photo diary #3

I've been thinking that I should get back to sharing actual concrete moments about my life, even the most minute, boring things, the way I used to when I first started Wonderless. five years ago. (Also, shit, five years?!) So, here's a summary of how I've been for the past few months, as told mostly through shitty phone pics. 

I finally started a real zine collection when I attended Lit UP 4 in June. It was a fundraiser for when the Faculty Center was destroyed by a fire in April, with a mini-bazaar held by independent presses and zine purveyors. There were performances by bands and spoken word poets, too, but once I got what I came for, I bolted out of there and waited for my dad at a McDonald's like a loser. (Double loser, because I saw people from school and pretended I was invisible.) Then I came all the way to Escolta for some zines by Sarah McNeil. Then in July I attended Local Loca's Kontrabando at Cubao X.

I'm obsessed with everything I've gotten so far—they're all so interesting and funny and well-written and intricate and creative. The illustrations and photographs are really good, too, of course. Some of my favorites are Strangers and さまよいます by Aga de los Santos, featuring film photographs taken in Japan; I've Gone Away by Alyssa Africa, a glossy, gorgeous collection of snapshots from her travels; and Feels;21 by Shin, which is full of drawings that convey existential dread, sadness, and dry humor.

Nothing much to say about this, really. I just love the lighting and I was pretty excited to have brought Annie out again, since I hadn't really used her since Singapore.

I was out grocery shopping with my parents at this place in Valenzuela and they had all these plastic cats and dinosaurs scattered throughout. I caught these cuties in a compromising position. I wasn't having the best night at the time but I really want to go back to that supermarket!

I saw the prettiest minimalist repurposed plastic dinosaur planters outside shoemaker and designer Maco Custodio's studio, which happens to be located right along Tandang Sora, very close to where I live. I was there to interview him. It amazed me, and we talked about this, how burgeoning creatives can be found right in the far north, in areas like Novaliches, among auto shops and everything. His studio, which is near his apartment, is in a really home-y compound. You never would have guessed. We were surrounded by his sketches and works in progress, listening to slightly outdated pop music on his radio, safe from hard rain. It was a really cool day for me.  

I got to do a behind-the-scenes/fly-on-the-wall feature on AlDub that I think turned out pretty well—I was never a fan but it was pretty cool witnessing all those raw moments and writing about them. I got to sit (well, stand) in while they filmed an episode of Real Talk and kind of felt like I was Rachel McAdams in Morning Glory. People said the whole Harvest Moon thread felt a little too convenient, but I swear that was the real deal! They also said they liked the piece, and it made our little "10k Club" with thirty thousand views (!), so I was really giddy about that, even if I did make a mistake that went viral thanks to an oversight when I was transcribing what they said during the interview. (I was mortified, of course.)

On July 30th, CNN Life partnered with Ayala Museum for its annual Inspire Every Day event, which doubled as the website's official launch. In the morning I attended a talk by Keiji Ashizawa about his project, Ishinomaki Laboratory, at the Met. Then I had lunch at Harrison Plaza's Village Square, which has an indoor koi pond surrounded by benches and bisected by a tiny bridge under a skylight. I loved that it was practically deserted, and, again, how it feels frozen in time. I wish I could've stayed longer, but I was on a pretty tight schedule.

I arrived at Ayala Museum a few minutes before my afternoon shift and visited the exhibits before clocking in, so to speak. I helped give away free totes at our interactive booth (more of a box, really). It was three hours of standing and speaking to all kinds of people, but I surprisingly had a really great time and I'd do it all over again, no questions asked. Near the end, I got to meet the other girls manning the booth with me and, honestly, it was just so nice hanging around with and speaking to them. They helped me rearrange the huge 3D Life logo to form my name; easily one the day's highlights. Then I took the P2P (a double decker!) on the way home and discovered the magic of Wendy's chicken nuggets. Really.

So, about those darn MSTs. Despite being saddled with regular priority for preenlistment, I actually got the three I needed. "You're lucky," the really kind woman who printed my Form 5 told me. And I guess I am—but more than that, I was someone who spent two days lining up for those slots in the middle of the night. I spent the first night with Cheska and the second alone with Saturday Night Live and two kind night guards.

I learned that hard work pays off, but there's a lot of luck involved, indeed. I learned that I love any kind of endless night in general, no matter who I'm with or where I am or what I'm doing, because I kind of had the time of my life. Also, dawn's favorite habit is sneaking up on you.

This little guy can be found near the bike racks outside the Math building! He is quite the big ball of fluff. I should visit sometime.

I love how matchy-matchy the colors are! The photo on the left is the cover of an academic study published by SUNY that I found in Booksale. The photo on the right features a pair of adorable tiny snails I hung out with while waiting for a jeep in the rain. The waiting shed was (slowly) crawling with them.

