Lists

Lists, listahan, lijsten...whatever I do, I seem to keep on making them and I seem to keep on falling behind on my resolutions to keep up with my lists of things to do, things to see, things to write, people to visit, places to go and things to buy.
My email box is a list filled with more than 1200 unread mails, that I resolve to plow my way through. I tell myself that there are gems of such interest in the mails that flow in from the listserve at OWW that I should really take the time to read them thoughtfully and formulate my own thoughts and opinions on subjects that my fellow workshoppers are talking about. I still haven't been able to give those mails more than a cursory glance. Life just happens, and time seems to keep on rolling so fast it's pretty hard to catch up. I find myself gasping like a beached whale, waiting for my breath to catch up on me so that I can move on to the next exercise of living my life with a smooth expression on my face.

I am making yet another list to myself. Aside from the list that permanently says, work on your novel today, I've now expanded to include doing some major rewrites on stories that I've written in draft and still haven't gotten around to rewriting. Why is it that there seems to be a clock ticking away in the back of my head? It goes tick, tick, tick. Seconds and minutes fly by and I find myself wondering why I ever imagined that I could write a novel. But I'm just that stubborn, I suppose I'll stick to it even if it isn't as good as I imagined it would be. Characters never behave the way you want them to behave. Nothing is predictable about a novel. I admire people who have the strength of will to complete their novels, down to the part where they say the end.

Eileen Tabios has another collection of poetry out. POST BLING BLING is a collection of poetry, found under e-books, that you can download for free from moriapoetry.com. I've downloaded the book and am looking forward to making time to peruse it in quiet. Let those words resonate inside my brain, so that I can see what lies beyond the obvious. When I was a child trying to write poems, I remember this violinist friend of my mother saying to me that poets and writers are people who see beyond what is. That you see beyond the leaf to what lies beyond. I'd like to see more than the leaf, to be transformed somehow by the magic of words. Because words are magic and words are power. I swallowed that truth, took it as my own, and have led the life of a scribbler ever since.

E-bay is buying Skype. Has the deal gone through I wonder. 45% of Skype users are located in Europe, that should expand e-bay's market.

Why is it that when I order a book from Amazon that costs 2,99 cents, I end up paying 12,00 for the entire thing? A couple of months ago, I ordered two books at 2,99 each and found out that I was being billed 22,00 euros for the entire package. Why oh why do I have to live in a country where english books are so hard to come by?

I still have a list of people to visit. Why is it so much harder to visit people when you're in another country? In the Philippines, I saw my friends every week...sometimes almost every day. Here, I have to make an effort to break out of my tendency towards monkishness. The other week, my husband complained about us turning into hermits. I woke up at 8 on a Saturday morning, sat down at the computer, started writing and forgot to open the drapes. When he came down at 10.30 the house was wrapped in shadow.

"We're turning into hermits," he said.

"Huh?"

I kept on typing. I registered that comment, but I was in the middle of a scene that I would end up scrapping entirely anyway. So, why do I do this? Why do I spend hours and hours typing words only to scrap them the next day?

Joel Jan is color blind. I was afraid of that.

"He almost had a perfect score when he took the CITO test." His Kindergarten teacher told us last year. "He kept mixing up green and brown, which is not a crime because those were his only mistakes and it could mean that he either has a problem with colors or he is color blind."

All during the summer vacation, we practiced. Count the green trucks, count the red ones, count the brown ones.

"He still can't tell the difference," says his teacher. "Shall I ask the school physician to give him a test?"

So, it's official. He is a bit color blind. Did you know that it is something that happens mostly to boys? There are more color blind boys than there are color blind girls in the world.

Did you know that the gene is passed on from the mother to the son? So, I see colors normally, but I carried a color blind gene that I passed on to my son. Because according to what I've read, it's a gene my father may have which was passed on to me, and which I in turn passed on to a son. It means that if my son gets married and has a daughter, she probably won't be colorblind, but if she has a son, he will probably be color blind. Is that such a disaster?

Maybe it's not, but I did a google search and found a site called vischeck.com which allows normal color seeing people to see how color blind people see the world.

I still have to digest this information properly, and in some way, my head is a bit askew with all the thoughts that keep on running through it. Like the knowledge that he'll probably have to decide whether it's better for him to drive a car or to just stick to public transport. Can he still be a train engineer?

Why does it hurt somewhere inside, even though I know that he won't notice the difference between the colors that he sees and the colors that I see?

Ate Conching and Kuya Gary are in the Philippines. They survived Katrina.

I lost five kilos since I started my diet two weeks ago.

This is just another list.