Tired.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world. - John le Carre

Sometimes, I suspect I am suffering from diminishing lucidity. It’s a condition that causes one to lose clarity of thinking, an affliction that reduces all mind processes to mud. I am a proxy server that refuses connections, I am error 404, I am a fatal head slump on the leather desk blotter.

I think I just need to go home.

6 Reasons This Writer Isn't Writing

I can write but why am I not writing? Why won't anyone hire me? I'll tell you why.

1. My name is Maharlika, not Mary.

2. I am not blonde or blue-eyed.

3. I do not speak English with a twang.

4. I refuse to engage in a price war with Indians.
At the risk of sounding like I am sourgraping, I wonder how these Indians get impressive reviews. Even their GaF profiles are peppered with grammatical mistakes! Yet they come with 49, 52, and even 208 ratings! How was that possible? Are all clients really willing to overlook substandard writing in exchange for dirt-cheap pricing?

5. I do not have a PayPal account.
To get one, I'll need a credit card. I do not have a credit card and it would be ridiculous for me to get one. I live in a province. The closest thing we have to a mall is a dark, two-storey building that is more warehouse than a store. Around here, we do not have ATM machines. What we have are passbooks. If I need to draw money from my account, I bring my passbook with me, fill out a withdrawal slip, and hand it to a teller. How could I have a PayPal account? How could I have a credit card? And why can't any client just pay over GaF or Elance?

6. I will not write for potatoes.
C'mon, $1 for 500 words? That's not a salary - that is charity! If that is all that a writer makes, I think I will be better off whoring. Even whores around these parts make more than $1 per article!

Two days ago, over at Elance, I placed a bid for $5 for a 300-word article. My bid was rejected and I was told (not too politely, mind you) that I have no business charging that sum because I am Asian. I was livid! I wanted to scream, "Now hold it right there, mister! I may be Asian but I probably know subject-verb agreement better than you do!"

I don't get it, I really don't. Everyone says the battle for humanity has been won; that Hitler is gone; that Mussolini is dead. Yet even in job marketplaces, I have obviously been slotted into that worst of writer minorities: 1) I'm Asian and 2) I'm a woman. Everyone assumes my writing is no good because I do not have a Westerner's zip code!

That is why this writer isn't writing - at least not under terms that are little better than highway robbery.

Anaphora

There's this neat little trick I use when I write. I repeat certain words or phrases. I begin a paragraph with one and use it somewhere in the middle, if not the end. For example, "I can't forget the way he talked; the way he walked; the way he smelled." Only recently, I learned there was a word for this technique: anaphora.

Anaphora is a lovely technique. It makes words come to life, acquire sound, acquire meaning. If I have a daughter, I will name her Anaphora. She will be light on her feet, kind to strangers, and a lover of all things light, dreamy, and beautiful.

What about you? What will you name your daughter?

Stitching Broken Pieces of a Life at 4am

(1)
Years from now, you will see me as we cross the street. I shall be standing in the middle of the traffic, looking everywhere except at you. You will try to catch my eye. I shall brush away something (a tear? a piece of dirt? a memory?) from the corner of my vision, as if trying to get rid of a shadow.

(2)
Sometimes I wish am not made of glass.

(3) Sometimes, I wish I could stop hurting over you.

(4)
In the end, we are all broken dolls merely stitched back together. I can still see the faint gleam of a seam running across my breast, just above my heart.

(5)
It seems so odd, sifting through these fragments of stories as if they were all pieces of a grand novel. I can’t seem to place them together, as if the edges don’t quite want to fit. Did we really meet? Marry? Live together briefly with our two beautiful boys?

Sometimes, I wonder. Did we have that life together or was it all a dream?

Invincible (or at least my son thinks I am)

Romping with my boys this weekend took up all my energies. We wreaked havoc on the beddings and most of the furniture. It was more demanding than a 3-hour session at the gym! They squealed and shrieked and pounced on me. I was a goner, no match for their lithe limbs.

During a particularly vigorous tickle and tumble, J bent from the torso and gave me (albeit not purposely) a backward headbutt—right on the nose bridge. Awww. I saw black, I saw stars. An ice pack was called into duty. My nose swelled. Good thing I’ve never had rhinoplasty or else my nose would have migrated sideways, or worse, to my forehead. Throughout all this, my son did not even blink; he just kept on playing. Literally, a hardheaded little kid. Well, he’s not my son for nothing.

Loved.

That mad tinkling of the piano, the two-step rhythm of the drums, the wheeze of maybe a sly harmonica in there; the song is a musical score to a gone time. A time inhabited by clean-shaven gentlemen clasping pretty ladies at the waist and twirling them elegantly around. It’s something to be giddy about. There was a promise whispered there, in the imagined rustle of skirts, the soft, powdered cheek pressed to shoulder. It was a secret thrill for a young girl not yet fully aware of the world, but eager to discover it.

The promise was this: I love you more than life itself.

To be loved like that, wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?

Journeys

A few weeks ago, I was able to finish an entire book. That I am even marking the act of being able to finish a book as an event tells how derailed I have been from the life I envisioned for myself. I used to think that at this point in my career, I should have more time for books, less time for meetings, to dos, and plans of action.

Alas, that is not to be. But I am not one dwell on the derailment, what I do is steal time away from the everyday to sneak in some reading. When a book turned up on my shelf a few weeks ago, I half resented, half appreciated its coming. Resented because it was one more reminder of my life not turning out the way I wanted it to. Appreciated, because well, a book is passage to another world, away from this one, as long as the pages are open, other worlds are open to me.

Cold Mountain is a strange series of journeys, moving through a war, conventions of the times, moving out of the self, moving towards another person. I learned new things from the book, a few almanac-style facts that I think would be useful to add to one’s skill sets: how to survive in the wilderness. I haven’t seen the film, so it’s good exercise to be able to form images without benefit of celluloid suggestion, to form scenes not colored by cinematic lighting. It is a cruel landscape and time that unfolds in Cold Mountain. It made me realize how, shaped by the elements, what we know in one culture shifts radically in another, owing in no small way to geography. What I know of winter is that it is cold and bleak. But the winter described by the book is much harsher, a season tempered by a gnawing hunger in the stomach and in the soul.

It made me think of journeys, the kind that take you out of yourself and what you know, into landscapes that are vaster, altered, alien.