Artwork I did for a cover of Imaginary Beasts, an online bimonthly themed fiction anthology. Black and white lineart scan, which is bigger than the actual piece.
I’ve neglected this blog for far too long! This must change.
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Make A Comment Notes: I’m posting this here just so I have some sort of record and permanent form of this poem apart from the one on Facebook. I first posted this online sometime last year, a random transliteration composed with much laughter at my favorite computer shop and subsequently put up at Miamor. When Miamor went offline, though, this died with it, but I resurrected it for the sake of the Jose Rizal Facebook fan page. You know, to give it some sort of interesting content.
Looking over this again, there are many things I would change. For instance, I would translate “dulce extranjera” to “other-land kitteh” or something similar, and there are many phrasings that seem embarrassingly awkward now, but I suppose this will have to stay in its present form until I have the time to go over the original poem again. I’m not including the original notes here, but I would like to reiterate my acknowledgments to my cats, the tyrannous Peaches and the adorable Cream.
So without further ado: Mi Ultimo Adios by Jose Rizal, translated into LOLcat.
–
Kthxbai Fo Realz
Cat Rizal (teh littelz sexeh kitteh)
Kthxbai cheezburger,
U srsly yummeh cheezburger,
Mai shiniez I gif u, tho it no can has teh cheez
N even if it had moar of teh cheez
I wud gif u all dat cheez.
OMG FAYT!
N teh kittehs also gif u der shiniez.
Whar kittehs? Dun carez:
Scratchy place, roll-around place,
Dey r all place for gif teh shiniez.
I go bai nao, omg hi2u sun
N omg bai2u dark,
N omg if u need moar colorsz
I gif u red splashies,
U can has it.
Wen I wuz itty bitty kitteh
N again wen I wuz haf biggr kitteh
I c u in sleepytime, cheezburger,
Yummeh cheezburger,
Full of shiniez and kitteh drugz.
Mai shiniez it can has
For teh win! I sez bai to u cheezburger,
For teh win! I sez bai nao for moar cheez
For u n moar cheezburger yummehz
N for mai wunnerful cheez sodat I can has too.
Wun day if u can seez mai kthxbai place
N windses! N flowersz!
Can has kissumz plz? I can has no can see,
But I can has kissumz!
N cheez!
Shiniez plz moon,
Shiniez plz dawn,
Blow plz windses,
I wants teh birdsies! In mai base
Singings teh songses.
Moar hot plz sun,
Rain plz to cum bak to sky?
N kittehs plz to cwy?
N wen timez wifout noise u pray, cheezburger,
Plz ask Ceiling Cat to gif mi cheez.
Plz ask Ceiling Cat for kittehs hu r ded,
N srsly ded, n omgwtf ded,
N for mommeh kittehs hu cwy,
N kittehs wifout mommehs,
N for cheezburger, dat u can has moar cheez.
N wen kthxbai place iz dark,
Wen ded r loneleh buh not rly,
Dun distewb! Ssshhhh kitteh!
If u hears moozeek
Iz jus mi maekin moozeek for u, cheezburger.
N when kthxbai place u forgots,
Even rockz forgots, no remembers,
Scratch wif big claws, maek messiez
So dat mai kittehdust dun go ‘way
N pwns teh burger on youz.
Den dun carez if I iz forgots,
I pwns ur sky! I r in ur base!
I be moozeek
N shiniez, n cheez,
N meni meows of mai feelingz. U no can see?
Mai cheezburger, hu I wants moar dan moar,
U can has ears plz, kthxbai — I go ‘way
From other kittehs, mommeh and daddeh kittehs, sexeh kittehs,
I go whar can has no doorz on fridgsesz, no lids on foodz,
Wer der is cheez. N moar cheez.
Kthxbai, litter kittehs, kittehs for teh win,
LOL kittehs, WTF kittehs,
Kthx, nao I sleepiez,
Kthxbai kitteh i dun kno, kthxbai shineh kitteh,
Kthxbai all my base. I r ded, I has moar cheez.
