Hazelnut lattes on Thursdays

I don't know her personally, which makes me confused about this sadness I feel.

Sometimes I really feel like that favorite crisp white oxford shirt in the wash.  It's a trip to the laundromat every week, with a generous helping of soap suds and wrung really dry.

Cycles I understand well.

There are days when it's absolutely hard to bear--all that hard work and then a stain, which takes forever to clean off again.  And then there's the rain, and all sorts of complications under the hot iron.

Still there comes another day: another day to serve the purpose well. 

One day and another and another. 

So I lost my driver's license. 

I only discovered that it was so on Friday night, when I was transferring stuff to a handier wallet for a trip.  Upon discovery, I mentally retraced my steps and determined that I had last taken it out when I made a credit card purchase. 

I immediately went back to the shop and asked around.  Even if that immediately was actually nearly a week later.

To no avail.

In the end, I had no recourse but to execute an affidavit of loss and apply for a duplicate.

So I have a new driver's license. 

An old new one, to be exact, because I actually have a year and a half to go until I'm supposed to renew. 

It's a slightly different face, but the same old identity.

I think that's a pretty nice metaphoric way to kinda begin.  Again.

I'm circling back the old corners.

Figuratively, of course. 

One thing that I can say about myself:  I like places with a certain permanence.  Chalk it up perhaps to my navigational handicap, but I like knowing where things are. I love that I've lived in the same place for nearly 30 years, and that my neighborhood still remained pretty much the same:  there's still the post office, the drug store a few blocks down, the police and its adjacent fire station, the party favors stop in a secluded street corner, the grocer 10 minutes away.

I commute to work.  Even if it takes three rides, and about an hour and a half in travel (mostly meaning traffic) time each way. 

As of press time, I've had four employers but six workplaces.  Putting files in boxes and the interruption (thus extra hours) of work from moving did not bother me as much as having to find a new watering hole.

My first ever watering hole was a small shop behind my first office building.  It was obscured from public view by virtue of its location--a small side street, fronting a parking lot, and by both natural and man-made structures--buildings shielded it, trees gave it character.  

At first, it was just convenient and the coffee was cheap. 

Over time, I had started to love it, the way we start loving the familiar.  I always had a corner to sit on.  The servers and the cashier could tell what time I came in and what I would be having.  Always with a smile, they'd punch in the code for a cup of coffee. 

I filled notebooks in that place.  My fiction, now that I think about it, was probably born in that place.

Almost a month ago now, I finished writing a piece: my first in that particular genre and one of the rare times that I wrote in my native language.  I wrote almost the entire piece in one sitting, from early in the morning until I presented it that afternoon. 

It began, though, in that coffee shop long ago.  Characters started living in my head, key scenes and plot points started working. 

It took longer than expected, but five years later, they found paper.

After a few more moves and getting displaced (in the many ways that can mean) a lot more times than I cared to remember, I found myself  bouncing around from place to place to place.  

And eventually, after about two years since I last visited, I had lost that little coffee shop fronting the parking lot.

In the past year, since I started on this new work, I've had four fairly regular places (and a few that I visit once or twice a month): a small run-of-the-mill breakfast place (my first staple), a more upscale coffee shop that serves drinks in a demitasse, the local Krispy Kreme, a Paris-styled bistro.

One rainy morning last month, I spotted a place.  Again.  It was a few doors down from my first staple.  I had always intended to visit it but never got the chance until then.  I walked the length of the street and down the steps to the basement floor.

It's submerged from the street, with soft light, and a whole lot of tables and chairs, which makes for an unhurried, a-tad-anti-social cup of coffee.  In short, perfect for me.

I went to the counter for my cup: it was served in a familiar brown mug that I knew from a life past and a lost place that I mourned.  As I sat down on my chosen spot, with a collection of 90s boy band ballads blaring, I knew that the cashier seemed familiar.

I was struggling with my piece then.  I was trying to pull some threads together.  I was rather rusty from not writing fiction, honestly. 

After two days, when the shop was playing a selection of 80s duets, I got up the nerve to ask the cashier if he served at that old place.  I told him the street name.  And I told him that it's a shame it's become one of those budget lunch places sitting next to a convenience store.  

