Finally Legit. And Locked Out.

I finally got my new ID card for the UP. Bobot picked me up (25 minutes early! breaking my stereotype of the 5-10 minute fudge factor on pickup times) and took me to the Registrar's building, where I sat in front of a purple background and, chaching, there I was in all my glory. I sort of look like a frump in my picture, but since I am a frump--no harm, no foul, I suppose.

Because I had to leave early, it was up to Lizzie to get herself packed up and out the door on her own when the schoolbus arrived. There must be something in the air or water, because the bus--which usually arrives 10 to 15 minutes late--came early. In her rush to get out the door, Lizzie forgot about the key... Or so she texted me a few minutes ago. I don't know the details--whether she locked the key inside the apartment, or took it with her, or just ran out leaving everything unlocked.

Ah. The wonders of communication: I just got a text from Lizzie with the deets. She locked the key in the apartment. Well, that's what the guard is for, I suppose. To let me in when I get back after teaching my classes.

Speaking of the wonders of communication, I'm putting -- or trying to put -- a little film that Lizzie and I made into this post. I don't even recommend watching it. It's just my attempt to test the technology. (Meanwhile, Lizzie's been busily playing with her IMovie program, making all sorts of short films for our viewing pleasure. If this works, we might have to upload one of them...)

AND... It's taking a really long time to load up. Which doesn't make me all that happy. Impatient American: c'est moi.

The film loads up on the editor but then on the website itself I can't find it. (It's just a big white box. Can you see the big white box?) Also, the paragraph breaks in my text disappear.

So I tried loading the film onto Facebook. That took exactly 10 seconds, max. I'm beginning to suspect that Blogger bites the big one.

Intramuros

Couldn't get on the internet this morning when we tried--so this to our family and friends who hoped, perhaps, for one of those morning-here-evening-there phone conversations, sorry. We were thinking about you, though.

Yesterday, Beng took us out in a nice air-conditioned van to the walled city, Intramuros, where we toured the oldest standing church (during a wedding), San Agustin, and the Santiago fort that the Japanese took over in WWII, where they killed quite a few Filipino and American soldiers, and where, at the turn of the 20th century, they imprisoned and executed Jose Rizal, one of the country's heroes (an intellectual and novelist, too).

It was both lovely and spooky to tour the fort, walking in the brassed footsteps that mark out the path they marched Rizal along on the day of his death, looking through the closed windows at the cell where they kept him before sentencing him to death by firing squad. The gardens inside the fort are lush and tended; Beng says that there was a time, about 25 years ago, when it had all grown over with jungle, neglected. "I love these gardens," she said. "I'd love that house, if it were mine," she pointed to Rizal's white Spanish colonial memorial. "That's my ideal house."

The heat and humidity pressed down on us, making our clothes weigh more, our steps heavier. Across the river, a river choked with floating weeds, Manila bustled with life. A cluster of men on a far pier, stripped to their shorts, hooted and jostled with each other. I wondered whether they were thinking of jumping in. Behind us, in the locked dungeons, the ghosts of drowned military men, centuries of them, lay still, waiting for the evening's coolness.

We ended our journey at the bay, watching the sunset. A man with a bucket of fish attracted a cluster of men and boys, crouching by his catch, the usual curiosity lighting their faces. Families sauntered in the heat, looking out over the water. The high rises, the boats on the water: I was reminded of San Diego, summers spent with Grandma Tutu. I tried not to think about the two hungry faced boys who hid by the parking lot, behind the row of blinking, raucous bars, waiting for us to pass by, flush with our good fortune.

On Again, Off Again

I've been having trouble getting onto the internet for the past 24 hours. Now I'm in Butch's office, and for whatever reason am on. But it took some doing to get here--basically, I had to deal with multiple rejections.

The life of a writer, ese.

