annani

poetry what?

joy.anne@gmail.com — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:42:57 GMT

You know you have to stop reading a poetry book when you read something like this:

"Being a heart, / he has no chance for boredom. He is beating / every moment of the day and night. He pumps / blood and falls in love - these are his endeavors."

YUCK. Stephen Dobyns sir, you are breaking my heart.

music meme

joy.anne@gmail.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:34:45 GMT

I've been sick the past few days. Colds, coughing, muscle pain, the works. Reading gives me headaches and sleeping is starting to get boring. I miss my friends.

When my hard drive crashed, I lost my downloaded files, ebooks, music, movies. I also lost a lot of poetry drafts but I'm not going to pretend some are worth anything. Anyway, I've been rebuilding my downloads list starting with music files. In the meantime, here's a song meme I got tagged in Facebook: Once you have been tagged, you are supposed to write down 25/30 songs you cannot live without. You know, the ones you can listen to over and over and never get tired of. They don't have to be in any particular order. These are the songs that make you laugh, cry, think of an old friend, whatever the reason.

1. Carry Me, Ohio - Sun Kil Moon
2. Driftwood - Travis
3. Hummingbird - Wilco
4. Don't Look Back in Anger - Oasis
5. Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out of - U2
6. Have You Forgotten - Red House Painters
7. You Are My Joy - The Reindeer Section
8. How To Fight Loneliness - Wilco
9. Love on the Rocks - Sara Bareilles
10. Drunken Angel - Lucinda Williams
11. Blackbird - Sarah Mclachlan cover
12. Some Bartenders Have the Gift of Pardon - Mark Etzel
13. I Don't Wanna Wait - Paula Cole
14. Dance Me to the End of Love - Leonard Cohen
15. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds - Beatles
16. Stop Crying Your Heart Out - Oasis
17. World Spins Madly on - The Weepies
18. The Freshmen - The Verve Pipe
19. Never Let You Go - Third Eye Blind
20. Lately - Stevie Wonder
21. Another Little Hole - Aqualung
22. Delicate - Damien Rice
23. She - Elvis Costello
24. Building a Mystery - Sarah Mclachlan
25. Harbor - Vienna Teng
26. Love - John Lennon
27. Painting by Chagal - The Weepies
28. August and Everything After - Counting Crows
29. All I want is You - U2
30. Be be your Love - Rachael Yamagata

coron, palawan

joy.anne@gmail.com — Mon, 25 May 2009 10:30:14 GMT

Jumped from the boat to the open sea with no life vest, jumped from a waterfall (somewhere during in that millisecond fall, I changed my mind), went on a safari tour and fed a giraffe, watched the mating of the calamian deer. I loved it - from the chasing of the female in heat to the violence in the act. (The male suddenly thrust himself into her, once. The female jolted then sprinted away. Done. Parang flu shot lang, Soki said.)

And I wore a dress!

Now back to reality: Work deadlines, other-stuff deadlines and I have to stop delaying having to decide about graduate school. Like, tomorrow. Argh. Just thinking about it makes me crave Jollibee and an instant eight hour sleep.

where i go blah blah

joy.anne@gmail.com — Mon, 18 May 2009 09:34:10 GMT

Once again I could find myself quite stunned at the process of having to process. There's also the part that thinks maybe I'm being too hard on someone who is so clearly desperate to be forgiven. But despite this past year and how it changed me, I know I still believe in some things, people for instance, and trying to do good (which makes me an unfit Darwinist in a sense). And in childhood, despite its cruelties. So when you ask why a continuum of sorrys is not enough, it's because I still refuse to process the fact that things have changed you in ways I cannot recognize. For me, you were always the good guy.

In perkier news, Chris says she has learned to fry food, I have eaten my dose of spicy chicken Yakisoba and I love Kris Allen.

Comment ni Edrie: And you emo-posted again. Haha.

Tenderness, Stephen Dunn

joy.anne@gmail.com — Thu, 14 May 2009 09:28:57 GMT

Favorite Stephen Dunn poem

Tenderness

Back then when so much was clear
    and I hadn't learned
young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,
    I was twenty-three,
she thirty-four, two children, and husband

in prison for breaking someone's head.
    Yelled at, slapped
around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all
    I knew
were backseats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.
    We worked
in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret
    that to help
National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which lead to my body
    existing with hers
like rain that's found its way underground

to water it naturally joins.
    I can't remember
ever saying the word, tenderness,

though she did. It's a word I see now
    you must be older to use,
you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm
    it is
when at last it comes. I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her
    so softly,
then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back
    to me twofold,
and finally, sometime later, it became

reflective and motiveless in the high
    ignorance of love.
Oh abstractions are just abstract

until they have an ache in them. I met
    a woman never touched
gently, and when it ended between us

I had new hands and new sorrow,
    everything it mean
to be a man changed, unheroic, floating.

joy.anne@gmail.com — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:24:20 GMT

We've started calling X OPM for Oh-Promise-Me, because of his tendency to promise marriage and other things to people. Which one time ended in genuine disaster. The few times R and I have cornered him, we've managed to ask the most important questions.

