I can't stoooopppppp!!!!!!

Last Saturday our house turned into a vortex of travelers on the move... fifteen minutes into our evening house party/ bbq/ soiree, I sat for a quick shot of rum with a few gentlemen in my backyard. Ben had his backpack packed and his boarding pass in his pocket - in a few moments, I would walk him to the train to the airport, where he would not breathe fresh air until he would disembark 14 hours later in Berlin. Coco's brother, Christophe, and his friend Didier had just put down their bags in my living room, fresh off the plane from Paris the night before. And my friend Mike wandered in, just in from hanging out in a boat off of Cape Cod photographing whales.

I raised my glass to life being a great adventure.

Later on that night many more people would wander in and out of our backyard in various states of inebriation. This time of the year brings many visitors to Chicago. Aside from our new houseguests, my roommate's friends and colleagues drifted in to help celebrate her birthday. Friends of friends of friends of friends, who I had never met before. I saw old loves meeting again for a brief moment in my living room, having been parted by the distance the length of the Mississippi, in the same town for just one night. The city opens up as the weather gets warmer, and the heat of the sun matches the strength of the wind - and the lake is a gleaming showcase of water and light. It would be crazy to come here when the weather is cold and people stay burrowed in, bound tighter that a nut, when the skies are high pressured and gray. I am not used to inviting people into my house, meeting strangers in my own personal space. I am used to being the one doing the visiting and then coming home just for a breather, doing laundry and sleeping for hours and hours in my small dark room.

There were several elements that appeared at the party that reminded me of how close to home here I have come - my brothers arrived to sit and philosophize under the tree, and were thrust with my old skatergirl friend's newborn baby and toddler to hold for a brief moment, my old schoolmate appeared and commiserated with my old neighbor. We were on a street I have lived on for years, in a city that I have come home to every time I have traveled anywhere and I still felt the push of life in motion.

Yesterday I went downtown to an Irish Pub with the Paris crew to watch the soccer match between France and Italy. The four of us rode there on three bikes - Christophe was heroically transported on the rack they had just attached to the back of Corinne's vintage Schwinn road bike. A towel was wrapped around it for comfort and he held on for dear life as she struggled up hills and across bridges to get downtown. Her tireless efforts were shaded somewhat by the easy birdlike gliding flow of my racing bike and the girl's cruiser Didier was stylishly swooping around on.

She yelled at me for blocking the way.

"I can't stop!!!" she screeched in a nerve wracked warble, as they hobbled across the intersection. I moved forward just quickly enough to not get crashed into. After we passed the intersection, balance and composure were regained and we arrived just in time to see the start of the game and for me to finally let out my chuckle.

Mi Ultimo Adios by Dr. Jose Rizal

Farewell, my adored Land, region of the sun caressed,
Pearl of the Orient Sea, our Eden lost,
With gladness I give you my Life, sad and repressed;
And were it more brilliant, more fresh and at its best,
I would still give it to you for your welfare at most.

On the fields of battle, in the fury of fight,
Others give you their lives without pain or hesitancy,
The place does not matter: cypress laurel, lily white,
Scaffold, open field, conflict or martyrdom's site,
It is the same if asked by home and Country.

I die as I see tints on the sky b'gin to show
And at last announce the day, after a gloomy night;
If you need a hue to dye your matutinal glow,
Pour my blood and at the right moment spread it so,
And gild it with a reflection of your nascent light!

My dreams, when scarcely a lad adolescent,
My dreams when already a youth, full of vigor to attain,
Were to see you, gem of the sea of the Orient,
Your dark eyes dry, smooth brow held to a high plane
Without frown, without wrinkles and of shame without stain.

My life's fancy, my ardent, passionate desire,
Hail! Cries out the soul to you, that will soon part from thee;
Hail! How sweet 'tis to fall that fullness you may acquire;
To die to give you life, 'neath your skies to expire,
And in your mystic land to sleep through eternity !