4 Comments three portraits of women inhabiting the reaches of an imagined country
The Princess of the Cliffs
She stands at the edge of cliffs ringing a bay whose waters have been stolen from storm-tossed seas, her hair streaming bright fire behind her like the banners of an army at war. Despite the wind tearing at her form and whipping the sleeves and skirt of her dress into a whirl of homespun linen around her limbs, she stands unmoved, feet firmly planted, toes curling around gravel and dead grass. Her dark blue gaze, far-seeing, rises above gray rock and white surf to touch the very tips of a galleon’s sails. White canvas billows in the wind, echoing the curves of seagulls’ wings.
The ship, she knows, carries someone who has heard of this bay: an explorer, sent to chart these waters, or a merchant prince. But she knows as well that they will not reach her shores or set foot on her cliffs. The water below her is full of the wreckage of other, similar ships. The tides that enter this bay know only dead wood, tattered cloth, rusting metal, ropes that have long ago given way and turned into the snakes of the deep.
Sometimes she takes pity on the survivor of the shipwreck. She walks the secret path that leads down to the bay and, wrapped in a white robe, a lamp burning in her hand, pulls him from drowning and brings him to the safety of her tiny house, hidden among the rocks. And sometimes he stays, and she teaches him how to listen to the wind, how to sing the songs of sea and sky and sand, how to lift a hand up to the lightning and tame the storm.
Then inevitably he must go and leave her. He begs her to come with him but she always refuses; she does not believe what he tells her about the blood of kings, and she will not part with her solitude for anything. Not for the sake of his promises, not for the sake of his heart. So she gives him a single gull feather knotted with a strand of her hair and sends him on his way on the back of a great white roc. Its wings, huge scythes cutting through the air, beat slow and loud around her as she tells the wind to guide him back to his native lands. She watches him go in silence, her face turned to the sun over the water. The sunset strikes her face, illumines it in red and gold.
The Enchantress in the Woods
A woman, sleeping on a bed formed by the gnarled roots of age-old trees, her hair fanning around her in a glory of blood-red curls. Her skin rivals the lily or the whitest of orchids, and the curves of her limbs, the rich spaces of her stillness, bring to mind flowers that bloom only in the hearts of forests and bear fruit only once every thousand years. Like them she is one of the secrets the earth holds fast beneath the green ribs of mountains and the veins of streams. She takes from the earth its silence, its majesty, its power.
If a traveler should dare to wake her, she will uncurl herself from slumber and open rosy fingers like flower petals unfurling at the first touch of dawn. Her eyes will flutter open: green as emeralds and all the promises of paradise that were made from the beginning of the world.
She will say, “I will change your life, and for my sake you will become capable of things you never dreamed or imagined. You will dare unspeakable heights and suffer and love more than you ever thought possible, and you will grasp strength you never knew you had.”
And her voice will be like the voices of wine-glutted nymphs, like the songs that are sung by nightingales just before dying, like violins whose strings are vines and whose bow is a wind of poisoned perfume. Her voice will be like all the things that die before their prime because they are too lovely to live. Her voice will be like longing and sorrow and pain.
“Then, in the end, we will part. You will leave me, as they all do — irrevocably transformed, my name burned into your heart. And I will walk away and think of ships and seas and silence, of parting and forgetting, until someone wakes me again.”
The Girl at the Window
There is a girl at a window you daily pass on your way to the life you live half in resignation and half in restless impatience. Her hair is dark as night’s water and her hands, their fingers so slender as to let the light through them, veil her face, which is like a single star hidden by clouds. She rests her chin on one hand as she watches the daily ebb and flow of people, and if you see her you will wonder if her wrist will break, it is so fragile, like the hollow bones of sparrows.