*

I wrote this yesterday and today, and saved it up to paste here. I better do it, now, before I lose this connection:

It's raining--off and on--hard. I turned on the TV as soon as I got up this morning, hoping to figure out whether schools had been canceled again. A ticker tape along the bottom of the screen said something incomprehensible, except for "preschool, elementary, ng high school," signal 1," and "suspendido." So I went downstairs with my laptop to see if I could find an English language news website, or get the guard on duty to translate the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen.
As I turned on my computer, 6:30 AM, it was the changing of the guards. The guard going off said, "No school today, ma'am," answering my question before I even got a chance to ask it (they're looking out for us here). And then I found an English language news site and it was confirmed.

It seems that we were anticipating a typhoon (ignorance is bliss), Typhoon Feria, and our signal 2 alert had been downgraded overnight to signal 1, as the storm blew itself out into a mere tropical depression over Mindoro. Schools, however, are still suspended because of the heavy rains (no doubt because they cause flooding and traffic jams).

Meanwhile, the department of education is asking schools to stop panicking over the H1N1 outbreaks--so far, only one Filipina has died from the virus--and to stop suspending classes. Seems that we need to reserve the suspensions for the weather.

And the apartment complex has passed out extra garbage cans to fill with water, just in case our supply is interrupted. Oh. Yeah. It can get worse. A lot worse.

*

I prefer the rain, honestly, to the unrelenting moist heat. On Tuesday, I taught my two classes in a sweaty haze. After my first class, my shirt was soaked, and when I got up from my chair I looked down to see a humiliating stripe of sweat, crack-sized, on the black plastic.

It's still wet, of course, and I'll probably arrive for my 1:00 PM class spotted about the shoulders and soaked around the ankles, but I might smell a little fresher than I did yesterday. I wonder how many of the students will be prevented from attending because of the weather?

*
Now neither Lizzie nor I can get onto the internet down here in the breezeway of the Balay Kalinaw. Very upsetting.

It means that instead of finding my character inventory sheet on my SNC archives via the internet, and a copy of Tobias Wolff's "A Bullet to the Brain," to prepare for Butch's grad fiction workshop tomorrow, I'll have to trudge back up the 63 stairs (4 stories broken into two of flights of 9 steps each) and think about making dinner. Sheesh.

I wonder if the rain's managed to eat through some crucial server connection.

*
Day 2 of the internet disconnection.

The sun's shining, and the housekeepers busily wipe down the tables and chairs here in the breezeway. I've washed and hung a load of light clothing on the line. The barking dog whines his or her usual complaints behind the apartment complex and roosters share their full throated appreciation for the clear skies.

After the bus comes for Lizzie, at 9:30 today instead of 11:00, maybe I'll wander with my camera past the front gate, down Dogohoy, record a little portion of the world that I've been avoiding. Or maybe, if I'm feeling very brave, I'll see if I can walk down to Katipunan Avenue, where the jeepneys and cars and buses rush past in a mad dash.

I guess I'll have to reconstruct that character inventory from memory. Jeepers--real work.
The world goes on, but for Lizzie and me it's just a little smaller, since we can't connect--at least right now--with you.

*

Back into the present tense:

I tried to walk down Dagohoy, I swear I did. I managed to make it one block. And then I ran into a tight warren of streets, branching off from where I stood, or more like narrow lanes, about two tricycles or three motorcycles wide. Handbuilt shacks of all sizes crowded either side of each lane like broken teeth. People lounged in chairs, smoking, between crazy lines of drying laundry. The force field bulged out at me in wavy lines of invisible, electric heat.

I'm sorry, but I couldn't go a step further. All of my early adolescence, those years spent in Mexico behind iron gates and broken glass and barbed wire, welled up in me and before I knew it I found myself scurrying back to the Kalinaw with my metaphorical tail wrapped up between my legs.

There was no way I could force myself to get to Katipunan (though, to tell the truth, I am less afraid of traffic than of free range human beings). I'll have to leave that for another day.

I wish I could be like Sydney Bristow in Alias, and swagger on through with spy-like aplomb, all wig and leather adventure. Or like Buffy, who wears her flippant Hollywood ignorance like the latest teen fashion. Instead, I'm Adrian Monk's dumber little sister, counting the light poles, wiping my hands on moist towelettes and flapping them dry in the safety of the car.