He seemed surprised that I remembered.  I told him I was a regular at the old place.  We never exchanged names, and faces fade over time, of course.  I don't expect him to remember me, but I sure remember him, dear as that old place was to me.

It's almost uncanny, thinking about it now, that I was actually already completing that piece then, the piece that I began at the old place.  It seemed apt that the journey finds its end in a somewhat parallel place. 

Two weekends ago, I listened to a very wise "shepherd" tell a very lost me that to get back on track, what I really need to find is what gives me life.      

For me, it's fiction. 

I really did get lost.  If my non-entries were any indication. 

After a while, since that weekend, I find myself thinking of those things that got sidetracked by other "more pressing" matters.  There's this one and that one and that other one.  I look at my blank pages and I'm again excited at the possibility of their unraveling narratives for me.

There was a time that I thought about burning all journals of the past.  Only my innate packrat kept me from doing so.

I'm still very embarrassed about what went on those pages.  But for the first time in a long time, I find something of worth about them.

If nothing else, they're chronicles of a long journey.  Even if they circle back to the same block.

Two statements preface this entry:

I find something symbolic about the first day of the month falling on a Monday.  It seems like a perfect new beginning somehow.

I love road metaphors.  There's something very precise and poetic about driving and journeys. 

I hope, in how I structure my thoughts into words following, it becomes apparent later, why I put those sentences together. 

Always, when I write, I labor over the beginning.   I don't start until I'm absolutely sure.  I have to find that mark that says "begin."  To me, it's the first line.  My first line.  Once it comes, everything else comes.

Over the year of mighty sporadic entries, I've wanted to give voice to too many things--random insights, some bright spots, the reasons I actually haven't written.  But it takes too much energy to find my first line and I've not enough patience to dethread my stories from one another. 

Thus it left a lot of things unsaid.  (Or perhaps, even unthought).

This past weekend, though, was a weekend of stories.  I weaved through the skeins of my tangled narratives.  Without a clear starting point, somehow, everything left unsaid found itself in words spoken and thought.  Sometimes even written. 

And in that sharing experience, I shed my first tears in a year. 

I think the tears were a long time coming.  As well as the stories. 

On Saturday night, I sat on a comfortable spot to begin a story--it was a letter, actually, but it was still a story.  On the stationery, chosen at random, it said, "Give me a spark.  I don't know where to begin."  

Perhaps the stationery choice wasn't random.

So, to sort of start at the beginning, I took a trip.

Yesterday afternoon was the time to come home. I caught a ride.  I never really knew anyone in the group before getting there, so I expected random ride assignments.  I imagined school-bus-like convergence of personalities with much to talk about on the way home. 

What really surprised me about my ride assignment was that I was alone with the driver of my ride. 

For me, that was a matter of trust.  And a little bit of a lesson in surrender.  I'm comfortable, even many times fascinated with commuting:  all those nameless souls in close but meaningless physical contact. 

Not that I didn't trust him, because I did--and I do; and not because I wanted to take the wheel, because I don't--I'm the perfect passenger (but that is a different road metaphor for another day).  It's just that the only prolonged period that I sit on the passenger side in silence and without squirming is if my dad, my brother, or any of my best friends was driving.  

It was drizzling the entire way to my drop-off point.  I can't know if it was only the discomfort of a long drive, and the silence of a virtual stranger, or any of those random reasons but I kept talking.     

I kept spilling stories.  My stories.  Those I shroud in fiction (because, to an extent, all stories are true, even those imagined), and those that were almost reportage. 

Being uncomfortable, I was actually comforted.  Ironic as it is. 

Perhaps the ride assignment wasn't random as well.
     
So, to again sort of start at the beginning, I went on a trip.

The month was closing when I went on the trip.  It was going to be the end of something, and therefore the beginning of another.  But, as the days had become cycles, I found nothing to be particularly excited about something beginning.

Now home from that trip, though, with that drive, I guess there's something to be said about finding my proverbial first line in the surprising.  All it takes is a little trust and surrender.  And a bit of a step out of the comfort zone.

And.  By the way, I'm "growing" another wisdom tooth.  My upper two have erupted--also during some particular crossroads of my life.  Dentists have given me pain about having them removed (I still haven't).