Her mouth does not often open to speak nor take in food; she derives her sustenance from watching. Daily she takes her fill of life, her eyes mirroring the world. Her fingers, when they press against the windowpanes, leave no mark save for what a single snowflake might make, a breath of cold whiteness against brittle clarity. She would be lonely if she knew how to be, but because she is no one, only herself, she merely echoes the loneliness of people like a glass vessel pouring out rarefied air in answer to the questions of the wind.
This is the life she lives, and she thinks that it is a good one. It is a life spent watching dreams take form, so many fantastic gryphons and dragons rising into the air of the imagination with scales gleaming and throwing off rainbows as they take flight, and following their paths until they shatter or turn into supernovae, blinding bursts of glory. It is a life spent observing the tiny details, the little loves, that daily go into the fabric of people’s clothing and the grains of their food, the deaths that occur again and again as infant joys rise bright and whole from ashes.
She is learning how to live without a heart. Perhaps one day she will decide she is ready and take her heart down from where it rests, cradled in a casket woven of the glitter and illusion of hope, beside volumes of poetry on her highest shelf. She will unlock the casket and gingerly take out the tiny, breakable thing, and place it in the hollow of her chest, inside the cage of ribs and pale, trembling flesh.
»2 Comments This is what I have been doing over the past few days. Or maybe I should say, “this is what I have gotten myself into lately” — since, though it does not feel like trouble, it certainly looks (and is!) intimidating:
1. Work: Starting tomorrow I will be working as an editorial assistant at Vibal Foundation. So very excited! I love what the Foundation is doing and I hope to learn a lot from the projects I’ll be handling.
2. Freelance projects: I recently landed a freelance project that involves book design (covers and interiors) for a book on ethical lawyering. I’ll also be doing the design for the CD included in the book, and might — might! — be teaching some evening copy-editing classes at the same company that contracted me for this project.
3. Writing: I’m going to get back to finishing my NaNoWriMo 2008 novel, and might start working on a novel in an entirely different genre sometime soon, if all goes well with my story pitches/ideas.
4. Grad school: Well. This terrifies me and the prospect still makes me want to cry, but I finished my application a few hours ago. My statement of purpose:
I want to take graduate studies in economics in order to do research in the field. Because of my background and continuing interest in physics, I believe I am equipped to tackle problems in economic modeling through methods that, though they may require more complicated mathematics than is commonly used in economic research, may yield new and interesting insights into the dynamics of existing systems. I do not wish to approach economic phenomena as a physicist given a new closed system to study; rather, I wish to approach problems first and foremost as an economist, but with all the tools used in theoretical physics at my disposal.
I am interested in applying the methods of statistical mechanics to financial systems, and how various models of financial systems derive some theoretical framework from non-linear physical processes. In the future I would like to apply the results and methods of models such as the Minority Game to further our understanding of decision-making processes and their aggregate effects on macroscopic economic systems such as the stock market and foreign exchange. My long-term goal as an economist is to go into policy-making and finance, informed and aided by the latest advancements in economic research.
As I said in my Livejournal, the really scary part is that it’s all true.
»2 Comments Today I attended the third <form> function() & .class Mini Web Design Conference — and took notes. Notes in my Moleskine, with very scribbly drawings. I wish I had thought of doing this earlier; if I’d tried doing sketchnotes while I was still in physics (or economics) I might actually have paid attention in class. (My hand hurt afterward though, probably because most of the “fonts” I used were not similar to my usual scripty handwriting.) ETA 013009: The original sketchnotes idea is by Mike Rohde — his blog posts about sketchnotes are fantastic.
No scans, because the scanner is on the fritz — or rather, the computer to which the scanner is attached refuses to work properly. Also no annotations, because I am sleepy and have deadlines. But in any case — enjoy!
»A note: Feel free to re-post, but please credit Mia Sereno. And yes, I do have some sort of web design thing going on, but I try to avoid taking on projects for people I don’t know. I would be happy to come up with art or calligraphy for you, though!