*

And here's a moment of intense irony with which to end this rambling entry. I bought an old Mona Simpson novel at one of the used bookstores around here: Anywhere but Here. I started it after finishing Joaquin's The Woman with Two Navels. After half a chapter, I realized that the Bay City Simpson's main character comes from is actually Green Bay--all the names have only been slightly changed (De Pere is De Peer, Algoma is Malgoma, Pulaski is Pulanco, but Ashwaubenon remains Ashwaubenon and Lime Kiln Road is still Lime Kiln Road). So most of the novel's action takes place within walking distance of our house on Reed Street.

I travel half the world to read a novel about my backyard. Typical.

School?

Instead of having school get cancelled for snow, we get school cancelled because of rain. 

Yes this is the second day in a row that school has been cancelled because of rain. Plus, on Friday, we have a half day. Which is odd. So tomorrow if I have school at all it's going to be from like 10:30 to like 3:30. I really don't know. I've missed art. And gym. But I don't mind missing gym. We just stretch most of the time anyway. So I'm not that sad about missing gym. I wonder if I have to make up the missed days at the end of the year like we did in Wisconsin. But I'm making friends at school. They're really friendly at my school. What if school gets cancelled tomorrow? I will die. My mom can't get on the internet in her office so I'd be dead by the time by mom comes back. I would die not being able to read my manga online! Do you know how badly that kills me? You people have no idea how badly that kills me. But I did find this one manga website with english translations so I just reread the series New Moon Wo Sagashite. Yeah. I just finished the series before I came and talked to you people. I'm sorry I haven't blogged a lot. I don't have a lot of stuff to talk about. Its just the same old stuff almost everyday. 

Adios!

Lizzie >.<

The Other End of the Street

There's a lot of life at the other end of our street, Dagohoy Street. I know because every morning a stream of people wanders past the front doors of the Balay Kalinaw. So what's wrong with me? Why haven't I gone past the Kalinaw gates yet?

It's as if there's an electrified fence past the gates here. Or a portal to an odd, alternate dimension, one that might crush me. Maybe I worry that I'll walk past these gates and cease to exist. That I'll be swallowed up by the life that scurries past me. Perhaps I'm afraid of what I see over the balcony, from the 5th floor, and outside of our bedroom windows--a hidden warren of shacks behind the "legitimate" houses that front the street. Or perhaps I read something into the glances of the people who pass me, something more than casual curiosity (Look, there's one of those big butt Americans, standing on the porch, looking entitled...), something closer to scorn, a caustic dismissal. Perhaps I'm afraid I'll be further erased by it, past the gates where I, marginally, "belong" here.

*

Lizzie didn't have school today. We didn't find this out until we'd waited for her bus, waited and waited, 20 minutes past the pick up time. I texted the driver: is d bus on d way 4 Lizzie? I got an answer within 2 minutes: No classes 2day we r under signal 2. When we're under signal 2, all preschool, elementary and high school classes are suspended. We have to listen to the radio or watch local TV in order to figure this out (their equivalent of a snow day). Apparently, we're anticipating a typhoon (and after yesterday's pyrotechnics, massive thunder that shook my classroom like marbles in a fist and raised all the hair on my body, lightening bolts that sizzled in the air, I'm not surprised...and I'm not looking forward to having my typhoon cherry popped either). A typhoon didn't arrive, of course, but there was a hard rain this afternoon.

I went to campus before the rain started to hold my office hours. I was tempted to blow them off, of course, and stay home with Lizzie, but good old guilt made me go. No one visited me, of course, but I was able to read a few short stories by N. V. M. Gonzalez in Butch's office. As soon as 3:00 PM rolled around, my cue to leave, it began to pour.

I walked home in the rain, twirling my umbrella (not really, but that sounds good for narrative effect), and then stomped up the interminable flights of stairs to the apartment, which I'd locked--for good measure--behind me.