If over my tomb some day, you would see blow,
A simple humble flow'r amidst thick grasses,
Bring it up to your lips and kiss my soul so,
And under the cold tomb, I may feel on my brow,
Warmth of your breath, a whiff of your tenderness.

Let the moon with soft, gentle light me descry,
Let the dawn send forth its fleeting, brilliant light,
In murmurs grave allow the wind to sigh,
And should a bird descend on my cross and alight,
Let the bird intone a song of peace o'er my site.

Let the burning sun the raindrops vaporize
And with my clamor behind return pure to the sky;
Let a friend shed tears over my early demise;
And on quiet afternoons when one prays for me on high,
Pray too, oh, my Motherland, that in God may rest I.

Pray thee for all the hapless who have died,
For all those who unequalled torments have undergone;
For our poor mothers who in bitterness have cried;
For orphans, widows and captives to tortures were shied,
And pray too that you may see you own redemption.

And when the dark night wraps the cemet'ry
And only the dead to vigil there are left alone,
Don't disturb their repose, don't disturb the mystery:
If you hear the sounds of cithern or psaltery,
It is I, dear Country, who, a song t'you intone.

And when my grave by all is no more remembered,
With neither cross nor stone to mark its place,
Let it be plowed by man, with spade let it be scattered
And my ashes ere to nothingness are restored,
Let them turn to dust to cover your earthly space.

Then it doesn't matter that you should forget me:
Your atmosphere, your skies, your vales I'll sweep;
Vibrant and clear note to your ears I shall be:
Aroma, light, hues, murmur, song, moanings deep,
Constantly repeating the essence of the faith I keep.

My idolized Country, for whom I most gravely pine,
Dear Philippines, to my last goodbye, oh, harken
There I leave all: my parents, loves of mine,
I'll go where there are no slaves, tyrants or hangmen
Where faith does not kill and where God alone does reign.

Farewell, parents, brothers, beloved by me,
Friends of my childhood, in the home distressed;
Give thanks that now I rest from the wearisome day;
Farewell, sweet stranger, my friend, who brightened my way;
Farewell, to all I love. To die is to rest.

Coconute Tree Adventure

Balamban, Cebu

How to Be a Great Lady Part II

Everything happened on a damp afternoon of a Spring day. The phone call, the text messages, the heartdropping news. It was a day like this and the smells on this day sparked a memory chain that unraveled me back to the past

I burned incense to fill my little space, my writing nook, with the smell of spices and to clean the air. The curls of the smoke danced in the air, charming the wind and dancing in whirls and spins. They spun through the windowsill as the rain misted, it was the kind of rain that if I turned my face up to the sky, would cover me from ear to ear with an instant light dew. The dead leaves of winter were soaked and the chill in the air was a happy one because for once, at least, it was just no longer cold.

When the smoke started sifting its way through the window, I had been listening to music with the sound of bells and women singing and in the light of the afternoon sky I suddenly became stricken and broke down in tears. The sounds of ringing and full throaty declarative harmonies of their voices bore my memory back, and when the scent of the incense reached my nose I was instantly transported. I wept with my face turned back, and felt the tears stream endlessly down the sides of my face, dripping past my ears, falling into my hair.

I remembered climbing with curiousity into my aunt’s room, on bandy nine year old legs with wild hyper hair and excitement in my eyes. It was connected to a terrace that overlooked the sea, where she would stretch in the mornings those days she didn’t rush out for business, listening to opera arias in her wide sleeved robes. There would be incense burning, the smell masking the smell of her cigarettes and tea as she thoroughly enjoyed herself in the morning light. I would climb the steps hewn from native canes, with bamboo to glide my hands on. With my young impatient steps I would barrel into her open doorway into a room lit by low lamps and lanterns of diffused light.

