a perfect day for bananafish : Musings

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4 months

withlila2

Almost four months. Christmas lights installed and then put away, train rides from the north to south, snow and rain and sun and wind. Time passes, you grow, we live. Nights growing longer and sleep getting deeper, smiles in the bathtub, cries and tantrums, books being read. Emergency room trips and bandages and tears. Us singing songs you will never remember, the warmth of my embrace I hope you’ll never forget. Time passes, you grow, we live. You on my knees, you in my arms. You kicking your legs and squealing in joy. The light in your eyes upon seeing your favourite toy. No more sleeping in my arms; you’re too big for that now. From my bed, beside me, to your crib, alone. You waking from nightmares, whatever baby nightmares you have, and me smoothing your forehead, smoothing the monsters away. The days and the nights and the lullabies we sing. The snow falling, the snow melting, the footsteps vanishing into pavement. You constantly in my heart. Always, always. Time passes, you grow. We live.

bssbc Currently listening to
Broken Social Scene Presents: Brendan Canning
Something for All of Us…

2010 01 10 My Little Surrealist Comments (6)

This is where dreams are made

This is where dreams are made. In the early morning – at 2am, 3am, 4am, 5am. In a separate room from your husband, the lamp on all night. Baby against your breast. You absorbing the strange sounds she makes in her sleep. Dreams are made when you are wishing that you too could sleep. The tiredness overcoming your body, overpowering you, overwhelming. In the kitchen, carefully spooning out the correct amount of powdered milk into a bottle, your feet on the cold, bare tiles, shivering slightly and watching the rain pound on the freshly planted grass. October rolls in; time flies fast. You sit in the darkness with the television on, senseless show after senseless show, one after the other, while you wait for the baby to jerk awake and start crying. The anticipation of the morning. The sadness when your husband leaves for work. The happiness when you hear the key turn in the lock and he steps inside in the evening. The time in between. Dreams are made in the time in between.

Currently listening to:
Moriarty
Gee Whiz But This Is A Lonesome Town

2009 10 06 My Little Surrealist Comments (7)

Calm of the cast-light cloud

At the beginning of June, I was ordered by my doctor to stop working because my baby and cervix were too low. According to her, I’d overdone the whole metro-boulot-dodo routine and would need to take it easy from now on. Prescription: bed rest.

It is now mid-August and in the past 2 1/2 months I’ve hardly ventured out of the flat except for hospital visits, visiting a friend in Courbevoie and checking out prospective flats (which I did twice). I can’t help but gawk at the scenes of “real life” whenever I do go out. Suddenly, people walking their dogs, or ducking into patisseries to buy their baguettes, or clustered around in groups talking look like they belong to a movie set. It seems so exotic, exciting, intoxicating to see crowds of people going about their own business.

I have cabin fever.

And because I have that kind of luck, my third trimester echography shows that I have oligoamnios – not enough amniotic fluid. My doctor at the hospital privé where I am giving birth didn’t even bother to look at my echography results; she just asked me to take another one, and that was it. I am getting the feeling that hospitals here are synonymous to factories… the assembly line efficiency, the lack of compassion, the doctor-patient detachment is sort of doing my head in. But they tell me not to worry, so I try not to.

I haven’t done the touring-the-baby-store routine. Haven’t had a baby shower. Ordered a crib and table à langer online, browsing through a catalogue of limited supply available for delivery, when the fun of furniture shopping is actually entering a store and choosing the furniture yourself. I have to rely on Julien to buy baby bottles and bibs and bathtubs for me, and I feel cheated because I would have liked to pick things out myself. I have not yet packed my baby bag for the hospital because I don’t have the energy or enthusiasm to do so. I have not attended a single birth preparation class because I cannot leave the house.

I grow bigger and rub my stomach and talk to my baby and ask her if she’s doing all right, beg her to be all right, and apologise for being so weak, for not being able to prepare more for her arrival. If I only knew how to make myself stronger, I would do everything and anything and do it. But I don’t know how.

Currently listening to:
Enablers
Tundra

2009 08 13 My Little Surrealist Comments (16)

Conditionals

It is a curse; I have been programmed to be antsy, to not be content, with what I have. When I am here I want to be there and when I leave I want to head back. What must one do to be happy. Maybe angst does not, can not, exist once you hit your 30s. It starts being childish, angst, when you get older. Maybe. What do I know.

Pictures of a friend who looks genuinely happy with his life makes me pine for that as well. Pine for happiness, I mean, the same kind he has. I look back and see myself in University, nine, ten years ago, Slowdive blaring from my earphones while lying back on the grass, watching students run around the Sunken Garden. That was happiness. Music, and grass. All kinds of grass. Now there are bigger things I have to deal with, and I do not know how to handle them. “Lucky guy,” I think, going through pictures of a friend. I see in his eyes how happy he is. He never used to smile that way. And now he does.