18 Comments My father and I celebrated our birthday yesterday, January 19. It was, as usual, just the four of us eating good food and enjoying good conversation. After dinner at Kulinarya we walked some distance to The Ice Cream Bar, which is where they ate ice cream and I took way too many pictures of the interior decor.
This was a beautiful birthday, though there were no huge celebrations and it was the first I have spent out of a committed relationship for quite some time. I think it is because — although I do not know where He is leading me, or where this path on which I have set my feet will take me — I am at peace. And I am content. The words of the Psalm: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want are so familiar it is easy to bypass their meaning, but it is only now that I am coming to realize just how deep such contentment runs; how immense a joy it is to be able to say, even if faultily, even if not yet completely or not yet fully comprehending it, I shall not want.
Thank you to everyone who greeted me yesterday. I am very grateful you are part of my life.
»6 Comments wherein creativity is a spark and the night is a gunpowder trail
excerpt from Light Years
Joel Toledo
A boy is leaping with joy, plucking pollen flowers
from the air. Another is burdened with a feather,
hunched in a dark corner, like he is carrying the world,
a bird having escaped his grasp, and now the night has fallen,
astronauts again walking on the moon and here he is, still
pointing, heaving, naming one light star after another.
Musee des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The Closed Eyes of the Ravished
John Emil Vincent
Asleep, or ecstatic, let them be.
Faces topographical with pleasure.
They’ve been. And seen.
Too soon. But not too late.
Their eyes don’t roll up
when their lids click closed.
Spare them knowing
knowing won’t spare them.
Subterranean
Eric Gamalinda
Let me be the first to say
that I know the name for everything
and if I don’t I’ll make them up:
dukkha, naufragio, talinhaga.
Just like the young
whose hearts give no shame,
I love the excesses of beauty,
there is never enough sunlight
in the world I will live in,
never enough room for love.
I fear none of us will last long enough
to prove what I’ve always suspected,
that the sky is a membrane
in an angel’s skull,
trees talk to each other at night,
ice is water in a state of silence,
the embryo listens to everything we say.
I am afraid for the child skipping rope
on the corner of my street,
the girl on the train with flowers in her hair,
the man whose memory is entirely
in Spanish. I am more afraid of losing consciousness
when I go to sleep, or that in my sleep
I will grow old and forget how desire
once drove me mad with wakefulness.
Just like the perfect seasons
they will die
and I will die
and you will die also;
no one knows who will go first,
and this is the source
of all my grief.
excerpt from Monet Refuses the Operation
Lisel Mueller
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
Make A Comment “Two things,” said Kant, “fill me with breathless awe:
The starry heaven and the moral law.”
I know a thing more awful and obscure-–
The long, long patience of the plundered poor.
Edwin Markham, The Third Wonder
When I first read Phillip Kimpo Jr.’s letter to The Philippine Star, found via a link posted by Ia Lucero, I had to struggle to keep from crying halfway through. Some parts were so painful to read I skimmed past them, only to soak them in on my second — then third, then fourth — read. Since then it has taken me several days to form the words that make up this entry.
A lawyer for the government must inevitably find that honesty is dangerous; that justice must all too often be bought at the price of blood. Having survived that, having suffered through all that, only amplifies one’s pain upon finding that not even honesty is enough; when one is dragged into a controversy hell-bent on destroying one’s livelihood, one’s reputation, and one’s name.
Like what is happening to Phillip’s father.
Even trying to imagine what the Kimpo family is going through makes my chest tighten and my throat hurt: it must be horrible, it must be terrible — there must be no words. You have spent a lifetime refusing to give in to evil and suffering for it, then all of a sudden you are wrongly accused in a scandal that has the nation howling in outrage. It is a mockery of all the sacrifices you have made so far, all the sacrifices you will make in the future, and meanwhile your good name — that precious, precious thing — lies in ruin, irrevocably shattered in many people’s eyes. Your integrity is one of the few things that you truly have, and now even the reality of it is being challenged by a system that would crush you under its heel if the breaking apart of your life would ease its movement.