It was the treasure trove of an explorer; in every corner were jewelry boxes laden with gold chains and precious gems that spilled out, inviting me to try them on and give myself a glimpse of my young self in the costumery of a princess from a faraway land. There were dusty antiques, warriors carved out of tropical wood that stood in attack mode under faded paint and a collection of fearsome crucifixes sacrilegiously adorned with leis and NY Knicks caps. All the mirrors had been dulled of their silver. I could pull hats off of mannequins posed exquisitely, limbless. I was surrounded by all of the accoutrements and accessories of various grand places in time.

Across the world in her midtown Manhattan apartment, I slept fitfully in the week after she died. I couldn’t even think about the exact place where she might have dropped dead, or the sinister shadows in the demonic faces of the cherubs in the dawn light. It was no longer charming to be surrounded by so much haunted history, because now I was living that haunted history. I coasted forward during those days, not stopping to sink, breathing steady.

She left me, my sister and her granddaughter some of her shoes and clothes, and we bedecked ourselves in her things like costumes that somehow became molded to us perfectly by the time we left New York. My sister’s leopard print boots and my niece’s fur coat suited them because she had imparted in us some of the personality that it takes to pull off that kind of fashion showmanship. I came home with a floor length giraffe print jacket, and a pair of water shoes that I secretly always wanted.

This afternoon as I felt the low pressure of the weather system lull me, and the scent of the incense haunt me I remembered those shoes and felt compelled to pull them out. My friend sat patiently in my living room as I dug through my closet flinging shoes across the room, looking for the pair. I could find one, but not the other. I panicked, knowing that I hadn’t seen or wore those in a while.

"Freaking shizz! I lose everything!!! I can’t freaking lose those."

A breath and a step later I looked aside and under a pile of my clothes peeped the toe of her shoe mysteriously, as though her spirit had nudged it into my sight. It’s moments like those that I felt that she might still be close to me. I stepped into her shoes and trod through my backyard across the wet leaves to call my dog in. I was stricken though with the thought that almost a year after she had gone the shoes were relatively still kind of new and with the style of my time, since she was always slightly ahead of the curve with her fashion instincts. One day they wouldn’t be and in the years ahead her things would wear away. It has already taken me a whole year to begin adjusting to all the things she left in the vacuum of her presence, and I am left with a great legacy to one day start writing. What I want to hold on to are the things about her that are timeless, the things that will travel with me decades down the line. All she could really leave us were those instincts and that sensibility. The rest will fade, or harden into relics, but my life is too dynamic to carry around dusty baggage.

How to Be a Great Lady Part I

My aunt taught me alot of things I have needed to know, both in her life and in her death. Her presence blazed a way in my family to be the youngest and most rebellious girls of our generations, and is responsible for pointing out the wanderlust and adventure in my blood. She was known to have a tomboy streak, kind of like me, but she had the style of a dame. People have been telling me about how they remember her blazing through town on her bike and on her scooter like a fiend when she was young.

History comes full circle in strange and unforeseeable ways. She once told me that her oldest recurring nightmare was being plunged beneath the sea and wandering the wreck of an old airplane and encountering human remains. Oddly enough, doing this very thing has become one of my favorite hobbies since became a scuba diver. In this case, am happy to step up and live through the previous generations nightmares.

She stopped fearing death at a tender age. I think since her early 20's she had one foot in the grave practically, but this allowed her to live a very liberated life and live out fantastic adventures. Once she told me about traveling the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan as a young lady on camels and on foot. This information was relevant to the conversation that we were having as to where the handsomest men in the world can be found. She advised me that throughout all of her travels, in her opinion she found Afghani men to be the cutest. Of course this was so hilarious to me, especially when she said that the men of Italy were overrated. She definitely was not your typical filipina.

As one of the few western women traveling through the Hindu Kush mountains, tracing the steps of Alexander the Great, it didn't really occur to her to try and blend in and cover her head. Why should she? Everywhere she went she was an anomaly. All around the world people stared at her out of curiousity anyways. She was used to it; as a young woman she couldn't help but offend the societal norms of where she grew up, and to the rest of the world she was a foreigner, a beautiful and bizarre curiousity.
