I wish to close the loops I have started to make, and I must strive to have the same smile on my face. It is difficult to stare at the ceiling all day, to wince in pain and to have so much time on my hands. Nine, ten years ago, I could chase away the angst with drugs, music and friends. Now things are different.

I wish to close the loops I have started to make.

Currently listening to:
The Besnard Lakes
The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse

2009 06 12 Comments (5)

Climb

When your dreams get synchronised with the dreams of your partner, it means you aren’t the only one going mad.

“I just woke up,” I wearily told Julien over the phone. “I kept waking up and going back to sleep. First I was climbing stairs in what looked like my old school, and it was really steep so I had to drag myself up, holding on to the rungs. Then… somehow I fell asleep again and then I was at a friend’s flat, and she lived on the fourth floor, and I had to climb the stairs — only, I had to climb over doors and step on the doorknobs to get to the next flight of stairs…”

He told me that he too has been having the same kind of dream lately. “It’s me climbing a hill. Covered in grass. But it’s so steep that I could fall backwards if I didn’t hold on properly.”

Qatar is officially sucking the life out of us. We have become zombies. I sit here all day, sometimes talking to myself to hear voices around me, never mind that it’s my own. Sometimes I wake up and find myself momentarily lost, confusing the greyness of the sky caused by sandstorm for a grey winter morning in France. I miss being with my husband. He works six days a week, leaves the house at 5:30am, comes home at 8:30pm the earliest, with a total of 2 hours of driving a day. And in between the hours of dusk and dawn, we dream the same dream – climbing stairs filled with obstacles; trying our best to hold on.

Currently listening to:
Black Mountain
In the Future

2008 08 12 Life in Qatar Comments (10)

The Problem With Me

The problem with me is that when I am sad, I expect people around me to be sad as well. Have you ever heard of anything more selfish, more egoistic, than that? I have the ability to shut down and shut others out. I also am quite skilled at not being able to amuse myself. I fear that as I get older, I wait for things to happen instead of making them happen. Which is not good at all.

When I put on a show, it’s like draping black curtains over the windows and mirrors of a house. How hard is it to remember that I am 29 and not 16 anymore? I expect others to read my mind, to solve my problems, to comfort me, without me saying a word to them. It ends up in chaos, in confusion. It ends in silence: suffocating black curtains blocking out the sun, blocking out my reflection, so that I cannot look into my own eyes and realise that a hole too deep has been dug; that what I started, from something nonsensical, has blown out of proportion and now has powers of its own.

I envy others; I feel superiour to others; I do not know what I want. The problem with me is that I have never really learned how to talk about things that seem important to me, just because I am afraid that other people will find it unimportant.

Currently listening to:
The Album Leaf
Into the Blue Again

2008 07 24 N'importe quoi Comments (7)

Paris

I haven’t forgotten how beautiful this city is, but being here is different from remembering what it’s like. Like yesterday, when I was in the Metro, I found myself reverting to the old habits, like automatically boarding the second carriage, and taking the foldable seat next to the door. I realised how nice it was to people watch, wondering what people were thinking, making up stories of where this person was going and what kind of book he/she liked to read. Or like yesterday, at the bus stop, some people were smoking and stamping their feet to shrug off the cold, and the smell of the cold and the smoke reminded me of those winters when Julien and I would walk to the nearest tabac in the snow to buy cigs.

It started to rain as I walked to the metro station from Julien’s grandmother’s flat. I passed that little store that sells second-hand Japanese goods, then turned the corner and passed the Korean store, and looked over the building tops to see the Eiffel Tower against a backdrop of gray clouds.

I walked all the way to Rue du Commerce and had lunch at a Chinese traiteur. I sort of missed the taste of the Frenchified Chinese food, which is what I used to eat all the time when I was living in Paris and couldn’t be bothered to cook.

And then I went to a local Monoprix, where I made a tour of the aisles and found myself remembering our usual grocery list… the grilled chicken that come in those paper packs, the jambon cru, the saucisson, the crab sticks.

Browsing the alcohol section, I marveled at how different countries and cultures can be, and how we slowly adapt to wherever it is we find ourselves in, no matter how hard we try to resist. I guess that when you move around quite a bit like we do, you don’t really lose a home, but end up adding a new one to the list.

2008 03 06 Life in France
Travel
Uncategorized Comments (2)

Acute angles divide my path that I had lost

Damn, that’s what I get for editing the code!

