kids is that you are always in for a surprise. Just a few days ago, I was tidying up after a late dinner when I happened to be accosted by a dinosaur. In my own little pantry. Right next to a posse of superheroes.

It’s a constant source of amusement/alarm, these sudden appearances of toys in various places in the house. Once, I was awakened by a hard poke in my back and groggily found that I was sleeping with a wooden alphabet block. Sometimes I would step into the bathroom and right next to the soap, like a timid offering, is the lopped off head of Ronald McDonald. I would discover a purple wind-up spider in my closet, bobble-head Rugrats inside my shoes. One time, coming home late at night, I almost died because of a colony of Lego blocks left on the stairs.

But my favorite surreal moment involving toys (sounds kinky, huh?) is that time one morning when I woke up to find myself completely surrounded by cars. Toy cars formed a traffic line around my entire body–small matchbox cars, a couple of model autos, plastic cars with mismatched stickers, a limp bus missing a wheel, little plastic race cars in primary colors. While I was asleep, my boys who are early risers, placed all the cars in their possession around me. I felt like Gulliver, waking up in a Lilliputian parking lot.

Surprisingly, this gig in the urban jungle actually affords me weekends off. With two whole days to squander, I decide to have some barbeque time at home with my little household.

I got a little grill and brushed up on my arson skills, and voila! Yummy pork slabs that got devoured so fast I thought I just imagined them. My kids are always happy on the weekends when I have time to just laze around and chase after them, or read, or have a tickle, or like that weekend, do a slow burn.

With a beer can in hand and tongs on the other, the grill work eased away a toxic work week. There is something about barbecuing, that slow charring that requires you to be patient. To wait and trust that the waiting will yield desirable results. This is the quality of life that was often missing when I was still in that little strip of an island. A fine irony, isn’t it, now that I am in a more demanding job, I find that I still have enough time and energy to be—oh horrors!—laid-back.

I was able to snap pork pictures before the consumption began. Cheers!