twosday

sharing is caring

carrie brownstein’s blog is lovely. if i were a better musician, a better writer, and a more voracious consumer of music, i’d aim for a brownstein-like blog.

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the church-going-related project has stalled. to be continued over the weekend, maybe, the actual writing to start soon, hopefully.

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friends have lately been calling attention to my knack for not paying attention to or just flat out ignoring lyrics. it’s true. i have a horrible memory for those things, except for the most memorable lines. the problem it seems is simply paying attention to speech — listening. [odd, since i’m usually the listener in the conversation.]

so a new vow, for J and pacnw A: i will listen to lyrics. and to everyone else: i will listen [and remember] when you speak, what you speak of. because sharing is caring, apparently, and i should at least care enough in return to receive and retain.

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i want to walk.

studies in devotion, time warp style

a way to synthesize clouds of thought that apparently have been incubating for four years, and to partially explain what seems [and only seems] to be my newfound piety. i offer an old journal entry, from aug 2004.

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at times, when i’m sitting in church during another mindless homily or sermon, i’ll think to myself, ‘what is the point of all this? do people really believe this crap?’

the bigotry and hypocrisy of the church, with all its backwardness, was i thought the unchanging rock that would remind me of home, even when i was home. because i’ve been coming home for four or five years and each time my house feels less familiar. my house and the company in it.

so church. it’s supposed to be the final anchor. a church — any church, or maybe i should say the catholic faith — brings back that loving feeling.

on monday we went to st. phillip’s. or rather i was dragged there.

now i’ve come to expect certain things from my time in church, conditioned probably by hundreds of visits over the years. it’s necessary to maintain a certain level of silence, a distance even. no touching — though my family is steadily breaking that rule. reverence is demanded, even if it’s feigned. these rules, created in my head, seemed to go double for the men (mostly) at the altar. above all, ceremony is supreme. a lot of seeing and doing. the only hearing was of the word or song of god.

sitting in st. phillip’s on monday, i added to my mental notes about church: its immunity to advancement of any kind — morally, intellectually, but especially, i thought at the time, technologically. it felt good to be in a building that didn’t look like a tract home with standard ceiling heights and wall coloring. and this building wasn’t fake, this building and the religion it housed.

it felt really good not having a computer in front of me, or a tv, or a cup of overpriced coffee. church is a vacuum, where life and things can be suspended, but god [or something Big] exists in faith and form.

and then i noticed the tinny and piercing volume of the priest’s voice. they had installed a set of speakers halfway through the church to go with the set perched near the altar. the mic transmitted not only the word of father joe via low-quality sound, but also every clank and swoosh the mic could pick up.

the formerly distant clergy, whom i could only see and barely hear as a child, became uncomfortably familiar down to the bothersome details. the sound of cloth against metal when the priest wiped the rim of the chalice. the rustling of paper as he flipped to a reading in his bible. and even more disturbing, i suddenly knew him intimately as i sat 25 pews away. i heard his heavy breathing during a quiet moment. the whispered words that were between him and god as he blessed the bread and wine were broadcast throughout the cavernous church.

my faint prayer during mass for a swift passing of the hour in church is now a prayer that the priest not say — or i not hear — anything inappropriate. or anything that might shed light on the ceremonies of mass. because i don’t want to know. i want what i know about church to stay the same. or if i must learn something new, i want it to add to my view of the church as massive, unforgiving, ceremonial and stern.

studies in devotion, part i

an obvious observation, perhaps: you can tell a lot about a neighborhood by the state of its 10a mass.

i.

when i saw the ushers pull shut the church doors, i started jogging toward them, not wanting to be the asshole who comes in after the procession. there was no need for it, since a good half of the total mass-goers arrived during the readings, crowding the last six pews or so. the priest went on with it, against the din of the late shufflers-in. i imagine the folks at st. peter’s are used to the tardiness of the overwhelmingly filipino parish of beacon hill.

the building is more chapel-sized than the faux-cathedrals and modern monstrosities that pass for catholic churches in wealthier suburbs. the exposed beams are of a dark, probably rotting wood, while the brightness that the stained glass windows might admit is muted by what seem to be plexiglass casings or coverings, as if to protect from whatever large weighty objects might be thrown their way.

