splash

When you’re alone for a long time, and you’ve decided that you like it that way, your life achieves an equilibrium. All your energies are equally distributed amongst all the different sections of your life. You get the right amount of sleep. You excel at work. You’re productive on your days off. You have time for your friends, you have a healthy social life, and you only drink once a week, sometimes once every 2 weeks. 

Your mind is sharp and focused. Emotionally, you achieve a sort of equanimity. You become attuned to that inner conversation you have with yourself, the one that gets a bit drowned out when you’re in a relationship and half your mind is occupied by someone else. 

You achieve solitude, which is different from loneliness. You become like the surface of a calm lake, still and serene, like a mirror reflecting the sky…

Then you fall in love again and it’s like someone hurling a huge boulder right smack into the centre of that lake. 

‘Nuff said. 

Well, it’s not everyday my favorite emcee tweets me back…

my week of gigging

This was a temporary return to my old Manila lifestyle of attending an average of 3 gigs a week. It felt good. I miss music.

I enjoy gigging in Sydney more. Nobody smokes indoors, and they bring in great international acts, like Miss Jean Grae here. 

She had an intimate little solo show at the Good God Small Club. So glad I was able to catch her before she took the big stage 4 days later the Metro Theatre, this time with one of my favorite emcees, Pharoahe Monch. 

I was ecstatic. He performed all my favorite songs off of the “Desire” album. Except for the sexy one, but I didn’t think he’d perform that. Wow, what a great performance. I just love Pharoahe Monch! The photo above and below was taken by the talented Tristan Edouard, who has taken lots of awesome photos of hip-hop acts who have reached Sydney’s shores.  

Thursday night was for catching Blood Orange aka Dev Hynes over at Good God. I had never heard of him until they advertised the gig, but once I checked out his myspace, he seemed like someone who would be really fun live. And I wasn’t wrong. I love the obvious Prince influence on his music. 

And he sure made the most of that cordless guitar, stepping right out into the dance floor. If he’s ever in your hood, I recommend you catch him. 

Next gigs in line are Whitest Boy Alive, Feist, and Erykah Badu! Woohoo!

Some favorite X-mas photos

1) Giddyap, giddyap, giddyap let’s go! Someone built a sleigh and put it on his front yard for display.

2) Another guy went really OTT and turned his front yard into a disco winter wonderland, complete with music, disco lights, and a snowblower. WOAH! The wonders of suburbia.

3) Baby Jesus went missing from the creche this year, so we had to improvise last-minute.

4) Can you spot the bad sheep?

5) Singing a Stevie Wonder song while my dad plays the piano. I don’t think I’ve ever had a photo taken with my dad like this.

6) My brother joins the show!

sidewalk drawin’

The challenge of keeping my niece entertained on a sizzling, suburban December afternoon.

I drew the tree, she decorated it.

putting up the lights!

My year in lists

Major projects completed:

1) A full-length indie film: Suppose the Night Tasted Like Sugar 

2) Album cover design for my dad’s second solo release, “Laro”

3) A play for Sydney Fringe Festival: “Aussies of the Magic Mic and Adobo Kind”

4) An entry for the Sydney Chalk Urban Art Festival

5) A 3-d soda pop bottle for the Castle Hill Orange Blossom Festival

6) An entry for Toni and Guy Yen Young Australian Artist Award.

Cities/countries visited:

1) Manila, Philippines

2) Barcelona, Spain

3) Sao Paulo, Brasil

4) Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

5) Iquitos, Peru

6) Lima, Peru

7) San Francisco, California, USA

8) New Jersey, USA

9) Philadelphia, USA

10) New York, USA

Regular Haunts:

1) Cafe Giulia’s

2) The Sandringham Hotel (for the life-drawing)

3) The cemetery (I’m weird)

4) Cafe Ella

New Skills Learned:

1) 3-D chalk art

2) First Aid

Major Hurdles:

1) Ze break up

2) heart ache, angst, and loneliness

3) Finding a new place to live

Major Growth Spurts:

1) Overcoming aforementioned major hurdles through love, patience, and forgiveness. 

2) Being promoted to supervisor at work

New Skills Learned:

1) First aid

Biggest Surprises:

1) Ze break-up

2) My round-the-world trip. 

3) Two of my best friends coming to visit from Manila. 

4) The most unexpected people being there for me during times of trouble and need. 

5) My beautiful new house!

Significant Losses:

1) Salvadore “Badong” Bernal, a Philippine National Artist in theatre design whom I was lucky to be a student of in uni. 

2) RJ Rosales, a beautiful soul, gone too soon. 

Inspiring People I Got To Connect With (lucky me):

1) Aracelli Limcaco Dans (Manila), Filipino painter

2) Cindy Kurleto (Lima, Peru), ex-MTV veejay, mother of one, and a woman of substance.

3) Rodrigo Luff (Sydney, Australia), damn good painter/ illustrator

4) Sara Meier (Manila) and Victoria Herrera (Sydney) aka “The Dolls”, two Pinay celebrities with something to say. 

5) Valerie Berry and Felino Doloso- two very talented, passionate Australian actors whom I’ve admired since I first saw them onstage. 

