Real Simple
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In an attempt to organize my life yet again, in what is surely the umpteenth time, I browsed the great Internet for clues. Hours of browsing helpful how-tos, bright ideas, tips and tricks, left me with no idea where to start. Everything flew by me, nothing stuck.
What became clear though, was that the amount of stuff accumulating in my house, my work, my thoughts, my days, my life—is getting to be overwhelming.
Accumulation requires very little effort. It’s so easy to satiate hunger—both the physical and the spiritual—with all sorts of things. With stuff. With fluff. You can rush to the nearest mall and let loose on the stores, grab things off the shelves and schlep them back home, marveling at the speed with which you can decimate a month’s hard-earned pay. Get it on, pile it up, shove it down, take it all in. Who cares about rent and bills and milk and diapers and flu shots when you can have the pretty green shoes? And look, I can even run in them!
I excelled at accumulation. I would eat sugary goods the equivalent of my righteous anger in one sitting, washing them all down with tepid green tea in an attempt at control. I would watch movies indiscriminately, one after the other, not pausing to think, skipping the intro, skipping the credits, skipping analysis. I would let the images come at me fast and furious: the ugly, the unbearably beautiful, the bleak, the bloody, the sublime. I let them all come, my eyes raw and red, my head throbbing, my mind turning into a palsy that would not let me sleep, would not let me sink into quiet. I have read a book unto its death, not stopping for hours, worming my way into the words, reading right into the dark of night, the only one awake, the breaking light outside the window falling gray as I turn the last page. Sometimes I would think of getting on a bus at the stroke of midnight, just speed across the blackness into nothing, not stopping, not slowing down, not changing direction, hoping only that the ceaseless moving through time, surely, please God, would be enough.
I have a friend, we all used to be condescendingly amused by him, he was the type who got lost in the details, plodding through life at what we thought was a pitifully slow pace. He could sit engrossed for hours looking at how light causes leaves to show the tracery of their veins, could be held captive for an impolite length of time by the shell curve of a woman’s ear, could spend days beating an idea to death, one insight at a time. He couldn’t get to the big picture fast enough for us, he was bogged down by how it was all pieced together.
The fine irony of that little story is that only now, years later, do I understand how that feels, to be burdened by all the smallest things. By all the stuff we surround ourselves with. All that we ingest, all that we take in, all that we chase after. Soon enough everything adds up, swells to a burgeoning that fills one to the point of bursting.
That friend, I visited him in L.A. last year, and he seemed distracted by the temp job, the many plans to be upwardly mobile, the travails of getting it on in the big city. We filled the hours with catching up, taking great care to get the details of our stories exactly right. For all that it mattered, what I took away from that visit was a moment that was unadorned and still achingly clear: he and I, we held hands the entire time we walked that long strip of shops in Pasadena, in those last few moments at sundown, the sky above us violently saturated orange and indigo.
It was simply that, and not much more.
I suspect that 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.
And just because I can, I unleash before you a beach poem by 
He left the book on the topmost row of the shelf where I keep
the television. It is a new book, one he knows I haven’t read yet. I do not like how he
continues to keep knowledge of things that pertain to me. More to the point, I do not
like him presuming that all the things he used to know about me still hold true.
Even in the streets of Cebu, it seems as though the much-examined Ang Lee
film, 
The universe is sending me mysterious signals, and it’s using a Brit pop star to channel in. This is today’s surprise endless loop on iTunes.
There is an 
Yes, it’s all gone to yellow. What better way to rise out from the doldrums than to change one’s costume, eh? I wanted an intimation of the summer colors soon to come, so the flowers are blazing yellow 
, and a u. On the inside, it said ‘I Love You, Mom and Dad! Happy
Valentines.’
I was standing in line at the department store, waiting for
my turn at the cashier's. Right behind me was an elderly couple—gray-haired,
frail looking, very senior citizens. The little old lady was clutching a pretty
pair of sandals and looking impatient. I empathized with her; our line really
was taking so long. It turns out the woman in front had an item that was not
tagged. I shifted impatiently foot-to-foot while one of the store staff went to
find a price tag. 
Three of us sat down to a late night drink under half a roof and a smattering of stars. There was fragrant French wine (red), juicy jamon serrano (moistly pink), and a warm balmy night (inky sky). Across our table was a nice view—vaguely Spanish looking guys who languidly drank beers and swirled cigarette smoke. Two of the guys were cute. I was glad to note that my 35 year old libido is apparently alive and well, and more than willing to ogle. 
I have been trying to put together a complete folder of my poems, and by rummaging around various piles of old papers, I got a small surprise—a poem that I had always thought to be lost—now found. This was a college-era poem, and I remember it was whipped by panelists of La Salle's creative writing workshop. I was quite ecstatic back then because the poet I much admire, Elsa Coscolluela, was the one who read this poem to the class. 
Just today I ran into a gaggle of accountants. I find this
most peculiar, because it happened in broad daylight. The folks who crunch the
numbers aren’t usually known to bask about freely in the noonday sun. Anyway, they came out of this hotel in droves, all very chatty, frissons of giddiness bouncing off
them as they invaded my path. 
Every few months I resolve to get back to living healthy,
this means I think about getting back to the gym, cutting out those extra fats
from my diet, eating more nutritious food, easing up on the sugar, getting
enough sleep. This attempt at a life change is usually driven by the sad fact
that I no longer seem to be able to fit comfortably in my pants. And certain skirts. 
What I miss most about the island I left is that the beer
there is overflowing. 
There's nothing like doing domestic errands to bring you crashing back to
earth. Lately I find that in my straddling various roles of mod mom, domestic goddess (ahehe), corporate drone, aspiring poet,
freelance writer, inveterate blogger—tinker, tailor, soldier, spy—I often fall
into pits of stress. Trying to manage everything at once, 
No one was normally allowed inside the Sisters’ cloister except for the cook and the helper. No one else, that is, except me. 
The nuns, they had all kinds of rules, all beginning with the word no. No talking during study hour. No giggling during prayer time. No running in the halls. No running in the stairs. No short skirts. No see-through blouses. No going out on school nights. No going out without permission. No drinking, no smoking. No long phone calls. No visitors after six o’clock. No meat on Fridays. No unladylike shouting, no hanging of underwear in the room, no unmade beds, no gossiping, no staying out after curfew. And the best one of all, no boys.
Do you remember the board
game Snakes and Ladders? We used to play it, my sisters and I, on those long stretches of
rainy afternoons that forced everyone to stay indoors. 
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