I wanted to replace Enid Coleslaw on my sidebar with actual-me. And I wanted to give myself the reverse coloring book treatment for a change. I just wish I could fill in the lace details on my top! I have to say, though, that it turned out to be a nice little exercise in self-actualization. I'm not usually big on self-portraiture or anything like that. (Unless you count all the confessional me-me-me writing, ha!) 

This is a screencap from when I watched The Nice Guys last month and really liked it. I thought the subtitles were a nice touch. And, well, yep. Me too, bud.

the further i go, the more that i know

It dawned on me the other day that since I started carrying my Aqua Pix around with me all the time, I've been unwittingly uncovering a love for this city I grew up in.

This rediscovered hobby has documented the recurring themes in my life (loneliness included) and, in my effort to look for subjects worth keeping in picture form, has led me to really stop and look at Metro Manila from a new perspective. And for every exposure, I keep finding new favorite things about it.

It's taught me to say, "Fuck it," and bring my camera out at a busy intersection to capture a moment, a person, an object I find too interesting for words. It's taught me to stay alert and to get off my phone and to remember why I love long bus rides and window seats. Sometimes, when I'm trying to finish a roll of film, I would take a detour on my way home and walk around somewhere in search of anything that sticks out—like this game I would play with myself on car rides, where I try to look for something I think is beautiful every ten seconds. Turns out it's not hard at all, and I'm never disappointed.

I feel like I've known how to define something—being a part of Manila—for years, but it's only now that I'm understanding it.

So, here, again, is a glimpse into my own personal Metro Manila.

I don't know if you can tell, but that's a cat.

She said, “Let it slide.”

A bit back I got this sudden urge to try out black and white film, just because I never had before, so I found myself splurging on a Kodak Tri-X 400 at Satchmi and loading it into my Aqua Pix. I finished it off relatively quickly, but when I went to drop it off for processing, the shop said I'd have to wait a whole month to get it back and see my photos. Luckily, I called after two weeks and was super excited to find that they were ready.

When I was using the roll, I didn't read up beforehand on how to properly shoot black and white. I had to learn to rely more on the textures and the moment to take effective and interesting images, because with color, it's so easy to hide behind vivid, bright subjects in all kinds of hues. So I would sometimes come across a really colorful object and couldn't do anything about it, because it wouldn't translate well in grayscale. And when I finally saw the pictures, I was so happy with how they turned out—especially considering they came from a toy camera!

These photos were taken all over Metro Manila (and all over my life, for that matter): UP, Vargas Museum, SM North and TriNoma, the MRT, Ortigas and Shaw, Cubao X. The final half were from the day I decided to walk around Avenida and Escolta by myself on Independence Day, in search of zines and a national identity. (Okay, not really the latter, but I'd never felt more like a citizen of Manila than I did exploring those streets and experiencing the slice-of-life culture fully on my own.) 

Fun, only sort-of related tidbit: I got lost on my way to Escolta, and just as I was inwardly slapping my forehead and telling myself Gob Bluth's catchphrase, "I've made a huge mistake," the bootleg music stand I was walking by started playing Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence." As in, "Hello, darkness, my old friend." One of my favorite moments ever in all my twenty-one years for sure.

It’s the best euphemism for getting the living crap kicked out of you that I’ve ever heard.

I was seven years old when Rico Yan died, gone to sleep and never to wake up again, aged twenty-seven and fresh off the immense success of Got to Believe! 

He’s been gone fourteen years. I barely remember anything, to be honest. But somehow, his impact on me remains, and it’s as great and painful as ever. I have no idea why, but the void he’s left is still unfilled, and in my head, his presence is still really vivid. 

In some ways, this was my first true brush with the experience of death, how tragic and unbelievable it can be, how bad its timing is. How it can affect a person. Maybe that’s why. 

*

I was ten when my mom pointed to River Phoenix on television and said, offhand and matter-of-fact, “Oh, that boy is dead.” Stand by Me was on HBO, and I watched that cigarette-smoking kid with his sleeves rolled up and his vulnerability fluctuating with strange fascination, because I couldn’t comprehend that he was right there, and he was also gone. 

I would see him years later, in The Thing Called Love, one of his last films, also on HBO. He was all grown up. He brooded even more than he did as Chris Chambers. He played guitar and sang softly, somberly. He was beautiful. “He’s dead,” my mom reminded me, sounding slightly sadder this time, her voice conveying the sayang of it all. 

In the years that followed I would exhaust River’s filmography and learn more about him than I ever had any business knowing. I would listen to his songs and delude myself into thinking that I understood him. The more alive—the more flawed—he seemed, the higher I put him on a pedestal. But I never quite forgot the fact that came before the rest: He’s gone. And call me morbid, but that only pushed my infatuation further.   