Originally I had written a long post with pictures and descriptions, but here’s the short version, as I seem to have mucked the post up:

Things that happened in 2007:

Lived in Paris
Watched Explosions in the Sky and Clap your Hands Say Yeah
Moved to Qatar
Returned to France for holidays
Moved flats
Received the French nationality
Got my drivers license (and a car)
Went to Japan
Went to Manila to hang out with the brothers

There! Others have probably read the longer version. Maybe it’s for the best… because I was kind of worried that it would sound that I was bragging about how “wonderful” my year was, and then 2008 would come and bite me in the ass by making nothing happen at all. I had visions of people rolling their eyes while reading the previous post, saying “How utterly lame.”

Oh, never edit posts by code, even though Wordpress is taking a long time to load. I’m going off to a corner to sulk now.

Currently listening to:
Pinback
Autumn of the Seraphs

2008 01 22 Stuff that happens to me Comments (11)

Jigsaw Falling Into Place

It never really bothered me before, and I’ve certainly never thought much about it, but only now have I come to realise that I’m losing my words.

Speaking was much easier in France. Sure, I had made a brief stop at the Land of Self-Pity and Frustration (this was a few months after arriving in France – when the high of settling in/playing tourist finally lost its luster and I kept finding myself at the counter of a boulangerie, helplessly trying to explain to a surly employee that I wanted my tarte au poireaux heated up), but afterwards it got easier. The rule is: you live in France, you learn French, you speak it. All the time.

Afterwards, I could make the switch quite effortlessly, mainly because I knew what language was fit for certain occasions. If it was with the inlaws or during family reunions, French. Friends and nights out, French. Filipino friends, Filipino and English. At a party with someone who didn’t speak French, English (I’d hang out with the only English-speaking person, because I knew what a terrible feeling it was to not be able to follow a conversation, and oh god was it nice to speak English again for a change). And so on and so forth.

Here in Qatar, though, it’s difficult to keep track of which language to use. Every afternoon, the poolside of our apartment building resembles the United Nations: people of different nationalities, multilingual children dive-bombing into the deep end of the water, shrieking in different languages. The majority speak French, but English, Mandarin, Spanish or even Tagalog aren’t too far behind. Being in a group of people who speak either one language or the other, I find myself, from time to time, translating for someone to help keep them in the conversation loop. If I start speaking in pure French, or English, or Tagalog, I don’t have a problem; it’s during multilingual group conversations that my speech goes haywire.

One of the terrible habits I’ve acquired is starting a sentence in one language and finishing it with another. Halfway through my sentence, I tend to forget an English word, replace it with the French one, and finish in French. “You have to tell me which days you’re available, or else we should… should… annuler le ticket …” Then I would cringe, wave my hand at Julien’s raised eyebrows, say, “Oh, you know what I mean!” and scurry off, trying desperately to remember the term for annuler in English.

Other times I find myself unconsciously muttering expressions in the wrong language during conversations. I’d say things like “Ben dis donc”, “Ce n’est pas grave…”, “Oui, mais bon…” with English-speaking or Filipino friends; “Seriously?” and “Damn, that blows” with French speakers. It drives me mad to feel like such a scatterbrain. I’ve secretly sniggered at people who spoke Taglish, and here I am doing the same thing, only worse — I’ve added another language.

***

During last night’s party, attended by French, Italian, and English speakers, I swore to myself that I would try to speak correctly. A few hours into the party, one of the guests turned to me and asked, “Ah, so you are of Asian origin but were born in France?

“No, I’m from the Philippines,” I corrected him.

“Ah. I just thought, since you speak French… well, it’s just surprising to see you speak French. I hope you don’t take it badly, the mistake I made. Because it’s a good thing, this globalization. God knows we all support it.”

I looked around at the people over the rim of my wine glass and realised how beautiful it is to be able to speak another language, and I got a very rare surge of pride for myself (let me underline the phrase very rare, because I hardly ever allow myself a pat on the back), thinking of the time when the guardian of our residence made me cry by cruelly mocking my then-terrible French, or when sales ladies would roll their eyes at me while I stuttered brokenly for a refund, or when a TGV ticket controller impatiently cut me off in midsentence while I tried to tell him that I didn’t understand what he was saying.

***

Anyway, I think I should hang out by the pool more often and try to get my languages straight, and try to get words to stop failing me. Practise makes perfect.

Currently listening to:
In Rainbows
Radiohead

2007 10 26 Life in France
Life in Qatar Comments (17)

The end of Ramadan

A friend and I walk along the Corniche to hear the canon go off (that signals that fasting for the day is over). There is a family sitting along the pavement, surrounding a picnic basket, waiting for the signal to start eating. After we hear the canon (a booming sound that startles us out of our seats), we continue to sit on the bench, talking about the differences between our countries, swapping school horror stories, and watching the West Bay building lights go on one by one across the water. As we walk back to the car I realise that I just survived my first Ramadan and, looking out across the sea, I wonder what other firsts are still in store for me.