Now, the third of my third molars is pushing its way out my gums, throbbing in the background.

As with the timing of the earlier two, perhaps its coming out is not random, too.
 

I simply celebrate the convergence of good fortune today. 

These days, when words are hard to come by, I revel in the baby steps that I make in whatever direction.

Perhaps this is only my cycle of relearning.

Once, on internship, the publisher of the daily I was working in asked us, for the final evaluation, a short essay on what we've learned. 

"Or unlearned," he said.  I wrote that I've unlearned drafts. 

Until then, I had always begun everything in longhand, on the backs of last semester's photocopied notes or readings.  Getting thrust out into the "real world" (which John Mayer says is a lie we have to rise above), with a 2 p.m. daily deadline of story summaries, it was not possible.

My sophomore year, our professor opened our "real" journalism class with a lesson on writing leads.  Our black markers were crossed and uncrossed with red on the board.  A cycle of critique and editing and polishing for two weeks where prospective journalists' self-esteems--rock stars in many a high school paper plummeted to unknown depths.

I took the same professor in a junior elective class: a paper due every Tuesday, with a reading that accompanies it.  A sucker for masochism, I suppose, I took a similar class my senior year under an accomplished journalist of an international magazine.

While many of my classmates expressed a grade-conscious fear at every critique session, I really, honestly never felt anything other than normal.  (Except for that one time I honestly did not have a story: but that is another story).  My professor that senior year even caught me and a friend at mass and jokingly asked whether it was time to beg the Lord for favors--and my answer was no, it was just a thing I do, mass on my lunch breaks.  I wasn't that much of a journalist in high school, my previous experience notwithstanding.  

This was just another class, another period to get over.

Or maybe I was just that innocent.

The first thing I learned is that I don't know anything. 

So to learn, I suppose I have to unlearn. 

Just what to unlearn I don't know yet.

People are so fragile.  The threads that hold one and each other together can easily snap, cut, tripped up, fray, break.

I sometimes wonder how we do this.

The realization makes me so weak, all I want to do is sleep. 

Because I'm kind of homesick, too, even when I haven't left home.  Or maybe because I'm lost.


San Francisco.  I fell in love with the city the moment I glimpsed the Bay and the skyline.  I fell in love with it deeper when I saw the fog come down from the mountains.  It finally won my heart when, at the vista point of the Golden Gate Bridge, the wind hit me and brought with it a surge of inspiration and a burst of happiness that were sorely lacking just a few days before.  There is magic in the Victorian houses in the midst of a city that is eclectic and liberal, in the streets that walk uphill, in its bridges, in the beautiful contrast of chilly, slightly violent breezes and sunny days of clear skies. 


New York.  This is the world's ultimate city--the city Baz Luhrmann said to live in at least once in your life, but to leave "before you get too hard."  Movies, TV, pop culture have always covered New York City, and seeing it on celluloid has given me too much (or perhaps too little) expectation.  The day I arrived, I sat on the arrival of JFK for two hours, waiting for my friend's flight to come in.   I watched people come and go: couples of all permutations were sharing kisses and hugs.  Once I saw what was outside, really outside, I remember feeling a bit panicked, then depressed, then disappointed.  Or a mixture of everything.  And maybe it was all because I haven't had sleep for an overnight flight.  I kept my spirits up.  "This is New York," I told myself.  "You want to be here."  The popular adage has proved true, however, because after I got myself a few hours' sleep, I already felt electric.  For all the feelings about it that I can't quite articulate at the moment, I am thankful to have taken as many pictures as I can.  I let myself simmer with the emotions underneath the surface.   One day, to unleash it all, when I get back. 

Occupation: student seems the truest of all the ways I answered that blank in my entire life.  I have answered it as reporter intern, private employee, non-government organization staff, and writer.  Apart from writer, which is a recent manifestation of courage in confession, mostly occupation was a label I gave myself.   In a way, it's kind of a role. 

And I was only truest in those days when I was really a student.  When you are a student, you really are not occupied with anything but being one.  It covers everything else.

I just realized also that we are inherently programmed to be students when we are not making a living or crafting lives for ourselves and others.