What words are there, indeed? What kind of world do we live in if people must suffer for doing what is right? If those few, brave souls willing to work for progress and change — for truth and justice and all those other qualities the rest of us all too soon abandon — must immolate themselves on the altar of self-denial for even the smallest of chances to achieve their goals? It seems so unfair. It is unfair.
That doesn’t mean we can’t fight it. In this instance I believe fighting for truth means standing with the Kimpo family and others like them, supporting them even if it is only through our faith in their honesty and our conviction that the undeserved stain will be erased from state prosecutor Kimpo’s name. This will happen: I not only hope so, but believe so. My mother, before reading Phillip’s letter and watching the videos of the interview with Ces Drilon, hesitated to make any pronouncements regarding the issue; it was probably a misunderstanding on his part, she said; an oversight, but she would say nothing more. After seeing everything, though, she shook her head and said, very quietly, that the man could not have done what he was accused of doing. There were tears in her eyes — or maybe I was just too choked up to see clearly — when she told me to write Phillip a letter of support.
It is not easy to be an upright public official in the Philippines. Some may say that people who fulfill all their duties and obligations don’t deserve much praise: they’re just doing their jobs. But oh, how difficult it is to stand against corruption, to remain strong despite pressure from all sorts of places, to act according to one’s conscience when everything, even one’s own sense of self-preservation, is urging one to give in. It’s even more difficult to remain steadfast in one’s position when one’s family is involved: when accepting a single bribe can spell the difference between luxury and lack, when a single signature can secure the future of one’s child. Not easy. All sorts of heartbreaking. I applaud Kimpo Sr. for being able to do so.
And I sympathize — oh, so much — with Phillip. Though my childhood was not as difficult as his (just more confusing, perhaps) I understood exactly what he meant when he said that, when he was younger, he was angry at the rich. So was I for some time: they had so much, I thought; were capable of effecting change I could only dream of, and yet they wasted it on pointless things while the rest of the country starved.
But then I realized that not everyone was like that. Time has taught me that hope has stronger wings that we can sometimes see and that there is no such thing as a demographic so uniformly bad so as to deserve wholesale castigation. And I have learned, with time, that people such as Phillip and his dad — they’re hardly poor. They may seem so, in other people’s eyes, but really: what is the value of a clean conscience? How would you price a man’s good name? What amount of money will buy you peace or the restful silence that comes just at the edge of sleep? Can fifty million pesos buy any of these things? At the end of a life, lying on a deathbed or in a gutter, what truly matters?
We are pressured (only all too often, all too effectively, and all too well) to think in terms of material value, but every so often I manage to see clearly, and I see that those who are truly honest and just would not exchange any of their ideals for the world. I think that Phillip’s father has been richly repaid for all his hard work by being blessed with a son who would defend him with every last ounce of courage and passion he possesses. I think that Phillip’s wealth lies not in terms of cars or houses but in having a father he can look up to with love and admiration and pride, as a truly just and honest man.
I think that we need more people like them in this country.
Edwin Markham, the author of the quatrain with which I headed this piece, was an admirer of yet another man known far and wide for his integrity: Abraham Lincoln. It was Lincoln who said, “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have.” In the end — past greed and corruption and the shadows of this world — this is what remains, incorruptible, adamantine.
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2 Comments 
e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0
I celebrated the new year by putting up nakedsingularity.net, my blog for all sorts of calligraphy and geeky stuff (mostly physics-/econophysics-/math-related). No post for the new year or anything, but then again I didn’t realize 2008 was ending until I filed some images and had to put them in the ‘2009′ folder.