"All knowledge of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but sheer illusion, and only in experience is there truth."We are perfectly justified in maintaining that only what is within ourselves can be immediately and directly perceived, and that only my own existence can be the object of a mere perception. Thus the existence of a real object outside me can never be given immediately and directly in perception, but can only be added in thought to the perception, which is a modification of the internal sense, and thus inferred as its external cause … . In the true sense of the word, therefore, I can never perceive external things, but I can only infer their existence from my own internal perception, regarding the perception as an effect of something external that must be the proximate cause … . It must not be supposed, therefore, that an idealist is someone who denies the existence of external objects of the senses; all he does is to deny that they are known by immediate and direct perception … – Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant

Riding Dirty

I woke up early this past Sunday morning in an ashy mess of a living room strewn with beer cans, blunt innards, miscellaneous flakes floating around and a snoring roommate surrounded by bottles of painkillers... the TV was still on and my brain felt dried, wrung and stupid, burned with digital images and droning sounds. My sinuses were sore with languishing stale smoke, my blood felt dirty, my muscles creaky stiff and cold. I stumbled into bed unhappily and reflected on the shitty physical state I had let myself get into with my face buried miserably in the pillow, coming to the conclusion that this is just not how my life is going to be. I'd have to take immediate action to shake myself out of this wintertime stagnant potato chip movie watching lifestyle, or why not just pour the quicklime straight into my skull and die now?

I got up officially when my bike mechanic friend came over to help me work on my Bianchi road bike. I've been waiting to work on it since the summer but I've have been pretty much just been busy keeping my other bikes ridable. In the meantime, I thought out the process, talked to my bike mechanic, came up with the gear ratio that I want and put aside the $$. It had been sitting in the corner all dusty with a bent wheel just being unusable and annoying.

I'd been riding my mountain bike to work since it got cold out and my road bike would get all salty and messed. Its a stable bike to ride in the raw elements and its fun to jump curbs and roll through bridges, but it is also fucking slow and heavy. I got passed on the street by all kinds of dorks one too many times, contributing to the depression of last weekend. I don't really have the sort of constitution to be fine with being the slowest person on the road.

By 10 AM I had taken my bike apart completely. I got new wheels and fit the back one to a single cog, took off the gear shifters and derailleurs, cut my chain and oh shit, its converted. Those may have been the most educational few hours that I have had in a long time, my mind was spinning in high gear. I found myself happily playing with my old hub on the carpet in total fascination. I worked with like 20 different tools that I had never seen before. It looked awesome, especially with all the extra gear stuff taken off. My mood changed and I was a completely different person from the cranky croakiness of the early morning.

But the next day when I was riding it, something felt kind of off and I wasn't too surprised when the chain fell off and I heard the faint clink of broken washers on the road, a fucked up sound to hear when you're on your way to work and late. So I walked it to the bike shop later in the day where we took off the old stupid biopace chain ring and my old pedals and just set up a new crank system. It turned out that the shape of my old shit was ovular and made my chain fall off without the derailleurs. I had never taken apart my bike and put it back together by myself before- my bike mechanic encourages a sort of dependency when it comes to fixing stuff.

"What's this?" I'll ask.

"Ah, basically, its really complicated and that's why you have me here to help you."

"But what if something happens to you? Then I'd have to go figure it all out off wikipedia?!? What?!?!?!?!? I need to learn."

Taking my bike apart reminded me of how I used to love taking apart my skateboard to clean out the bearings, set up new wheels and fuck around with the bushings on the trucks. Every part of my skateboard is customized to my exacting specifications, except for the grip tape which I usually like to outsource because I'm clumsy with that shit. Once you've had your hands on every bit of hardware and have rotated the screws on every thread to exactly the place where it will bear your weight perfectly to your style it is your skateboard - more of a part of you than your shoes or clothes.

