...or sometimes, rainbows and unicorns
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Posts tagged: love
Dear Ms. Winterson:
I <3 you.
P.S. This reminds me of another excellent lgbt read about Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. The book was called The Book of Salt, by Monique Truong
Because we wanted to earn a bit, and didn’t have anything else to sell, we decided to sell what we had the most of when we were around 7. Stationery. We sold stationery for 1 peso each sheet, 50 centavos for the smaller ones. The Barbie ones were 3 pesos per sheet, higher priced because it was more valuable for us then, and because we didn’t want anyone to buy it. We peddled it on the streets of our baranggay in Malabon. Our total earnings amounted to Php3.50, placed inside a duck-shaped, plastic toilet paper holder. My cousin told me he’d guard it for safekeeping but I never saw it again.
My mom had this gift idea for my brother. She bought a huge spiral notebook, then wrote a ghost story for him. We then made the “book” interactive by creating pop-up pages. For several afternoons, we’d create collages using recycled gift wrappers and draw ghosts on the said book. In one page there’s a holographic Santa Claus, grinning diabolically from the window. In another page, there’s a ghost popping up to say “boo!” from behind a door. She had all these craft ideas when I was younger, like creating tiny pots and pans out of airdry clay, or using leaves as stamps for my very own stationery. We gathered different leaves from my grandma’s garden and she cut brown kraft paper into small rectangles. Using poster paint, we painted on one side of the leaves and used it to stamp unique leafbone shapes on the brown paper. She labelled it with my name after: Rean’s notecards, with a tiny drawing of me, smiling.
I was obsessed with pop-up books for the longest time. I was given a book about how it was like in the Wild Wild West, and I constantly played with pull-out dog from the second floor in that book, chasing after that kid in a cowboy hat. It also amazed me that the barrels outside the house contained different fruits: oranges and apples. The barrels were tiny, and the act of peeking inside it made me feel like a happy snooping giant.
There’s this book with stick figures that I found upstairs, photocopied and bound in red, called “Yoga for Children”. We had this neighbour from Romblon named Florence, around my age, and I’d call her and we’d go inside the bedroom of my parents and try out each pose. We were more bendy and flexible then, and with that kiddie naivete I’d wonder what was so special about the poses we just did, it didn’t feel like much of an effort back then.
At my cousin’s house, they had an endless supply of thick, A4 sized cartons, used for their “bibingka” business. They were brown on one side, eggshell white on the other. She’d get a huge stack, some pens, and we’d get ready for our drawing session. She had some Pinoy komiks like Fantasy and Nightmare, and some Archie comics, which we’d then use as our reference for drawing. I remember telling her how I wanted to draw something like that girl singing Vogue, Vogue because the girl there had long flowy hair which made copying it exciting. She had those pens that change color when you use the color changer pen that came with it. That was the first time I experienced coloring with gold and silver crayolas. My favorites were sea green and gold, so I often drew mermaids so I could have an excuse to keep on using those two colors.
Remember a few days ago when I tumblrd my favorite quote from Jonathan Carroll’s White Apples? Look what I found in his blog a few days after! :)
Latest Booksale haul! Some books for giving away as gifts, most are for me. mwahaha.
Also, two of my fave mags: Bitch and Women’s Health. Mmm, magazines.
My book arrived this morning via mail! Happiness. :)
Look what the gf gave me for Christmas/my birthday! The Keri Smith boxed set!!!
I am so excited about this. Keri Smith is my idol and one time I did an activity in Miranda July’s site (learningtoloveyoumore.com) and discovered that I answered after (or was it before) Keri Smith! I’m not sure if she’s the same woman, but nevertheless, what were the chances, right?
I was planning on completing a book before I do the activities on the other books but I couldn’t resist, each book is such a revelation.
This is why I love Booksale. The other day I called all the major bookstores, looking for Jonathan Carroll’s The Ghost in Love.
Sadly, all of them didn’t have it. I went to my favorite Booksale branch, the one at MCS, where the staff is warm and friendly, and knows me by name and asks how I am and why I wasn’t able to visit them for a long time (because I had no moolah) and remembers that I told them the reason before.
I first saw the book “Glass Soup” by Jonathan Carroll. It was only Php50 and I grabbed it and I think I even kissed it in my excitement. It was followed by my other wonderful findings, at only Php20 each! (except for the Berg book and the Dream Girl book)
Here’s my loot:
- The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith
- Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
- Until the real thing comes along by Elizabeth Berg
- The Best American Travel Writing 2002
- Chasing Cezanne by Peter Mayle (Which will be given to my mom)
- an almost new copy of Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
- Dream Girl by Laura Mechling
- Glass Soup by Jonathan Carroll
Yup, a very merry Christmas indeed. Mmm, new books. :)
The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world, and why not finally carry that secret out with our bodies into the living rooms, and porches, backyards and grocery stores? Let the whole thing flower: the poem and the person writing the poem. And let us always be kind in this world.
From Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones
“A city presents many different faces, and it is up to the traveler to assemble the proper composite.”
In “Are We There Yet?”, Levithan takes us to beautiful Italy, where he sets the stage for what seems like a bizaare love triangle between two brothers and a girl (who reminded me of Jean Seberg in Breathless). Elijah is a charming slacker, all artsy and laidback, while his kuya Danny, well, is a workaholic. And has control issues. And works in advertising. In accounts. (or so I think) Needless to say, they don’t get along too well. So their parents send them to glorious Italy in the hopes of them rekindling their lost brotherhooderism, where they get to have a lot of life-changing realizations and it sounds really schmaltzy and eat,pray,loveish? but in execution it is totally not.
See, Levithan sneaks up on you with the simplest of truths that he packaged so neatly and honestly, Levithan style (which means straightforward, but full of huggles and warm fuzzies):
“Although it is such a singular word, there are many variations of alone. There is the alone of an empty hotel room. There is the alone of being caught in a throng of people. There is the alone of missing a particular person. And there is the alone of being with a particular person and realizing you are still alone.”
or:
“We all want someone to build a fort with. We want somebody to swap crayons with and play hide-and-seel with and live out imaginary stories with. We start out getting that from our family. Then we get it from our friends. And then, for whatever reasons, we get into our heads that we need to get that feeling—that intimacy from a single someone else. We call that growing up. But really, when you take sex out of it, what we want is a companion. And we make that so damn hard to find.”
He takes the standard cardboard character of the Jessica-Elizabeth Wakefield dilemma and fleshes them out, full of heart and compassion that I found myself changing my mind about them every chapter.
Reading this was sheer delight. You have the armchair travel aspect with different places in Italy seducing you: vaporettos in Venice, sunflower fields bright as the sun in Florence, the Colosseum in Rome. You have teen drama without much angst or pent-up rage or cockiness. The boys in this book are not boorish misogynists, which is very refreshing for a YA novel written by a guy about two young guys. You have delicious descriptions of museums! The two guys here are museum addicts, and Levithan describes in detail how the Annunciation differs depending on the pov of the artist with much aplomb that I found myself googling said images, amazed at how accurate his interpretation was. You also have that driving question: Who ends up with the girl? (Although I was really hoping that one of them would tell the other that he’s gay and everybody would be all happy and gay in the end with no hurt feelings).
I’m pretty sure that their outward exploration reflects their inner reflections as well metaphorically, but I’m rather satisfied with the plain good story that this book offers at the topmost layer. I love this book so much that I plan on giving it to my brother for his birthday, maybe as a metaphorical way of saying sorry-I-think-I-might-have-been-a-shitty-sister-here- have-a-touching-book-about-brotherhood-instead.