a few rows ahead of me sat a middle-aged woman who kept badgering the old ladies a pew ahead of her. at first they humored her, but as the mass proceeded they ignored her, even shushing her a couple times. eventually she wandered to the back of the church, and for a minute, when she approached, i was afraid she’d talk to me and that i’d have to shush her too.

mass is secondary to these spectacles and distractions. the church seems alive and awake.

ii.

again, i rushed into a set of church doors not wanting to be late. but you pay if you get to st. james cathedral at 10a on the dot. you have to grab the first empty seat you see, which can be difficult because every seat is probably taken by 950a, and the pews are scattered in four areas that face the center, where all the holy action takes place.

everything about st. james startled me, starting with the punctuality of its well dressed members. the pews were filled with a mix of respectable upper-middle class folk, the elderly, students, and what i thought was the occasional hobo hiding in the back pews. as if under the roof of what you might characterize as The City’s Catholic Flagship Church it must be emphasized and demonstrated that everyone is served, everyone is welcome. even the army of clergymen and women is rather diverse.

for all of its plurality, the cathedral is magnificent in the way that cathedrals are supposed to be: dramatic ceilings and skylights, a musty antique feeling, cold marble floors and walls, a heavenly choir. this last thing is the best part, almost outweighing the building’s unforgiving acoustics when it comes to crying babies and the vitriol that the priest spouts.

[i’m reminded here why i can’t be catholic, at least not now.]

iii.

queen anne’s parish is predictably st. anne’s church. they’ve just finished renovating or maybe just building anew altogether one of those modern monstrosities that are so in vogue. the ceilings soar and slant. like a cathedral, the floors are cold [via concrete, not marble] and the seats are arranged in a sort of cross centered on the altar. the stations of the cross, i’ve noticed in many of these new churches, are enormous. all that’s missing is a gigantic crucifix to go with it [for which they’re still soliciting].

the sermon to this very homogeneous parish included the following admonishment: “don’t say, ‘i have a boat and we need to go boating, so i can’t go to church on sundays.’”

i saw no one in the pews like me, except for maybe the visiting african priest and a middle-aged filipino couple. we [the couple and i — i created a bond in my head with them over the course of the mass] crossed our arms half the time.

when the priest said, and i paraphrase, ‘when you’re part of the church, part of any collective, there are expectations,’ he seemed to be looking at me.

he will cut your hair when you’re gone

i awoke early this morning to get some reading done, to find markets in disarray and continuing general financial chaos. and then i read this:

“A legal suit in 1856, involving a woman servant who claimed that Baltazar had cut her hair for reasons that are not clear, sent the poet to jail for four years.”

best biographical side note ever.

lend me your ear, move that mouth

early this summer i met an uncle of mine for the first time. he stopped in LA on the way back to chicago from the philippines. this very learned, rather mayabang uncle said at one point, ‘my kids regret not learning tagalog when they were little. and they should. language is culture.’

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it’s frustrating to come across folks who can’t pronounce ‘ethnic’ names (like my own), because from one angle it appears that the mispronunciations are almost purposeful or done out of spite. surely, people must hear that their iterations of my name place the accent in the wrong place, or that the ‘A’ is short and not long, or — at the very least — that the last two syllables aren’t to be run into each other in an ugly car weck.

before this scorn reaches its peak, though, it’s reined in by an understanding that perhaps people don’t hear it, or maybe their mouths just don’t move that way. it’s the same understanding i have for people who can’t reproduce musical pitches, even along with the pitch as it plays. it’s the same slack i cut myself for not being able to move my body parts the way i’d like when i ‘dance.’

[still, for the sake of life-long learning, one would hope that with enough practice and attentiveness, pitches can be reached, body-parts can gain flexibility and rhythm, mouths and tongues can do the necessary gymnastics.]

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in tagalog class and when i practice with my parents (who provide rather explicit, ungentle criticism),  i’m surprised by my inability to move my mouth and reproduce sounds that i very clearly hear. i can reproduce musical pitches, so why shouldn’t i be able to make those glottal stops? the rhythm of speech isn’t there either; instead the sound is an ugly stop-and-go, in part from a frantic search for words but also from an uncertainty of where to put those filler particles that would make the words move more like a steady stream than a bout of sideways rain. that the language isn’t completely foreign to me, and that i can acknowledge where my speech doesn’t sound right, makes this state a little more pathetic. the block, i suppose, is also psychological.

