Avenue Q

I loved it.

Okay, for those who object, I have yet to see the Broadway production, so my expectations are somewhat lower. Any prior experience has been limited to sessions with Jemai’s PekPek Ipod – a constant “The Internet is for Porn” and “My Girlfriend who lives in Canada”. Sesame Street baby ako, and it was wonderful to see something familiar. And like Sesame Street, it felt like, I could relate. Avenue Q was like Sesame Street for this age. RCBC was packed, mostly the just out of college crowd, my people. And I know nearly everyone of them have wished countless times that they could, like Princetongo back to college. I know I have. I still do.

To those who haven’t seen it or at least taken the two minutes to Wiki it, it might come off as another Broadway play with a gimmick. It’s not. It’s the story of our lives, and when I say our, I mean this generation of twenty-somethings. I have a person in mind for every person in the story – the perpetually single or No Boyfriend Since Birth (NBSB) schoolteacher, the person with a degree and a dream, the has beens, the Trekkie Monsters, and the Gary Colemans (He’s real, by the way). We all wish we could go back to the one place we’ve been trying to leave the past 4 or so years: college. That was when life was simplest, but that’s over, this is the real world, and Avenue Q is the closest we can get to Sesame Street.

Pissed.

I get fat when I’m too happy. Or too content with everything happening in my life. Now, I’m fat. Seriously.

But yesterday, I hit the gym. And today I hit the gym and endured an hour of hearing the instructor yell “Beyonce, Beyonce!”.

I think I’m fucking pissed.

My inner junkie

The thing about poetry is that it requires some thinking. Unlike a good book where you can tell from the teaser on the jacket if it’s something you’d be into, poetry requires actual reading, then sorting through the themes and authors which touch you the most. It’s for this same reason that the few poetry books at home are Robert Frost’s and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s.

Tisha has been the dealer to my inner poetry junkie.

This poem is so real. It makes me want to cry, not from sadness. But because, ang galing ng pucha. This is as close as I can get to a sappy mood.

The Muse This Time, R. Zamora Linmark

I am, at the moment, a patron of the meat market. Profession: a poet on-call because poetry only comes when it wants to; hobbies; listening to Gershwin while looking for Freud in Woody Allen movies; history of the heart: six lovers who wanted to be immortalized.

“Funny,” said my fourth, “you can cook up a poem about bumper-to-bumper traffic, but when it’s time to write about me…” How do you explain to someone who makes you come thrice a week and gives you head and foot massage at bedtime why it is much easier to write about gridlock in the land of diesel than return to that humid night in Makati, where we had met, in a Korean-owned steam room, a misnomer since lust provided the heat.

The fifth and sixth were more demanding. “Screw the acknowledgment page,” said the fifth. “I want a biography that sings,” said the sixth. Completely unaware they were making the same request an hour apart from each other, I told them, “What do you take me for? a mail-order poet? Dial-a-poem?”

“I don’t get it,” said the third. “You can create beauty from a dead fish,” said the second. “Destroy buildings in one line,” said the first, “but you cannot write about the good ole devil?”

Their words are stinging now as I approach twilight. Truth is: love’s hard to live with. I forget to set the alarm clock, I buy everything on credit, I start making up words, I call in sick to the world. “Are you a poet?” asked the second. “A lover?” asked the third. “Just shut up and write,” said the first.

I can’t. Nothing is entering. Except the voice of my first lover, the one who set the picture straight. “The problem with you is you think you’re Woody Allen in Manhattan.”

Gershwin’s blue clarinet, black-and-white Big Apple, an ice cream parlor. At the counter, Woody is buying Hemingway’s daughter, Mariel, a milkshake before he delivers the bad news. Tears coursing down her cheeks, she asks, “Why? Because I’m too young? Because I don’t know Rita Hayworth from Veronica Lake? Because I’m not Diane Keaton running with you in the rain?” They split, then a minute before the credits roll, he changes his mind. “I’ll take you back,” Mariel says, “when I return from London.”

That’s the closest to my idea of love: watching the skyline, making out, making mistakes, making believe desire means it’s with somebody else, then breaking up, and, if we’re lucky, forgiveness that comes right before take-off. There, I’ve said it. What more can one want? A lover who loves me as much as the rain. Rain, and, from the opening credits to the closing heart, Gershwin.

Shake Body Body Dancer

The last three weeks I’ve been busy participating in among the campiest of corporate Filipino traditions: the variety show. In our company, this is otherwise known as SCiP on Dancing, a dance-off between various corporate units. The winning team gets a shiny cup, bragging rights, and the unfortunate task of hosting next year’s event.

Where I work, it is not only a matter of serious business, but a chance to initiate company noobs to the unwritten clause in the employment contract – that everyone must perform at least once in a corporate activity. It didn’t take much for me to say yes, because I knew if I didn’t do it now I would still end up doing something like it in the future. I gave all necessary disclaimers to HR because I have the coordination of a stick of bamboo. I can sway to the left and right, and even then it still looks clumsy. Upon hearing the theme as being “Dance Icons and ours being Shakira, I crossed my fingers, gave a little prayer to Kuya Jess and hoped that I didn’t end up falling flat on my face, injuring my workmates, or make HR regret their choice of dancer.

Thank goodness for our choreographer who had the foresight to assign me to the segment of the dance which required the least amount of dance ability: the tango. While I had to do some booty shaking (again something I had not planned to do beyond the confines of my room and the company of a belly dancing video) for the chorus, I was lucky enough to have a very competent (ooh another corporate word) dance partner. All he had to do was push me around really.

It honestly took me close to ten years to pick up the steps and do it with some confidence. It wasn’t until three days before the event that I was able to go through the dance in sync with the music. It was great in the sense that I got to know at least 20 other people who worked for the company (there’s always a kind of bond when people go through something together), achieved the unwritten clause in my employment contract, and learned this one thing: It’s never too late to learn how to dance.