Sunday, December 14, 2014

Perchance to just read

Full moon over Wack Wack, Mandaluyong City, and Ortigas Center, Dec. 6, 2014. Photo by Babeth Lolarga

"... I don’t write every day. I can’t write every day. Sometimes I take a whole week off from writing to sleep and read and cook and clean and watch a dozen episodes of Justified, which is probably a necessary vaccine against burnout but makes me feel like I’m slacking.

"I don’t want to complain too much because, let’s be honest, this is a craziness I’ve chosen for myself, and a privilege. I’m not scrubbing toilets 12 hours a day, six days a week just to put food on the table, and I’ve got a partner who makes it possible for me to pursue my dream without completely losing my mind. But I still wonder how other writers manage it."
- Liz Entman Harper, "Like Pushing an Elephant Into a Volkswagen", www.themorningnews.org

I like to fool myself into thinking that when I'm thinking, I'm also writing. Or when I'm taking pictures, I'm also composing in some way.

Aw schucks! I must admit that there are days when the high point is watching reruns of TV sitcoms like "Everybody Loves Raymond" or "Frasier." And then I got hooked on "House of Cards." I have a lot of catching up with "Game of Thrones." I lucked out when I caught three-fourths of the movie Julia with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave (and Meryl Streep in a bit role).

When I grew tired of watching, I noticed that my Home Improvements-oriented brother had brought some method to the madness that is my bookshelf (thanks, Dennis!). I found myself reading best-sellers like Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and Sophie Kinsella's Mini Shopaholic (not my choices, they're the stash of the other book readers in the family so we have quite an eclectic selection).

Didn't put down Pablo Neruda's Memoirs until sleepiness took over. He likes to use what to my limited vocabulary are unfamiliar words: mephitic, meretricious, calcined, volutes, hieratic, arborescent. The reader previous to me had the thoughtfulness to highlight these words so I can return to them and finally discover their meanings. Good thing SeƱor Neruda never had reason to use them in his poetry that speaks to all humankind.

Who said, "I could be social, but I could read (I'd rather read)". And that, dear and few followers of this blog, is what I've been up to these past days. Thus my public book of days that is this blog hasn't been updated.

I'm about to make up big time with a series of entries. I'm keeping everything short after I've been told that the ideal blog text should be 350 words long or less.

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