The bike ride home was delightful. I never us that word, but thats what it was. I was delighted. "My bike is the shiiiiiiiitt!," I sang at the top of my lungs, "my bike is the bomb-dot-com! Its the smoothest bike in town! There's no cooler bike around!" I called Jen 10 times in a row until she answered because she may be the only person I know who could understand the excitement. Converting it to single speed turned my bike into an elegant machine with simple mechanics, a light coasting smooth ride that rockets me around.

I am 100% purist. I like to keep the components simple and minimal and focus my energy on the essentials. The skateboard is the most ascetic vehicle around - its just wood, trucks and wheels. There is no sophisticated technology that can help you be a better thrasher. Its also the most egalitarian ride - the skater makes the skate tricks, not the board. You could line up five people and give them the exact same setups and they will all skate differently. Out of this most basic formula I've seen superhuman feats accomplished and the physical laws of gravity challenged in the sickest ways. It doesn't take that much to rip, as long as you keep your bolts tight.

Once I got home from the bike ride I was spinning on a natural high from being so stoked and I put the bike in the kitchen so I could just stare at it. I sat down to watch Heroes but my blood had not quite settled yet and I couldn't shake the restlessness and felt like jumping around or dancing. After a short while I found myself standing on my skateboard watching TV. I hadn't seriously sessioned in months and my board looked bored just sitting there. Then oops I jumped and snapped an ollie. Then, oh shit, I start practicing my kickflip on the carpet. I landed one and did the I'm the coolest song in my head again. The roommate starts looking annoyed at all the noise, and I couldn't take it anymore. I ran out of my house like a werewolf and ollied every sewer cap on my block.

It's been a year since I broke my leg, about the exact amount of time that my doctor said I would be fully healed up. So I skated with the confidence that my leg is whole, a luxury I haven't felt in a long time.

Then I knocked on my friend's door a few blocks away with urgency. She answered the door in her pajamas. "Let's go skate!!! We have to! It's the only thing that will sustain us!!!"

"Uh... actually, I'm sleeping?"

"All you have to do is put on your skate shoes and coat. That's what I did."

It was 16 degrees in the late evening. "You're crazy", she said before closing the door. "But I want to skate too."

I cruised around fast like a maniac until I broke a serious sweat. What is better for a pent up and irritated cranky person than the private personal drama in the pushing and jumping kicking toe flicking falling getting up again then landing and cruising of skateboarding? Nothing. I'm absolutely certain.
I got home and called all the skaters in my phone to set up time to go to the skatepark. The next day I got a new deck and skate shoes and took some personal afternoon time off of work to schralp it up with my homies. I finally skated Krush again, after breaking my leg there last winter and I no longer hate that skatepark or fear the bowl. It's funny. I spend so much time and energy trying to act like I'm supposed to be a for real adult but I wind up having the best time taking turns skating with a bunch of helmeted and smelly 7th grade boys at the miniramp. Funfuckingfunfuckingfunfunfun.

Ok, I am getting to the point. Getting back on my skateboard and fixing my bike this week has made me realize how much I am missing in life when I am just drinking beer and watching football sitting around trying not to freeze. Without it I am lost. While I was skateboarding my creative thought process and abstract reasoning skills came back after mysteriously disappearing during recent crucial times. Its a very real and tangible phenomenon how skateboarding expands your mental awareness and understanding of everything. That's why I do it. Later I asked other skaters at the skater bar if that is real to them or am I just crazy, but everyone I talked to knew what I meant.

So it's important to make the time and effort to skate when you are a Chicagoan because this weather will weigh you down in every way. Even when its fucking freezing and you think you're too old for goofing around. Just wear gloves and a hat and you'll get warm pretty fast. And call me, because I've decided that a dedicated person should skate every day that they can even if its just the curb in front of my house, as long as I am not injured or its wet outside. There are so many things I am not even close to doing on my skateboard that I have been dreaming about for a long time. Cold air has higher pressure than warm air, which is what I believe makes us all feel so yuck in months like this.