"So if she says, you ruined her life, do you think she might have a point?"

"I guess..." he said, looking sad. That made us sad too.

We seem to have reached quite a comfy connection, the kind which drove him to ask earlier, "May date ka na naman?" in that sort of judgmental tone and I said "Ikaw, may bago kang pakakasalan?"

And what I still won't forgive was when Z dropped by sometime last year to deliver me food and he looked at him, at me and then asked "FB mo?" He would later describe it as "nag-iba yung mukha mo, promise." And then this older officemate asked, "What's an FB?"

And he said, "Fucking buddy."

And I laughed so hard.

the lost week

joy.anne@gmail.com — Mon, 11 May 2009 03:32:55 GMT

The last day, we went to the cloistered nuns' monastery. We were prohibited to go there, but I wanted to sneak in and see the nuns, or their eyes at least. He thought it was silly but he came anyway. We sat on the lawn, waiting. Then I pulled some grass and threw it at him. He looked at me, puzzled.

"You're stupid for taking drugs. And stopping school. " I said. He said nothing. "And for wanting to die."

He was still quiet so I pressed on. "And for thinking the world can revolve around someone, and for being stubborn." I knew what I was doing. He had trusted me, showed me his paintings while he told me this story, but I couldn't help it.

"I can't believe how stupid that was." I pressed my knees to my chest, hid my face.

"You're crying," he said finally. "I don't get you."

"You're stupid."

He had tried to teach me how to play the guitar, sat beside me during meals, shared his dreams of painting the world. That time the bus made an unexpected u-turn across the grass where I was and almost hit me, he had pulled me out in time. Then a kid had yelled "Kuya ____ has a crush on Ate Joy!" I had a flight back to Manila in a few nights. It was just one of those things that had no future and for the first time in weeks, I was angry again.

The nuns never came out. Or maybe we hadn't been looking. If someone had peered on a window, they would have seen nothing very interesting anyway, just two trespassers on the lawn, barely touching, just a hand over another pressed on the grass.

ala Jack Kerouac

joy.anne@gmail.com — Sat, 02 May 2009 10:26:36 GMT

Or in the words of Conor Oberst, there's nothing the road cannot heal. Off for a while with vintage Oliver Sacks, clothes straight out of the drier, and a pack of antihistamine.

Must find some place to land this anger, some place for takeoff.

And leaving you a remnant of Salvatore Quasimodo in the meantime: Everyone stands alone at the heart of the earth / Pierced by a ray of sunlight / And suddenly it is evening.

pahabol sa poetry month

joy.anne@gmail.com — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 10:29:48 GMT

Dreaming at the Ballet
Jack Gilbert

The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.
They will do anything it’s true.
And the skin is beautifully cared for.
But they have no sense of it. They are
all manner and amazing technique.
I lie with them thinking of your
foolish excess, of you panting
and sweating, and your eyes after.

Sabay sabay tayo, Marian Rivera

joy.anne@gmail.com — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:44:05 GMT

Over in Youtube, people are disparaging or defending Marian Rivera with a passion akin to angry sex. I'm actually afraid I might recognize one of the Marian fans as my friend Lara. She's hardcore - Hindi buntis si Marian! Hindi niya inagaw si Dingdong! Hindi siya palengkera!

I couldn't care less right now actually. This is my day's cheap thrill (and it is cheap), except for the fact that I feel kinda like a lesbian laughing over this (not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with feeling like a lesbian or being a lesbian for that matter).

all you need is love

joy.anne@gmail.com — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:29:44 GMT

Suddenly everyone's getting married - Ruth, then Ai, then Riza and Darwin has a half naked picture on Facebook. I don't get the future so I tell Darwin his picture is photoshopped. He used to be fatter. He says that's very very stupid.