I'd left Lizzie in the airconditioned bedroom with the headphones, noise cancelling, on, watching something on her laptop. I tried the knob and remembered my brilliant stroke of security, punching in the lock as I left. I knocked. I knocked louder. I put my lips to the door crack and half-yelled, Lizzie! Let me in! I called Lizzie's cell phone. I came downstairs and asked the guard, Boy, to call up to the apartment--maybe the real phone would jangle through the closed bedroom door, the airconditioning, the headphones. No go. I had to wait for Marie, the housekeeper, to trudge up the stairs again with me and open the door.

Turns out that Lizzie's cell phone was, for school, on silent. Not that it would have cut through all the barriers.

*

Lizzie's been reading a lot of manga online. She burns through the juice in her computer battery in, what, two hours? She's got another battery but that one, too, is dead. "What's the point of having two batteries," she wonders, "if you can't charge one while you're using the other?"

Why can't I seem to get myself to wander farther than this gate post? Why does the thought of getting into a taxi (after a student wrote a fiction writing exercise about a callow young man who takes a taxi and gets shot for his trouble) make me break out into a sweat? Why does the task of getting to Lizzie's school to pay the rest of her tuition seem like an insurmountable obstacle?

These are the questions that obsess us.

Noir

I know you're probably dying for an entry by Lizzie. I'm partially following Nana Peterson's emailed advice not to pressure Lizzie into posting, nor to require it. Once it becomes a chore, I suppose the reasoning goes, there will be no incentive to do it.

Honestly, Lizzie's found manga online, so when we come down here to upload or write our posts, she loses herself in that strangely stylized world. That's after she checks her gmail for messages from Meghan and Jaimee, and hunches over her responses to them, smiling enigmatically to herself and flicking me semi-angry glances to the side. "You know it's illegal to read other peoples' emails," she says.

If you're needing a Lizzie fix and there's nothing forthcoming here, I suggest you check out her new Facebook page, under Lizzie Peterson. Since we created it together, she's been taking a plethora of those silly quizzes, including the one that asks you what sort of stereotype you inhabit (I'm the art freak; she turns out to be the loner. "What's up with that?" she fretted. Or maybe it was me fretting. I don't want my daughter to inhabit an evil stereotype before she even reaches high school...) If you're on the up and up, I'll let her friend you. (Perhaps it's naive of me, but I can't imagine anyone that we haven't vetted, at least by proxy, reading this blog right now.)

*

I asked my Fiction Writing students for advice: what Filipino writers, writing in English, would they recommend for me?

I jotted down their suggestions in my notebook, Cha looking over my shoulder through a beautiful scrim of dark hair to correct my spelling: Christina Pantoja Hidalgo, I wrote, June Cruz Reyes, Eddie Angbarros, Alfred Yuson, Cesar Luis Aquino, Nick Joaquin, Christopher Pike, Jessica Zafra (starred, because mentioned more than once), V. H. M. Gonzalez, Joel Stein, R. J. Ledesma, Diqueros of the Inquirer column. And of course Jose Dalisay, aka Butch.

In Butch's office, I found an old, browning copy of Nick Juaquin's The Woman With Two Navels, and I've been stretched out on the couch here, under the fan, for a few hours now, lost in the semi-surreal world of these post-war Filipinos as they move back and forth in their minds and bodies between the dreamy world of Manila's denial and the prosaic world of Hong Kong's exiles. The novel's style reminds me of the noir flourishes of Raymond Chandler and his Big Sleep, the dark, dripping streets and the twisted, feline femme fatales that haunt the protagonist's waking, midnight hours.

It's been a hot day, in the upper 80s with matching humidity--an "underground weather" website says the heat index is 102--and as I languish on my couch with my feet up on pillows and the fan breathing on me its small mouthfuls of warm breeze I'm touring a Manila that hasn't existed since the 50s, wondering about all the nooks and crannies of the current city that I'll probably never see. Because I'm a frightened American woman. Because I don't have a car or a tour guide. Because, like the Manilan citizens Juaquin describes, I too want to forget or deny the filth in the gutters, the rotting rats and black dust, the little girl squatting to relieve herself on the busy corner, the higgeldy piggeldy tin roofs, held down by old black tires, crammed into the nooks behind this apartment--to forget about my complicity, either through undigested nationality or economic privilege or middle class guilt or plain willful ignorance, in the inequality, in the Hollywood snap-snap glamor dream over the country's contested ground, its body.