It is a somewhat crazy decision to go back to formal schooling--no matter how informal the mode of instruction is (online, select study sessions; mostly self-reading of pre-selected modules) simply because it is not a natural course of progression.

But I am in it now. 

And I promised myself that I will not turn back.

The thought of going back to school has played around in my head since I graduated.  Two-three years at work, the thought started to hound me again.  But I've always ignored it in my early 20s.  By the time (my personal milestone year of) 25 rolled around, my life had changed so much that my energies were focused elsewhere.

When I seriously started to make plans about hitting the books again, I remember talking to a colleague and dropping hints about a long impending trip.  As we walked the main street of the financial district, in the heat of the midday high-summer sun, I remember saying that I was going to go through "a big change."

She had playfully chided me about its being an engagement that I've kept secret.  While I was talking about a long vacation then, that was when it really hit me that being a student again is a big change comparable to getting married or moving states.

I confessed (surprising myself) then that I had plans of going back to school but I didn't make the application period and all such stupid excuses--which, of course, in hindsight, now turn out all right and make perfect sense.

I said, the only thing that I regret then was that I had not gone back to school sooner, when I had more time and money.  I had not spoken it out loud, but bosses and workload were also a factor.  I had been thinking wistfully of my 8-to-5, my manager, and my desk at my first corporate job.

Now I'm back with that manager: I am now a direct report.  I'm on an 8:30-to-5:30 shift.  And somehow I can see a semblance of regularity in a day's work.  I see the shape of my day--always has been important to me.  I like to know what to expect; I get variety enough in my writing assignments.

I have also gained enough confidence in my maturity to handle six units of coursework, on top of all the responsibilities I have and intend to keep.  There are also family and friends and all the meaningful and trivial things that make my life.

The point is, I keep feeling that I'm coming back home.

And it's strange.  Because it's the most exciting journey I've ever been on.

Ah, fiction, what will I do without you?

One of the perks growing up with a mixed culture (and heritage), like I did, is having another name. 

I have a legal name: that which gives me an identity on documents, that which I sign with.

But apart from that, I have a name that's born of my tradition.  Other than in school--kindergarten to high school, I almost never used it anymore. 

That name, while it never appears on any of my legal documents, is me, too.  I answer to that name with the same face, manifest with the same mannerisms, think the same thoughts, indulges in the same interests. 

Even when I am the same, sometimes it also feels like a different identity: the name provides a separate skin.

Back in the work that I just left last month, I had created a persona when the phone calls became unbearable and everybody seemed to want a piece of me.  She spoke with a Valley Girl accent in a nasal voice and she was whiny.  That is me when I am at my extreme tiredness and I can't bother to be nice anymore.  I put her on to keep from losing myself.  I even gave her a name.

In the years before that, in my first corporate job, the disguise was simple: a black jacket.  The black jacket, on the back of my office chair when I wasn't there, was my game face.  The one I put on at 8 o'clock every morning, and the one I left at 5 o'clock in the afternoon.

Today I had an encounter with a person who doesn't know me.  But labeled me.

I had to remind myself that I am not who she thinks or judges.  My mind wandered to the fictional selves that I created.  I decided maybe I have a new alter ego.

I realize this makes me sound schizophrenic.  I am in full control of my faculties, I assure you. 

I prefer to think of this as a creative way to deal with stress and asses.

One of the things I'm really loathe to have to watch are confessions of love. 

That goes for teary-eyed wedding vows--no matter how earnest, as much as (or probably even moreso) the grand romantic gestures that make up movie moments.

But.

If it has to be done, it better be done really well.

I can think of inane things, boring things, useless things: grocery lists, today's planner, the taglines on the construction coverings, newspaper headlines, song lyrics.

To fill the need temporarily.

But nothing would sate the hunger and restlessness as a perfect, perfect piece of fiction.

Again.  Finally.  

Life is seldom easy and the worst can happen to the best.

I am hardly a pillar.  I am also broken and immature and unsure and unready for battle.

But I am grateful to be an instrument, to help carry the load.  I am grateful to know that I have done the right thing.

I celebrate the new. 

My first day at new work today: but also like a sort of coming home.

And with that, I think I grew another wisdom tooth.

I am officially enrolled. 

Seven years after graduation, I am a student again.