And before all these, sometime back, we used to sprawl on the green smelly carpet after a late night FGD thinking about everything we would do if we didn't have to dissect the growing problems of milk sales, food preservatives and why children don't like sour mayonnaise. And yet, enjoying the perks that came with that - Starbucks, free food, free travel, bonuses, movies in the viewing room during project downtimes, which was really the only rebellion we could manage.

I don't know when the "All You Need is Love" fascination came up. For the Bollywood-themed Christmas party, we cut out hearts and sang that before an audience of annoyed people. After a tired day, you could expect Darwin to come to you, hug you and say, hey... don't worry, all you need is love. We called him sunshine, despite the fact that when he wrote about life (or anything at all), it made us feel sadder and more trapped than ever. It was Patty who said he had a kind of intelligence that was a bit too dangerous for this world. Years later, holding different jobs, most of us would still keep in touch, remind one another of market research borne dreams (which had absolutely nothing to do with market research).

I told Darwin that Feb 12 was Darwin Day, after Charles Darwin, and he said "why need that Darwin when I'm here?" It felt like one of those "All you need is love" moments, it was completely untrue, but for the moment you wanted to believe it.

Don't look back in anger, Oasis

joy.anne@gmail.com — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:53:03 GMT

Rainy day in the office. Working in the conference room with Ram on the other side of the table. The research office has been invaded by perky interns. "Life shouldn't be like an airport," he says all of a sudden.

"Why is that?" I ask. These days, he's sad and prone to musings.

"It shouldn't be about the arrivals and departures. It should be about the in-betweens."

"Oh."

"People leave, we leave. Then there's always someone else, in time. What happened to the in-betweens?"

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs* by Chuck Klosterman

joy.anne@gmail.com — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 04:41:15 GMT

That girl who adored John Cusack once had an opportunity to spend a weekend with me in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, but she elected to fly to Portland instead to see the first U.S. appearance by Coldplay, a British pop group whose success derives from their ability to write melodramatic alt-rock songs about fake love. It doesn't matter that Coldplay is absolutely the shittiest fucking band in I've ever heard in my entire fucking life, or that they sound like a mediocre photocopy of Travis (who sound like a mediocre photocopy of Radiohead) or that their greatest fucking achievement is a video where their blandly attractive frontman walks on a beach on a cloudy fucking afternoon. None of that matters. What matters is that Coldplay manufactures fake love as frenetically as Ford manufactures fucking Mustangs, and that's all this woman heard. "For you I bleed myself dry," sang their blockhead vocalists, brilliantly informing us that stars in the sky are, in fact, yellow. How am I going to compete with that shit?

--
But I love Coldplay. And Travis. And Radiohead.

--
Edrie says how are the MA plans and I joke "gusto ko lang naman talaga mag-asawa ng Amerikano at pumunta sa Amerika." Then he says African-American men have the biggest penises in the world. Wow Edrie, the facts you've accumulated. Quite impressive.

You Are My Joy - Reindeer Section

joy.anne@gmail.com — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 04:41:37 GMT

Ivy first let me listen to this from her ipod a year back. I forget the context now, I must have been worried over something and she was trying to cheer me up. She said if I find someone, I should make him sing me this.

I want to be a yarn doll on a bicycle. I want to fly a kite.

the introverted kind of happy

joy.anne@gmail.com — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 02:27:50 GMT

The Holy Week plan: Find a cheap hotel room with wifi, read nonstop, work and finish all side projects, write (or try to), watch Rent, documentaries and tv comedies, sleep for ten hour periods, not see the sunlight for a few days.

(now if only I can get this laptop to function arrrrgh.)

to wherever, from here (for candy, nikki, ekai, george, lance, rom, bryan)

joy.anne@gmail.com — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:23:57 GMT

C says she's planning to get married soon. I don't know why but the news makes me happy. Finally, some semblance of stability. It's been long enough, stumbling through adulthood, grabbing chances at happiness. I hate weddings but this one should be an exception.

I've always felt weird talking with people from way back, with how everything has changed, lives gone smoothly and astray in different directions. Ten years back, we thought we were ready for life and its permutations, George captured our pictures in black and white, an emblem of the past as if to say there was nothing but the great future ahead of us. Now, we still stumble through different, yet parallel stories of gains, loves and losses.

Sometimes it was too much too handle, and we were young - the falling apart of selves, departures, arrivals, pregnancies, corporate jungles, ruined relationships. Years back under narra trees, we waited for our lives to unfold, bored, restless. We were in love with ourselves, we could only wait for that love to unravel.