*

The sad truth is that I can hold these sharp self recriminations in my mind along with a nagging sense that my current hair style is square and dowdy, that the dress I'm wearing doesn't flatter my figure. How shallow am I really? Sometimes I wonder why it is that I find it so hard to actually inhabit my life. Instead, I feel I'm playing, badly, a part in a boring drawing room play of manners, the kind of play that Henry James might write, miffed that his audience pelts him with rotten tomatoes at the finish.

*

Meanwhile, two lone ants dance a kind of Arabesque into and out of the patches of sunlight between shadows cast by the dining table and chairs. Human angst, the petty strivings of human against human, human dreams--none of these enters their insect realm.

Marinating

It's been hot and humid for the last 2 or 3 days. I didn't think I'd miss the torrential rains, but at least they cool things off, introduce a new kind of air, trap all the Jeepney smoke and rinse it out of the sky. I put on my only pair of jeans this morning, and a long sleeved shirt, so that when Lizzie and I went downstairs for our Skype date with Dave, Brad, Diane and Melanie, there would be a lot less skin for the mosquitos to sniff out.

That was at 8:30 in the morning. Now it's nearly 5 PM and I feel as if I'm marinating in these clothes, my skin sticking to them in a moist, human way that's deeply uncomfortable and, at the same time, natural.

After our Skype call, I dragged Lizzie with me around the corner to a Protestant church, Church of the Risen Lord, for 10 AM English service. All of my Lutheran childhood came flooding back to me--the somber organ hymns, the Doxology, the reverence for the spirit of church, for the fact of the liturgy, the slightly stiff smiles we gave each other during the passing of the peace, our backs upright, our eyes and lips smiling in the centers of our separate faces. Lizzie slouched down on the hard pew and dug her head into my shoulder. The parishners fanned themselves with their programs, their bamboo fans. A church lizard crawled around the high, arched ceiling. The architrave? Is that what that part of the church is called? A few sparrows flitted in and out of the church's stark bones up there. "The animals are really into church," Lizzie muttered.

After the service, Lizzie and I slipped out into the hot day and walked over to the Chocolate Kiss for what's becoming a habitual Sunday lunch treat. Lizzie convinced me to get the pesto pasta so that she could try it, and got her usual Chix in a Basket. We shared a piece of Devil's food cake. Pretty good, but I'm still a stone fan of the classic chocolate cake--chocolate on chocolate. How can you go wrong with that? Marshmallow icing is all well and good, but chocolate butter cream ... [she shivers with delight]

I'm getting all the gestures down--how to get a table in the restaurant. How to order. How to signal for the check by making a little box in the air with my fingers. How much to tip.

We came home and watched Happy Gilmore in the airconditioned splendor of the bedroom, lying under the stream of cold air. Before we flew out here, we made a pact: when we felt that we were getting a little overwhelmed with our new experiences, we'd say "it's a Happy Gilmore moment," and we'd watch the movie together to take a time out, to reset. On the way over to the Chocolate Kiss, Lizzie wondered if we should watch the movie.

"What, are you feeling Happy Gilmoreish?" I said.

She shrugged. "Maybe a little."

I don't think she or I really understood just how much space, apart from each other, we'd carved out for ourselves in Green Bay. Even in our smallish two story house, there's enough space for 3 people to have separate domains, and interests.

Now I'm in the livingroom under the fan, a wretched show (Make Me a Supermodel) burbling in the background on ETC, an on-air channel here that skims the most tawdry top layer off American culture and shows it, again and again, in waves of repeats. Lizzie's retired to the bedroom and is rewatching Juno--she did ask for permission first, bless her heart.