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i know, i know. kailangan ko magsanay. i need to practice.

it’s changed

because white is right, and i’m tired of my words being in the dark.

summer’s ends, loose and otherwise

in the laziness and semi-malaise of the precious last week before the start of the quarter, i offer some bullets, to be exchanged for whole posts if time and my mind grapes permit.

• the most prominent emergence out of this summer’s work: rationality — its valuation, stylization, separation from style and experience, how it even relates to experience, its intertwining with but disavowal of emotion.
• debt — social, political, personal — and how it’s not so great, especially when enfolded with other emotions.
• style or discourse. a theoretical fork i’ll resolve this quarter — habermas (and his discontented children) or foucault (and his smug self-righteous children).
• the alignment of: rational/modern/depersonal versus emotional/personal/non-modern.
• and still, a frustrating failure to know the philippines.

the onward trudge.

summer’s summit

second encore, penultimate song

visions of december

it’s raining in seattle, at a chilly [for summer] 69 degrees. the dampness and gloom remind me of december, as does this essay i’m working on that was due that month last year. i hope i can put both behind me soon.

in the meantime, some procrastinatory notes.

today i ended a stint at childrens hospital [no article needed. that’s how good it is.], in a department that offers support, spiritual and social, for families whose children have serious and/or terminal illness but have decided to continue treatment. the unit was tight-knit, so as a temp i was very often on the outs, which was ok; they let me read on the job. on the whole, it wasn’t very exciting, and was often sort of sad reading about the patients. the consultants in my department, unlike the doctors, needed to know such things as ‘tommy likes toys and spending time with his brother steve.’ the reports that contained such details were sandwiched in the medical records in between the long lists of medications and doctors visits.

the woman i covered for was the most interesting person i met, and sadly i only saw her my first day. she moved to seattle from new orleans after katrina, selecting UW out of a long list of schools that tulane had given her the week after the hurricane. the time she took off this month was devoted to her husband, who just got called for deployment [his second tour!!] to iraq.

despite this, she was perhaps the most cheerful person in the hospital. the emails she left always contained at least two exclamation points. when she laughed, it pierced the air at a high but not shrill pitch, and lasted a good three or four long undulations. it made you want to hear again whatever it was that could elicit such a response.

today, more laughter. my office, i think, is next to rehab. at first i thought i heard the soft wails of a few three-year-olds crying, but as it got louder and patters of running started to accompany it, i realized it was gusts of laughter — the kind you’d hear from kids when they’re being tickled and can’t control themselves. it’s probably the best thing you can hear at a hospital.

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for this essay i’m working on i’m pretty much devouring stanley karnow’s in our image, a pop history text on the US colonial period in the philippines. it’s not the most meticulously researched, at least not by scholarly standards, and it’s shamelessly pro-US. the man has an odd attachment to osmena [he practically sanctifies him], and knocks quezon at every opportunity. but it’s hard not to get drawn in by such gems as ‘ambling along to an insouciant drumbeat.’ that is, until you realize that he’s talking about your people.

smells like abroad

the returns of my people are starting, the first coming unexpectedly today with a phone call from D. her travels took her to egypt, with forays into tunisia and somewhere else, i forget where. over a sushi dinner at a restaurant with quite possibly the worst service in seattle and most overpriced menu, D regaled me with stories of living in cairo suburbs (a lot like parisian streets), holding other people’s purses and children on the metro, sharing water with strangers, sexual harassment in the market, and korean tourist sing-a-longs during a 230a pilgrimage up mt. sinai (’it was hard to feel like moses with that going on’). on her trip to tunisia, the child of the tourguide gifted her this:

that’s right, a headless camel on a magnet. it’s a pretty good parting gift.

D  hadn’t unpacked her shoulder bag, and so she pulled out goody after goody, including the camel magnet (and eventually the camel’s head), so that it seemed like there was a little part of egypt right at our table.

at one point she handed to me a worn book of postcards from tunisia. the whole night i had been trying to get a sense of what her environs were like for two months — what exactly a cairo suburb was, how it felt to walk around, what the heat was like — but it was only until i flipped through the photos of immaculate tunisian tourist spots that i got a whiff of what it must be like to live there, at least as a foreigner. really, it was the smell that gave her trip another dimension to me. the insides of cabs, the markets, the scarves of women she stood next to on the metro — i imagine their scent wafted into her purse, latched onto the small tchochkes she was pulling out onto the table in a sushi restaurant in seattle.