Bouts of obsession

This is what came out when I doodled without thinking, without focus, and with total abandon. For hours I doodled, and when I was finished and truly saw what I have made for the first time, I was nonplussed. It scared me quite a bit, this chaos, this utter lack of organization.

Calligraphy pen on watercolor paper



Something for Ice's cubicle

Watercolor

A character sketch

He is lacking in savoir faire, and utterly. He feigns a blase disposition but his conversation betrays his unsophistication and eagerness to please. He likes to engage in discourse filled with platitudes and sophistries, a charlatan pretending to be a savant. His political commentaries, which he gives around gratis, are often fatuous and his critiques of literature, expressed in a manner theatrical and with much gesticulation, are almost always lacking in depth. His laughs are intentionally strident, as he finds that that is the only way he could draw attention to himself.

**

On my marshmallows

I emptied a huge pack of fluffy white marshmallows into a jam jar, to be consumed abstemiously. I take two or three at a time, never more, because they are just so pretty in the mason jar with its floral engraving and white and red checkered tin lid and I want to prolong the prettiness as much as I can. Aesthetics win over the urges of the tummy.

On the "odor genie"

The odor genie absorbs the fetid air coming from the dingy dog that set up camp outside our house (poor thing has yet to receive its first bath from its master). Whenever the genie absorbs the squalid smell that intermittently wafts through the window screen and into the room, it effuses a raspberry scent that at first smells sweetly like candy but which the brain soon learns to classify as acrid because of the fetidness we know it heralds as it masks.

Bottle Rocket

"One morning, over at Elizabeth's beach house, she asked me if I'd rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realized that not only did I not want to answer THAT question, but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again for the rest of my life."-- Bottle Rocket, 1996

Watercolor

Jar

Watercolor

A girl is a girl is a girl.

"Elegance is refusal."
--Coco Chanel

Today, I am to face a most daunting challenge, the ultimate test of self-restraint. First, I will watch Coco et Igor and Tom Ford's A Single Man, and then I will go shopping with friends later in the afternoon and not buy a single item of clothing. I promised myself I will scrimp and save for a proper sketch pad and my tuition fee.

Let us see. :)

Speaking of poverty, here are some of the things I would like to buy but can't:
1. A tailored blazer that will make Coco proud
2. A couple of framed New Yorker covers
3. Still Larousse Gastronomique (Just for show, I admit.)
4. A French-looking coffee table (preferably whitewashed)
5. Champagne flutes
6. A framed movie poster of Hors de Prix
7. A set of calligraphy pens (I would like to try drawing with them.)
8. A fancy shelf for Ice's toys

The list could go on and on. And on. And on.

In solitude

Random musings from this afternoon:

When I muse, I turn my head sideways up, almost always to the left, as if the answers in the world rest there. I purse my lips, lest a thought comes out unpolished and before it is organized into coherence. Sometimes, I take a while, and when I stop, I forget about what I was thinking.
*

Kenny’s/Seattle’s at Katipunan is a place you go to in order to be lost. You go there to be somewhere else. The beauty of the place is its sense of detachment. It does not pretend to be your home; it lets you alone. In its vastness—two spacious floors peppered with around a hundred tables- you find priceless solitude. Order your food, grab a seat, and, in a moment, you are in your very own microcosm. The place becomes oblivious to you, and you to it. The place doesn’t mind that the colorful paintings lining its walls and its floor-to-ceiling sculptures are ignored—it knows its purpose is to be unobtrusive. The waiters leave you alone because they know that you desire to be invisible. A man in the corner nook happily taps away on his laptop, grinning wildly once in a while and laughing to himself like no one is looking. At another table, a group of teenage girls talk loudly of their secrets and of high school gossip; no one hears. You scribble away in your journal vigorously as you did when you were younger and had the bedroom all to yourself. For a while- an hour, perhaps- you feel truly alone, and you bask in this thought. All it takes is a sweeping glance across the vastness of the room and its hustle and bustle, and you are back. The trick is to not look outwards.
*

At the next table, a man with a nice, baritone voice talks about Facebook in the manner of an expert. It takes you a while to know that he isn’t. Nearby, his infant daughter sits proudly on her yaya’s lap and looks on, hanging onto his every fraudulent word. You wonder how long it will take her to find out.