*

I was thirteen when Entertainment Tonight aired a visual obituary for Heath Ledger. I had never seen a single film of his; the most I ever heard of him was through a pop culture reference Meg Cabot made on All-American Girl. I started off detached and slightly curious, but I was a blubbering mess by the end of it. He had one of the nicest smiles I had (still have) ever seen. 

I fell into a routine: I made my dad buy me a VCD of 10 Things I Hate About You at the now-defunct Video City in SM North that I watched every day after school. I drew a black ribbon on my hand to signal my mourning; I’d refill it when it faded and draw it on again after it washed off. I read Wuthering Heights because Heath and his sister had been named after the central characters. When I got older, I started putting “The Weakness in Me” by Joan Armatrading on and walking around bookshops, pretending he was following me with a copy of The Feminine Mystique, as normal people are wont to do. 

But when I think of him, I think mostly of Patrick Verona and William Thatcher, and with that I do him a disservice, again and again and again.

*

It was around that same time when I was thirteen, my Heath Era, that I found Charlie Bartlett among a pile of pirated DVDs at North Ridge Plaza. The poster looked cool: skinny kid looking smug, doodles all around his head, Kat Dennings, pre-Iron Man/comeback Robert Downey, Jr. 

At this age I had begun testing the waters of nonconformity and embracing weird uncoolness. Charlie Bartlett sold prescription drugs to people at his school and was cheerful to a fault, unlike broody, moody me, but he was a wiry, vibrant outsider who was never anyone else but himself, and I found comfort in that. 

It was also around this time that I bought a back issue of CosmoGIRL! that featured Anton Yelchin—Charlie Bartlett himself. He was eighteen. He talked and made quick jokes (no doubt spoken in his signature animated tone) about taking pictures (he would end up getting a better camera than his late-2000s phone and get really, really good), buying vinyl (another factor that made me want to start my own collection), and sleep (he certainly looked the part). “Confidence is a big thing with [Charlie],” he had said. “He never feels like he has to be certain things for certain people.” 

I was pretty much a goner. I followed his career pretty closely after that: in New York, I Love You as a teen going to prom; in Middle of Nowhere as a lonely amateur drug seller; in Like Crazy as a young man in love and other things that resemble it; in Only Lovers Left Alive as a rock-and-roller with a healthy dose of naivete; in Rudderless as a musician with Fabrizio Moretti-like charm; and in 5 to 7 as a struggling writer who has an affair with an older married woman. And the ones that came before, like the brilliant, difficult Fierce People, and the better known titles, too. He could inhabit characters like, well, crazy. 

He became a constant, an omnipresent comfort. I’d been counting the days until I could see Green Room, and whatever else. There was going to be so much else. 

So when I woke up this morning, checked Twitter, and saw that a friend had tweeted: WHY !!!! DID !!!! ANTON !!!!!! YELCHIN! !!!!!! DIE!!!!!!!!! for the briefest of seconds I thought maybe, just maybe, she had seen a movie. Maybe it was even Green Room. Maybe I’d just been spoiled. 

I’m not going to repeat to you what you already know. I can’t.  

I went to sleep a mere thirty minutes Before. I’d been watching a film in which two sisters were hosting a party, not knowing that their mother was dying in a car crash. They looked so happy, so unaware, that it made me cringe. I never want to be in that position, I decided. 

The funny thing was, ironically, right at that moment, I was. 

My cousin texted me to ask what the hell had happened. That’s when it really hit me. We had discovered Charlie Bartlett together, come to think of it, and have had a joint obsession over Anton forever, I’m just realizing. It’s hard sometimes to convince her to see a certain movie that I love, but I only have to mention his name once to get her to agree. 

Rudderless is a hard film to watch on its own, heartbreaking, and it only gets worse with repeats. Of course, this only makes me like it even more. And now there’s this added layer of heartbreak—I almost feel like never seeing it again. In the 7-Eleven near where I work, I made the mistake of thinking it would be fine to listen to the songs Anton had performed on the soundtrack, where he sang lines like You’re so emotional...guess what, the music never stops, and It’s a long way down/Even longer way back up. 

I was so wrong. But, hey, my New Year’s resolution had been crying in public whenever I damn well liked.  

In the beginning it was odd even to me that this loss hurts this much, that it’s getting to me this deep. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. All of it was so abrupt. He was so talented, and so real, and so unlike anyone else. He was so young. He would never be twenty-eight. 

And once more it doesn’t compute in my head, which seems to be stuck in denial mode right now. 

I just had to get this off my chest, I think. Someday maybe I’ll write about him and do him justice. But for now I think I need to process. 

If you ask me why, I don't know

Here's some art. I miss spending more time in my own corner of the internet.

P.S. I found out a couple weeks ago that I once had cyber_witch2005@as-if.com as an actual email, which I desperately want back.