I’m smack dab in the middle of pre-menstrual mini-spiral week, clutching onto the last threads of that fleeting clear-headedness I was just flexing to a friend beginning of this week. I had so many realizations this Monday about wanting to get an education in Dublin instead of going back home, a notion antithetical to the panic of not having enough money in the foreseeable future, and also the more important realization that there is a me underneath the stacks of anxiety and rumination that come from hormonal surges I oftentimes can identify but not overcome.

In any case, I woke up debating whether to stream or go to the gym. I woke up late, the way I always have for the last several months, but thankfully the guilt has been growing weaker and weaker by the month. So when my gym buddy and close friend told me there was an orange warning (wild winds), it then seemed strange to then not stream now that number 2 is out.

I was going to let my perfectionism take over, the instant dialogue that would have said I’d wanted to do more PH-timezone streams because the people I want to come work with me are in Southeast Asia. But somehow, in the tiny threads of sanity still in my fist, I realized it was better to get used to streaming than to be streaming at the most ideal time slot. It’s so hard to be me sometimes. But hey, the me that said hell yeah let’s stream outside schedule, is the same me. We all do contain multitudes and attitudes and it’s always amazing when the kinder ones emerge.

Anyway, I did have a chattier chatbox and 1 more viewer than usual and a nice chat talking about Dead-End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto. I was somehow able to connect where I landed in talking about the events of the story in the book and where I was in what I was writing, and it was all about how a proper apology can be made. That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about in this suddenly perfectionist culture, how I think it’s better to make mistakes so you know what people’s boundaries are, and as long you mean your apology and strive to do better, you should be welcomed back. Because the other end of it is being too afraid to try anything new or say anything sincere and so to keep everyone happy you stay small. I’ve been chided before for wanting to stay small and it really sucks to see that it had been true for quite some time. I’m very opinionated, it’s just not the first thing you’ll notice about me (it’s the squarish jaw, maybe).

I quite miss the early 2000s blogging culture, of just being able to write about anything of interest to the author, and recently I’ve been reading Ria‘s substack everyday, because her posts are so sincere and so full of joy and gratitude about her goings-on (huh ito ba plural nito). She’s going through something that would be very difficult for the fragile-willed so her words have been very inspiring to me.

On the writing front, I was finally able to finish the first “final” draft of my novella right now entitled Sailfin (a dragon-looking lizard). It’ll end up at around 13,000 words I think, so longer than any short story I’ve written so far. It’s about two unstoppable forces, how the unburdening of traumas is necessary to a full, feeling life, and also what happens when you betray a friend.

Here’s the “reading guide”/prologue for it:

Entrustment, or a Reading Guide

First, a truth: life can be unbearable.

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We say we are of the modern age, but it was the Páan, fun-loving, nomadic adventurers, and the Sapang-Nayon, alchemists and scholars, that had developed some of the most elegant principles for being in the natural world that only a few of us can ever hope to articulate. There are descendants of the Páan* and the Sapang-Nayon among us, true. But our fears threaten to eclipse their faith in nature and will.

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Here upon appreciating the thriving communities of the water-bound, we enscribe the recollection of Gastra, who at this time understands themself to be a karugangan. We deliver this account to prove that the Páan and the Sapang-Nayon did not live in a kind, gentle, resource-rich world. That during their time, there lived nature spirits that spoke through people’s emotions, amorphous deities that bestowed calamities, deaths, and synchronicities, nameless entities enshrined in stone and clay, and crawling, swooping, monstrous creatures that can crush one underfoot. That there was hunger, plagues, deaths, uncertainty. That it was exactly like the world we are living in now.

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Next, the legend Gastra held close: that the karugangan are disembodied entities that live inside their Páan hosts, that they communicate with their hosts without words, that they reintegrate into the karugangan hive while their hosts sleep, so that they can accumulate as much knowledge as they can to ultimately take over Páan bodies in a much-prophesied awakening.

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Last, a wayward fact: while it was not too unusual to witness a full circle rainbow after a fast-moving storm, at the time of the events in Gastra’s recollection, the conditions for this fanciful meteorological phenomenon had not been met for years.

* Spoken in two beats, heavier on the first

I hope you have warm meals and hilarious conversations this weekend!