It surprised me, how the end of the year went and snuck up on me with all sorts of drastic changes and events that happened without any warning at all — I thought 2008 would be ordinary, and then it suddenly turned my life upside down. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not. It’s too early to tell. But I am very thankful for the grace that has carried me through everything that has happened to me. It is always, always, grace.
Ah, about nakedsingularity.net — I’ve been told several times that calligraphy and science is a strange combination. Well, maybe it is, but 1) I like strange combinations; 2) I think equations are beautiful; 3) numbers and symbols are the alphabet of math; 4) I’ve always thought that my problem set solutions looked rather pretty, anyway. The above image is my very stylized rendering of one of the most famous math identities, and also one of my favorite equations ever. I think that if these things I do get just one person to see the very visible, very real beauty in math and science, then I will have done something good.
»2 Comments in which the falcon cannot hear the falconer
The Christmas season has been maddeningly busy this year, so I wasn’t able to post proper greetings. But I did manage to record a little a capella tidbit of a familiar, heartbreaking song: Pasko Na, Sinta Ko. The song should be… significantly more melancholy than how I sang it; a nightingale’s ache. I might try another recording when my voice recovers from holiday stress, but for now, please have a listen.
I am not a poet, but I find so much joy in poetry it’s sometimes a little pathetic how I will quote my favorite poems every single chance I get. (For instance, this post’s title and subtitle are taken from The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats.)
Some lines particularly appropriate for my current state of mind:
from In a Dark Time, Theodore Roethke
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
Recently, in the Philippines: politicians reveal the bloody side of entitlement complexes. High-ranking officials beat up a 56-year-old man and his 14-year-old son in a golf course, and have the gall to file counter-charges. The man’s daughter wrote a heartbreaking blog post about her first-hand experience with power-mad politicians, and Noemi Dado has posted a rather comprehensive collection of links along with an incisive commentary that makes for a good introduction to the whole issue.
What fuels my outrage — apart from the violence of the incident itself — is the fact that it happened in the first place. Monsters would not be able to do this if they weren’t so confident in the protection of their power; if they were not so absolutely certain they would get away with it, eventually. There are people who say that punishment is not a good deterrent for crime: I say it is, as long as people know that the punishment will be meted out regardless of the status of the offender. This… is not the case here, where the rich get away with everything from rape to murder and former presidents somehow find a way to re-establish their positions in power despite charges of plunder. Ours is a system that fosters injustice.
And I refuse — I refuse — to simply accept this. I refuse to say, “this is the way things work, we just have to survive and hope we don’t get crushed by the unfair system.” We don’t have to tolerate injustice. Acceptance, resignation, apathy — these things will just propagate it. But we need people to actively fight against it. We have voices, we have eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear, hands with which to write messages the world can see. Time to make use of them.
Semi-related, in that it deals with justice in the Philippines and the various ways in which our legal system is twisted to suit selfish ends: our church’s head pastor called my mother earlier last night. A churchmate of ours was involved in an accident yesterday. He was in a parked car and opened his door to exit the vehicle, only for a cyclist to ram into the open door and be sent careening through the air. The cyclist was going very fast and wore no helmet. Our churchmate rushed him to the hospital, but he was pronounced dead on arrival.
By the time my mother was called in on the case our churchmate had been detained in the police station’s jail for almost twenty-four hours. He was being pressured to settle with the widow for an amount of PhP100,000 (a little more than USD2,000?) — even though he had no liabilities since, technically speaking, the death was self-inflicted. Why the pressure? The police investigator wanted a cut of the settlement. In fact, as soon as the police learned a lawyer had been called in they moved our churchmate to another jail in an attempt to hide him.
This must say something about me — that in times like these, the desire to become a lawyer and to change things rises us in me, hot and overpowering all other things (such as my common sense and self-preservational instincts). I want to change these corrupt systems. I want to be a barrier that says, No more of this: I will not succumb. I want to stand for truth and justice and equality and all those other things people hardly believe in anymore, because they see them so rarely.
I want to burn.
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