Albums I Overplayed:

1) The entire Erykah Badu catalogue

2) The Suburbs- Arcade Fire

3) Doolittle - The Pixies

4) Voodoo- D’Angelo

5) As I Am- Alicia Keys (my secret guilty pleasure)

6) Desire- Pharoahe Monch

7) The ArchAndroid- Janelle Monae

Concerts/ Gigs Watched:

1) The Kills

2) Exzibit

3) Goapele

Books Read:

1) The Beach- Alex Garland

2) The Elephant Vanishes- Haruki Murakami

3) Everything is Illuminated- Jonathan Safran Foer

4) The Unbearable Lightness of Being- Milan Kundera

5) Survivor- Chuck Palahniuk

Most worn fashion Items:

1) My Nike blazers

2) Skinny jeans

Personal Zeitgeist for 2011:

1) Free-thinking, inspired, dynamic, growing, positive, grounded. 

soledad

The thing I value most right now is my solitude. Having complete possession of my own thoughts, mind, and feelings. Lingering for as long as I like in that interior room where my person is at complete liberty to play, to think, to feel, to be. 

Solitude used to be loneliness, when I felt that being alone was just an interim period I had to go through before someone else came along. Being alone was waiting… waiting till someone came in and filled in all that empty space. 

But now, being alone is not the absence of another person. It is not a negative space. It is filled with me. It has become my own country, and I guard its borders. 

My country’s currency is time: valuable, and not to be wasted or thrown away on fruitless pursuits. I value my time. I know it won’t last forever. 

Being alone has become solitude, and it’s a thing of real value in this world, in this life. So precious. And when the time comes that I have to leave this country, I hope I’ll still know my way back. 

My bestfriend’s X-mas gift to me: Windex, Harpic, Pine O’ Clean, a bad-ass scourer glove, Chux, and a basket of wooden clothes pins and chocolate…. in short, absolutely everything I need! Only a true friend would think of this :-)

Dear Life,

Thank you for giving me what I need, and not necessarily what I want. Because too often, what I want turns out to be only what I thought I wanted. There’s always something better than what I want.

Love,

Me

gratitude entry

Going through another transition, and I feel the need to write down all the things I’m grateful for. Things like good friends, probably the most valuable asset in my life right now. I’m the sort of person who’s spent a great part of my life training myself not to need others. It comes with the zeitgeist of the times, I guess, living societies that stress the value of independence.

But life is so much richer when you’re interdependent with other people, when you can stand on your own feet but allow yourselves to need others because it makes them feel like they count.  It’s like saying, here, I’ve made some space for you in my heart, you can come and stay. I was going through a tough time this year when one of my friends told me, “Need me, please need me.” People who care about you want you to give them the chance to be there for you. Likewise.

What would I do without my friends? They’re gold.

I’m also thankful for a positive workplace. How is it that I work with such thoughtful, and amazing people? Their positivity is just amazing. Work is a healing place. I can’t stress how my workmates have played such a huge role in keeping me emotionally healthy and balanced this year. They help me to be a better person every day.

I’m thankful that I’ve really honed my drawing skills this year, and that it was product of my own self-imposed discipline. I feel sharper than I’ve ever been, and I feel as if I’ve finally begun to find my own voice. As an artist, I feel more confident and sure of my identity, and I’m now ready to take that leap and convey true honesty in my work.

I’m grateful I know how to sing. Because singing is always an honest voice, and it’s a beautiful thing to do.

I’m grateful for the influx of creative and like-minded people in my life this year. It’s been a year of chance meetings and forming connections with others on the same path, and when you live a creative lifestyle, you can never get enough of those. Like attracts like. I never want to stop meeting people I can learn from. I hope to flood my life with them.

I’m grateful for the all the unexpected travel I got. I’ve never traveled so much and so far, inwardly and outwardly.

I’m grateful for good skin.

Lastly, I’m grateful for my family. We’re pretty much all on different paths, but always they will be there for me.

my favorite song

“What is your favorite classic pop song?”, was what an almost total stranger asked me.

I gaped at him. That’s a pretty big question to ask someone within 30 minutes of knowing them. I mean, that’s personal shit, man. Who knows what sort of picture of me he’d piece together based on my answer? I’d be subjected to some amateur psychoanalysis for sure.

Plus, it’s the kind of question that jolts your brain, kickstarts it and gets it rolling like an unused machine. How dare he ask me such a confronting question?

“I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it”, I answered.

“Fair enough”, he said.

3 days later, while riding the train, I had the answer. It was sunset, and the world was bathed in a golden glow, and time was standing still as it always does on train rides. Then it began to play. Little electrical circuits ran from my iPod through dirty white headphone wires, and emerged on the other end transformed into the most beautiful song in the world. As it played, bliss descended on me like a fog that lingers only for a little while.

I love this song so much that I cannot possibly dissect it as a piece of music though I’ve tried many times. I cannot break it down as a collection of parts, a beat, a bass-line, a rift, because I get swept away in its infinite beauty every single time, and soon I am lost in that perfect blend of everything that it is.

It was my favorite song. It was such a moment of euphoria that I wanted to grab my phone and text him the answer to a question which he probably didn’t remember asking me.

But I didn’t. Maybe if he ever asks me again. Maybe.