Yes, waiting sucks.

First.
Yes, yes, I have come to the conclusion that I haven't completely gone off my rocker when I decided to ask, "Why wait?" Waiting sucks. And yes, I didn't go about the waiting, nor the ending of the waiting in the best possible way, but that's really all I can find myself to be sorry for. Because now, I hope I'm on my way to where I really want to be, instead of waiting (there's that word again) around for some good samaritan to give me a free ride. Here's to being a student again. Go me!

Second.
One of the things that drove me crazy while I was in Manila, was that my sister had had all my books shipped back to Iloilo. And so after a few weeks of re-reading the few books I brought back from Japan (which I've read a million times over there), I was beginning to go crazy. (I had read High Fidelity from middle to end, start to middle, and then start to end before I conceded that I needed help.) My sister was no help. She considers her Chemistry texts good reading, and doesn't mind rerererererererererereading Harry Potter 5 & 6 or Clavin and Hobbes. Good thing I have friends who still appreciate good fiction.

But now that I'm back in Iloilo (Yes, I went home, what's it to you?), I immediately looked through my books (Immediately after two days in front of the TV, that is.) and decided to create another Reading List. Here they are:

1. The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne
2. The Longings of Women, Marge Piercy
3. Lord Jim, Conrad
4. Kinkakuji, Mishima
5. Our Father, Bernice Rubins
6. The Shipping News, Proulx
7. Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party, Greene
8. Pere Goriot, Balzac
9. The Art of the Novel, Kundera
10. Love in the Time of Cholera, Garcia Marquez
11. In the Name of The Rose, Umberto Eco
12. In Cold Blood, Capote
13. The Silmarillion, Tolkien
14. The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood
15. The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
16. King Lear, Shakespeare
17. In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje
18. Accordion Crimes, Proulx
19. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers
20. Leaves of Grass, Whitman

Ambitious, aren't I? Twenty books in two months? This is impossible of course. I can't even do it even if it were twenty romance novels (Hmmm... Maybe I can). Not to mention that I am still in the middle of a book that I've been reading for almost a week now (21. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields).

Most of the books I've had forever. (The reason I have bought so many books without having read them all, aside from the excellent prices at Booksale, is that I have this fantasy of being 35 and retired(see, how lazy I am?), on a lounger on a beach somewhere with all my unread books stacked on one side and that's what I do all day--read and read and read (sunbathing and sipping mai tais) until I've read them all, then I can die in peace. Weird, huh?)

Anyway, most of them I've had since before: Some are a re-read, others recommendations, plus a smattering of the pretentious (Umberto Eco? Hello!). But the point is, I have a project for the next few weeks, and it feels good.

(Aside.
Incidentally, this going-through-my-old-books stuff has made me remember all the other books that I used to own but now I can't find--if you have borrowed a book from me and still haven't returned it (and have not given it to some girl you were hoping to impress, hahaha!), I really would like to see that book again... please. Even just to touch it and smell it again. Really. All my Kundera--from The Joke to Identity and everything in between, my Shirley Jackson short stories, even my romance novels, and all the others that I've forgotten!!! Ohmygod. I really miss those books.
So, please.)

Anyway. Third.
I tried to submit to the Ateneo Workshop, but I didn't make the deadline. (Fuck, fuck, fuck!) I had completely forgotten about it (too much waiting can actually do this to you). Anyway, being the eternal, irritating optimist, I'm now taking this failure as a sign that my newer stuff aren't that great. Haha. But I did submit some re-written, re-worked poems for publication and I hope, I hope those do better, because I sweated my ass off to rewrite them, and I do think they're good (ehem.) and, it was on time at least. (Please, please, please.)

Fourth.
This is what happens when I have been silent--on paper, on the net, vocally, even-- for so long. I reach a threshold and then I just bubble over. Drey, stop. (I have just replied to the backlog in my email. Ten or so emails in two hours, one in Japanese! Grrr.) Seriously. Stop.

Last. Promise.
One of the five that didn't make it. A re-write of an early morning writing exercise.


Patterns repeat

Like when a girl sneaks
a boy into her room after dark—
her mother had forbidden it

like the mention of the bastard
who broke away at the words
forever, chain, us versus others;

like vines having no where to go
but up walls. Circumvention
creating paths, patterns

that shouldn’t surprise any more.
The light come the morning finds—
an empty bedroom, breakfast for two—

nothing but outlines and shadows,
hints of the unspoken, the silence
of the nights to come.