There was a conversation with Nikki years back. We were afraid of being ordinary, of our lives meaning nothing. It was college, the time when dreams didn't fail us yet. But too many things have happened, these days, I just want to be ordinary, find myself again. The person who flickered a flashlight on George's tent roof, who sang along during a Side A concert in the parking lot under a drizzle. Rebuild our heroes, rebuild us, forget the betrayals, the faces of those who have managed to hurt us, forget the cynicism, go back to when days were possible without five cups of coffee. And most of all, to forgive ourselves for the hope that didn't see us through, because we were young then, and we still are young and life can still be inexplicably wonderful.

watchmen etc

joy.anne@gmail.com — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:46:24 GMT

Kaye is leaving next week. I tried to digest that news while we were in Eastwood last night for take out dinner and Watchmen. I couldn't remember the last time I saw her - it must have been months. It seemed as if we've had issues since forever, work, personal lives etc. And still, I could call her for things I wouldn't discuss to anyone else. I didn't even know how to say goodbye and thank you.

Watchmen felt cheesy, with a creepy moral lesson in the end, unnecessary scenes and a misfit of a soundtrack. We were in the recliner seats in the Eastwood Mall and at some point, sleeping became more appealing to finishing the movie. Only they didn't provide blankets. I liked the Dr. Manhattan - Silk Spectre angle, but even that couldn't save the movie.

We did get a free bucket of cheese popcorn each. And while in a conversation on something about college, Lara said something about being stupid and young, but I had no idea what she was talking about.

Sweet Ballad, Munchausen by Proxy

joy.anne@gmail.com — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:17:29 GMT

(The best part in Yes Man.)

Hummingbird, Wilco

joy.anne@gmail.com — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 02:31:52 GMT

I have been dreaming statistical processes lately. Always, it's the SPSS nightmare - the encoding never stops, the codes don't mean a thing, the numbers don't add up.

Sometimes the list of tasks to accomplish, for personal growth, for happiness whatever, feels impossible to finish. And then I go back to music.

so far

joy.anne@gmail.com — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:23:54 GMT

Three more months and I'll be a full year in the job. I've never lasted a year in any job. My shortest stint was in a government agency where I got hired to do research only no one knew exactly what I was going to research about. They made me wear a skirt. I lasted eight days. For the sake of survival though, I have engaged in the following: writing spam, writing more spam, writing about dog grooming, early pregnancy symptoms, the wisdom of Dr. Phil, the battle between cauliflower versus broccoli etc. At some point, Paul and I thought about reselling dried fish. But dried fish is complicated, it didn't work out.

I can't wait to be a full year in. It's tough being the kid who failed the marshmallow test, it's like being haunted forever.

--
I need to have a plan. I told Ivy that and she said, what plan? I said I didn't know exactly what but I had to start somewhere. So what I really need is a plan to have a plan. I have no idea how that's going to work out.

But I wrote a story where no one died, and no one committed incest. That should be a start to better things.

hello again, LJ

joy.anne@gmail.com — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 02:22:44 GMT

Someday I will find the humor and poetry in all this.

definitely, maybe

joy.anne@gmail.com — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:34:15 GMT

And what has always touched me about this movie, aside from the characterization of the three women and the complicated connections, is the rise and fall of Will Hayes' idealism. There's that scene, it's the end of the nineties, and he's sitting outside a girl's front porch smiling, tipsy, and looking somehow broken. After being told that he's a mess, he does the only thing that seemed possible at that moment - save himself and break someone else. He tells her (and it's one of my favorite movie lines): Maybe you should go to life rehab. You know how the story will go, you know the girl will go away. It's thirty minutes to the end of the film and all the love stories have been snuffed out.

Sidedish Friend

joy.anne@gmail.com — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:47:15 GMT

It was Ivy who introduced me to Rachel Yamagata, in between talking about Depeche Mode and why those who give cookies (rather than psycho/pathetic stuff like poetry) are better loved. It's very bitter music. Ah, to be young and bitter. You forget there are worse things.

I love the idea of the backdoor. Ram said it was a victim thing, we all go through that, yes wanting to save the world, then giving up on that, wanting to save someone, but that never works either. Cameron complex, said Kaye, attracted to the misery. (RJ was House in a class cosplay hehe).

from Love Invents Us, Amy Bloom

joy.anne@gmail.com — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 04:07:07 GMT

"I’m going to love you as long as you’ll let me, and I’ll teach you a little about literature and real music, and then you’ll break my heart."

Christmas wish

joy.anne@gmail.com — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:38:00 GMT

I want my own Xerox machine.