Vanity

I've always wondered exactly how much of myself should I inject into this blog. Should I post entries only on the places I've been, people I've met and things I've experienced? Or should I make public my thoughts and personal issues as well? This has always been my blogging dilemma.

On the one hand, I do want to share snippets of my life, a few books reviews and social commentaries but on the other hand, while I would want to make this blog a sort of outlet for my angst or melancholy or whatever bad feelings I harbor for the day, I do not want to wear my heart on my sleeve. Though I was told I do that often.

I don't think I can decide on this matter any time soon. I am not prudent. Neither am I without biases. Since I rarely delete any blog posts (none from this one has been purged as we speak), you will read a hodgepodge of both niceties and sourness from me in the future. While I go and ponder whether I should write about personal stuff here, I will leave you with pictures of myself. Not because they are of any great worth, but because today, I just feel totally vain.

Eat-All-You-Can

I was feeling a bit down yesterday so I invited my friends to a dinner buffet at Crustasia. I wasn't craving for any food in particular, but I was eager to eat whatever they'll serve up my plate. I mean, what better way to get rid of the blues than by swallowing it whole, right?

Good thing I was with Pearl and RJay. I wouldn't have to observe proper dining etiquette when I'm with them. The food looked so temptingly sumptuous. And so, the three of us attacked the buffet, eating crabs with our hands, squirting gelatins into our mouths and swallowing half-chewed siomai. We ate till our stomachs stretched and till eating itself became sickening. If John Mark was there, he would have called us patay gutom, for that was exactly what we were.

We stayed like that from 7:30 till almost 10:00 in the evening. We left only because it was nearly closing time but we could have still gone through another round. When I got home, I only checked my Facebook for a few minutes and then went straight to bed. The glutton that I was.

Not surprisingly, today I woke up and found myself still full, which is a first. I looked at the mirror and I could have sworn my tummy grew a few centimeters larger but what I saw next was THE nightmare. Tiny red blotchy rashes have discolored their way to my skin, making my left arm look like a really long tomato. They were itchy and horrible-looking! And they were on my face too! Stupid allergies!

I'm not gonna continue with this blog post anymore as it will only get nasty. I was so pissed! Seafood never caused me rashes before. Now that it did, I'm petrified of pigging out. Blame it on the crabs.

Booked

Unless you’re Neil Gaiman and I’m absolutely in love with your fiction, I don’t exactly buy freshly published books. I prefer second-hand’s with pages already caressed by the fingers of wary readers. Besides the considerably lower prices, the thought of them being read before prevents my need for book reviews, thus shrinking the chance for unwanted spoilers.

Since I’m going to Marbel on Saturday, I thought, what better time to catch up on reading. So today I decided to visit a few good bookstores and stock up on books. Which second-hand’s should I buy?

I first went to the old Book Sale in Cubao, the nearest bookstore from where I live. The selection ranged from Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto to the more down-to-earth Stamp Collecting for Dummies. It's funny how none of the books there interested me today.

So I decided to go to Padre Faura and ditch my old perspective on buying freshly published books. Anyway, the ones I had in mind are authored by who else but my favorite essayist F. Sionil Jose.

Since everything in Manila is now 33 degrees Celsius or hotter, I took a cab to Faura. It's fascinating how you see the landscape change from the post-modern Gateway to the old Quiapo church and how everything in between tries to blend in, sometimes awkwardly but that's just Philippine urban planning to you.

Sure, I could have bought the books of the Rosales Saga from National Bookstore, but I've always wanted to buy them at the author's publishing house itself. I even hoped to bump into Sir Jose this afternoon but I wasn't that lucky.

Location: 531 Padre Faura, Ermita, Manila

Obscure and solitary, the Solidaridad Bookstore stood at the corner of Padre Faura and Adriatico streets just a few steps away from Robinson's Galleria. The taxi driver missed it as he was busy running 531, the shop's number, in his head. I had to walk two blocks back to get there.

The books in Solidaridad weren't cheap, but they weren't as costly as they would have been in a local Powerbooks. J. Baldwin's A Fire Next Time. God, I wish I had bought that but I came here for Sionil Jose's original works, and I only had money for second-hand's.

So I bought Tree, a book out of the Rosales Saga. I have just stopped on page 20 so I could blog about it here. Contrary to popular opinion, the book is not hard to read at all. It even makes me wonder why we weren't required to read it back in high school. I only discovered Sionil Jose when I started reading his essays on nationalism during college. Had I not done that, he would have fallen to the category of great men whose names I've only memorized but never really knew.

I also bought Gagamba, The Spider Man. No, it's not the Pinoy version of Peter Parker swinging his way to walls and fighting mutated villains. Gagamba is a cripple who sells sweepstakes tickets at the entrance of an Ermita restaurant. I haven't started on this book yet, but knowing F. Sionil Jose, I presume this work will be another form of social commentary questioning the meaning of life and the role of the ever-evolving Philippine society.

That being said, for the next couple of days, expect me to be even less sociable as I will uncompromisingly and unflinchingly be "booked".

Leave it to F. Sionil Jose to post a sign as moral as this on the window of his bookstore.

The Eye of the Tornado

My mood today is on a record low. I was excited to go to Quiapo and have my palms read by the fake fortune tellers, but my brother ditched me for his more eccentric friends. I might as well have ditched him when he had pharyngitis. That leaves me with nothing to do other than read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar for the second time around.

Really, this must be how the eye of a tornado must feel, alone and empty amidst the surrounding hullabaloo. Everyone I know have work, friends and family, the primary things that keep any normal person preoccupied. But I'm not bothered by any of those. I quit working, loathing my job. My friends kept theirs in the hopes of climbing the corporate ladder. And Mom and Dad live a hundred miles from here, oblivious to the erratic mental state of their own daughter.

It's a good thing I have this blog so I could keep track of how I'm feeling and be able to say Well Kat, from the look on things, you're still pretty normal. Like a leash I put on myself in case I lose grip on reason and things get out of hand. Things are still controllable now as I have one last thing to look forward to -- law school.

The day I decided to proceed to law school, I also decided to devote most of my waking hours purely for academic pursuits. This is something I planned but failed to do during college. However I honestly don't see any way for me to stop getting involved in whatever exta-curricular is out there. My bones are screaming to move. I have to do something. I need to get busy, to get motivated. Since my brother and I share nothing in common except blood lines, I have set a lunch date with some of my college friends next week at Makati. Hopefully they would provide some form of a solution to my mental slump.

Perhaps it's just the heat, but I've had it with summer. Though the thought of having to lie in bed till 10:00 am is comforting, I don't want to wake up every day not knowing what to do. I might as well swallow a dozen Valiums and never wake up altogether. There won't be any difference anyway.